Head Coach

Omar Zayed

Omar has coached for fifteen years and has run this floor for six of them. He competed at 94kg to national level, and a reconstructed knee ended that in his late twenties — which is the short version of why he writes programmes now rather than chasing a total. He writes the strength block every member follows, revises it at the eight-week review, and still takes the 06:00 on a Monday because he thinks a head coach who stops coaching becomes an administrator inside a year. If you are new and wary of a barbell, you will probably meet him first. He has a settled way of putting people at ease that does not involve pretending the first month is easy. His particular interest is return to training — members coming back after surgery, after a long illness, after a decade away. That work taught him most of what he knows about scaling, and it is the reason Mobility sits on the timetable as a class in its own right rather than as five minutes bolted onto the end of a lifting session. He runs that one himself too. He is careful about the line between coaching and clinical care. If something hurts in a way that is new or getting worse, he will send you to a physiotherapist before he programmes around it, and he keeps a short list of people in Al Quoz and the Marina he trusts. He would rather lose six weeks of your training than be the reason you lose six months of it. He also decides what the twelve-week blocks look like across the year, which means he is the reason strength volume climbs between June and September while everyone's outdoor running stops, and drops back in October when it starts again. If you want to know why your programme changed, he wrote it and he will tell you. Outside the studio he is usually somewhere in the Hajar mountains on a gravel bike, going slowly and enjoying it.