Two Nations That Consider a Treadmill a Last Resort

🇸🇪 Sweden 🇨🇭 Switzerland By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Sweden and Switzerland both have excellent, modern, well-equipped gyms, and both populations treat them as a slightly sad indoor substitute for the real business of exercise, which happens outside, in weather most other nations would consider a valid reason to cancel plans entirely. Sweden has friluftsliv, the deeply held belief that open-air life is a near-spiritual necessity. Switzerland has mountains, quite literally, right there, permanently, daring you to not go up one on a Saturday.

I have joined gyms in both countries out of habit and used them considerably less than the locals, who seem to regard a treadmill as something you use only when actively injured or buried in snow past the point of reasonable outdoor activity, which, to be fair, does happen, just rarely enough to not count as an excuse.

Do's & Don'ts

🇸🇪 Sweden

🇨🇭 Switzerland

Sweden

Friluftsliv, loosely "open-air life," is less a hobby in Sweden than a load-bearing cultural value, baked into everything from school curricula to how seriously people take a proper winter run. The commitment to being outside, in all weather, year-round, is not performative — it is genuinely how a huge portion of the population maintains both fitness and sanity through a winter that offers roughly six usable hours of daylight at its worst. Cross-country skiing, ice swimming, long forest runs in minus-ten temperatures: all treated with the same casual normalcy most cultures reserve for a gentle stroll.

Indoor gyms exist and are excellent, clean, and well-designed, but the culture inside them is notably understated — quiet focus, minimal conversation, athleisure so understated it borders on invisible, and almost nobody chasing the aesthetic peacocking you'd find in gyms built around mirrors and personality. Sweden's fitness culture, like a lot of Swedish culture generally, prizes competence and consistency over display; you train because it works, not because anyone's watching.

Where Sweden genuinely shines is in how deeply exercise is integrated into ordinary social life rather than treated as a separate chore — running clubs, ski trips, and outdoor "fika" breaks (coffee and cinnamon buns, mid-hike, non-negotiable) make fitness something you do with people you like, in places you'd want to be anyway, which solves the motivation problem most other cultures never quite crack.

Allemansrätten, the "right of public access," underpins all of this and deserves its own mention — a legal principle that lets anyone roam, forage, or camp on most land, public or private, as long as you're respectful of it, which transforms the entire country into something close to a shared, unfenced gym. This isn't an abstract legal curiosity either; it's actively used, constantly, by people picking berries on a forest run or pitching a tent on a weekend hike without a second thought about ownership or permission. The sauna culture that often follows a cold-weather workout adds its own ritual layer — a proper sweat, followed by a plunge into genuinely freezing water, treated as a completion of the exercise rather than an optional indulgence, and one of the few moments where Swedish reserve gives way to loud, delighted shrieking.

Switzerland

Switzerland's relationship with fitness is inseparable from its relationship with its own topography — when the Alps are your backdrop every single day, treating a treadmill as a serious training tool starts to feel almost comically beside the point. Hiking here is not a weekend activity, it's closer to a civic duty, with an astonishingly well-maintained trail network, colour-coded by difficulty with a precision that borders on Swiss cliché, and an entire culture of gear investment that treats proper boots and poles as essential infrastructure rather than optional extras.

The Verein system — local clubs for hiking, cycling, skiing, pretty much any physical pursuit you can name — is the real social backbone of Swiss fitness culture, and joining one is one of the fastest, most reliable ways to actually integrate into local life, far more effective than any gym membership. Group hikes come with genuine seriousness about difficulty ratings, trail etiquette, and preparation, because the mountains here are not decorative, they are legitimately capable of ruining your week if you underestimate them.

Gyms exist, are impeccably maintained, and are used — but they occupy a clearly separate category from "real" exercise, mostly reserved for strength work and bad-weather backup days, never positioned as a replacement for an actual day on a trail or a slope. The Swiss relationship with fitness is, in the end, deeply practical: the mountains are there, so you use them, properly, with the right gear, and you don't make a fuss about it.

The precision extends well beyond trail signage into the transport that gets you to the trailhead in the first place — a Swiss train or postbus connecting to a cable car with timing so exact that missing a single link by thirty seconds can genuinely unravel an entire day's hiking plan, which is either the most stressful or most admirable thing about Swiss outdoor life depending on your mood that morning. Winter brings its own serious infrastructure: ski resorts groomed with an almost obsessive consistency, mountain huts that require advance booking and a level of planning most casual hikers elsewhere would find excessive, and a national expectation that children will be competent skiers by an age that would be considered remarkable almost anywhere else. None of it feels showy. It simply feels like a country that long ago decided its mountains were not scenery, but infrastructure.

The Verdict

Sweden wins on sheer year-round discipline — a population that genuinely does not let darkness or cold slow it down, and makes outdoor fitness a shared social good rather than a solo grind. Switzerland wins on sheer scale of opportunity — nowhere else have I had a legitimate Alpine hike available within an hour of my front door, every single weekend, without exception. Both make the indoor gym look slightly like an admission of defeat. I remain, despite fourteen relocations, unconvinced by either country's winter running enthusiasm, but deeply envious of their trail networks.

What Nobody Warned You About

r/sweden — paraphrased: my Swedish colleagues genuinely go for a run at minus twelve and call it "refreshing," I have never once agreed with that word choice.

r/switzerland — paraphrased: joined a hiking Verein thinking it would be casual, first outing was six hours and 1200 metres of elevation gain, nobody warned me "moderate" meant that.

expat.com Switzerland forum — paraphrased: bought a gym membership out of habit, used it four times in a year, the mountains made it almost entirely redundant.

Conclusion

Sweden and Switzerland have both, in their own ways, decided that real fitness lives outside, regardless of season, terrain, or sense, and both have built genuine social culture around that conviction rather than leaving it to individual willpower. You will end up outside more than you ever planned to in either country, slightly out of breath, slightly cold, and, against your better judgment, enjoying it. The gym will still be there when you need it. It just won't be where the actual life happens.