September 2018 www.womanthismonth.com 38 PEOPLE | interview Renowned fitness instructor, mentor and all-round inspirational female, Fatima Batook, shares her journey in the fitness arena with Behnaz Sanjana. Pure Yoga + Cycle (PYC), in Hamala, is Bahrain’s only topline hot yoga studio and licensed Spinning facility. Owner Fatima is a Saudi national who has mentored numerous students and trainers to date. She attended her first Spinning class in the year 2000. “It started off as a quest for personal transformation,” she says. “I had dealt with obesity at the young age of 18. I lost 70 kilograms within five to six years. Today, I am approximately 60 kilograms, so you can do the math! I remember struggling to find the best way to reach an ideal weight in those roller-coaster years. Advice from friends and family didn't really help. Finally, I sought professional help, and that made me want to be qualified and certified to help others transform themselves to live truly happier lives.” She retells her initial experience with this form of working out: “Being overweight, I had just started my quest to lose the extra pounds. I wasn’t very keen on the Spinning class; I stayed for 10 minutes and left, thinking I would never do it again. One day, I had no other option but to take the class again, and to my luck it was a session with Spinning master instructor Sarah Morelli. I went through the hour without looking at the time; she had taken me to another world and that’s when I discovered the mind-body connection of exercise and fell in love with it.” Fatima went on to get certified as a Spinning instructor in 2007 by none other than Sarah Morelli herself. “She inspires me still today and I still learn a lot from her,” she says. Since then, the fitness professional has attended many an international event. “I have attended the World Spinning and Sports Conference (WSSC) every June since 2010, and have gone to the Spinning showcase in the UK five times to date. The 24-hour Portugal Ride in August 2015, the underground Spinning 12 hour event in a salt mine in Poland in 2016, and the sixhour Spinning Experience in Holland in 2014 and 2016 are a few of the amazing, fun events that I have attended. I also join many fitness instructors every year to learn about new types of exercises and stay up-to-date with new sports research and physiology,” she says. In her initial years, Fatima did have to get around some difficulties in treading her own path in Saudi Arabia’s conservative society. She says: “When I first started, about 12 years ago, fitness for women in Saudi Arabia was very rare, and was meant only for the well-travelled and elite. Most fitness instructors were expatriates, so it was very difficult for others to understand why I was SPINNING TO SUCCESS
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