Fight Clubs

Want to get fit, demolish calories and gain more confidence at the same time? Here’s how you can box, grapple, throw and kick your way to a brand new you, right here in Abu Dhabi.

One quiet day in the Abu Dhabi office of What’s On, we decided to play the soundtrack to Rocky IV on our stereo. It’s the movie where Stallone fights Ivan Drago (played by Dolph Lundgren) and it involves that training scene where Rocky is running through the snow lifting trees to 1980s synth music. Now, we live in the desert so we don’t have snow, and we don’t want to lift giant logs either, but it did inspire us to get off the sofa and try a boxing fitness class (but we don’t want to fight Drago – he would break us). So we started to research this feature, and then we got really excited. Because be it boxing or karate, jiu-jitsu or aikido, there are plenty of places to bust some moves and get lean in the nation’s capital, and most importantly, many of them burn at least 600 calories an hour. At this rate, we can see us getting fit enough to take on that man mountain Drago after all...

MUST-TRY CLASSES

Brazilian jiu-jitsu

Jiu-jitsu is huge in the capital – last month, the emirate hosted the Abu Dhabi World Jiu-Jitsu Championship, an event that saw the world’s best compete in the UAE. Emiratis love the sport (even members of the capital’s ruling Al Nayhan family are fans, while local fighters won 147 medals at an event in Dubai last September). It’s a fighting style with a focus on grappling and fighting on the ground and is related to judo and you can burn around 600 calories an hour during a session.

Primal Gym, Al Reem Island, Abu Dhabi, Sun to Thur 7.30pm, price on request. Tel: [phone]. Taxi: Amaya Towers, Al Reem Island, near Repton School. primal.ae

Karate