With days of beaches and bathing suits not far off, it is the time to tone.

Fred Gonzalez stood at the threshold of the great “Toning-Tanning-Cult of the Body Machine.”

In one direction, through glass double doors, flowed the raw materials--clear-eyed men and women with gym bags--ready to be processed by Lifecycles, Stairmasters, free weights and tanning beds.

Out the same doors emerge the finished products--athletes in a flush of endorphins, their eyes glazed in post-aerobic high.

It’s Memorial Day weekend.

Summer is coming.

The machine is in high gear.

“It seems like it kicks in at this time every year,” said Gonzalez, 20, as he waited for a friend outside the Torrance Athletic Club. “I’m trying to get a little bigger and to get a tan.”

But why?

Gonzalez blushed, then smiled. “To be a lady-killer, I guess.”

This Torrance club is just one of several dozen shrines in the South Bay to which devotees like Gonzalez flock at this time of year. With days of beaches and bathing suits not far off, it is the time to tone.

It was this spring, in Palm Springs, that the El Camino College student and his buddies resolved to build their bodies. In the desert, it seemed all the best-looking girls were with the Charles Atlas types, Gonzalez said.

To enhance their desire, Gonzalez and five friends are putting $10 each into a pool. A panel of female judges will award the $60 pot this summer to the hunkiest of the half dozen.

“I just want to get bigger all around,” Gonzalez said.

For Valerie Seitz, 21, of San Pedro, summer preparation is even more intense.

She has joined two health clubs--one for its superior aerobics classes and the other for the weights. To maximize her two-hour workouts at the clubs, she often brings along a personal trainer to direct the action.

Seitz said workouts are not an ordeal. She enjoys meeting her friends at the gym and socializing. For the real estate office worker, it’s worth the more than $400 a month for the two gyms, the personal trainers and the supervised weight-loss program.

Seitz said she needs to take off eight more pounds. And time is wasting.

“Since Christmas--you eat all that junk food--I’ve been thinking of taking it off, taking off that weight,” Seitz said. “Summer is definitely on my mind.”

Anita Allen, 26, of Torrance shares that feeling.

She joined the Torrance Athletic Club because her roommate goes there. And she’s thinking about “toning up for my bathing suit.”

Even though she feels in good shape, Allen said she always dreads shopping for a new swimsuit. “They show every possible flaw in your body,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever like it.”

Still, health club owners know they can depend on their patrons to keep on trying.

“We get more people saying they need new exercises for their stomachs,” said Tom Doolin, owner of the Torrance club. “And with a lot of the women, they want exercises for their bottoms.”

He said many new members are taking advantage of a presummer special: $14.95 for one month of unlimited baking time in one of the tanning beds. “That’s so they don’t have to walk out on the beach butt-white,” Doolin explains.

For Doolin, this brawn business is as dependable as the season.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘Oh man, I don’t want to be here.’ They are making themselves come. They know they are going to be on the beach soon. It is only a matter of weeks now.”