Health Clubs

There are 8 million ways to exercise in the naked city. High-impact aerobics, low-impact aerobics, high-/low-impact aerobics, step, step circuit, power step, power walking, power dance, aqua aerobics, country-Western dance aerobics, hip-hop aerobics, cardio-funk, power-funk, strength training, stair-climbing machines, exercise bicycles, treadmills, kick-boxing, in-line skating, yoga, Pilates and spinning.

Kara Kennedy, the oldest child of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, died Friday at a Washington, D.C.-area health club after her daily workout, said her brother Patrick. She was 51. "She's with Dad," said her brother, a former congressman from Rhode Island. Their father, who had a malignant brain tumor, died in 2009 at age 77 . She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002, and doctors removed a malignant tumor the next year. Patrick Kennedy said she loved to exercise but the cancer treatment "took quite a toll on her" and "her heart gave out. " Her mother, Joan Kennedy, told the Boston Globe that Kara's death was "such a shock because she was in such good health.

At the Bodies in Motion health club, Tee Mushonga wrapped up a successful sales pitch by handing a stack of paperwork to a new customer for the West Los Angeles facility. If Mushonga, the club's membership director, had looked through his office's glass window, he would have seen another customer at the front desk completing paperwork. This one wasn't signing up for a new membership. He was canceling it.

Jack LaLanne, the seemingly eternal master of health and fitness who first popularized the idea that Americans should work out and eat right to retain youthfulness and vigor, died Sunday. He was 96. LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia at his home in Morro Bay, Calif., his agent Rick Hersh said. He had undergone heart valve surgery in December 2009. FOR THE RECORD: Jack LaLanne: The obituary of fitness pioneer Jack LaLanne in the Jan. 24 LATExtra section, and a headline accompanying the article online, reported that LaLanne opened what is commonly believed to be the nation's first health club, in Oakland in 1936.

Even as Americans have been bombarded with pep talks to get them off the couch and into an exercise routine, health clubs have expanded their repertoire beyond weight machines and treadmills. Both efforts seem to be paying off. A record 13.9 million club members logged at least 100 or more days at gyms and health clubs last year, up from 9.4 million in 1987, according to the annual Health Club Trend report.

A health club chain agreed Wednesday to pay $33,000 to settle a civil lawsuit over allegations of misleading advertising and using bait-and-switch tactics to sell memberships in the San Fernando Valley. The Sports Connection and The Sports Club Management Co., agreed to pay the fines to settle a suit brought in Los Angeles Superior Court by Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti. At the time, Sports Connection was managed by The Sports Club Management Co.

The Redevelopment Agency has postponed for two weeks a decision on a request by Bally's Holiday Health Club to operate a club downtown without the required number of parking spaces. Bally's wants to convert a vacant, 34,000-square-foot commercial building at 210 W. Lexington Drive into a health club that is expected to draw about 2,500 members. However, the building has spaces for 78 vehicles where 170 spaces are required. An exception would be one of the largest ever granted in the city.

A Westwood health club that local homeowner groups protested would ruin the village's attempt to revitalize a high-end retail corridor has been denied permission to open. A city zoning administrator ruled last week that Better Bodies, which has leased space in a 21-story building on Glendon Avenue, could not get a variance to convert the space into a health club.

The Burbank City Council tonight will consider regulating health clubs with an ordinance requiring at least a $75,000 bond to ensure that membership fees can be returned if a club closes. Checking the backgrounds of club owners is another element of the ordinance under consideration. If approved, the new ordinance would go into effect in 30 days. In the meantime, a moratorium on issuing permits for health clubs that went into effect in December would be extended.

Members of Bally Total Fitness accustomed to watching their weight will soon have something else to look at. The Chicago-based fitness chain said it plans to display ads inside its 325 nationwide health clubs. Bally said Rancho Santa Margarita-based Sports Display Inc. will create and install the poster ads as part of a three-year deal with Bally. Sports Display will pay Bally a minimum of $700,000 over the three years.

New gym memberships are always popular around the holidays, but do folks really know what they’re getting into? Signing a health-club contract, like signing any other contract, requires some due diligence. As this Orlando Sentinel story says: "Americans often sign health-club contracts at this time of year, readying for a big New Year's resolution. But a number of health clubs went out of business in the past year, leaving consumers in a bind. " This story also provides a check-list of things to do before you sign on the dotted line.

Small gyms and fitness studios in Southern California are battling the recession like boxers in the ring fighting for any advantage. For many, 2010 will be another year of dodging blows from rivals and anxious customers coping with economic uncertainty. With new customers harder to land, the pressure is on to keep the old ones. "We are working so much harder for our money," said Stephanie Moore, owner of Revolution Fitness in Santa Monica. Los Angeles is an especially challenging environment for independent fitness studios and clubs because there are so many of them competing for the same customers, said Linda Conrad, executive director of the statewide trade group, California Clubs of Distinction.

Aldous Huxley's eyebrows are so caked with mud in the black-and-white photograph they look as though they might snap off. But the novelist hardly appears concerned with the future state of his eyebrows. More pressing, perhaps, is whether actor Jim Backus, encased in a coffin-like steam box nearby, might melt away more than a few extra martinis. Officially, Huxley was participating in one of the first "men's weeks" at the Golden Door Spa in San Marcos -- 50 years ago this year -- to give a lecture on the "mind-body as one word."

Members are quietly returning to a health club where a gunman killed three women Aug. 4. Workers at LA Fitness took down plastic sheeting behind the facility's front glass doors before opening the club in Bridgeville for the first time since the shooting. "This is a happy, nice place, and I think it's important that we come back, because things like that can't control our lives," said Dorrine Green of Upper St. Clair, one of about 15 people waiting at the club when it opened. George Sodini, 48, entered the club with a gym bag full of guns, then killed three women and injured nine others in a Latin dance class before killing himself.

Before Elizabeth "Betsy" Gannon and two other women were shot dead and nine others were wounded in their aerobics classroom at a health club, the gunman paused to shut off the lights. The priest who conducted Gannon's funeral Saturday said that was only fitting. "Because that's what evil is all about -- cowardice. Evil can't function any other way but in the dark," the Rev. Francis "Bud" Murhammer told about 200 mourners at St. Margaret of Scotland Parish Church in Green Tree, a suburb south of Pittsburgh.

George Sodini seethed with anger and frustration toward women. He couldn't understand why they ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He said he hadn't had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn't slept with a woman in 19 years. "Women just don't like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive," the 48-year-old computer programmer lamented in a chilling diary he posted on the Internet.

A Carlsbad company that runs a chain of popular health clubs is disputing an Internal Revenue Service audit that found the business owes about $2.5 million in back taxes and penalties. International Fitness Consultants Inc., which owns 24 Hour Fitness clubs, claims in documents filed in U.S. Tax Court that the IRS erred in disallowing a number of legitimate business expenses during an audit of the company's operations for 1992 and 1993. The IRS contends that the company owes back taxes of $1.

A Garden Grove man who was swimming laps in a health club pool drowned Monday, police said. Sung Ro, 66, was found at the bottom of a pool at Imperial Health Spa at 8251 Garden Grove Blvd., police said. Ro, who was unconscious and not breathing, was pulled out by members of the spa, some of whom gave him pulmonary resuscitation, police said. Paramedics transported Ro to West Humana Hospital in Garden Grove where he was pronounced dead.

An armed man strolled to the back of an exercise class at a health club in suburban Pittsburgh on Tuesday night, pulled out two guns and started shooting, leaving at least four people dead, including himself, and wounding at least 10 others. "He did not say anything," Allegheny County Police Supt. Charles Moffatt said. "He walked right into the room where the shootings occurred as if he knew exactly where he was going."

At the Bodies in Motion health club, Tee Mushonga wrapped up a successful sales pitch by handing a stack of paperwork to a new customer for the West Los Angeles facility. If Mushonga, the club's membership director, had looked through his office's glass window, he would have seen another customer at the front desk completing paperwork. This one wasn't signing up for a new membership. He was canceling it.