From nuclear engineer to fitness coach: Why this entrepreneur swapped reactors for reps in Dubai

Dubai: Meet Cameron Gordon – a 30-year-old British entrepreneur in Dubai. He spent 11 years maintaining nuclear reactors at power stations across the UK. Today, the 30-year-old wakes up in Dubai running Graft - a hybrid fitness centre in Al Quoz that he co-founded just months after arriving in the Emirates.

“I didn’t want to, 30 years down the line, look back with regret that I didn’t take a chance on following my own dream,” Gordon said. “How can I tell my kids growing up that they should chase their dream if I didn’t do it myself?”

The Hartlepool native arrived in Dubai in August last year, initially playing it safe with an engineering role at Barakah power station on the Abu Dhabi-Saudi border. But within four months, everything changed.

Gordon’s journey into engineering began at 16 with an apprenticeship, including two years of training at a Royal Navy base in Portsmouth.

As a maintenance assistant team leader at Barakah, he worked on reactor outages and shutdowns. A comfortable, safe job. Still, Cameron wanted more.

"It was a safe job, a stable income, lots of opportunities for growth and potential," he reflects. "But it didn’t light that fire in my belly."

For six to seven years, Gordon had been coaching CrossFit and functional fitness part-time in the UK, rising at 5 am for training sessions before his engineering shift, then returning to the gym after work. The gruelling routine involved two training sessions daily, five to six days a week.

"After I first ever done a coaching session as a fitness coach, I knew that that was what I was passionate about," he says. "However, in the UK, it didn’t really make sense financially—the salaries aren't as good for a coach in the UK as they are in Dubai.”

His partner, a teacher in Dubai, provided the crucial support. "She just said to me, 'Look, I’ve got this good, stable salary. I know you’re not happy. Come back, get a coaching job, make me happy, and I'll be there to support you.’”

The risk paid off. After coaching at Elevate CrossFit gym, Gordon met the gym owner, June, who saw potential and proposed opening Graft together. Seven months later, they’ve launched Dubai’s newest fitness destination.

Graft—English slang for hard work and effort—is a hybrid fitness centre offering completely coach-led, class-based training designed for everyday people, not just elite athletes.

"Hard, relentless work and active, pushing physical and mental limits to achieve elite performance," is how Gordon defines the gym’s ethos. "It’s pretty much similar to hustlers."

Unlike traditional CrossFit, which can intimidate newcomers with complex skills, Graft focuses on functional movements accessible to anyone. "If you’re in Graft for one week, I will have you competent with every movement that we do in here," Gordon promises.

The facility features top-tier equipment and programming, with coaches selected as much for their personality as for their qualifications. "They don't care what you know until they know that you care," Gordon explains. "We made sure that they were good people first, before they were good coaches."

Community sits at the heart of Graft's mission. “We've built that environment where people want to come back, they want to see their friends, they want to spend time in the gym," Gordon says. "That consistency is what will pay off in the long run.”

He believes Dubai's fitness scene is special. "Everyone who comes here are all very similar types of people—very driven, very ambitious. There's not many cities or countries I've been to that have a fitness scene like the UAE."

Gordon said he is also witnessing a broader shift in fitness culture, from bodybuilding and mirror selfies to performance-based training. “As soon as you make that change of training purely for what you look like to training for performance and training to be healthy, the relationship you will have with training becomes so much healthier," he said.

With entrepreneurship in his blood—both parents run their own businesses in the UK—Gordon has ambitious plans. The immediate focus is making Graft's Al Quoz location profitable, following the success of the Elevate CrossFit gym.

"We're already looking at potential options for different locations in the UAE," he reveals. "We’ve looked at a potential option in Dubai South, potential option in Abu Dhabi."

For now, Gordon is living his dream—waking up every day loving what he does, helping others achieve their fitness goals, and building a community around hard work and mutual support.

"Everybody has the potential to reach their individual goals, as long as they're willing to put the work in," he says. "Whether that's my grandma wanting to get up from a chair or me qualifying for World (Hyrox) Championships—the effort is completely the same."