Survival of the fittest

WELLINGTON Street may not exactly be Venice Beach, but the first five floors of a corner office building represent the closest thing to transported Californian cliches that Hong Kong has ever seen.

Posters lining the walls of the street-level makeshift office of the Ray Wilson California Fitness Centre are covered with images of buxom Baywatch babes and well-oiled human Ken dolls. In their midst, sit a team of upbeat 'fitness professionals' behind plywood desks, busily answering telephones, pulling in passers-by off the streets and asking bemused office-workers what they 'want to get out of their exercise programme'.

While this might look just a little out of place in the heart of Central, the feigned-interest-and-forced-smiles approach is working: within three weeks since the health club began flogging memberships, some 1,500 people have signed up.

'There has never before been anything like this in Hong Kong,' said Eric Levine, the blond, blue-eyed and brawny managing director of the centre. 'We have opened 100 clubs in the US but we have had the most phenomenal response here. It's a record-breaker.' Walk uphill across Lan Kwai Fong to the ground floor of an office building in Hollywood Road, and there sits the sleek shell of the New York Fitness Club. Co-founder and investment banker Anthony Desir, a US-qualified marathon runner for the Moscow Olympic Games, described his place as 'a premier centre' for 'discriminating' fitness buffs. 'We are not just some muscle-heads and we don't want the riff-raff. The other clubs can have the sort of people who will steal the aromatherapy oil,' he said.

By early October, there will be at least six new health clubs in Hong Kong, with more in the pipeline for next year. The 25,000-square-foot Ray Wilson California Fitness Centre, part of a behemoth American chain that runs 100 clubs in California, Colorado and Nevada, is slated to open at the end of September. New York Fitness, the brainchild of Desir and businessman Edward Lui - who was once on the Hong Kong professional fencing team - will be ready for business by this time next month.

A few weeks ago, TLC - which stands for The Lift Club - opened its doors with a triple-level branch in Austin Road followed by a similarly sized one in Admiralty; TLC is also the first fitness chain in Hong Kong to be approved by the National Academy of Sports Medicine, a Chicago-based association responsible for creating an international certification programme for fitness professionals and setting training guidelines.

Then in October, Deborah Sims, formerly of the Phillip Wain group, will welcome members to her swanky 30,000-square-foot spa-cum-fitness centre, Body by Deborah, in Causeway Bay.