China's new prosperity fuels fitness craze

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The 90-minute workout is routine to Wu, a 36-year-old ad sales representative. But the surroundings a four-story fitness club catering to different fitness levels and needs would have been unimaginable just a decade ago.

"When I thought of a gym in the 1990s, it would be bare with dumbbells and maybe running machines in a room," said Wu, a small woman with big, smiling eyes. "My mom thought doing house chores was working out, but that's not a truly aerobic sport."

Their lives transformed by breakneck economic growth, many Chinese are embracing creature comforts which would once have been denounced by their communist bosses as bourgeois indulgences.

Fitness is largely an urban, middle-class craze. Most Chinese still rely on farming for a living, and hard, physical exercise is not their idea of recreation, nor was it for urban Chinese just escaping Mao-era poverty 20 years ago.

Now they are free to shape and pamper their bodies, and fitness clubs are moving in.

"Once the people have more time and more money, they will think of fitness," said Gu Haoning, who monitors the health and fitness industry for the government's General Administration of Sports. "It would be impossible if they are still trying to eke out a living and don't have extra money for fitness."

The national fanfare surrounding the Beijing Olympics is adding to the momentum.

A generation ago, most people exercised in parks and side streets. In the 1980s, Jane Fonda's aerobics videos began circulating. Now, in a country long shadowed by famine, food has become plentiful and there are even signs of an obesity problem.

Matt Lewis is a pioneer in Beijing's fitness market. The New Zealander came to Beijing in 1997 to manage an elite country club and immediately saw opportunities in bringing fitness to the emerging middle class.

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