Working Out While at Work : Health: Companies are spending millions on employee exercise centers, believing fit employees are more productive and healthier.

Corporate fitness centers used to be a perk.

“Companies started putting in recreational centers and exercise equipment because it was a ‘good thing,’ ” said Stephen Pauley, manager of the Rockwell Employees Recreation and Fitness Center in West Hills. The center, which opened in 1941, serves the 9,000 area employees of Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division.

“The benefit to a company was undefinable. You couldn’t put it on a graph or show how it would help a company’s financial picture. It was just a good thing to do. A benefit. A warm fuzzy.”

The workplace has changed radically at Rocketdyne since the West Hills center opened. Likewise, views on bodybuilding and fitness: Pumping iron has gone from aberration to social acceptance to being a craze that shows no sign of abating.

In the 1980s, more businesses jumped on the fitness bandwagon--and not just to be faddish or to increase their quota of warm fuzzies. Corporations, many of which had long subsidized health-club memberships for top executives, were ready to experiment with offering the joys of sweat to a far wider range of workers. They were willing to bet that a fitter employee would be a more productive employee who would file fewer costly health claims.

Such national powerhouses as Campbell Soup, General Electric, Hughes Aircraft and Toyota U.S.A. have installed fitness centers at various facilities in the past few years. Likewise, a handful of firms headquartered in the San Fernando Valley have made a considerable investment in exercise equipment, locker rooms, showers and even personal trainers.

Rocketdyne’s commitment to fitness and recreation, for example, comes with an annual price tag of $1.3 million to staff and maintain the 10-acre West Hills center, with its indoor exercise building and extensive outdoor playing fields. The property, once part of an estate owned by comedian Lou Costello, was acquired to provide plant employees with recreation space for baseball games, picnicking and other family outings. One of the playgrounds has a metal Jungle Gym-like structure shaped, appropriately, like a rocket.

“All this started as part of the industrial recreation movement of the early 1940s,” Pauley said while conducting a tour of the center. “Back then, we had about 80% blue-collar workers at the plant and 20% white-collar and executives. The company thought it was a good thing for the employees to have a nice place to spend leisure time with other workers. Join clubs, play sports. It would build morale. But there wasn’t much thought given to ‘working out.’ They did enough physical labor on the job. It was hard work.”

With the advent of computerized automation, the ratio of blue- to white-collar workers at Rocketdyne has almost reversed itself, Pauley said. And the blue-collar jobs involve much less heavy lifting.

“Now those jobs mostly consist of someone sitting and watching a CRT screen, monitoring what an automated machine is doing,” Pauley said. “It used to be that after a day of work, blue-collar workers had to go home and rest. Now, they leave work and go work out.”

The fitness center, which is free to Rocketdyne employees, their spouses and retirees, has also been transformed by technology, especially in the room recently set aside for cardiovascular exercise, with its eight high-tech Stairmaster machines (with six more on order), two rowing machines and 12 stationary bicycles. The nearby weight room has several racks of dumb bells and barbells, plus an 11-station circuit of Nautilus exercise machines. A suspended wood floor, which is thought to reduce the impact on the body during aerobic exercise, was recently installed in a former auditorium at a cost of $35,000.

Outside are two 60-foot swimming pools and a children’s wading pool; tennis, basketball and volleyball courts; a running track and a croquet green.

But on a recent weekday afternoon, fewer than 20 people were using all these facilities. Pauley said that because the company allows little flexibility in workers’ schedules, most of the people who use the center during the workday are retirees and spouses.

“Flex time has traditionally been a no-no at Rocketdyne,” he said, “so workers have to come after work or on weekends. That’s when we get very busy.” Pauley, a trim man who has competed in 90 triathlons, clearly wishes company policy were otherwise.

“I think flex time would be the way to go,” he said, “but it’s not easy convincing a big company to make that big of a change on the say-so of the fitness director.”

Pauley estimates that only about 10% of the eligible workers visit regularly. He wishes that the percentage were higher, but he also is not sure what he would do if the numbers suddenly increased. “I’d like it to be at least 20%,” he said, “but 20% of 9,000 is a lot of people. As big as this center is, we would not be able to handle them.”

At GTE California headquarters in Thousand Oaks, about 23% of the 3,000 eligible employees and area retirees use the plush fitness center. The carpeted exercise area includes a suspended wood floor for aerobics, numerous Keiser air-pressure weight-training machines, two Stairmasters, five treadmills, 12 stationary bicycles and a rack of free weights.

Next to each bike and treadmill is a socket for personal headphones. The exerciser can turn a knob to choose from three music selections or the audio from a wall-mounted TV.

Although GTE allows many of its employees flexibility in scheduling their workdays, only three people were using the room on a weekday afternoon. “Our heaviest time by far is lunch,” said Mike Leonard, a fitness trainer hired by GTE to run the center. Leonard, who interned under Pauley at Rockwell’s fitness center, explained that because GTE has a successful van car-pool program, many employees cannot take the time before or after work to exercise.

Those who take advantage of the program receive an initial fitness test to gauge their strength and endurance levels. Using software developed by Fitness Systems, a Los Angeles company that provided advice on the design of GTE’s fitness center, Leonard and his three full-time “fitness specialists” (also supplied through Fitness Systems) come up with a personalized exercise program.

In this area, Leonard differs from his mentor at Rocketdyne. “We bought a computer package that cost us about $2,000 a couple of years ago to design custom fitness programs,” Pauley said, “but we gave up on it. It didn’t allow us to make the programs custom enough. It didn’t allow for enough personalized attention.”

Both programs retest participants periodically and both Pauley and Leonard say that people who follow their programs and come to the centers regularly make great progress.

Don Rose, who was using a “leg extension” machine at GTE to exercise his legs, agrees with them. Rose, who is 70 and retired last year, comes to the gym five days a week. “I had had a lot of plans to start exercising in my life,” he said, “but I never got much past the planning stage until the mountain came to Mohammed.

“When it was right in the same building where I was working, it was so convenient I couldn’t come up with an excuse.”

Rose has lost 25 pounds since he started exercising in the fitness center, and he says his endurance has greatly increased. “I used to huff and puff just walking down the hall,” he said. “Now I can easily cover a few miles at a time.”

The center, which was included in the plans for the headquarters that opened in 1985 (the gym didn’t open until 1987), costs almost $200,000 a year to operate, said Martina Cunningham, manager of the company health program.

GTE pays only about half of that. The rest comes from the $10 monthly fee paid by those enrolled in the fitness program. For that, participants get not only the use of the facility and guidance of trainers, but also an individual oak locker, towels and overnight laundry service for their gym clothes.

Redken Laboratories in Canoga Park has installed a small fitness center outfitted with a weight-machine circuit, free weights, a treadmill and stationary bicycles. A trainer works on a part-time basis to give fitness tests and demonstrate the use of the machines.

“The idea behind it was that it would help with health costs,” said Jim Griffith, vice president of human relations. But there is little flexibility in work schedules at Redken, and the gym is open only during lunch and after regular work hours. Griffith estimates that only about 30 employees out of 500 use the gym.

“I wish it were more, but a lot of our people here are parents, and they want to go home right after work. The numbers making use of the gym are just not high enough to make a correlation between usage and health costs.”

The correlation between usage and health costs is difficult to study, even at gyms that are used by a much higher percentage of employees.

“Some people might ask, ‘What does all this fitness stuff have to do with making better rocket engines, making more money,’ ” Pauley said. “I think there is definitely a connection, but that is very hard to show.”

While there have been surveys that suggest cost benefits are derived from having an employee fitness center--a study by the Canadian government suggested that workers enrolled in some type of corporate health and fitness program take an average of 2 1/2 fewer sick days per year--the definitive testing has not been done. The problem is the cost of doing an exhaustive study.

“We’re talking expensive number crunching,” Pauley said. “To do it right would cost about as much as it costs to run this center for a year.”

Until that testing is done, the health of corporate gyms must depend completely on a benevolent management view toward fitness.

“If a company goes through hard times, the health center is among the first things to go,” Pauley said. “It’s still considered just a perk when times get rough.

“Until we can prove otherwise, we are still just a ‘good thing.’ ”