Cluff Lives a Non-Stop Aerobic Workout : Health and Fitness Career Keeps Her on the Move at 56 Years Old
Still fresh after a six-mile morning hike and a manicure, fitness guru Sheila Cluff moves swiftly through her Ojai health spa. Looking sleek in a cherry-colored body suit, she says a quick hello to a visitor, then power-walks to her corporate office a block away. As queen of a diverse fitness mini-empire--two fashionable health spas, 200 employees, workout videos, TV shows--Cluff has neither the time nor the metabolism to slow down.
If anything, the 56-year-old grandmother is assuming more responsibilities: Gov. Pete Wilson recently named her to the state’s new Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
“Sheila is very highly respected (in fitness) and there was no doubt in the governor’s mind that she’d be a great candidate,” said John Cates, executive director of the council. “She brings a lot of years of experience to the job.”
At a meeting in February, Cluff sat across from the Terminator. Arnold Schwarzenegger is chairman of the 16-member council, which includes former boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard, tennis player Tracy Austin and Olympic gymnast Peter Vidmar. The council’s goals: develop programs promoting physical fitness for people of all ages and enlist the private sector to provide the funding.
“I’m a minor player compared to Arnold and Peter,” Cluff says, “but as a group, we can convince people that getting involved in fitness and wellness will impact on all areas of their life. The state has no money to do this, so it’s up to (the council) to find a way.”
Cluff, who met Wilson last year when she spoke at a women’s conference he attended, is going to concentrate on involving businesses in the council’s efforts. She also wants to focus her fitness skills and philosophies on the “aging population,” she said. “The perception of being 57 needs to be changed. We should have the attitude of being young and vital and energetic.”
Cluff didn’t wake up one day and turn into a dynamo or read a book that changed her life. Even as a child ice-skating competitively in Canada, she was goal-oriented and driven. “It never occurred to me that getting up at 4 a.m. in 40-below weather was unusual,” she said. Her father was a politician and both parents were entrepreneurs who told her “there was nothing I couldn’t do,” she said.
After skating professionally for the Sonja Henie Hollywood Ice Review in the 1950s, Cluff became a physical-education teacher at a high school in Canada. She noticed that girls were bored by the standard phys-ed fare, so she started a “cardiovascular dance class,” which became “so popular even the parents wanted to do it.”
Ahead of its time, Cluff’s connection of dance, music and cardiovascular workout now is called aerobics. In the late ‘50s, Cluff knew she was on to something and started a company called Fitness, Inc. She took her company to upstate New York when her husband Don, an electrical engineer, was transferred to Plattsburg, N.Y., in the early ‘60s.
Although her move into television was probably inevitable, it was sparked by tragedy. In 1965, her 2 1/2-year-old son was stricken with meningitis and died in two days because the local hospital didn’t have the right testing equipment. Afterward, Cluff appeared on a telethon to raise money to buy the equipment for the hospital. Thinking she’d be “laughed off the air,” she turned out to be telegenic and went on to launch the first of what would be several TV fitness shows (including one at KABC in L.A.).
In 1969, her husband was being transferred again and had a choice of locations. The Cluffs picked California because it was on the cutting edge of the fitness movement. With their four children, they moved to Ventura and Sheila went about establishing herself as a fitness expert. She asked the Ventura Department of Parks and Recreation if she could start a conditioning class and was told: “No one is interested in fitness in Ventura County,” Cluff recalled.
But the recreation department listed her class anyway and she was allowed to use a “cafetorium” at a junior high. She expected “six people to show up” but 86 did, igniting her fitness career in California. In 1976, she and her husband mortgaged their house and borrowed from his pension plan to buy a then-68-year-old Ojai hotel, converting it into a health spa.
“Our first year was very tough,” Cluff said, “but then things turned around and the fitness wave began.”
In ‘79, the Cluffs opened their second spa, in Palm Springs. Both places are similar to women’s “milk farms,” offering low-calorie meals, exercise programs and such body-pampering amenities as luffa scrubs and hourlong massages. But Cluff’s spas go beyond the milk-farm routine, “focusing on nutrition, wellness and intellectual enrichment,” with seminars on women’s issues and stress reduction.
Cluff said 80% of her customers are women.
“The idea of a health spa vacation has not caught on with men,” she said.
Aside from still teaching eight aerobics classes a week, writing fitness books and making workout videos--her latest is “Body Awareness With Sheila”--Cluff conducts exercise classes aboard cruise ships 12 days a month. Her hectic schedule is ruled by an appointment book, which is always jammed. Seldom does she have time for anything except working and reading novels. There’s no TV, except for “60 Minutes,” and she has no interest in sports: “I don’t even know who won the Super Bowl.”
But she’s having a blast.
“When your passion becomes your business,” she said, “your business becomes your fun, and life is just plain fun.”
