In Spain, Fitness Happens at the Beach With a Six-Pack and a Tan. In China, It Happens at 6am in a Public Square With a Boombox and No Shame Whatsoever.

🇪🇸 Spain 🇨🇳 China By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Spanish fitness culture is aspirational and aesthetic — beach calisthenics bars along the Barceloneta filled with genuinely alarming numbers of shirtless men doing muscle-ups as the sun rises, a national obsession with looking good that borders on performance art. Chinese fitness culture is communal and utterly unselfconscious — grandmothers in matching tracksuits performing synchronised fan dances in a public square at dawn, sound systems blaring, dozens of strangers moving in unison with the kind of collective commitment that would make a Spanish gym-goer, mid-selfie, slightly uncomfortable.

I've done both — sweated through a Barceloneta calisthenics session next to men who looked like they'd been carved from marble, and been folded, bodily, into a square-dancing routine in Chengdu by a seventy-year-old woman who was not taking no for an answer. Spain treats fitness as something you do to be seen. China, at least in its most visible public form, treats fitness as something you do because everyone else is doing it too, and joining in is simply what a functioning community looks like at sunrise.

Spain: Do's and Don'ts

China: Do's and Don'ts

Spain: A Culture Where Looking Fit Is Half the Sport

Spanish fitness culture has undergone a visible shift over the past decade, moving from a country historically more associated with long lunches and later dinners into one increasingly obsessed with physical aesthetics and outdoor athleticism — particularly among younger urban Spaniards. The beach calisthenics scene is the most visible expression of this: cities like Barcelona and Valencia have built extensive free outdoor gym infrastructure along their coastlines, and at dawn and dusk these spaces fill with an intense, largely male crowd performing bar and bodyweight routines with an intensity that borders on competitive theatre. There's an unmistakable performative element — the sun, the setting, the audience of joggers and cyclists passing by — that makes Spanish outdoor fitness feel as much about being seen as about the actual workout.

Padel has exploded alongside this as arguably Spain's fastest-growing sport, with courts appearing in cities and towns at a genuinely startling rate, driven by its social, doubles-format appeal that fits neatly into Spanish life's emphasis on shared leisure time. Commercial gym culture exists and is growing but remains secondary to outdoor and social fitness — Spaniards are far more likely to describe their exercise routine as "I play padel with friends twice a week" than "I go to the gym," and the evening paseo, a simple unhurried walk taken by entire families after dinner, remains a genuinely significant, culturally protected form of low-intensity daily movement that predates the fitness-influencer era by centuries and shows no sign of disappearing under it.

China: Fitness as Collective Ritual, Not Individual Achievement

Public fitness culture in urban China operates on a completely different social logic, most visibly expressed through guangchang wu — square dancing — a phenomenon that has become genuinely iconic: groups, often dozens strong, mostly (though not exclusively) older women, gathering in public squares, parks, and even parking lots at dawn or dusk to perform synchronised routines to amplified music, a practice so widespread and occasionally contentious over noise that it's generated its own body of local regulation attempting to balance community exercise against residents' sleep. It's an extraordinary thing to witness precisely because of its total lack of self-consciousness — nobody is doing this to be admired individually, the entire point is the collective synchrony, and newcomers, including bewildered foreigners, are almost universally welcomed to join rather than treated as intruders.

This communal, outdoor-first fitness ethos extends well beyond square dancing — Chinese cities are dense with free public outdoor gym equipment, installed by municipal governments as part of long-running national fitness initiatives, and tai chi groups remain a fixture of urban parks at sunrise, practiced with a seriousness that belies its gentle appearance. There's a generational split worth noting, though: younger, urban Chinese professionals increasingly gravitate toward Western-style commercial gyms, fitness apps, and boutique studio classes, a trend accelerating in tier-one cities like Shanghai and Beijing, creating a genuinely interesting split-screen effect where the same public park can host both a grandmother's square-dancing troupe and a twenty-something jogger with wireless earbuds and a fitness tracker, each operating in an entirely different fitness culture within a hundred metres of each other.

The Verdict

Spain wins on sheer physical spectacle — there is genuinely nothing quite like a Barceloneta sunset calisthenics session for pure aesthetic drama. But China wins on inclusivity and community, because nowhere else have I been folded so immediately and warmly into a stranger's exercise routine simply by standing nearby looking mildly interested. Spain's fitness culture asks "how do I look." China's public fitness culture, at least in its most iconic form, asks "are you in step with the rest of us" — and there's something genuinely moving about a form of exercise that measures success by unison rather than individual achievement.

What Nobody Warned You About

r/Spain — paraphrased: moved to Barcelona and was genuinely intimidated by the beach calisthenics crowd until realizing most of them were just enthusiastic regulars, not actual athletes, and everyone was friendlier than the muscle suggested.

Internations Shanghai — paraphrased: got pulled into a square dancing group by a very insistent aunty within my first week and now it's the highlight of my week, still don't know most of the steps.

Quora — paraphrased: someone asked if the 6am loudspeaker exercise groups were annoying and the most-upvoted answer basically said "you get used to it, and eventually you miss it when you move somewhere without it," which felt suspiciously true after a while.

Conclusion

Fitness, done right, should either make you feel powerful or make you feel connected, and these two countries have picked entirely different sides of that equation. Spain will sculpt your ego on a beachfront bar. China will fold you into a square-dancing troupe before you've had coffee and somehow make you love it. Try both before you decide which version of sweating you actually prefer — just don't show up to a Chinese square-dancing session expecting to look cool, because that was never the assignment.