There is a 7 AM hour at a Gulberg gym I have been turning up to for the better part of a year. The lights come on at six-thirty. The air conditioning is set to the kind of cold that only makes sense if you understand what is about to happen in the room. By ten past seven the deadlift platforms are full. Not full of staff. Full of people who pay to be there.
Five years ago, this hour did not exist in Lahore.
That is the story. Not the headline version, Pakistanis discover the gym, which is condescending and also wrong, because the city has had bodybuilding subcultures for decades. The actual story is narrower, slower, and more interesting. In the last 36 months, the centre of gravity in Lahore's fitness culture shifted from cardio rooms to strength rooms. The city's relationship with its body changed underneath that shift.
The two-gym era
Until roughly 2021, two kinds of facility dominated Lahore.
The first was the health club. Chrome-and-glass operations attached to hotels or housing developments. Treadmills in long rows. Free weights tucked apologetically in a corner. Almost always empty.
The second was the bodybuilder gym. Usually a basement, often in a converted residential garage. Run by men with extraordinary forearms and a strict no-women-after-five rule.
Both were stuck. The health clubs sold a fitness culture nobody had asked for: low-intensity steady-state cardio for "weight loss," group classes lifted from American suburbs in the 90s. The bodybuilder gyms sold an inherited culture: hypertrophy splits, prep diets, performance-enhancing assumptions baked into every conversation.
There was nothing in the middle. If you wanted to lift heavy and not be in either context, you trained at home or you didn't train.
The gap was the opportunity.
What actually happened
Three things, more or less in parallel.
Powerlifting communities organised. Small, regional federations started running meets, first Lahore, then Karachi, then Islamabad. The meets were terrible at first: bad equipment, bad judging, bad scheduling. They got better. By 2023 there were lifters from these meets going abroad and placing in Asian sub-junior categories. Word travelled. Suddenly there were teenagers in Defence and Bahria asking specifically for strength coaching, a phrase that hadn't meaningfully existed in the Lahore market.
Coaching as a credential category emerged. Pakistanis returning from training stints abroad, some genuine and some less so, started selling actual programming, not just floor supervision. Online programs. In-person blocks. The price point sat awkwardly above what a personal trainer used to cost and well below a foreign coach. It cleared.
Women showed up. The single biggest demographic shift in any Lahore gym I've been in over the past two years is the morning-and-late-evening women's strength block. Not the cardio room. The squat racks. Women, most of them in their late twenties to early forties, most of them new to lifting, coming in three times a week to train under a coach, eat a calculated number of grams of protein, and progressively load a barbell.
I didn't know I was allowed to look like this.
That's what one of them told me, after a year of training. Look meant: visibly muscular. Allowed did most of the work in that sentence.
What the rooms feel like
The new generation of Lahore strength gyms, the ones that opened or rebranded between 2022 and 2025, share a specific vocabulary. Wood platforms, not rubber tiles. Calibrated plates, not bumper-marked steel. Squat racks at chest height, not above it. Music kept under conversation level. Coaches wearing labels that say "coach" and not "trainer." A clipboard or an app where every set is logged.
None of this is technically necessary. You can get strong on a 30-year-old olympic bar in a bodybuilder basement. People have. What the new rooms signal is that strength training in Lahore stopped being a subculture and started being a category, with norms, with marketing, with credentials, with consumers.
That's the shift.
What it costs, and the uncomfortable part
A serious strength gym in Lahore in 2026 runs PKR 12,000 to 25,000 a month. Add coaching, you're at PKR 30,000 to 60,000. That's a non-trivial number. It puts serious lifting in the upper-middle bracket and explicitly out of reach for most of the city.
This is the uncomfortable part of the story. The version I'm telling is real, but it is not universal.
The shift is happening in Defence, Cantt, Gulberg, Bahria. Neighbourhoods that already had disposable income. The bodybuilder basements in Misri Shah, Ravi, Shadbagh are still there, still serving working-class men, still doing what they always did. Those are not the gyms anyone is writing magazine pieces about.
The two cultures haven't merged. They've stratified. The new strength scene didn't replace the old one. It grew in parallel, mostly without overlap, mostly in the parts of the city that were already changing for other reasons.
That is also part of the story.
What's next
The honest answer: I don't know. The growth curve in serious strength gyms looks like it's plateauing. Most of the people who were going to start lifting because they saw their friends lifting have started, and the next jump probably needs the price to come down. Whether anyone in this market wants to be the value-tier strength gym is the open question.
What I am sure of: the room I started in, the 7 AM Gulberg gym, deadlift platforms full, women in the squat racks, coaches with clipboards, would have been unimaginable in this city when I was eighteen. It exists now. It's not going away.
That is not a small thing.
Bugo's lifestyle desk covers fitness, food, and the cultures that shape the body across Pakistan. Got a gym story? editorial@bugo.pk.