Fitness is free, if you know where to look

On a cement gray weekday morning near the Santa Monica Pier, a handful of people have ventured to the beach: a lone volleyball player, a homeless woman singing into the air and Ken Chiarito.

Chiarito, wearing khakis, a sleeveless T-shirt and shoes, swings effortlessly on a series of steel rings, up and back, up and back. Occasionally he spins two, three times, or flips his body 360 degrees in a balletic rhythm -- Cirque du Soleil for the common man. After this 10-minute routine he drops to the ground, hurriedly puts on his khaki uniform jacket and heads back to his job at a nearby hotel.

Chiarito has been doing the rings three times a week for about a year and a half, on his lunch hour. He learned by watching others, then developing the flips and twists on his own. The 36-year-old from La Crescenta began his routine a few months after he started his job, working in the food and beverage department. That was almost two years ago.

He had no money to join a gym and turned to the rings for cardio. He is proof that in a country that last year spent billions on exercise equipment and billions more on health clubs, fitness can be achieved with no more than motivation and a chafing dish.

“I was sitting outside one day on my lunch break,” Chiarito explains, “and there was this one guy who was like Baryshnikov. I used to be really good on the pegboard when I was in high school, so I thought I could try it.”

The first day he traversed only three rings, but the next day he went across all 10. He’s been faithful to the routine through injuries that include a sore shoulder, a torn elbow tendon and chronic hand pain. He shows his palms, which are striped with thick calluses. Sometimes the pain wakes him up in the middle of the night and he has to run his hands under cold water. But he keeps going.

“There’s no waiting in line, no traffic and you get such a kick-butt workout,” Chiarito explains. “It’s my cardio, it’s my own thing.”

Occasionally passersby ask how he got started or how he does the tricks. “I’d rather do it with no one watching,” he confesses. It helps him concentrate on the routine. But mostly he enjoys “the solitariness of it. No one’s around, the bicycle rental place is closed, and it’s like I own the place. It’s kind of cool.”

Chiarito has been a fitness buff as far back as grade school. Smaller and more wiry than his classmates, he got knocked down too many times playing football, but discovered that baseball and hockey suited him. Growing up in suburban New York, his father planted the seeds of his you-can-make-a-gym-out-of-anything philosophy. “He would try to push his Jeep [for exercise]. At one point I really wanted to join a gym and he said, ‘You don’t need to.’ ”

A bowling ball served as a weight. “From that I knew that if I ever got stuck somewhere and had to exercise, I could make do.”

And he has. While on location working as an extra on films such as the remake of “Planet of the Apes,” he brings a dumbbell for predawn workouts. A few months after starting his hotel job he decided to use heavy trays, wine stands and ice buckets for weights.

“I thought the wine stands looked like dumbbells, so I started doing curls with them,” he explains. He did rows with the trays and bench presses with chafing dishes, and “I felt I was getting tighter and getting more pumped up,” Chiarito says. “I started standing up straighter.” One co-worker joined him occasionally but didn’t stick with it.

A serious motorcycle accident in 1988 left him with pins in one leg, and walking on a treadmill or pedaling a StairMaster can be excruciatingly painful.

What keeps him going, he says, is that it simply “makes me feel good.” And there’s another reason: “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he says, “and so to a degree I do it so that somebody would be happy in what they see in me -- not just me, but also my physique. I think it’s appropriate to have a nice physique for your significant other.”

Chiarito’s dedication and resourcefulness are lessons to those who feel they must join a gym to get fit. It also points out the need for public parks and recreation centers that offer equipment such as bars and rings scaled for adults. According to the city of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, about 18 parks in the L.A. area contain some kind of equipment, places including the Highland Park Recreation Center, the Rosecrans Recreation Center and Chatsworth North Park.

“There is a need for more opportunity for people to safely exercise in their communities,” says Cedric X. Bryant, chief exercise physiologist for the San Diego-based American Council on Exercise. “That would certainly have a positive impact, and lord knows we need it.”

And, Bryant points, out, “Your muscles can’t tell whether or not they’re being stimulated by a $2,500 machine or a sandbag. Muscles just respond to the relative load you expose them to and the method with which you train them.”

He adds there may be another benefit to working out on a jungle gym versus a commercial gym: the importance of play. “When we become older we forget how to play, and we need to introduce more play into exercise,” Bryant says. “People are doing some interesting things -- there are bicycle polo teams and kickball leagues. The key is to try to find things that people enjoy doing, and sometimes more structured activities are not engaging enough.”

For Chiarito, the formula is simple: “If you really want to do it, you’ll do it,” he says. “I hate to sound like a cliche, but only you can change you. If you really want to work out, you’ll find a way to do it.”

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Jeannine Stein can be reached by e-mail at jeannine.stein@ latimes.com.