Paul Cooper visits various doctors as he grapples with his many “frailties,” as he calls them: diminished hearing, a blind eye, an aortic valve made from pig tissue, another valve derived from a cow, a heart monitor surgically implanted in his chest and Stage 4 cancer.
He also visits a gym three times a week to pursue a late-in-life dream: crushing powerlifting records among men his age and weight around the world.
“I’m living off of medications and implants, and sometimes I’m out of breath and I don’t know why,” said Cooper, 78, of Huntington. “But then I go to the gym and I’m a whole different person. It’s the only place I get a respite.”
Earlier this month, Cooper competed in his latest Revolution Powerlifting Syndicate meet at his gym and home-away-from-home for the past two years, Gaglione Strength in Farmingdale. The national organization hosts bench, dead lift and squat-based amateur competitions at local gyms. Cooper benched 165.35 pounds, setting a world record for anyone in the 114-pound weight class and the 75- to 79-years-old age bracket, according to officials with the syndicate as well as Open Powerlifting, an online database that collects data from lifters and organizations like the syndicate from across the globe.
Last year, Cooper, who’s 5-foot-4, set a Revolution world record for his age in the 132-pound weight class. Since then, he’s worked to lose weight so he can put another notch in his belt.
The seeds of Cooper’s fulfilled dreams were planted 11 years ago when he said he read a Newsday feature about three men in their 70s who trained at their local gym and competed in lift competitions. He started researching the syndicate’s competition records.
“I said ‘I think I got a shot at some of those,’ ” Cooper recalled at his kitchen table one recent afternoon. “But I was working fulltime, working a second job, raising a family. I put it on my bucket list.”
At the time, Cooper was lifting weights on his lunch break with Jon DeMaio and John Bullard, his fellow employees at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, where he worked as director of facilities, overseeing new construction and renovations. DeMaio, who took over Cooper’s position when he retired a couple of years ago, drew on his weight room experience, which dates to his days as a high school gymnast, to offer Cooper tips. Back then, Cooper’s only competitor was himself.
But the trio could only hit the gym “as often as the job would allow,” DeMaio said.
“You would see really significant progress, then we would get busy and we would kind of fall back and regress,” DeMaio added.
Cooper, doing a weighted pullup, said he feels at home with his friends at Gaglione Strength gym in Farmingdale. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
PERSONAL TRAINER KEY
Cooper made more consistent progress toward his bucket list goal after retiring — and after his second heart surgery to implant a bovine valve within the porcine valve already in his chest. He began training at Gaglione Strength, where he met then-intern Hannah Callahan.
Despite prior experience that gave him “pretty decent form” and made him “very strong, right off the bat,” Cooper still had to learn more about powerlifting, recalled Callahan, 25, of Hauppauge. During the year she trained him, Callahan locked Cooper into alternating “mesocycles,” or weekslong training blocks with specific goals. The cycle of lifting lighter weights for several reps built up Cooper’s muscles, while the weeks lifting heavier weights fewer times bolstered his strength.
“There’s this common misconception that powerlifting is just doing one-rep maxes all the time, and you go extremely heavy, but . . . we need to focus on building muscle,” said Callahan, now a certified personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach at Redefine Fitness in Stony Brook. “I think over time I gained his trust.”
Cooper said of Callahan that he “learned to not question her judgment.”
“I would say, ‘Are you crazy? That’s too light,’ ” Cooper recalled of his early training days. “By the time I got to the fifth rep, it’s not too light.”
DOCTOR WEIGHS IN
Losing muscle mass and strength is a big reason seniors can lose physical abilities as they age, according to the National Institute on Aging, based in Bethesda, Maryland. Strength training can improve the quality of life for older adults by helping them maintain muscle mass and improve mobility.
Federal guidelines call for adults, including older adults, to do muscle strengthening activities two or more days per week and at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic physical activity per week, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Still, just 13.9% of those 65 and older met federal physical activity guidelines, according to a 2024 CDC report.
While stretches and strength training of some kind is as critical as cardiovascular exercise for seniors, late-in-life first-time lifters can suffer tissue tears around the joints or damage shoulders, knees and other critical joints if they are lifting too much or have poor technique, said Sreevathsa Boraiah, chief of joint replacement surgery at Northwell Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park. “If you’re not lifting anything when you’re 60 and then one day you decide to go and bench 200 pounds … you might get injured,” he said. “If you’re starting to go heavy in your later years, you have to build it up slowly. Your bones might not be ready to take that load, your muscles are not ready . . . But once you’re there, keep it up.” While Cooper figured he “had nothing to lose” when he took up powerlifting after retirement, Liz Honig, one of the handful of seniors who powerlifts alongside him at Gaglione Strength, had fears and apprehensions.
“The first month or so, every time I was driving [to the gym] I was nervous,” Honig, 71, of Babylon, recalled. That was about a decade ago. Her fear of injury was assuaged after Honig’s trainers assured her over several weeks that they wouldn’t push the novice beyond her capabilities for her own safety.
“You start to realize that if it’s too heavy, you just put it down,” Honig said. “There’s really nothing to be afraid of.”
Cooper joined Gaglione Strength gym in Farmingdale about two years ago, and a then-intern at the gym, Hannah Callahan, helped him build on what he already knew. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
CARPENTER’S FRAME
While Cooper did not inherit a powerlifter’s frame — he’s compact, with narrow shoulders and a slim chest — his carpentry skills came from his grandfather.
“Before I could even walk I was hammering nails,” Cooper said.
After he graduated from the now closed Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn in 1963, he said he planned to avoid writing any more essays by studying physics at Queens College. He graduated in 1968 and briefly taught scuba diving there. He married his college sweetheart, Linda, in 1972 before they moved into a home he built in St. John, where two of their four daughters were born. He continued his scuba pursuits in the Virgin Islands before dedicating himself fully to construction.
By 1980, the family moved into their Huntington home. A few years later, Cooper received his professional engineering license and managed facilities at Queens College and Franklin Hospital, now Long Island Jewish Valley Stream. He retired from SCCC in 2023.
Before his postretirement transformation, Cooper said he weighed about 150 pounds. In addition to adding exercise, he gave up the cookies, cakes and candies he loves and started eating more fish, nuts and beans. He barely ate in the run-up to his recent weigh-in — just
“celery, cucumber, lettuce and a little bit of coffee,” he said.
GOING THE DISTANCE
Cooper said that in his 50s, he began running marathons for the same feeling of camaraderie he gets at Gaglione Strength.
“I’m too slow to compete with anybody; I’m in the back of the pack,” Cooper said. “But I found my friends were doing this [weightlifting], so I started doing it with them.”
Callahan, who still works out at Gaglione Strength, believes the more than 50 races Cooper finished helped him as a lifter.
“I think that his discipline has really taken him a long way,” she said. “Running is a mental battle. . . . When it gets the hardest is when it counts the most.”
Cooper’s marathon days ended shortly after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that he said morphed into Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, a form of blood cancer that diminishes infection-fighting white and oxygen-carrying red blood cell counts, meaning sustained aerobic activity like running is out of the question.
He said he takes chemotherapy drugs daily to combat his terminal Stage 4 cancer, which is a slow-growing variety, according to the Cleveland Clinic. “It’s conceivable that it won’t even affect my lifespan,” Cooper said. “I could die of something else before that.”
With his 165.35-pound bench press, Paul Cooper, seen here at Gaglione Strength in Farmingdale, this month broke the record in his age bracket and weight class (114 pounds). Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
TWEAKING THE LIFT
Eight months ago, after being out of breath more often than usual, Cooper said surgeons implanted a heart recording device “about the size of a cigarette” in his chest. It has yet to record irregularities.
Cooper said his cardiologist expressed concern that his newfound passion could cause an aortic aneurysm or rupture, so he has adapted his technique accordingly.
“When you’re pressing, especially when you’re holding your breath, your [blood] pressure temporarily spikes,” Cooper said. “So I don’t hold my breath. Normally that helps you; you’re trained to hold your breath. I breathe normally. I could probably squeeze a few more pounds out if I didn’t, but I’d rather take less risk.”
The benefits of powerlifting far outweigh the risks, according to Cooper. He sets and surpasses goals, made new friends, and said that after 25 years of high blood pressure — for which he once needed 280 mg of Diovan daily — he’s down to only 40 mg. His cardiologist, he added, “is my biggest fan as a weightlifter.”
It’s doubtful that his physical therapist feels the same. Bench pressing abuses Cooper’s shoulders, and he said he suffered a “trigger finger” strain, or an inflamed tendon that causes his finger to lock in place.
“It hurts when you bend it,” he said of his finger. “I probably did it from deadlifting too much weight in the beginning.”
Over the past two years, while Cooper has worked out at the gym, Honig has grown to know him as “funny” and “a great woodworker.” He recently repaired a cracked antique spinning wheel she uses to fashion her own yarn.
“These are my friends,” Cooper said of his fellow gym goers. “These are the people that support me and who I support, and I couldn’t do it without them. . . . It takes a village to raise an old powerlifter.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the location of Northwell Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
Nicholas Grasso covers breaking news for Newsday. A Long Island native, he previously worked at several community newspapers and lifestyle magazines based on the East End.