High-Tech Sweat : Personal health: Many believe exercising can be fun, if it involves enough electronic gadgets that light up and make noises.

OK, so now we can admit it: Exercising is one gigantic, thunderous, crashing bore.

All that stuff about “runner’s high” and the Zenlike pleasure of feeling “the burn” and the purity of spirit achieved through sheer aerobic depletion--well, we’re all big boys and girls now, and we know it’s a bunch of snake oil. Exercise is not fun. But because many of us believe that anything can be fun--if it involves enough high-tech gadgets that light up and make noises--we have not abandoned the quest for granitic pecs, glutes, delts and abs. We’ve simply turned it into Pac-Man with sweat.

Increasingly, would-be hard bodies, many with more money than motivation, are shoving the furniture aside and filling their dens and guest rooms with the latest in fitness devices, all fitted with enough lights, buzzers, screens, readouts and sophisticated computer circuitry to clog the cockpit of an F-14.

They then strap themselves in and sweat and puff as much or more than they always did in their less palmy days, when a pair of $50 jogging shoes was considered a fairly complete investment in fitness. And, having unwrapped their newest fitness/torture toy yesterday, they likely are in the middle of a veritable frenzy of newly inspired exercise.

The difference is that now they are being entertained, provided with diversions such as heart-rate readouts, calorie counters, distance measurers, video screens that flash pictures of hills and valleys, race courses and tracks, and little glowing reminders to slow down, speed up, keep the back straight--even electronic cheers at the finish line.

It’s a way, say equipment manufacturers, retailers and exercise professionals, of bringing people back one more time to the bike, the rowing machine or the stair climber. It’s a way of banishing boredom.

In a word, it’s motivation.

“Most of these electronic things are really motivational things,” says Robert Girandola, an associate professor of exercise science at USC.

“They give the person a lot of bells and whistles and stuff. If you need that motivation, and these things help, that’s great. The funny thing is, if you put it (a stair-climbing machine) in a building with stairs, people will take the elevator to get to it when they could get the same workout climbing the stairs.

“Personally, I like to see people who are self-motivated, but that’s not the society we’re living in right now.”

Jody Dean, a psychologist who has practices in Mission Viejo and Fullerton and specializes in sports psychology, says that “a $100 stationary bike is going to give you the same cardiovascular workout as a Lifecycle. The heart doesn’t know the difference.”

“But,” Dean adds, “when people are paying more and getting something more sophisticated, they possibly may feel like they’re getting a better workout. The gadgets do decrease boredom and give you feedback, and with any kind of exercise program, people like immediate feedback. Gadgets are very seductive.”

They’re seductive enough to induce thousands nationwide to turn from health clubs to exercise machine retailers, plunk down a few thousand dollars--and possibly much more--and outfit their homes with the latest in NASA-like fitness gear.

Everybody’s current darling, exercise professionals say, appears to be the stair-climbing machine, which comes in several incarnations.

Probably the most popular model is the 4000 Personal Trainer, manufactured by Tulsa-based StairMaster Exercise Systems. It features two foot pads upon which the exerciser stands and presses alternately, as if climbing stairs. The machine can be programmed depending on a person’s level of fitness, says Ralph Cissne, a company spokesman.

A screen in front of the exerciser’s face displays, among other things, distance traveled and calories burned, and there is an optional heart-rate monitor. The same model is used in commercial gyms and homes and retails for $2,195.

“We’re selling about 20% of them to people who want them for their homes,” Cissne says. “The lines to use them in clubs are so long now that if people have the money, they’ll buy one for their home. They’re affluent people who have been exposed to the product. And the electronics are as essential as they would be on an automobile. People have gotten accustomed to that kind of thing, and they’ve become sophisticated about it. They want as many bells and whistles as possible. A pretty good analogy would be a luxury automobile.”

The staff of the YMCA in downtown Los Angeles knows this well. A haven for before- and after-work fitness buffs, as well as lunch exercisers, the facility has 15 StairMaster machines and 16 Lifecycles, which, says associate director of physical education Jay Petty, are usually all in use.

The Lifecycle--which has nearly become a generic name for all electronically enhanced stationary exercise cycles--is the machine that pioneered the computer-chip revolution in exercise equipment.

Manufactured by Life Fitness Inc., based in part in Irvine, the newest version of the Lifecycle features a test that can measure oxygen uptake (with resulting recommendations on how many times a week and how long to ride based on level of fitness), displays that measure calories burned, elapsed time, miles traveled, pedal revolutions per minute and a selection of simulated terrain, such as hills and valleys. The retail price is $1,598, and one of the places the machine is available is at that most quintessential of yuppie gadget stores, The Sharper Image. It’s also offered through American Express.

Michael Hoffman, a spokesman for Life Fitness, says that individuals are buying the Lifecycle and other company products partly because “in the early ‘80s, computerization became acceptable, and it was logical that fitness would enter the Computer Age. People today aren’t going to go for equipment that’s just mechanical. They’re used to computers, and they’re going to go for what they’re used to.”

They went for more than 20,000 home-use Lifecycles in 1987 and about the same number the next year, says Hoffman, who adds that, since the beginning of the decade, more than 150,000 Lifecycles have been placed in health clubs throughout the country.

At StairMaster Exercise Systems, Cissne says, more than 1,000 of the company’s stair-climbing machines are being shipped each month to clubs and homes.

Still, for an aging generation weaned on Pac-Man, one Life Fitness product may be, as Hoffman says, “the ultimate.”

It’s the Liferower, a straight-pull rowing machine with a sliding seat and a video screen in front of the exerciser. It’s a convincing reminder that the parent company of Life Fitness--Bally Inc.--made its original reputation on things such as pinball machines and one-armed bandits.

“Imagine this,” Hoffman says. “You get on the machine and call up the program, and there’s a skyline of an imaginary city in front of you and on the top of the screen is a pace boat, in digitized cartoons, like a video game. The machine makes the sound of splashing oars and marks every quarter-mile and continually reads out if you’re in front or behind the pace boat.”

The clincher, he says, is the ability of the machine to simulate interval training--alternating periods of hard and fast rowing and easier work.

“We have this helicopter that comes in on the right side of the screen,” he says, “and drops additional rowers into the pace boat, as many as seven rowers, for the peaks of the interval. For the valleys, how are you gonna get them off the boat? Easy. A shark. You hear the ‘Jaws’ theme, the shark comes out from the left, passes over the boat and takes off rowers.”

And, periodically, “a little instructor panel appears, like a coxswain on a boat, and tells you to keep your back straight or use your legs. And there’s the sound of a crowd cheering at the end, even if you lose.”

All this for $2,795.

More expensive still is the Startrac 1000 treadmill, manufactured by Tustin-based Unisen Inc. For $3,795, you get a machine that has eight preset exercise programs (the user can design even more), LED readouts indicating racing laps around a track, elapsed time, distance traveled, miles per hour, interval pacing and calories burned.

“Some people fall in love with the electronics, based on the aesthetics and the sizzle,” says Andy Richters, Unisen’s western regional sales manager. “People learn about them initially through the health clubs, all these machines that have so much glitz and glamour to them. For the clubs, the key to keeping your members is keeping them motivated, and that’s one reason the bells and whistles sell. They’re also functions people are looking for in home equipment because at home it’s harder to get motivated because you don’t have the social aspect and the camaraderie of the clubs.”

Another important function of the machines, which has nothing to do with electronics, is their ease of operation, Richters says: “These things need to be super-user-friendly. You don’t want to look like an idiot.”

This is one reason, he says, a machine that “I think can get people the fittest in the shortest amount of time” has not enjoyed the same popularity as, say, the Lifecycle and the stair machines: The cross-country ski machine, sold by a handful of companies in different designs, is meant to simulate the back-and-forth leg motion and swinging arm action of the cross-country skier.

But, Richters says, “it takes a lot of concentration, and it takes practice to be somewhat adept at it.”

None of the various devices, including the ski machines, pushes the user to greater effort, Girandola says; the user may exercise as vigorously or as leisurely as he or she wants. And, according to Hoffman and Cissne, because the devices simply duplicate stairs, a bicycle or a boat, they require the user to burn no more or fewer calories than would be burned while climbing real stairs, riding a real bike or rowing a real shell.

(According to American Medical Assn. figures, a 150-pound person in one hour burns 900 calories running 10 mph, 300 calories walking 3.75 mph, 840 calories race rowing, 600 calories cross-country skiing and 210 calories cycling at 5.5 mph. These numbers increase or decrease depending on the intensity of the exercise.)

But the machines do offer the advantage of allowing the exerciser to do all of these things in the den.

The evolution of the machines continues, Hoffman says. Further gadgets, such as heart and pulse monitors will probably be seen more often (they are already a feature on a stair-climbing machine called the Versaclimber), as will microelectronics.

Cissne says that manufacturers may even offer more diagnostic gadgets specifically for use by doctors: “Whatever the public wants ultimately it will get.”

Dean says there is undeniable appeal in owning your own piece of high-tech exercise equipment. It’s called snob appeal.

“In our society,” she says, “we have this funny idea that if it costs more, it must be better. Also, these things are furniture. If people have guests over, they’re going to see the machine sitting in the middle of the floor. It’s like a couch or a work of art to show off, sort of a status symbol. It’s something you don’t need to cover up or get embarrassed about.”

Indeed, it all may add up to a new wing of the vaunted “electronic cottage”--a complete home workout room for the age of both computers and gridlock.

“In this town, people don’t have time to go to the gym anymore,” says Chris Latzko, general manager of Physico Fitness Superstores, a Los Angeles fitness equipment retailer.

“Right now our business is 80%, easily, going to the home market. A lot of stars are buying. People are really going into buying small home gyms. They come in six months in advance wanting to know how big this is or that is so they can plan to build a special room for it all and just pop it in the house.

“This business,” Latzko says, “has gone from a nothing business to a super billion-dollar business across the country. And in this part of town, in Beverly Hills, it’s become kind of like keeping up with the Joneses.”

But vanity is not all, Latzko adds.

“If you have your equipment at home,” he says, “you don’t have to get dressed up or put on makeup. You can work out just as you are.”

Or not. Because in spite of all the workout wizardry, the lights, the cartoon videos, the buttons and bells and beeps, it’s still exercise. And, therefore, not fun.

“I have a feeling that you’re always going to have to come up with something new because people inherently don’t like to exercise,” Girandola says. “The lines are very long (in the clubs) behind those high-tech machines, but I have a feeling that eventually it’ll become old hat.”