Dubai has thousands of great coaches. Finding one is absurdly hard.
If you want a personal trainer in this city, here's roughly how it goes.
You ask a colleague. You scroll Instagram and find someone with good photos and forty thousand followers, most of whom appear to live in another country. You walk into a gym and get assigned whoever is free, at whatever rate the club sets. Or you give up and keep training on your own, badly, for another six months.
At no point in that process can you compare two coaches side by side. You can't see what they charge without sending a message and waiting. You can't tell whether the person with the good photos is qualified to work around your back injury. You can't filter for someone who trains women, or works with kids, or comes to your building.
For a city this obsessed with fitness, that's a strange gap.
The bigger problem is on the other side
Ask a coach in Dubai what the hardest part of their job is, and very few of them will say the training.
They'll say finding clients.
Most good coaches are not marketers, and there's no reason they should be. They spent years learning anatomy, programming and rehabilitation — not content strategy, not paid social, not search engine optimisation. Yet the way the industry currently works, a coach's income depends heavily on skills that have nothing to do with coaching. Film yourself consistently. Post at the right times. Build an audience. Learn to sell.
A trainer with fifteen years of rehabilitation experience and no interest in being on camera is close to invisible in this market. Meanwhile someone with a good ring light and eighteen months of experience fills their week.
That's a bad outcome for everyone. Clients end up with the most visible coach rather than the most suitable one. Coaches end up competing on production values rather than results. And a lot of genuinely excellent people quietly leave the industry because they couldn't make the business side work.
That's the problem we built MyCoach to solve
We wanted to create a community where coaches, and businesses across the fitness industry, can concentrate on what they're actually good at — training clients — and let us handle the part they didn't sign up for.
That means taking the bulk of the marketing and lead generation off their plate. Not by asking them to post more, or teaching them to run ads, but by building the technology that puts them in front of people already looking for exactly what they offer. A coach shouldn't need a content strategy to be found. They should need to be good at coaching.
The mechanism is straightforward: make it genuinely easy for someone to search, compare and contact a coach, and the coaches who suit them get discovered without having to become marketers first.
What that looks like today
We currently have 265 live listings across the UAE.
Coaches cover strength and performance, body transformation, health and rehabilitation, lifestyle fitness, and sports coaching — tennis, basketball, boxing, martial arts and more. They work in gyms, at your home, outdoors, or online. Some work with children. Some work exclusively with women.
The average listing on MyCoach sits at AED 323 per session, though the range is wide — entry-level sessions start well below that, and specialists command considerably more.
We're publishing that figure deliberately. Price opacity is one of the reasons this market is hard to navigate, and you shouldn't have to send five enquiries to work out what normal looks like.
Where this goes
The ambition is straightforward: to be the place people in the UAE go when they need a coach.
Fitness is where we've started, because that's where demand is loudest and the market is most fragmented. But the problem isn't specific to fitness. A parent looking for a tennis coach, someone returning to sport after an injury, a swimmer looking for technique work — they all hit the same wall, and they all deserve better than a comment section and a hope.
We don't have every coach in the UAE listed. Not yet. But for the first time, the ones we do have can be compared properly — on qualifications, specialism, location and price — and they can spend their time coaching instead of chasing.
What this blog is for
Twice a week, we'll publish something useful about training in this region. Not content marketing dressed as advice — actual answers to the questions people ask us.
What a coach should cost. How to tell whether yours is qualified. Where you can train for free in your community. What's worth doing during Dubai Fitness Challenge. Which gyms in which areas suit which kind of training.
Some of it will be unglamorous. Licensing rules and park permits aren't exciting, but they're the things nobody explains properly, and getting them right matters more than another list of protein tips.
If there's something you want covered, tell us.
