As COVID Cases Rose, So Did Home Workouts in Qatar

Benu Ravi laid in front of the camera, pushing and pulling a resistance band tucked around his back.

“Feel the pump and let your muscles burn,” he grunted.

Ravi, a fitness coach with 20 years of experience, was filming an instructional video on executing a proper bench press movement. He did this for his clients who were confined to home workouts, but also for himself to stay motivated in such difficult times.

As the pandemic became an emergency health crisis in Qatar around mid-March, a nationwide lockdown shut down everything, including gyms. It is a health crisis when the population of a country is unable to exercise, and even more so when 70% of the population is overweight according to a 2016 report by Qatar Biobank. All these factors have resulted in the rise of home workouts in Qatar.

Over the next few weeks, Ravi received many requests on making home workout tutorials from Education City students. They all used to train at Ravi’s workplace, the Multaqa Student Center Gym, before the lockdown began.

“Along with other trainers, we would then make instructional videos for our students.” Ravi even forwarded some of these videos to his boss so they could be displayed on social media sites to further educate the public on home workouts.

Ravi was not the only one to observe this rise in home workouts. A look at the phrase “home workouts” on Google trends showcases a dramatic spike in its search volume during mid-March, which could be attributed to the country-wide lockdown imposed at the same time period.

A graph showcasing the interest of the word “home workout” in Qatar from 2019 to 2020. The vertical axis represents interest over time, which is defined as search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. Data taken from googletrends.com

To diversify his workouts, Ravi looked for more gym equipment. However, so did others.

“[We saw] noticeable increase in overall sales during the pandemic,” said a spokesperson for Force Sports, a sporting goods store in Qatar. An employee at the same company, who requested to remain anonymous, further added that the first six months of the pandemic resulted in higher sales when compared to the same period in 2019.

Age and gender were not a factor in the purchase of gym equipment according to Force Sports. This suggests that the need to remain healthy was a priority for many in Qatar, and even more so during a pandemic when gyms are closed.

Experienced lifters had sufficient knowledge of doing home workouts. Ravi had a strict weekly schedule which would involve lifting days along with high-intensity circuit training on weekends. However, for beginners, this meant starting from scratch. Raghdan Alhennawi, a student at Northwestern University in Qatar, was one of them.

“I wasn’t doing any kind of bodyweight workout, I started off with mostly doing cardio and yoga,” he added.

With the possibility of gyms not opening any time soon, Alhennawi decided to continue with home workouts and increase their intensity and exercise diversity.

“I then started changing it to bodyweight push-ups, and trying to do multiple variations of it,” he added.

Regardless of fitness experience, one challenge haunted beginners and experts equally: the motivation to continue to work out.

“I worked out for one month and just stopped right away,” said Useful Odoje, a student at Qatar University, who has been lifting for the past five years. “I just couldn’t find the motivation,” he added.

Along with Odoje, even Ravi with his vast experience in lifting acknowledged the hardship of working out at home. “My motivation was low, with what was going on back home, and being worried about my family all the time. However, as I stayed indoors, I decided to work out and also stay fit,” said Ravi.

Alhennawi’s motivation to continue working out at home took a different route.

“I realized I was losing my stamina, and this is what kind of motivated me. I didn’t want to lose myself. I didn’t want to lose that kind of fitness. I didn’t want to lose that kind of health style that I had built.”

“And what really kept me motivated was being able to sleep early, which was great for my mental health as I was stuck in my dorm room for many months,” said Alhennawi.

As COVID cases started decreasing over the summer, gyms reopened in mid-September. Many experienced and beginner lifters flocked to the gyms immediately, and even Odoje finally got enough motivation to resume working out upon hearing this news. Ravi mentioned that when he got back to his workplace, many of the students had gotten fit, while others had lost muscle and gained fat.

Useful’s first workout at the Student Center when the gyms reopened, posted on his Instagram (Photo/ Useful Odoje)

Currently, the trend of home workouts has decreased ever since March. However, Qatar is facing a resurge in COVID-19 cases. Its seven-day average cases rose from 187 at the start of the year to 346 in a span of a month, according to the Ministry of Public Health. Many worry that the country might go into another lockdown. For those who went back to gyms, this could mean the possibility of returning to home workouts.

“This freaks me out a lot because I [have] kind of developed a rhythm at the gym, and I don’t want to lose that at all,” Alhennawi added.