Sweating It Out : Weather: Income helps determine how well you beat the heat. The well-off cling to air-conditioning while the poor settle for a dip in the bathtub.

Biceps gleaming, Bill Whitton said he has the perfect system to beat the heat: Live in an air-conditioned world.

“Go from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned job to your air-conditioned gym, and then sweat,” recommended Whitton, 30, as he flexed 60 pounds of weight toward his chest in a Chatsworth gym Monday. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

But as temperatures zoomed into the 100s Monday for the second day in a row, Whitton exemplified the striking contrast between how the well-off and the poor in the Valley cope with the heat.

The high temperatures are expected to continue throughout the week as a high pressure system lingers over the area, said Rick Dittmann, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides weather information to The Times. It hit highs Monday of 101 degrees in Woodland Hills, 106 in Santa Clarita and 98 in Northridge, Dittmann said.

For those who can afford to follow Whitton’s advice, the current heat wave is a mere annoyance. Their dry-cleaning bills soar. Their electrical bills climb into the triple-digits. They eat more gelato.

Searingly hot days weigh more heavily on others.

“People have a tendency to ignore you when you panhandle because they are so hot themselves,” said Bernie Bears, a 57-year-old homeless man who had parked his shopping cart in the shade near a gelato shop on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. In an unconscious parody of the rich, Bears pulled out a rubber rug that resembled a putting green and began practicing his golf swings as passers-by stared.

“You try to stay cool however you know how,” Bears said.

Three blocks west on the boulevard, Encino resident Eileen Kurit was doing just that.

“I’m buying my fall wardrobe,” she said, as she rifled through a rack of $265 linen shirts in an exclusive Sherman Oaks boutique, where the temperature was a deliciously chilly 70 degrees.

Regardless of their income, Valley residents flocked like parched birds to various local pools. Some pools are a little more luxurious than others.

For instance, the pool at Braemar Country Club in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains in Tarzana offers a nearly unparalleled view of the Valley floor. Membership for pool use only costs about $900 per family annually.

“We could afford a pool but this is better because we don’t have to clean it,” said Encinco resident Ken Weston, 43, an engineer sitting under an umbrella by the sparkling water of the nearly empty pool.

Across the Valley in the city of San Fernando, the public pool was packed with youngsters who pay 50 cents apiece to swim. Because his house is not air-conditioned, Tony Diaz, 15, said he and his four siblings consider the pool “like our second home.”

Some Valley residents cannot afford the bus fare to get to the pool, never mind pay the admission price. Elvia Camerena, a 24-year-old welfare mother who lives in the San Fernando Gardens public housing project, is afraid to even let her two children cool off under the hose lest the apartment manager chastise her for wasting water.

“So my children are always taking baths because they can’t stand the heat,” she said. “If I was rich, first thing I’d do is buy me a house with an air-conditioner.”