One of These Countries Does Squats at Dawn for Free. The Other Pays Triple So Nobody Sees Her Sweat.

🇻🇳🇰🇼 Vietnam vs Kuwait — By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Every country has a relationship with its own body, and most of them are lying about it. Vietnam's relationship is communal, free, and conducted in public at an hour most Western professionals associate with regret rather than resistance training. Kuwait's is private, air-conditioned, gender-partitioned, and billed monthly in Kuwaiti dinar at a rate that would make a SoulCycle instructor wince. Neither is wrong. Both are entirely logical responses to the climate and culture that produced them — which is precisely why I'm about to tell you which one is doing it better.

What fascinates me is how little either country performs fitness for tourists. Nobody installed free outdoor gym equipment on a Hanoi sidewalk because a travel blogger might walk past and feel things. Nobody built three segregated floors of cardio into a Kuwait City mall as a cultural exhibit. These are load-bearing parts of daily life — which is why the people doing it have zero patience for being called quaint.

Do's & Don'ts: Vietnam

Do's & Don'ts: Kuwait

Vietnam: Free, Public, and Slightly Terrifying at 5am

Vietnam's fitness culture runs on a schedule that would violate Western labour laws. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are genuinely alive before sunrise — not in the performative "yoga before my flight" influencer sense, but in the sense that entire neighbourhoods of retirees, teenagers, and office workers convene in parks to stretch, do tai chi, dance in synchronised formations to music nobody requested, and work the free outdoor gym equipment city governments have bolted to the ground in practically every green space. The machines are basic — pull-up bars, leg presses, elliptical cranks — and used by absolutely everyone, which is the point. This is not a gym membership. This is public infrastructure, as unremarkable and essential as a bus stop, and treating it as exotic is the fastest way to mark yourself as someone who has never actually lived there.

The ingenuity extends past the official equipment. Locals repurpose park benches for crunches and tree branches for pull-ups with the casual confidence of people who've never needed a resistance band to feel something. It's democratic in a way gym culture rarely is: nobody's wearing $200 leggings, nobody's filming a form check, and the 70-year-old on the next machine will out-rep you without trying.

Where it gets more complicated is the indoor, aspirational end of the market. California Fitness & Yoga, Elite Fitness, and Anytime Fitness have expanded aggressively through Hanoi and HCMC, chasing the same urban professional class that drives Grab scooters and orders flat whites. Membership runs $50-70 a month — not cheap by local standards — and buys you air conditioning, English-speaking trainers, and a noticeably more self-conscious crowd than the 5am park regulars. Expat forums flag the obvious: equipment quality and trainer competence vary wildly between branches, and humidity turns every gym bag into a science experiment if you don't air it daily. But the real story isn't the chains. It's that Vietnam built a fitness culture that costs nothing, starts before the heat does, and asks nothing of you except showing up.

Kuwait: Paying for the Privilege of Not Melting

Kuwait's fitness culture exists almost entirely indoors, and if you've stood outside in Kuwait City in August — 45-50°C, humidity clinging like a bad decision — you understand why. Outdoor exercise isn't inadvisable here, it's dangerous, unsafe roughly five months a year between 11am and 4pm and frankly sketchy most other hours too. So the entire apparatus of staying fit has migrated into the one environment Kuwait fully controls: air conditioning.

This has produced a genuinely booming fitness industry — gym numbers up 30% over three years — built largely inside shopping malls, because malls are where Kuwaitis already spend their leisure time and where the air conditioning is already running regardless. It's sensible urban logic nobody asked my opinion on, which hasn't stopped me admiring it: why build a freestanding gym when you can bolt one onto a mall that already has foot traffic, parking, and a food court for the post-workout reckoning.

The defining feature, though, is gender segregation, and it is not a footnote — it's the business model. Most chains, including anchor brands Gold's Gym and Platinum Health Club, operate as men's, women's, or strictly timetabled mixed-hours facilities. Demand for women-only space is, by every account, enormous — not a niche accommodation but the dominant preference, with premium pricing to match; female memberships run roughly 20% higher than male ones. Couples budget for two separate memberships at two separate facilities, which is either an inconvenience or simply the cost of a culture that takes female-only space seriously, depending on how much you enjoy performing outrage about things that work fine for the people living there. Meanwhile the obesity numbers are sobering — Kuwait sits among the highest rates globally, driving both public health campaigns and the gym boom itself. The gym isn't a lifestyle accessory here; for many, it's the only room in the building where the climate isn't actively working against them.

The Verdict

Vietnam wins, and it's not close. Kuwait's fitness industry is a rational, well-run response to an uninhabitable climate — the mall-gym model is genuinely smarter urban planning than most Western cities manage. But rational isn't the same as joyful, and nothing in Kuwait's gym economy replicates the unpretentious democracy of a Hanoi park at dawn, where a free pull-up bar and a retiree who can out-lift you cost nothing and ask nothing except showing up before the heat does. Kuwait built a fitness culture around paying to avoid the weather. Vietnam built one around beating it to the punch. One is a subscription model. The other is just how people live. Kuwait gets full marks for logistics and zero for romance — though, fair enough, romance was never the brief in a country where the outdoor temperature can actually kill you.

What Nobody Warned You About

Expat.com Ho Chi Minh City forum — Newcomers assume any gym with "fitness" in the name will have reliable equipment and trainers; quality varies enough branch-to-branch that it's worth a trial visit before signing anything.

Expat.com Kuwait forum — First-time arrivals are routinely surprised that a couple needs two separate gym memberships at two separate facilities, at two different price points, because almost nothing is sold as a household package.

Quora — Western newcomers sometimes read gender-segregated gym hours as a restriction, when most of the demand driving it comes from women actively requesting female-only spaces, not from anyone imposing it on them.

Conclusion

Here's the thing nobody tells you before you relocate: your fitness routine will not survive the move intact, and pretending otherwise is how you end up resenting a membership. Vietnam will ask you to get up absurdly early and exercise in public with strangers who couldn't care less what you look like. Kuwait will ask you to accept that your workout life now happens indoors, on a schedule dictated by your gender and the sun's murderous intentions. Neither is a downgrade from whatever gym you left behind — they're different answers to the same question every expat eventually has to ask: what does staying healthy look like when the place you've moved to didn't design itself around you? Vietnam answers with a park bench and a 5am alarm. Kuwait answers with air conditioning and a price tag. Pick your climate, then pick your compromise. The gym was never really the point.