At the Sports Stadium in the city of Shebin El-Koum, which belongs to the Menoufia Governorate, north of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, the young man Ali Mounir decided 7 years ago, at the age of sixteen, to start practicing gymnastics and fitness exercises alone, without joining any club or sports center.
Mounir’s fascination with the game made him follow the most prominent athletes registered in it on social networking sites and the official websites of major competitions. Once while browsing the Guinness Book of Records website, he saw a number of them breaking records and entering the world encyclopedia, to decide to “victory over them”.
The Egyptian young man trained for months alone, using only videos, and realized that self-training while wishing to achieve dreams were able to make the impossible, but injuries chased him a lot because he was not familiar with the sport and qualified him appropriately to achieve the numbers.
“I told myself after trying to join a gym and he refused me, dreams come true with effort, and no matter how difficult the road is, I will achieve the impossible, and everyone will be amazed by the successes I achieve,” this is how the Egyptian young man tells Sky News Arabia his story, after he recently managed to achieve 15 A record in the Guinness Book of Records.
And the 23-year-old continued, “I was constantly browsing the videos of the outstanding players in the game, and I was trying to implement those moves that they make at home. I used to look at the record videos as if it was imaginary and impossible to achieve.”
From here it was the beginning
In 2018, the young man tried to take his first steps, but was shocked twice, the first when Guinness rejected his attempt to break the record of an Armenian player in one of the exercises in which he managed to achieve 75 reps per minute, and the second when the Faculty of Physical Education refused to join him after passing all the tests.
Mounir said: “That was a harsh period in my life. I was practicing without guidance and without a foundation of my knowledge, other than my lack of knowledge of the best ways to document the record, which needs about 6 months, starting with submitting the application and waiting for the arrival of the guidelines, collecting evidence, filming and waiting for the media to result in either Accept or decline,” he explains.
Ankle injury
And the 15-year-old holder of Guinness World Records added: “During those months, I sustained a major ankle injury, because of the dangerous exercises I was doing, until I exceeded it in 2020, which marked the beginning of achieving my first records in which I failed and achieved 80 repetitions. And I broke the Armenian player’s record with five extra kicks.”
In 2020, I set the record after recovering from an ankle injury, to be able to achieve it with 80 reps and break the record of the Armenian player with five additional reps, and with him a set of records over the past months that reached 15 records.