🇺🇸 USA · 🇮🇹 Italy
By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office
In America, fitness is an industry, an identity, and in certain zip codes, a social obligation. The gym is not where you go to exercise. It is where you go to perform exercising, and the performance has production values: specific attire, a documented regime, a protein shake with a macronutrient profile that has been calculated by an app that knows more about your body than you do. Americans approach the gym with the same organisational energy they apply to everything else, which is to say: comprehensively, publicly, and with measurable outcomes.
In Italy, physical fitness is achieved through a different mechanism: living. Walking up cobblestoned hills on your daily errands, cycling to the aperitivo, gesturing vigorously throughout a two-hour dinner in a way that constitutes meaningful upper-body work. The Italian gym exists and is used. It is simply not, culturally speaking, the primary site of physical maintenance. The passeggiata — the evening stroll — has been handling this function for centuries and does not require a membership fee, noise-cancelling headphones, or a motivational playlist assembled by an influencer in Scottsdale.
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| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Wipe down equipment after use — this is gym law, and non-compliance will earn you a look of specific, targeted disdain from everyone within visual range | Occupy a machine while scrolling your phone between sets. Americans have strong and documented feelings about equipment hoarding and the person waiting behind you is building a case |
| Wear proper gym attire — this matters less in terms of rules and more in terms of the social environment, which has established clear norms about what constitutes appropriate kit | Offer unsolicited fitness advice, ever, under any circumstances, to anyone. The American gym has a sacred personal space around one's fitness regime, and violating it invites the kind of look that suggests you have made a significant error |
| Engage with the gym community if you want to — American gym culture can be genuinely warm and communicative, especially in smaller boutique studios — but read the room | Skip leg day visibly. The American gym community notices and has opinions. These opinions will not be shared with you directly, but they exist and they are firm |
| Use the app to book classes — most US boutique studios operate on a booking system that is taken seriously, and showing up without a reservation is the fitness equivalent of turning up to a restaurant without booking | Compare your body to anyone else's in any verbal way, ever. The American gym is a judgement-free zone nominally, and a zone of intense judgement actually, and the rule is that the judgement is silent |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Join the evening passeggiata as legitimate physical activity — walking for thirty minutes at a social pace through a beautiful town centre counts, and don't let anyone with a Garmin tell you otherwise | Go to the gym between 1pm and 4pm and expect it to be open. Italy has a relationship with the afternoon that supersedes fitness scheduling |
| Dress presentably at the gym — Italians have a standard for gym attire that aligns with their standard for most attire: it should fit properly and it should be clean, and the rest is negotiable | Expect the same volume of equipment or class variety as a US facility. Italian gyms tend toward the compact, the functional, and the personal. You will know the owner by name within a week |
| Accept that fitness advice from the palestra staff is freely given and intended warmly — the trainer who tells you your form is wrong is not criticising you, they are doing their job, and the job is done with more personal investment than the American equivalent | Assume swimming in the sea is a leisure activity and not fitness. Italians have been getting their cardio from the Mediterranean for longer than the concept of cardio existed |
| Embrace the cycling culture, especially in northern cities like Bologna, Ferrara, and Padova — the flat terrain and the cycling infrastructure make this genuinely more effective than the gym for daily maintenance | Rush through the post-gym routine. An Italian gym's changing room is a social environment, and departing quickly without conversation is slightly unusual behaviour |
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The American fitness industry is worth over 35 billion dollars annually and grows by approximately four billion dollars each year, which tells you less about how fit Americans are and more about how seriously they take the project of becoming fit, the aesthetics of the project, and the equipment associated with the project. Americans do not do anything by halves, and they do not do fitness by halves, and the result is the most elaborate gym infrastructure in the world, staffed by people with certifications, available 24 hours in many locations, and equipped with mirrors that cover every surface so that no repetition occurs unobserved.
The boutique studio revolution changed American gym culture definitively. SoulCycle, CrossFit boxes, HIIT studios, hot yoga rooms, pilates reformer studios — these are not exercise classes, they are tribal affiliations. You are not just working out; you are a SoulCycle person or a CrossFit person or a Barry's person, and this identity has aesthetic implications that extend to your water bottle, your leggings brand, and the Instagram content you produce around the activity. The post-class smoothie is not refuelling. It is the conclusion of a complete social experience.
American gym culture produces genuine physical results in many people, and it does so through an infrastructure of motivation that is hard to argue with: the curated playlist, the instructor's relentless encouragement, the class format that makes forty-five minutes of hard work feel like a performance you were part of. But it also produces, as a byproduct, a relationship with fitness that is inseparable from self-improvement anxiety, comparison culture, and the peculiarly American idea that if you are not constantly optimising, you are falling behind. Behind what, exactly, nobody can say. But the Peloton keeps track.
The gym body in America is a specific cultural artefact. The definition of "fit" is more visible, more musculature-focused, and more aesthetically standardised than most other cultures produce. This creates a gym environment with high energy, high production values, and a particular social pressure that expats from Europe find either motivating or exhausting depending on their temperament. Both responses are entirely rational.
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Italy has a relationship with physical fitness that looks, from the outside, like relaxed ambivalence and turns out, on closer inspection, to be something cleverer. Italians do not, as a rule, structure their days around exercise sessions. They structure their days around life, and life — in a country where you walk to the market, climb to the hill town, cycle to the aperitivo bar, and spend forty-five minutes gesticulating over a risotto — provides the movement.
The passeggiata is the most efficient fitness programme in the developed world for the simple reason that it does not require any psychological effort to execute. Nobody needs motivation to take a walk at seven in the evening through a beautiful Italian town when the light is doing what it does and everyone else is also there. It is not fitness. It is pleasure that happens to involve movement, which is the optimal human condition.
The Italian gym — the palestra — is a real institution, particularly in northern cities, and it is well-used. But it operates on a different social scale. You know the owner. You know the other regulars. The trainer who has been there for fifteen years knows your shoulder problem and your tendency to skip the cooldown and your specific form of cheating on pull-ups, and they will mention these things to you in a friendly but unambiguous way. This is not the anonymous self-improvement factory of the American model. It is a neighbourhood facility run by people who have opinions about your wellbeing.
The Italian relationship with food and movement is more integrated than the American one. The aperitivo is not the enemy of the workout; it is part of the same social system that also involves the passeggiata and the Sunday morning football game and the cycling trip on a Saturday. The idea that fitness is a separate compartment requiring its own scheduled time and its own aesthetic codes would strike most Italians as slightly missing the point of being alive.
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The American gym infrastructure wins on ambition, on variety, on the sheer commitment to the project of physical transformation as a documented, measurable, publicly validated activity. Italy wins on longevity, on integration, and on the quiet evidence that a population that eats well, walks daily, and sees movement as pleasure rather than obligation has something to teach the country that invented the concept of "wellness" as a consumer category. Americans are fitter on the metrics Americans use to measure fitness. Italians appear, on balance, to have figured something out about the relationship between body and happiness that doesn't require a Whoop band. Both positions are defensible. Only one of them involves a seven-euro Aperol Spritz at the end.
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<small>"Moved from New York to Milan and kept looking for a SoulCycle equivalent for six months. Eventually a colleague just started taking me on the passeggiata every evening. I've lost four kilos and I haven't been to a gym once. I feel slightly betrayed by everything I previously believed." — American expats in Italy, expat.com</small>
<small>"The Italian trainer at my palestra gave me unsolicited form corrections for three weeks before I realised this was affection. In an American gym, a stranger offering feedback is a threat. Here it is a relationship beginning." — Internations Milan</small>
<small>"American gym culture in January is something you have to experience to understand. Every machine occupied, motivational music at medical intervention volumes, everyone on a plan they found online. By February 15th it's fine again." — Reddit r/xxfitness</small>
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Fitness culture is ultimately a story about what a society thinks the body is for and how it thinks happiness is achieved. America has decided that the body is a project with deliverables, and the gym is where the project gets done. Italy has decided that the body is a vehicle for living, and living happens outside. Both conclusions produce real fitness outcomes. Only one of them requires a monthly membership fee, a locker, and a playlist. The other requires good shoes and somewhere worth walking to — which, in Italy, is everywhere you look.
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Suki Nakamura
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.