One Step at a Time : Fitness Center Strives to Get Youngsters Involved

For the most part, kids and fitness centers don’t really mix.

Nearly all Orange County clubs offer drop-in care for young children of parents who want to work out, but beyond that there’s often little for kids or teens to do (most clubs have a minimum-age limit of 18 for use of exercise equipment).

Some clubs, however, are making strides toward involving youngsters in the fitness movement. One of the most extensive local efforts is taking shape at Irvine’s shiny new Sporting Club at Lakeshore Towers.

The club’s parent company, Athletic Clubs of America, decided to contract with an outside company to create and run a complete fitness center for kids within the walls of the grown-up club. They chose National Pediatric Support Services, a Huntington Beach company that administers day-care services for corporations.

Step by Step, billed as a “youth enrichment center,” is the result. It opened in September but expanded to occupy its full two-story space earlier this month.

Many of the people who fueled the ‘80s fitness boom are demanding services for their children, according to Ellen Borup, editor of an industry newsletter called Peak Performance. (The newsletter is published by Bellevue, Wash.-based United Research, which provides management and marketing information to fitness centers nationwide.)

Most clubs that try to attract families include day-care centers, and some offer classes for young members. Borup said, “That’s very much a trend, although most clubs don’t do it to” the extent of the Sporting Club program.

The fact that Step By Step offers many of its programs (for a fee) to non-members is “very unusual,” Borup added.

At Step By Step, the street-level room is the drop-in care area, for children age 2 months to 6 years. Kids 7 to 17 can use the hang-out room upstairs, which is still taking shape. The room’s amenities will include weight equipment designed for children 7 to 12, along with boxing and basketball facilities. There are areas to relax and socialize while parents work out.

The heart of the program, however, are the classes geared especially for each age group, most of which are open to non-members (for a fee), as well as children of members.

In the “Stepping Up Club,” for children 7 to 12, the afternoon offerings include rhythmic gymnastics, “body ‘n’ sports fitness” (which includes stretching, flexibility and some strength exercises), coed tumbling, tae kwon do and classes in a number of dance styles, from jazz, tap and ballet to hip-hop.

Moving outside the usual realm of sports clubs, there is also a “young artists” class that serves as an introduction to drawing, painting and sculpture. There is also a special kid’s route on the club’s artificial indoor rock-climbing wall, with classes for kids and teens each Saturday.

The “Stepping Out Club,” for teens 13 to 17, offers several of the same classes, with the addition of aerobics and a new afternoon program, started last week, in which teens are given supervised instruction and workout time on the adult weight equipment. The program includes short seminars on health-related topics ranging from training to nutrition.

Even the little ones get some working out. As an adjunct to drop-in care for children 2 months to 6 years, Step By Step offers a series of enrichment classes (the “Lil’ Step Club”) including tumbling and dance classes, along with play and story time, art and music classes and a very basic cooking class.

“We’re really making it a club for the kids,” explained Sheri Senter, chief executive officer of National Pediatric Support Services.

Drop-in care at health clubs has “generally been limited to a nursery,” she said. Her goal with Step by Step was to structure it more like a day-care center or preschool: “What we’ve really tried to create here is a learning environment.”

With the older children, the program aims to introduce habits of fitness and nutrition that can carry over into adulthood, Senter said. She noted that physical education programs in public schools have been trimmed back with the rest of the curriculum, making schools even less able to instill students with notions of how to live healthful lives.

Darren Hodgdon, president of Athletic Clubs of America, said that expanding club offerings to youngsters has “been an issue with the industry for a long time. The Irvine experiment may point the way for other Sporting Clubs and competing chains.

“It fits demographically with what’s going on in the Irvine marketplace,” Hodgdon said, pointing out that Irvine is a suburban, family-oriented city. Getting youngsters more involved with the club makes good business sense too, he said: “We’re conditioning them to be future members of the club.”

The drop-in care has been busy from the beginning, said Step By Step director Rose Grasselli, and she expects involvement by the older kids to grow as the program adds equipment and expands to fill the full physical space.

Although it shares the building, Step By Step is administered separately from the main Sporting Club. Drop-in care is available only to members of the club (free with a youth membership), but Lil’ Step classes are open to non-members.

The cost for one-month sessions of each 50-minute class is $32 for Sporting Club members, $36 for non-members. For members, the price for each additional sibling is 50% off, and the discount for siblings of non-member children is 10%. Prices are identical for classes for older kids in the Stepping Up and Stepping Out programs (the hang-out room is open to children of members only).

In addition to the regular Step By Step classes, the Sporting Club periodically offers other programs for teens, such as football and soccer camps and one-day workshops.