One Country Considers Walking to Dinner Sufficient Exercise. The Other Is Doing Aerobics by a Lake Before Sunrise.

🇮🇹 Italy 🇻🇳 Vietnam By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Italy has a fitness culture built almost entirely on vibes: the passeggiata, a scooter ride, the vigorous arm gestures involved in an argument about pasta. Formal gym culture exists, but it competes for attention with an entire lifestyle already engineered around moderate, pleasant movement and enormous plates of carbohydrates. Vietnam, meanwhile, gets up before dawn, several million people at once, for genuinely energetic public aerobics by lakes, in parks, on any flat surface available, before most of the world has finished snoozing its alarm.

I've tried keeping up with both, and only one of them left me sweating before 6am while pensioners twice my age lapped me.

Do's & Don'ts: Italy

Do's & Don'ts: Vietnam

Italy: Fitness as an Accidental Byproduct of Living Well

Italy doesn't really have a "fitness culture" in the gym-membership, personal-trainer, protein-shake sense that dominates Anglo countries — it has a lifestyle that happens to involve a reasonable amount of movement, built entirely by accident. The passeggiata, the evening stroll through town that whole families and social circles participate in, isn't marketed as exercise, but it functions as one: a daily, unhurried walk that doubles as social theatre, gossip exchange, and gelato delivery mechanism.

Formal gyms exist and, in cities, are often genuinely excellent — well-equipped, professionally staffed, taken seriously by those who use them. But gym culture here skews focused rather than social; Italians training tend to put headphones in, do the work, and leave, a stark contrast to the extended small-talk culture around gyms in, say, the United States. Football (calcio), especially informal calcetto games among friends, remains the more culturally central form of physical activity — less about optimizing your macros and more about maintaining decades-long rivalries with the same five friends from school.

What Italy lacks in structured fitness infrastructure, it compensates for with sheer environmental incentive: hilltop towns that require actual physical effort just to get to the shop, coastlines built for swimming, countryside built for cycling. It's fitness by circumstance rather than discipline, which is either the healthiest possible approach to exercise or an elaborate excuse — depending entirely on your relationship with your own gym membership.

Vietnam: Fitness as Dawn Civic Ritual

Vietnam's relationship with exercise is the diametric opposite of Italy's casual drift — it is early, communal, loud, and taken with total sincerity by an astonishing cross-section of the population. Walk past Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi or any of Ho Chi Minh City's parks at 5:30am and you'll find hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people already deep into synchronized aerobics routines, badminton games, shadow boxing, or group stretching sessions, often set to blaring speaker music that somehow nobody minds this early.

The demographic makeup is the real surprise for visitors expecting a young, gym-bro-dominated fitness scene: it skews heavily toward older adults, many well into their sixties and seventies, moving with an energy and consistency that puts younger onlookers to shame. This isn't a niche subculture — it's mainstream civic behaviour, deeply woven into daily routine, treated with the same unremarkable regularity as brushing your teeth.

Free public outdoor gym equipment, installed by local governments in parks across the country, gets consistent daily use rather than becoming rusted decoration, which is more than can be said for equivalent installations in plenty of wealthier nations. Indoor Western-style gyms are growing, particularly among younger urban professionals in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, but they remain a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, the dawn communal ritual that has been running, unbothered by trends, for generations.

The Verdict

Italy wins on lifestyle integration — a country that builds gentle, sustainable movement into daily life without ever calling it "exercise" has arguably solved fitness more elegantly than any gym membership could. Vietnam wins on sheer communal commitment — there's something genuinely admirable about a culture where getting up before dawn to exercise in public, together, across generations, is simply what you do. If you want fitness disguised as a beautiful evening walk followed by carbonara, Italy delivers effortlessly. If you want to be humbled by a seventy-year-old's aerobics routine before sunrise, Vietnam is waiting, speaker already on.

What Nobody Warned You About

r/Italy — a thread debating whether the passeggiata "counts" as exercise ends with general consensus that it doesn't need to, because that's not the point of it.

Internations Hanoi — a newly arrived expat describes being gently pulled into a lakeside aerobics group at 5:45am and finding it the friendliest ten minutes of their entire week.

Quora, "Why do so many Vietnamese people exercise outdoors at 5am?" — the top answer notes it's cooler before the heat sets in, and also just genuinely fun in a group.

Conclusion

Italy proves that a life well-lived can be exercise enough, no membership required. Vietnam proves that communal, disciplined movement can be joyful rather than a chore, if you're willing to get up before the sun. Neither approach involves a treadmill, and both, in their own way, put most Western gym culture to shame. I know which one gets you home in time for an aperitivo. I also know which one will still be exercising when you've long gone back to bed.