After becoming Red Bull’s first-ever CrossFit athlete globally and winning the recent Emirates Fitness Championship (EFC) – a branch of the Dubai Fitness Championship geared toward Emirati talent – 20-year-old Mahmood Shalan has set his sights on shining on the global CrossFit scene at next year’s Asian regional qualifiers.
But as talented as Mahmood believes he is at “the sport of fitness”, he admits to Sport360°’s Kara Martin he is really just scratching the surface and that there’s still plenty of hard work to be done.
How does it feel to be picked up as Red Bull’s first CrossFit athlete ever, and why do you think they chose you?
It’s weird, it’s cool. I don’t know actually, I guess they thought that since I’m so young that maybe I have big potential to get even better.
So that was six months ago, how has it helped your campaign to get to Korea for the Asian regionals?
Honestly it’s just made me a lot more professional towards my training. This time I’m representing something and so it makes me approach it with a little more urgency and seriousness. That’s why I accepted the offer – I want to make a name for myself and Red Bull is a big brand that can actually really market me and do that.
So why CrossFit? There seems to be a big surge in Emiratis taking it on in the past year…
Yeah we’ve got plenty of Emiratis doing CrossFit in Dubai now – while I don’t consider them a threat, some of the big names that will try to qualify for the regionals also are Marwan Al Marri (who’s very, very fit), Saoud Al Shamsi…
For me, as a kid I used to do swimming and played basketball for seven years with Al Ahli Club. I joined Fitness First when I was 15 and did Strength and Conditioning there for four years and that honestly got me really fit. That is when I really started getting a rush out of training.
Then one day I heard about CrossFit and I joined CrossFit gym The Burn Room and found that it was slowly pulling me away from basketball. Nowadays I am with Scandinavian Health & Performance (SHP) because I want something a little more focused regarding my training.
The Burn Room is great but they teach group classes, and at SHP it’s just me and the trainer working on my form, my technique… I’m pretty young so I place a lot of importance on getting my form right because I don’t want to get injured. At SHP I get that privacy and focus.
Is your family also fitness oriented or has your passion inspired them or other locals?
Well my dad tried to push me and my brothers into sport ever since we were kids but they’re not really very fitness oriented or as into sports as I am. But I think it’s rubbing off a little. My older brother, he was actually really fit, but has a knee problem. He’s joined the gym and sometimes sends me updates like ‘look how much I lifted today’, and that’s cool.
As for other Emiratis, yeah, it seems I inspired a few guys after winning the EFC, they approach me now like I’m actually a proper athlete. It feels good to take credit for all the hard work you put in.
You placed 20th last year in your Asian regionals debut. What did you learn from the experience and what will you do differently this time?
I noticed that a lot of the guys there had a lot of years under them whereas I had only been doing CrossFit a couple of months. I need to put in a lot more work, train hard to make sure that my physical capacity can take that work load without getting injured. And you have been putting in the time – three sessions per day!
Can you share more on your training programme nowadays?
My coach is making me train mornings, afternoons and evenings every day except Fridays. Mornings are usually something like gymnastics or Olympic Weightlifting sessions.
Afternoons would be like a MetCon (Metabolic Conditioning) workout with some mobility thrown in. And evenings focus on upper or lower body strength. Each session is usually an hour to an hour and a half long and I’ll continue like this up to the Asian regionals but maybe just slow it down a bit a month before and just focus on conditioning/CrossFit workouts.
I always used to train three times a day but now the sessions are just more focused, they’re proper sessions where I’m working the muscle tissue.
And honestly, I feel broken down and tired really often, because it (this training) is a completely different muscle tissue breakdown than when you actually just do CrossFit itself, which is really just conditioning and heart rate stuff with a little bit of muscle in there. I guess the goal here is to gain as much muscle mass.
Right now, as it’s only my third week training this way, it’s a little too early to say whether things have changed with my body. But I honestly do feel a little bit stronger, or at least a lot more mobile.
Red Bull are planning to send you to their world class Diagnostics and Training Centre in Austria in January, a centre managed by some of the top sports experts in the world to help athletes achieve high physical and mental readiness for competition!
Yeah, Red Bull send their sponsored athletes there sometimes for rehabilitation workouts, for further tests and analysis on the body, things like that. I’m definitely looking forward to it.
Austria is actually one of my favourite places, I’ve been before, so it sounds like the perfect scenario – to get away but at the same time do something active with a bit of relaxation and rehabilitation.
Is there one particular CrossFit athlete that you look up to or try to emulate?
Regular CrossFit Games champion Rich Froning, really just for the fact that he does it at the rate that he does it and makes it look effortless. It just makes you understand the amount of work he’s put in, and I respect that.
