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Egypt Bodybuilders Rare to Get Back to Gym Routines

Egyptian bodybuilders say they are raring to get back to their gruelling gyms routines after being on virus lockdown for weeks. AFP
Egyptian bodybuilders say they are raring to get back to their gruelling gyms routines after being on virus lockdown for weeks. AFP
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Egypt Bodybuilders Rare to Get Back to Gym Routines

Egyptian bodybuilders say they are raring to get back to their gruelling gyms routines after being on virus lockdown for weeks. AFP
Egyptian bodybuilders say they are raring to get back to their gruelling gyms routines after being on virus lockdown for weeks. AFP

Egypt's musclemen are annoyed with working out from home due to COIVID-19 virus restrictions and are eager to get back to the demanding routines at their gyms, where they also earn a living.

With massive biceps and a gleaming six-pack, Mohamed Ali -- who goes by his nickname Asab, a reference in Arabic to his bulging veins -- is normally an enthusiastic exhibitionist.

The 33-year-old is a personal trainer and veteran participant of several bodybuilding championships with Egypt's national team, which has a history of garnering gold medals on the world stage.

"I've taken it upon myself... to use the lockdown to start competing again at the end of the year, since I have a lot of time on my hands these days," he told AFP.

He is re-sculpting a taut physique through an extremely demanding workout, in the hope of competing in Mr. Olympia -- the world's premier bodybuilding competition, tentatively scheduled for December in Las Vegas.

Egypt has been under a night-time curfew for the past three months to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Gyms have been shuttered as part of nationwide restrictions, but that has not deterred Asab from hitting his home gym hard.

Asab said he is also worried about his business and his livelihood.

The owner of 16 gyms in Cairo said he was paying several hundred staff out of his own pocket.

Normally buzzing weight machines have stood idle for three months as the lockdown shuttered his facilities and cut off his only source of income.

Earlier this month, the government said gyms would partially re-open, without giving a clear indication of when.

"We're like other industries such as tourism and restaurants that have been affected 100 percent," Asab said.

"I have a whole team who depend on commissions from memberships... I really don't know if we'll be able to go on living like before or not," he said, surrounded by dumb-bells on his living-room floor.

Meanwhile, Mohamed Nassim, a 33-year-old Syrian who fled his country after war broke out in 2011, was also somewhat shy about showing off his muscles.

He said that when competing, he trims his body fat down to a lean three percent.

"I started getting into bodybuilding in Syria back around 2003, and it was only to bulk up initially because I was really skinny," he said.

"The first championship I competed in was around 2010, and I actually won in 2011, taking first place in a national competition -- but after the events we headed to Egypt," Nassim added, referring to start of Syria's civil war.

Nassim said he had been trying to stay in shape "using dumb-bells at home and maintaining the physical form I had built up over many years."

According to AFP, several champion Egyptian bodybuilders such as Big Ramy -- lauded by Arnold Schwarzenegger -- have turned into social media celebrities, heading overseas to compete professionally or even dabble in acting.

But Nassim has developed more modest, short-term goals since his bodybuilding career has taken a hit.

He is keen to return to being a hands-on personal trainer at his local franchise of World Gym, the American fitness behemoth, where he used to coach budding bodybuilders and those looking to stay in shape.

"The shutdown has really affected us financially and psychologically," he said.

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Varieties

Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
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Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)

The world knew Jimmy Carter as a president and humanitarian, but he also was a woodworker, painter and poet, creating a body of artistic work that reflects deeply personal views of the global community — and himself.
His portfolio illuminates his closest relationships, his spartan sensibilities and his place in the evolution of American race relations. And it continues to improve the finances of The Carter Center, his enduring legacy, The Associated Press said.
Creating art provided “the rare opportunity for privacy” in his otherwise public life, Carter said. “These times of solitude are like being in another very pleasant world.”
‘One of the best gifts of my life' Mourners at Carter’s hometown funeral will see the altar cross he carved in maple and collection plates he turned on his lathe. Great-grandchildren in the front pews at Maranatha Baptist Church slept as infants in cradles he fashioned.
The former president measured himself a “fairly proficient” craftsman. Chris Bagby, an Atlanta woodworker whose shop Carter frequented, elevated that assessment to “rather accomplished.”
Carter gleaned the basics on his father’s farm, where the Great Depression meant being a jack-of-all-trades. He learned more in shop class and with Future Farmers of America. “I made a miniature of the White House,” he recalled, insisting it was not about his ambitions.
During his Navy years, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter chose unfurnished military housing to stretch his $300 monthly wage, and he built their furniture himself in a shop on base.
As president, Carter nurtured woodworking rather than his golf game, spending hours in a wood shop at Camp David to make small presents for family and friends. And when he left the White House, West Wing aides and Cabinet members pooled money for a shopping spree at Sears, Roebuck & Co. so he could finally assemble a full-scale home woodshop.
“One of the best gifts of my life,” Carter said.
Working in their converted garage, he previewed decades of Habitat for Humanity work by refurbishing their one-story house in Plains. He also improved his fine woodworking skills, joining wood without nails or screws. He also bought Japanese carving tools, and fashioned a chess set later owned by a Saudi prince.
Not just any customer Carter frequented Atlanta’s Highland Woodworking, a shop replete with a library of how-to books and hard-to-find tools, and recruited the world’s preeminent handmade furniture maker, Tage Frid, as an instructor, Bagby said.
Still hanging near the store entrance is a picture of Frid, who died in 2004, teaching students including a smiling former president at the front of the class.
“He was like a regular customer,” Bagby said, other than the “Secret Service agents who came with him.”
Carter built four ladder-back chairs out of hickory in 1983, and Sotheby’s auctioned them for $21,000 each at the time, the first of many sales of Carter paintings and furniture that raised millions to benefit The Carter Center.
It was rarely about the money, though. Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend who would have the Carters over to her home in Plains, recalled seeing the former president carrying out one of her chairs.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘It’s broken. I’m going to take it home and fix it.’”
He was at her back door at 7:30 the next morning, holding her repaired chair.
Carter compared woodworking to the results of his labor as a Navy engineer, or as a boy on the farm: “I like to see what I have done, what I have made.”
‘No special talent,' but his paintings drive auctions Carter employed a folk-art style as a late-in-life amateur painter and claimed “no special talent,” but a 2020 Carter Center auction drew $340,000 for his painting titled “Cardinals," and his oil-on-canvas of an eagle sold for $225,000 in 2023, months after he entered hospice care.
Carter’s work hangs throughout the center’s campus. A room where he met with dignitaries is encircled with birds he painted after he and Rosalynn took on bird watching as a hobby.
Near the executive offices are a self-portrait and a painting of Rosalynn in their early post-presidential years, hanging across from a trio of Andy Warhol prints showing Carter in office.
Carter’s earliest years predominate, with boyhood farm scenes and portraits of influential figures like his father James Earl Carter Sr., whose death in 1953 led him to abandon a Navy career and eventually enter politics in Georgia.
Some of his subjects, including both of his parents, are looking away. Carter's likeness of his mother shows “Miss Lillian” as a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India. Jason Carter said the piece was particularly meaningful to his grandfather, who lost reelection at a relatively youthful 56.
“When he got out of the White House, she was standing there saying, ’Well, I turned 70 in the Peace Corps. What are you going to do?” Jason Carter said.
One Carter subject who meets his gaze is a young Rosalynn — they married when she was 18 and he was 21. He described her as “remarkably beautiful, almost painfully shy, obviously intelligent, and yet unrestrained in our discussions.”
Another who doesn’t look away is Rachel Clark, a Black sharecropper who had hosted the future president after they worked in the fields. “Except for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me,” Carter wrote of his childhood.
'Just a word of praise' Carter wrote more than 30 books — even a novel — but was most introspective in poetry.
On his first real recognition of Jim Crow segregation: “A silent line was drawn between friend and friend, race and race.”
On his Cold War submarine’s delicate dance with enemies: “We wanted them to understand ... to share our love of solitude ... the peace we yearned to keep.”
Rosalynn’s smile, he gushed, silenced the birds, “or may be I failed to hear their song.”
Perhaps Carter’s most revealing poem, “I Wanted to Share My Father’s World,” concerns the man who never got to see his namesake son’s achievements. He wrote that he despised Earl’s discipline, and swallowed hunger for “just a word of praise.”
Only when he brought his own sons to visit his dying father did he “put aside the past resentments of the boy” and see “the father who will never cease to be alive in me.”