There’s something about training with your feet in the sand and the Corniche breeze coming off the water that changes the whole feel of a workout. That’s the idea behind Active Parks: Beach Workout, one of the formats HARAKA runs under its ACTIVE Communities programme in Abu Dhabi. Instead of a studio or a gym floor, the session moves outdoors to the coastline, and instead of charging for a class, it’s free and open to anyone who turns up…
Beach Workout sits inside a much bigger initiative. ACTIVE Communities is delivered in partnership with Ma’an, The Authority of Social Contribution, and between September 2023 and August 2024 it turned 49 parks and 6 malls across the emirate into working wellness hubs. Over that year the programme ran 672 sessions, brought in 638 wellness ambassadors to lead them, and had backing from 38 participating companies. More than 34,600 people, 34,631 to be precise, took part. Those are the citywide numbers for the whole ACTIVE Communities push, and Beach Workout is the format that carried that same model out to the coast rather than a park or a mall atrium.
What makes the format work is that it doesn’t ask much of the people showing up. No membership, no booking fee, no kit beyond trainers and water. You see the setup on the sand, a group forms, and an ambassador leads everyone through a session built for an open-air, uneven surface rather than a rubber gym floor. Sand changes the way a workout feels on the body, it takes more effort to push off, balance shifts more, and that makes for a session that’s tougher than it looks even if the pace is the same as an indoor class. For a lot of participants this is their first time doing organised group fitness at all, so keeping it low-barrier matters as much as the programming itself.
Because it’s part of ACTIVE Communities rather than a one-off event, Beach Workout follows the same rhythm as the park and mall sessions: regular, publicised, and repeated often enough that people start to build it into their week. That consistency is really the whole point of the wider programme. Abu Dhabi has plenty of open, walkable coastline, and the ambition behind ACTIVE Communities has always been to use that existing public space rather than build anything new. A stretch of beach becomes a fitness venue for an hour, then goes back to being a beach.
It also reflects something HARAKA cares about in how it designs community programming generally: meeting people where they already are. Beach Workout doesn’t try to pull people into a gym environment that might feel intimidating or unfamiliar. It puts a trained ambassador on a public beach at a set time and lets the session speak for itself. Over a full year of ACTIVE Communities activity, that approach was what got the numbers into the tens of thousands, not a single flagship event but many small, repeated, low-friction sessions across dozens of locations, of which Beach Workout was one of the more distinctive formats given its setting.
None of this happens without the people leading it on the ground, and that’s really the part of ACTIVE Communities we’re proudest of at HARAKA. Every session, whether it’s on a beach, in a park or inside a mall atrium, is run by a wellness ambassador we’ve trained ourselves. Building that network is a big part of what our Events Management and community work actually involves day to day: recruiting people, training them properly, and then making sure they show up on schedule, week after week, at the same standard.
The partnership with Ma’an, The Authority of Social Contribution, is what makes that possible at this scale. In practical terms it means we’re not just designing a workout format and hoping someone picks it up. We train the ambassadors who lead each session, we coordinate with Ma’an on where and when sessions happen across Abu Dhabi’s parks, malls and beaches, and we hold the line on keeping every session free and open to the public. That last part sounds simple but it shapes everything else. Free means no barrier to walking up and joining in, which is exactly what got over 34,600 people involved across a single year of ACTIVE Communities.
As a wellbeing company based in Abu Dhabi, this kind of community activation is where we feel most useful. Our flagship gym is at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City, and we’ve been running programmes like this for a good few years now, but a lot of our work happens well outside our own four walls, in public spaces that belong to everyone in the city. Community activations Abu Dhabi wide only work if the people leading them are properly trained and reliably present, and that’s the bit we take seriously: not just designing a good session, but building a team that can deliver it consistently at dozens of sites at once.
We also work with corporate teams, schools and government entities elsewhere in the business, but ACTIVE Communities is deliberately public facing. It’s one of the clearest examples of what a wellbeing company based in this city can do when it partners with an organisation like Ma’an rather than working alone. If you’re curious about how a programme like Beach Workout gets planned and staffed, or you’re thinking about how your own organisation might get involved in something similar, get in touch with us at HARAKA. We’re always glad to talk through how it works.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026