If you’ve never signed up to a gym before, or even set foot in one, it can be a very intimidating place to enter the first time you’re finally motivated enough to; especially if it’s a gym like Dubai Sports City’s FitRepublik.
It’s not as if they haven’t put in the effort – and clearly a lot of money – into making it welcoming.
Setting aside the massive glowing sign out front that says ‘This is Where We Belong ’, the mega fitness hub is ever so cool and shiny and beautiful to look at, with colourful open-plan workout areas and studios offering every possible fitness fetish, the best of the best facilities and teachings in aquatics and gymnastics all the way to MMA, a popular health café and retail store, and even a cryotherapy chamber. Plus all that graffiti.
It’s just that everyone who goes there – and their kids – is incredibly serious about all this stuff.
Walking the ‘runway’ that dissects the vast main exercising space, on your way to your run of the mill shoulder press machine, you will pass some impressively built, beautiful human beings throwing, hauling and pressing boulder-sized, even mini car-sized things, others practising flawless handstands as part of a cool-down, and some taking on box jumps so high they scream ‘I’m training for the CrossFit Games’.
But we know we can’t judge a book by its cover – there’s no elitism here, and anyway, all that stuff is something to aspire to, the carrot in front of your first step on the treadmill. And FitRepublik haven’t overlooked the rookie and there’s a programme just for them.
Learn to Gym is where your journey begins. Offered four days a week, the programme is literally designed to teach members how to use the gym. You will be led around and taught the basic workings of all those curious machines you once looked at but never dared touch.
Ice-breaker: Get acclimated with FitRepublik’s instructors and trainers.
You will learn everything from how to warm up effectively, how to use a full range of basic equipment to target legs, chest, back, the shoulders, arms and core, as well as safety techniques in doing so. Trainers are well equipped to handle any issue or question and will even guide you on how many reps to do in order to benefit from the exercises, and which machines to try, or to avoid, depending on what your desired goal is.
FitRepublik manager and head of strength and conditioning Ammar Sabbah says: “I just thought Learn to Gym would be a great way to initiate some contact between instructors and clients, help break the ice and ease new members into using the gym.
“Also important is that the programme shows you that exercise can be simple, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Exercise has taken a very funny twist lately with all these crazy concepts, but this is taking it just back to basics. It’s using the gym the old-fashioned way.”
There’s the increasing idea that your old, typical exercise units, such as the seated machine press and the leg extension unit, aren’t enough to give you what you need anymore, but Sabbah vouches for them, and those are precisely the ones he guides as by the hand to.
We ourselves are no strangers to gyms, but as he talked up each machine from the ground up, explained and pointed out its benefits, and forced us to slow down our movements to really experience them on an anatomical as well as mental level, we were surprised to find how odd and foreign something as basic as a lat pulldown or leg curl felt.
A sucker for the mistakenly ‘get me there faster’ workouts like CrossFit and HIIT, suddenly standing in front of a mirror and taking a tutorial on dumbbell curls felt like something totally new.
We quickly realised we were not really here to learn about the machines as much as we were here to learn about our own bodily mechanics, something we really had never taken the time to slow down and consider before. And this is something a lot of new workouts have been skimping on.
“It’s all about creating a functional workout. I mean, I love Oly lifting but I don’t see how Oly lifting is something I will be doing in my daily functional life,” Sabbah says. “The old way of doing things is just as good.
“It’s like building a car – you work on optimising each part, the engine, the chassis, the tyres, before putting it altogether, and the performance of the car goes up. The human body is the same – I need everything from the back of legs to my biceps to perform and when I put all of it together, then I can achieve optimal performance and motion.
“If I go into compound motions immediately, the natural thing for the body to do is rely on its strengths, not its weaknesses. Ultimately, what you end up doing is creating more imbalances in the body.
“In Learn to Gym we’re literally showing you how to move your muscles, because once you learn how to do that then it’s safe to go ahead and make it more interesting, try other things, if you want to,” he adds.
FitRepublik will also be ramping up their floor trainer staff to ensure people are being monitored and looked after in the main space instead of just left to their own devices. But the Learn to Gym programme comes highly recommended for both newcomers as well as the ‘pros’ who plan to be spending many more days and nights at the gym in future.
It’s an educational essential, a pre-requisite before working your way up to all the other fun, crazy stuff they offer there.
