RIYADH: Pounding on a cross-trainer in a Riyadh gym, Heelah Abdulaziz is one of many Saudi women hoping the licensing of female-only gyms from next month is another step toward further improving the lives of women in the Kingdom.

Gyms for women are being encouraged for the first time due to licensing of female-only gyms by the General Authority of Sports last year.

The licensing, which was anounced last month, opens the doors for girls to live a healthy lifestyle and sidesteps the sensitive women’s rights debate.

A spokeswoman for the sports authority told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that licenses would be granted from April to boost the sports economy, which does not just impact physical activity but also employment and business opportunities.

For Abdulaziz, 39, allowing gyms for women — although they are still banned from competitive sports — made sense, with around 44 percent of women classified as obese in Saudi Arabia, which has some of the world’s highest rates of obesity and diabetes.

“We’ll get a lot more gyms. They’ll compete and get cheaper so more women can come,” she said at a NuYu fitness center, dressed in colorful workout gear rather than the head-to-toe black garment women, including foreigners, must wear in public.

“I didn’t have sport at school, but I got interested after having children and wanting to lose weight. I tried to exercise at home,” said Abdulaziz, who lost 15kg (33 pounds) in a year due to exercising.

Until now, the only gyms accessible to women were found in women’s centers, which would only get licenses if their main purpose was not exercise but as a spa or retail operation. Any centers found breaching that rule were closed down.

This left commercially run gyms catering to privately run women’s sports teams or middle-class women able to pay $200 monthly membership operating in legal limbo for years.

Susan Turner, chief executive of the NuYu chain set up by Princess Sara Mohammad Al-Saud in 2012 as the Kingdom’s first chain of female fitness centers, said licensing will lower costs, fuel expansion and improve standards. NuYu now has five centers, and is set to expand to eight this year.

But Turner said a major drawback was the ability to get staff locally, as sport is not mandatory in girls’ schools and physical education is not a career choice for Saudi women.

“At the moment we have to bring Western trainers to Saudi, but if we can train local women this will bring costs down and help staff more gyms,” Turner told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that NuYu planned to set up an academy for this.

“It is amazing that we get women coming in here in their 30s who have never moved their bodies on purpose... This is a culture that is very fast-food driven.”

This is in line with the government’s Vision 2030 released last year, which argues the need for a healthier society and an economy more inclusive of women.

In a break from lifting weights, Rahaf Naasani, 27, said women needed gyms in Saudi Arabia to be healthy and fit.

“There’s nowhere to work out outside, and the main activity otherwise revolves around food,” said Naasani, a mother of 6-year-old twins, who moved to Riyadh from Syria seven years ago.