Mongolia Builds Bodies on the Steppe, Portugal Builds Excuses at the Pastelaria

🇲🇳 Mongolia vs 🇵🇹 Portugal By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Let's dispense with the fantasy immediately: nobody in Ulaanbaatar is doing a sunrise yoga flow for the Instagram grid, and nobody in Lisbon is wrestling a grown man to the ground for sport before breakfast. And yet both nations have convinced themselves, in entirely different registers, that they are a "fit" people. Mongolia has the better claim, frankly, because its fitness culture was never invented — it was inherited, from centuries of herding, riding and grappling, and only recently had a glass-and-chrome gym bolted onto the side of it. Portugal's fitness culture, by contrast, is a recent European import worn over a population that the EU's own Eurobarometer has clocked as the least physically active on the continent, which is a genuinely remarkable achievement for a country with a coastline built for surfing.

What you get, then, is Mongolia's raw, slightly terrifying physicality running headfirst into Ulaanbaatar's new obsession with protein shakes and deadlifts, and Portugal's sun-drenched, café-adjacent self-image colliding with the inconvenient statistical truth that most of its residents would rather watch the ocean than get in it. Two nations, two spectacular acts of self-delusion. Let's get into it.

Do's & Don'ts

Mongolia

Portugal

Mongolia: Fitness Was Never a Lifestyle Choice Here

Here is the thing nobody tells you about Mongolian fitness culture: it was never a culture, in the self-conscious, brand-ambassador sense. It was simply what living here required. Herders move livestock across brutal terrain on horseback for hours; children learn to ride before they can properly walk; winters drop to minus thirty and below, and simply surviving them is itself a cardiovascular and psychological event most gym-goers elsewhere would never volunteer for. Mongolia didn't need a wellness industry because the steppe was already running one, unpaid and unglamorous, for a thousand years.

Then there's bökh, Mongolian wrestling, one of the Naadam festival's "Three Manly Games" alongside archery and horse racing. This isn't a quaint folk dance trotted out for tourists — it's a genuinely serious national sport with its own ranks, titles and techniques, and watching two enormous men in tiny embroidered jackets try to throw each other to the ground tells you more about Mongolian physical culture than any gym membership ever could. It is also, pointedly, not about aesthetics. Nobody's doing bökh for a six-pack.

Which makes Ulaanbaatar's recent gym boom all the more jarring. The capital now has a genuine proliferation of Western-style fitness centres, CrossFit boxes and bodybuilding gyms, backed in part by growing institutional and political support for the sport — the kind of growth that gets written up approvingly by international bodybuilding federations. Young, increasingly affluent Mongolians are lifting weights indoors in a city where their grandparents were breaking horses outdoors, and the contrast is almost comically stark: rural Mongolia is functionally one of the fittest populations on earth without trying, while urban UB is now trying very hard indeed, with protein powder and mirrors, to catch up to a standard its own countryside set accidentally centuries ago.

Portugal: All the Scenery, Suspiciously Little of the Sweat

Portugal has one of the great fitness-culture illusions in Europe, and it works almost entirely on scenery. Golden light, Atlantic swell, joggers along the Tagus at dusk — it photographs like the healthiest country on the continent. The data disagrees, loudly. The EU's Eurobarometer survey on sport and physical activity has repeatedly placed Portugal at or near the bottom of Europe for how often its residents actually exercise, with national press flatly reporting that the Portuguese move less than almost anyone else in the bloc. This is a country that invented the custard tart and apparently decided that was effort enough for one millennium.

And yet the fitness markers that do exist are genuinely compelling, provided you squint past the national statistics. Surf towns like Ericeira and Peniche have built entire micro-economies around people flying in specifically to paddle into some of Europe's most consistent swell — Nazaré's monster waves have made Portugal a pilgrimage site for a certain kind of adrenaline tourist who will absolutely tell you about it at dinner. Lisbon and Porto are dotted with free outdoor calisthenics parks, those municipal rigs of parallel bars and pull-up stations that let anyone turn a public park into a makeshift gym, no membership required. Running clubs cluster along riverside paths at golden hour, looking for all the world like a nation mid-transformation.

The gym membership habit itself is refreshingly unpretentious: budget chains like Fitness Hut have made monthly memberships cheap and accessible rather than aspirational, which is either democratic or a tacit admission that nobody's expecting much. Either way, Portugal's fitness culture is two nations stitched together — a visible, photogenic minority doing genuinely impressive outdoor sport, and a much larger majority for whom "exercise" means walking briskly to the pastelaria and calling it cardio.

The Verdict

Mongolia wins, and it isn't close. Portugal has better weather, better coffee, and infinitely better odds of a decent flat white after your workout, but Mongolia has something Portugal's wellness-adjacent branding can't manufacture: fitness that is structural, not aspirational. Nobody in the Mongolian countryside is "getting their steps in." They're simply living in a landscape that makes weakness a liability, not an Instagram caption. Portugal, meanwhile, has built a gorgeous fitness aesthetic — surf culture, riverside runners, free calisthenics parks — on top of a population that its own continent's statisticians have flagged as alarmingly sedentary.

That gap between image and reality is the whole story. Mongolia doesn't need to perform fitness because the terrain, the climate and the culture already demand it of anyone who lives there seriously. Portugal performs fitness beautifully, in photogenic thirty-second increments, while the Eurobarometer quietly files its uncomfortable truth in the appendix nobody reads. Ulaanbaatar's gym boom is at least an honest admission that urban life has softened a once-ferocious population and that something must be done about it. Lisbon's surf-and-smoothie branding, by contrast, is a country marketing a body it mostly isn't using.

What Nobody Warned You About

Expat.com forum, Ulaanbaatar thread — paraphrased: a newcomer asking where you actually find a decent gym in the capital, and being warned that most options split between ancient Soviet-era iron in concrete basements or glass-fronted new builds priced well above local wages.

The Points of Life (BoardingArea) — paraphrased: an expat writing about staying in shape in Mongolia describes winter effectively cancelling outdoor training for months at a stretch, leaving a choice between a treadmill indoors or simply not running at all until spring.

AngloInfo Lisbon forum — paraphrased: a new arrival asking for the cheapest first-time gym in the city gets pointed toward the budget chains, with a pointed warning not to expect much hygiene discipline or re-racked weights from fellow members.

Conclusion

So there it is: one country that built its people through necessity, and one that built a brand around people who, by their own government's survey data, mostly aren't exercising at all. Mongolia's fitness culture doesn't need you to believe in it — it will simply outlast you, the way it has outlasted empires. Portugal's fitness culture needs you to believe in it quite badly, which is why it photographs so well and performs so poorly in the actual statistics. If you want to get genuinely strong, go herd something in Mongolia for a winter. If you want to look like you might, at some point, consider getting strong, move to Lisbon, buy some Lycra, and let the lighting do the rest. Just don't confuse the two experiences, and for heaven's sake, don't call either of them exotic.