A guide for newcomers in the City!
Urban Sports Club:
I think the first piece of advice I can give to any newcomer in Berlin is to check out Urban Sports Club (USC). With it, you can visit different Gyms and Fitness Classes using just one subscription. They have monthly and yearly subscription plans (I recommend starting with the monthly plan so you can cancel it if you don’t like it). The plan I had in the past and personally recommend is the “M” one, for 69 EUR per month you can visit up to 30 fitness classes or gyms in a month. It is cool to get to know new places and new activities, mainly if you are not sure what you want to do. But some catches made me cancel it after a few months of using it, some of them are:
- It is quite expensive if you don’t have a company co-paid plan: some people that I know pay less than 20 EUR per month because their company offers USC as a benefit. If you have to pay for it in full (like I did) it can be quite expensive. A normal gym membership costs around 30 EUR, which is less than half of the USC “M”-membership price;
- The best classes are always full: mainly in the “M” plan, the best classes are always full and sometimes you have to book the classes weeks in advance, otherwise, you might not find anything good if you try to book close to the day you want to visit. If you can’t attend and forget to cancel the booking of the class you booked at least 12 hours before the class, you will have to pay from 5 to 17 EUR extra in fees.
- Many classes and gyms are available only for premium plans: if you have the “M” plan, you have way less access to locations in comparison to the “L” and “XL” plans, and the “S” plan is totally not worth it because there are very few places you can go with it (and I heard that the personal plans have fewer places than the corporate ones).
ClassPass as an alternative to Urban Sports Club
When I decided to cancel USC for the reasons I mentioned above, I decided to go for ClassPass as an alternative. It is similar to USC but there are some differences. It is better known internationally and available in many countries. It has a credit system, where you pay monthly for credits but you can also buy more credits as you go and use those credits to pay for classes. It has a few advantages about USC in my view:
- It can be cheaper than USC depending on how many classes you want to book: If you want to book up to one class per week, it is cheaper: one class is about 4 to 12 credits (some classes are more expensive, like Reformer Pilates, that costs around 20 credits and sometimes some classes go on sale). I pay the plan that costs 34 EUR and I get 23 credits per month, with that I can do around 2 to 5 classes a month. If you want to do up to 10 classes a month, it costs around the same as USC, and if you want to do more than that, USC offers a better cost-benefit.
- It is easier to use when I travel: I personally go to London quite often and sometimes I go to the States, and I can’t use USC there as it is available mainly in Germany and in some other neighboring countries like the Netherlands. But ClassPass is available, both in the UK and in the USA and many more countries!
- All the network is available, it doesn’t matter which plan you have!
- There are more options for good classes in my opinion, so it is easier to find a class at the last minute. But they still have large cancellation fees. But as opposed to USC, which also has Gyms in its network, ClassPass is fully focused on classes.
If you want to try it out, use my friend referral code to get extra credits to test free for the first month: https://classpass.com/refer/AD4SI78110. For full disclosure, ClassPass is not paying me, I just will get some bonus if you subscribe using my link!
Traditional Gyms
There are many traditional Gyms in Berlin that work more or less like any other gym in the world. I think the one you should choose is the one that is the most convenient for you. For example, I’m a proud member of FitX, the reason being they have a gym just 10 minutes walking from my apartment. The reason I chose to have a gym membership in addition to classes is that I can go there anytime without needing to reserve the class beforehand or think about cancellation fees. Most gym memberships cost between 20 and 40 EUR a month (mine costs 29 EUR), and more luxury ones like Holmes Place will cost closer to 100 EUR a month. The only trick is that many gyms require year-long contracts, and in Germany, you can not break a contract easily, you have to wait at least one year and tell the gym you want to break the contract 3 months before your contract ends.
Pro tip: If you have a CrunchFit gym close to your house (I unfortunately don’t have one) you probably can stay with just USC and you don’t need a gym contract, as CrunchFit gyms can be visited 30 times a month by “M” members.
Swimming lessons
Neither USC nor ClassPass offers good swimming lessons. If you want to improve your swimming techniques or learn how to swim, the best place you can go is to the swimming lessons of the Berliner Bäder Betriebe (the institution that takes care of the public pools in Berlin). You can see the details about their courses here: https://www.berlinerbaeder.de/kurse/schwimmkurse/ . They update the page around four times a year (once for each season), and it is kind of hard to get the lessons: you have to log in the day and time the courses become available and wait in a virtual line. I have done that and I enjoyed the class! In theory, all the classes are in German but my former instructor was American and he spoke to us mostly in English (you might not been so lucky and you might get a German-speaking instructor, so it is better to have at least B1 level German just in case). I also heard about some private swimming schools, such as WasserMeloni, but I have personally never been there so I can’t say anything about them!
WhatsApp/Facebook/Meetup groups and Sportvereine
Last but not least, there are diverse Whatsapp or Facebook groups (and also meetup groups, but I never used meetup) where people organize themselves to do all kinds of sports. One of those is this one about hiking: https://www.facebook.com/groups/internationalberlinhiking , I’m also on a WhatsApp group about Beach Tennis (if that interests you DM me on Instagram @anacosri) and I can add you to it!
There are also Sportvereine (sports clubs) that you can join to do the sport you want. But I would say that they are less friendly to non-German speakers. Anyways, here there is a list of some of the sport associations in Berlin: https://www.berlin.de/ba-steglitz-zehlendorf/politik-und-verwaltung/aemter/schul-und-sportamt/sport/artikel.84201.php
