Week 45 – Fitness Fest Dubai

Fitness Fest Dubai is now in its second year here, but it was my first time to visit this weekend-long event filled with anything and everything that has to do with sports / fitness / healthy eating / healthy living.

JPEG was working there the whole weekend – the company she works for was putting on a football event for children and teens – and so I went through on Saturday to say hi to her and get my fitness fix for the day 🙂

I probably didn’t give the event enough of a walk-through, but the bits and pieces that I saw were really cool – from healthy-eating stations to kickboxing stalls to inflatable obstacle courses to the strongman competition. This place has it all!

Getting in was easy as I was fortunate enough to have a ticket arranged for me, which was waiting at the gate when I arrived, but for regular entrants, it didn’t seem to be too much of a bother – there were zero queues when I arrived, and even if there had been, they looked set up enough to cater for large queues.

I did hear of one major flaw on the Friday – they ran out of water! Not a very smart thing to do a) in the desert, b) at a fitness event! As I wasn’t there to experience it I can’t comment too much, but it’s still not a good thing to happen – definitely something they should consider for next year.

However, that aside, I found the afternoon enjoyable and it certainly looked like things were organised properly and running smoothly. I didn’t take part in any of the group classes / challenges that they had going on during the day, but it looked like there was always something on that you could be part of – great way to keep everyone involved!

And now, since I don’t actually have much more to say on it – here are some photos that I took of the day. Probably shows it off a bit better 🙂

As always, click on any of the pictures to open a larger gallery view

Welcome!

Stalls on the grass

Capoeira

Giant darts

Inflatable obstacle course

Strongman

Dubai Marina in the background

JPEG’s football

Football “pool”

Loved this random set up 🙂

HIIT class

I didn’t realise I’d cut her head off… but you get the idea how awesome this is?!

 

Week 40 – Prince Amir

Week 40?! This means that there are only 12 more weeks until the end of the year….! Boy has this year gone by quickly (yes, we say that every year, don’t we?!)

So, what did Week 40 see for me?

Well, not a huge amount to be truthful.

It was a short work-week because it was  Islamic New Year on Saturday night, which meant Sunday was a day off work. And we pretty much spent it on the couch… well, I did. The girls did an escape room again but I chose to enjoy the extremely lazy day (and therefore not get anything new done on that day!)

So, my something new had to come from the very few days left of the week… and I am well happy with what I have for this week!

I had a kickboxing class in which Prince Amir, a 3-time world championship title holder in thai and kickboxing, taught us in the class!

Prince Amir is the owner of the kickboxing gym I attend, and while I’ve seen him teaching the earlier evening classes, I’ve not had the honour when I’ve attended the early class. But this past week was my week to make the most of his huge amount of experience and knowledge in the sport as he taught us some  defense moves.

I still have a long way to go in my kickboxing, but am really hoping that one of these days I’ll be confident enough to get in a ring and have a proper go!

Prince Amir on the left

Week 19 – Take Three!

This week’s something new comes in Three’s – three ingredients, third place, three times a week. 3. Three.

Three times a week

I’ve joined a new gym! It’s a kickboxing gym… so I’m now doing kickboxing 3 times a week 🙂 Something has clicked inside me and I cannot get enough of kickboxing lately, so I wanted to find somewhere other than my current class, somewhere that I can really focus on my boxing and get really good, putting all of my learning to practice and not just punching at bags all the time.

The gym I have joined was recommended by a friend and I am absolutely in love! I am now going there twice a week, with still one visit to my old gym. Three times a week. I can already feel a difference, so watch this space!

Third place

After I didn’t do as well as I’d have liked in the last gym challenge I did, I was chatting to one of the gym instructors and he told me that there’s a new challenge for the month of May, starting on 5 May – I was just in time to join it!

The challenge runs weekly and has different exercises each week. You need to complete as many reps of the given exercises as you can in 10 minutes. Just 10 minutes of pushing yourself.

This week: 20 kettle bell swings, 15 burpees over a box, 10 x 10m shuttle run. Repeat as many times as you can in 10 minutes. Go! I scheduled a timeslot and rammed out as many reps as I could, feeling pretty dead at the end of my 10 minutes. But when the weekly results were announced last night – I am sitting pretty in third place for the first week of the challenge. Boom! 🙂

Three ingredients

While scrolling through Facebook today I came across a breakfast recipe that sounded delicious, so I made note of it, thinking that I’d make it sometime over the weekend. And then I got home and couldn’t decide what to have for dinner so I went with the breakfast recipe that has only 3 ingredients: 1 banana, 2 eggs, olive oil.

Mash up the banana, add in the eggs, heat a pan, pour blobs into the pan, cook, eat. Yum! The recipe called for adding honey onto the pancakes, but I decided to go for some peanut butter and avocado. Double Yum! Make that Triple 😉

Three ingredients

All mixed together

First one in the pan

Tasting the first one – peanut butter

Flattening the second one with an avocado