I came across this article on the Al Jazeera Twitter feed a few days ago... Al Jazeera Article
and I have done a rough translation.

It is in the the Medical and Health section of the website and the article is called "How do you choose a gym?"

The article reads:

"Dumbbells must be clean and in good condition so as not to expose you to injury (European).
Registration at the gym is a helpful step, it gives you motivation and personal commitment when you pay in advance! The club also offers multiple machines for you to use and exercise many muscles in your body. But before signing up, you must make sure of several things:

• Location, select a gym that is close to where you live, you do not want to be in traffic for an hour before you reach it, because it may give you an excuse to avoid going in the future.
• Cleanliness, and the best place to check is the bathrooms, the last thing you want is an infection or disease. You should also check the machines and weights, do they look clean, or slippery because of layers of salt and sweat?
• Do they maintain their equipment? Look for broken equipment and watch the dumbbells, because they might slip during an exercise and fall on your head. If you feel the club and its parts are not regularly serviced, do not go.
• Environment, is there a friendly coach? Do the people feel comfortable or are you a stranger?
• Overcrowding, visit the gym at its peak time, which is usually between five and nine. If the club is packed it will disrupt you and delay your exercise and make you feel like a nuisance. If you are planning to train in the morning, visit the club at this time.
• Payment, some gyms give discounted rates for year long or half a year long memberships, but the best advise is to not register for that long unless you sure. You may discover a month later that there are some bad things about the gym. Join for only a month at first and tell the coach you will try it out and then decide. It is better to pay a higher rate for just one month than to be stuck in a trap for a year.
• Pay attention to the treadmills, are they new and clean? Many care about weights but aerobic machines may crash, the treadmill is usually used for a half an hour, and if there are a small number of treadmills in the gym, it means you will be delayed or forced to skip exercises in your program."

Let me know if there should be any changes in the translation.

This takes place in South Africa and even though it doesn't have anything to do with the Middle East it is still a fascinating part of gym culture.
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-05-24-00-cape-town-working-it-out-at-frankies

It wasn't until after I actually started taking classes that I was able to work out in Monde Sportif Fassi. I believe my first exercise was back and biceps so I was doing a myriad of rows, dead lifts and bicep curls on Olympic equipment that must have been from the 70's. This is the inside of the gym.

The woman in the first picture is a permanent employee, I want to say her name is Sarah and she is standing in the entirety of the weight room. The second  and third pictures are of the "basketball court" which is far too small to play any kind of regulation sport on. It looks more like a badminton court... but probably narrower. The fourth picture is the cardio machines and the fifth is a squat rack and some barbells with weights that don't quite fit on the barbell so they wobble a lot.

Halfway through my workout an aerobic dance-like class started up. I was asked to join, but I pretended I could not keep up with the routine. Here is a link to the video I took of it.

Monde Sportif Fassi Moroccan Aerobics 

Khalid Almohsinawi is a professional athlete from Iraq. He has participated in and placed in many professional competitions for the past 10 years including the IFBB Tampa Bay Pro.

Khalid Almohsinawi Profile

This past weekend Baito Abbaspour from Iran and Zaher Moukahal from Lebanon competed in the 2013 Men's European Pro Show with 18 other bodybuilders in Santa Susanna, Spain. Baito placed 2nd and Zaher placed 11th.

Baito Abbaspour

Zaher Moukahal

A little about my personal experiences. I studied Arabic in Fes, Morocco during the summer of 2012, the summer after my freshman year in college. The first gym I found in the city was called "Monde Sportif Fassi", that is French for "Fassi Sports World". In arabic it is "العالم الرياضي الفاسي". The word Fassi is the demonym, or gentilic, for the people that live in Fes. The pictures below are the outside of the gym and the sign advertising membership.

As you can see, the advertising is pretty interesting and much different from anything you would see in the United States. Bodybuilding is directly advertised on the sign and I have never seen any gym in the U.S. that uses that as an advertising tool. If anyone has an example please share it. What I have concluded is that gyms in the U.S. focus on, and advertise weight loss, and gyms in Morocco, and most likely the rest of the Middle East, focus on weight gain. When you get closer to the sign it is also apparent that the man's head is photoshopped onto the body. This next picture is of the inside of the entrance to Monde Sportif Fassi.

Upon entering this gym to inquire about a membership I was greeted by a woman at the counter and we hand gestured for a while because I had only been in the country for two days and I knew zero arabic at that time. Eventually the owner came out of his office. He was a Belgian man who said he moved to Morocco for the food and the weather. It was unusual for a Belgian man to move to Morocco and open up a gym, but he seemed to be doing great, and he was easily one of the biggest guys in Fes. I was not allowed to see the gym itself because I had stumbled in on a designated women's day. Three days out of the week the gym was only open to women and the other four were men, and if I'm not mistaken a woman could come on the day for men if she chose to. In the office of the owner we worked out the specifics of a membership. It was going to be 400 dirham a month which is about 47 USD. I realize that that is extremely steep for any gym in any country and I hope that he was not just taking advantage of my ignorance to the exchange rate. I did not get any kind of membership card that I could present at the door, you just walked in and if they didn't recognize you, they would look up the photo copy of your license that they had on file. I purchased my membership but it wasn't until the next day that I actually got to go into the gym.

Introduction

This blog is about bodybuilding and the fitness industry in general within the Arab world. I will be keeping up to date with competitions, athletes, products and any other developments within the industry. I will be opening the readers' eyes to things they may not have heard of and things they may never have the chance to hear about through any other medium. I frequent Middle Eastern-based websites, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and have some experience of my own in Arab gyms. I will be taking all of this information, translating what needs to be translated and synthesizing it here on this blog.