It`s early dawn at Rancho La Puerta, a health and fitness spa in Baja California, Mexico, the first gray light just beginning to soften the high desert terrain. At the bottom of Cuchima Mountain, the peak that stands sentrylike over the ranch, is a circle of about 30 persons, dressed in warmup suits and jogging lightly in place.
”All right now, let`s really stretch it out, warm up those muscles, get ready for the mountain,” calls the instructor, who is standing in the middle of the circle. They start their lunges, head rolls and squats. Once the warmup is over, they`ll hike up and down the steep mountain trail-four miles of copious sweat, breathtaking vistas and anticipation of breakfast.
A thousand miles away, in Safety Harbor, Fla., a like-minded group gathers outside a Spanish-style spa. It`s not yet 7 a.m., but the air is already heavy and muggy; most of the group are wearing shorts and tank tops as they go through the preliminary stretches. There`s no mountain here, but the idea is the same: a four-mile racewalk along Tampa Bay. ”Keep those arms swinging,” the instructor calls, ”and come down on the balls of your feet first, not your heels-that`s right, that`s right, keep it moving.” They swing their arms, sweat and watch the pelicans swoop down over the bay.
The pursuit of health and fitness is expanding from the domain of health clubs and jogging trails into the world of spas. The old image equating a spa with a fat farm is being shed like so much excess poundage. The new image is sleek, robust and fun. People still want to shed a few pounds when they go to a spa (are there many among us who wouldn`t like to drop at least five?), but the spa thrust now is getting fit, getting healthy.
Sweating at dawn, doing leg lifts after lunch, enjoying a tomato-juice cocktail in late afternoon and collapsing in bed at 10 is more and more becoming an increasingly popular vacation for millions of Americans.
Today, Marcello Mastroianni wouldn`t be sloshing through the mud baths in slow-motion pursuit of his ladylove as he did in that classic spa scene in
”Dark Eyes”; instead, he`d be panting next to her on the aerobic circuit or agonizing with her during 300 crunches in the ”absolutely abdominals”
class.
We Americans are known for the way we tend to be obsessive: We grab hold of ideas and lifestyles and ride the pendulum into excessiveness. And for the last decade, the obsession with health and exercise has been at the forefront. It has spawned the current plethora of health clubs, workout tapes, marathons and triathlons.
And now we have spas that have evolved from resorts offering limited calories and lots of pampering to places often resembling camps for adults, with different exercise classes available for every hour of the day. The pampering is still there, but such sensory pleasures as massages and herbal wraps follow rigorous routines of aerobics and calisthenics.
The trend is still so new that no definitive travel statistics are available, but travel agent Jeffrey Joseph, who 2 1/2 years ago started a now- booming spa consulting service called Spa-Finders, estimates that 5 million Americans opted for a spa vacation last year. His Spa-Finders had 3,000 clients in its first year and more than 5,000 so far this year.
The question is: How healthy is all this?
How good is it for you to head off for a week of climbing mountains, sweating in aerobics classes and lifting weights?
If you want to be healthy, is a spa vacation the way to do it? Or is it better to join a health club? Or is that a chicken-egg question?
The answers, of course, are almost simplistic. Yes, spa vacations can be tremendously healthy, rewarding and fun if approached with the right attitude. And that attitude means the desire to improve one`s lifestyle, both physically and mentally. When the body feels good, the mind feels good, too. A spa fitness vacation can give you a jump-start, get the body engine going.
But if you don`t take the spa home with you in some sense-if that week of concentrated exercise isn`t followed by a consistent and healthy exercise program at home-it just adds up to another frenetic week. You`ll go home with aching muscles, maybe minus a couple of pounds, but none the wiser.
”We`re not a quick fix,” says Yvette Rubio, former fitness instructor and now advertising director for Safety Harbor. ”This isn`t just a place to come drop five pounds. We`re interested in people`s lifestyles. Spas and health clubs are compatible. We encourage people not to go home and resume their terrible habits.
”And we hope that people follow through, with good food and regular exercise, when they get home.”
Safety Harbor might well be one of the most extreme examples in the country of the transformation of spas from palaces of plush pampering to centers of intensive exercise.
Just a few miles out of Tampa, Safety Harbor opened in 1926 as a posh resort catering primarily to wealthy women who wanted to be swathed in luxury while they lost weight. In the mid-`80s, it drastically switched gears: gym facilities and exercise rooms were modernized, the newest in exercise equipment installed and an intensive exercise program, including a number of tough water-aerobic classes, started.
Today, Safety Harbor appears almost schizophrenic, but it`s a schizophrenia that seems to be working. The old-style clientele still comes to lounge by the pool, smoke cigarettes, get massages and manicures and limit their calories. The ”new” group rushes from class to class, comparing notes on who the best aerobic teachers are and what their at-home exercise program is. Both groups get together at night in the lounge to sing around the piano and regard each other with a somewhat bemused tolerance.
Gail Waller, a Chicago woman in her 30s, started going to spas about 10 years ago. Her reasons for taking spa vacations have changed during that time, and they reflect the whole changing climate of spas.
”I wanted to lose some weight that first time. I had never really worked out. I played racquetball, but aerobics were not big back then . . . . A friend of mine and I decided to go to the ranch (Rancho La Puerta). The orientation was weight loss. We talked a lot about calories, which classes burnt the most (calories off); we weighed a couple of times a week,” she says.
She has been back to the ranch five more times, to the Heartland (80 miles south of Chicago) four times and to the Ashram in California once. She no longer goes because of weight; she goes because it makes her feel good.
”It`s a mental retreat and a physical challenge. I can`t even say it`s all fitness. It`s a time to regroup my energies.” And after returning with those, she resumes her regular exercise program at a downtown health club.
As spas evolve from their old fat-farm image into the world of health and fitness, that ”mental-retreat element” that Gail Waller talks about is becoming increasingly important.
There`s a trinity-like philosophy at many spas today: the trinity of improving body, mind and spirit. It`s great to come back from a spa feeling physically fit; it`s even better to come back feeling purified in both mind and body.
Rancho La Puerta in Baja California is considered the granddaddy of health resorts in North America; it was founded in 1939 by Deborah Szeckely, who also started the Golden Door Spa in California. Like other spas, the Ranch has evolved over the years; and its changes are representative of many spas.
Phyllis Pilgrim, head of fitness at the ranch, talks about the changes she has seen in the eight years she has spent there and what she sees in the future. And much of what she says has to do with that body-mind-spirit trinity.
”I think we`re looking at much more than the physical; we`re shifting to an educational base, an understanding of what happens to the body. It`s a more balanced approach. You know, the whole of Western society went haywire with all this aerobics,” she says.
”I think the future is toward gentler activities. There`s going to be a tremendous surge in tai chi, meditation, yoga…. We`re looking at a body-mind connection. We want mindful exercise, not mindless.”
That`s not to say that ranchgoers don`t have, and won`t continue to have, a full range of exercise options.
There`s that mountain hike in the early dawn (other, less-strenuous hikes are available also), but many ranchgoers start the day a half-hour earlier with a yoga/meditation class. Exercise classes extend through the day, at different levels of ability. But then there`s another yoga class in late afternoon, and Pilgrim`s ”Inner Journey” classes, in early evening, which she began 2 1/2 years ago, are packed. There`s no physical sweat in Inner Journey; instead, participants are on a quest led by Pilgrim of exploring the boundaries of the mind, the subconscious.
But physical fitness and lots of good exercise classes are definitely the key to spa success; the search for the meaning of life is important, but spa- goers are primarily interested in coming away from a spa week with a healthier, fitter body.
”When people go to a health and fitness spa, they want lots of classes,” Joseph of Spa-Finders says. ”I tell this to new spa owners who ask me for recommendations. I say, `These people want good exercise classes. Have top-notch instructors.”`
In fact, one of the problems spa fitness directors face routinely is trying to convince their clientele not to go overboard with the exercise.
People are not going to improve their fitness or health by virtually killing themselves the first couple of days. By Day 3, they`ll have trouble getting the body out of bed; muscles are going to do just so much, and then they rebel. More serious than simple rebellion is the possibility of damage.
Good spa directors warn their guests to listen to their bodies. Relaxing by the side of the pool or taking a nap in the afternoon can be just as vital to the fitness week as sweating in class. Keeping fit has a yin and yang, just like everything else.
”One of the concerns I have with fitness is when it becomes an obsession and when it leads to damage to the body,” says Karma Kientzler, executive vice president of Canyon Ranch, which now has facilities both in Arizona and Massachusetts. (And yes, that`s her real name. She figures her father, who named her, knew what her life was going to be all about; as with Phyllis Pilgrim at Rancho La Puerta, Kientzler is a strong believer in the mind-body connection.)
”I`m here to tell you that fitness will always be the reason a person goes to a spa. Fitness in the `80s has been big business. But we see a lot of injuries, even in low-impact (aerobics). Hopefully, in the `90s and by the year 2000 we will be able to educate people to use more balance.”
A spa vacation, according to Kientzler, is one bookend. The other bookend to fitness is what happens at home.
”This is a lifestyle. If you come to Canyon Ranch and then you don`t have a (health) club, or you don`t walk or work out to a tape at home, you`re just half there. And what you do at home should be something you love. If people don`t love the exercise they do, they`re not going to keep doing it.”
