FITNESS : Building Better Bodies in the Living Room

It’s where chrome meets crystal, velour rubs up against velvet couches and pink light washes the entrance to the women’s shower room.

A gym of ill repute?

Actually, it’s one man’s vision of the ideal place to build muscle and burn fat. It’s the Better Bodies Cross-Training Center in West Los Angeles--the $2-million brainchild of Tom Wilson, 32, the former manager of a Gold’s gym.

Evidence abounds that there’s something different about this gym. There’s a chair converted into a mini-garden, tabletops made from authentic manhole covers and, starting soon, a revolving art collection. Small, crystal chandeliers hang between velvet drapes across from the health bar, which serves up the standard power drinks and health candy.

There’s no blaring music, harsh lighting or people jumping up and down. In fact, aerobics don’t figure into this program.

“We adopted the outcome of studies that showed that cardiovascular conditioning is more effective than general aerobic classes,” Wilson said. “So we designed the club with 50% weight strength equipment and 50% cardiovascular machines--like Cybex bikes, Stairmaster and treadmills.”

The yearly membership fee is $750, which includes two sessions with a personal trainer. Wilson also offers a six-week, $1,500 program of “personal reconstruction,” in which clients receive a detailed nutritional and body analysis, a menu plan and four 90-minute sessions each week with a trainer.

All gym members start their workouts with a Cybex bike warm-up. Using headphones, they can tap into a 16-channel stereo system, whose offerings include the sounds of rainfall and waves hitting the beach, or play a CD or videocassette from home.

Then comes a session on a machine used to elevate the heart rate and work on different parts of the body in 30 exercises, each of them one minute long.

Wilson, who has been hanging around gyms and muscle people since he was a child, encourages his members to participate in other sports. “The whole philosophy is about cross-training. It’s more than going to a gym. We offer cardio adventures--hiking, rowing, roller-blading--through our affiliations and outdoor programs,” he said.

Wilson says that most people want to burn fat rather than build muscle. But staying fit, he adds, should include muscle building. That approach and the posh, living-room feel of the gym appear to have won converts.

“I love it,” said Alison Thorpe, 31, a paralegal who arrived in Los Angeles two months ago from New Orleans. “There are serious people here. It’s not a showplace in terms of people showing off. I would much rather look at (the decor) than any gym.”

If you still enjoy an old-fashioned massage, the former team masseur for the Edmonton Oilers hockey team, Hans Juergen-Merz, and his daughter, Britta, offer them for $1 a minute. Members use them to wind down from workouts that, despite the unlikely surroundings, are as tough as those found in any gym.

Leave it to this gym, however, to use a writer of Greek tragedies to put the hard work in perspective. A quote from Euripides, inscribed on a plaque outside the women’s locker room, says: “Discipline. Do not consider painful what is good for you.”

Better Bodies Cross-Training Center is located at 1400 W. Olympic Blvd. Los Angeles: ( 310 ) 473-1470.