Russia Trains For War. Belgium Trains For Brunch.

🇷🇺 Russia vs 🇧🇪 Belgium

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

I have been beaten with birch branches by a stranger named Oleg in a basement that smelled like diesel and eucalyptus, and I have been handed a complimentary waffle by a Belgian gym receptionist who looked personally offended that I'd come in sweating. These two experiences, I submit, tell you everything you need to know about how two nations approach the human body as a project.

Russia treats fitness like a national security matter — something inherited from the Soviets, who built sport infrastructure the way other countries build dams, and never quite got around to softening it. Belgium treats fitness like a personality quirk, something you do between the fries and the Trappist ale, mostly on a bicycle, mostly to justify the fries and the Trappist ale. Neither country will apologise for this. Neither should.

Photo: HUUM │sauna heaters via Pexels

Do's & Don'ts: Russia

Do's & Don'ts: Belgium

Russia: The Banya Will Outlive Us All

Here is what nobody tells you about fitness in Russia: it was never meant to be optional, and it was never meant to be comfortable. The Soviet Union built an entire apparatus — the GTO complex, "Ready for Labour and Defence," a state fitness-testing standard dreamed up in the 1930s — to measure citizens against physical benchmarks, and the current government has spent the last decade quietly reviving it, badges and all, as an official national health programme. You don't "work out" in Russia so much as submit to an infrastructure that has been expecting you since Stalin.

What survived the USSR's collapse is a particular strain of gym that Western wellness culture has never produced: the grim, strip-lit basement weight room, often literally underground, with Soviet-era machines nobody has bothered to replace because they still work. The Moscow Times has documented these basement gyms affectionately for years — unfussy, unbranded, populated by men who have been doing the same four lifts since 1987 and see no reason to stop. There is no playlist. There is no smoothie bar. There is, often, a radio playing something you don't recognise and a strong smell of old iron.

Then there's the banya, which is not a gym at all but functions as one in the cultural imagination — a ritual of extreme heat, cold plunge, and being hit with leafy branches by someone who likes you. Russian media has reported a genuine post-pandemic boom in banya and spa demand, and it's not hard to see why: when the whole country is built around enduring discomfort as a form of self-respect, a sauna that nearly kills you is simply Tuesday.

Even bodybuilding carries this stoic undertone. When Western sanctions squeezed supplement imports in the 2010s, Russian bodybuilders didn't quit — they adapted, sourced locally, and kept lifting, because stopping was never really on the table. That's the whole ethos: fitness as endurance test, not self-care.

Belgium: Pedal First, Apologise Never

Belgium has precisely one unimpeachable fitness credential, and it is the bicycle. This is a country that produces world champion cyclists out of flat, rain-slicked, cobblestoned nowhere towns, where the Tour of Flanders draws tens of thousands of amateur riders to flog themselves up the same hills the professionals suffer on, and where — per VRT's own reporting — commuting by bike has quietly become more popular than ever, e-bike sales climbing year on year. Belgians don't "cycle for fitness." Cycling simply is the infrastructure Belgians think through; the gym is an afterthought bolted on for whoever isn't racing this weekend.

And yet. Belgium also has a weight problem it does not particularly disguise. VRT reported outright that half of all Belgians are overweight; the Brussels Times ran the same grim arithmetic a few years later. This is the beer-and-fries paradox in full flower: a nation that reveres amateur cycling with near-religious intensity, while treating the frietkot as a non-negotiable post-ride sacrament and Trappist beer as basically a recovery drink.

The gym itself, when Belgians do go, is a far gentler animal than its Russian counterpart — more boutique, more social, considerably more fries-adjacent. La Libre reported in 2025 that fitness-studio subscriptions in Belgium are approaching a million, a real boom, but the vibe is closer to "see you at Pilates" than "see you at the squat rack." In Brussels, a mid-range gym membership runs around €48 a month — not cheap, not punishing, perfectly Belgian in its moderation. Nobody is hitting anybody with a branch. Nobody wants to.

The Verdict

If you want to be physically rebuilt, go to Russia. If you want to feel vaguely virtuous while eating extremely well, go to Belgium. Russia's fitness culture doesn't ask whether you're in the mood; it assumes the state already decided this for you sometime around 1931, and the basement gym, the banya, and the GTO badge are simply logistics. It is brutal, unbranded, and occasionally life-affirming in the way only genuine suffering can be.

Belgium, meanwhile, has built the single most charming fitness alibi in Europe: the bicycle. Ride ninety kilometres on a Sunday, earn the fries, repeat weekly, and call it balance. It isn't balance. It's a country that's found a brilliant workaround for loving food too much to ever skip a meal — pedal first, justify later.

My honest verdict: Russia wins on raw output, Belgium wins on quality of life. If forced to choose a gym buddy, I'm picking the Belgian, obviously — but I'm booking the banya.

Photo: Quang Nguyen Vinh via Pexels

What Nobody Warned You About

expat.com, Brussels forum — paraphrased: "I joined a gym near Avenue Louise expecting Berlin-style intensity and got a reformer Pilates class, a coffee machine, and someone asking if I'd tried the new cheese shop next door."

Talesmag.com, Real Post Report, Moscow — paraphrased: "Nobody mentioned that the local gym would have no reception desk, no music, and a man in his sixties who deadlifts more than the entire embassy combined and has never once said hello."

expat.com, Brussels forum — paraphrased: "You will get dropped by sixty-year-old men in full club kit on your first group ride. This is not optional information, it is a warning."

Conclusion

Here's the sting, delivered with love: both countries have figured out something the rest of us are still pretending not to know — that fitness culture is never really about fitness. It's about what a country is willing to admit it values. Russia admits it values endurance, hierarchy, and the quiet dignity of not complaining while being struck with foliage. Belgium admits it values pleasure, community, and the firm belief that any calorie burned on a bicycle is a calorie earned at the frietkot. Neither is lying to itself, which is more than I can say for the wellness influencers currently selling you a $40 smoothie and calling it "self-care." Go to Russia to get strong. Go to Belgium to get happy. Try not to confuse the two, and for heaven's sake, stop calling either one "exotic" — they're just doing it better than you.