BEIJING: Aged 35, single and stressed from her hectic job running a restaurant, Qi Quanli is one of China’s ambitious class of newly rich who are helping to power the nation’s booming fitness industry.

“In the past, I often suffered from insomnia. But now I feel much better. My weight is good too. No more fat,” Qi said with a smile after a sweat-drenched workout recently in one of Beijing’s most chic and modern gyms.

Qi spends close to $1,000 a year on her gym membership, a huge sum for many in China considering the average annual salary for urban residents is about $2,000.

But even amid the global economic crisis, Qi and many others who earn far more than the average are happy to pay for what in recent years has become an essential way to relax and socialise, as well as get in shape.

“I feel it’s worth it for people to pay one fifth or one tenth of their income on getting fit,” she said. “It gives people good health, it gives people happiness and we can make more friends.”

It is this attitude that has seen China’s fitness industry become in little more than a decade a multi-billion-dollar extravaganza of high-tech equipment and pulsating workout rooms backed by lifestyle magazines, health products and celebrity endorsements.

Outside of luxury hotels, there were very few modern fitness centres in Beijing or other big Chinese cities in the late 1990s, according to Evolution Fitness managing director Matt Lewis.

Now there are 200-300 catering for the mass market in Beijing alone, said Lewis, a New Zealander who helped set up Evolution Fitness in 2001 and now has two centres in the Chinese capital.

“It’s really expanded quite quickly,” Lewis said. “The majority going to them are local Beijing people, middle and upper class white-collar workers.”

Lewis attributed the rise in the popularity of fitness centres to a general increase in wealth and people wanting to get in shape after being locked away in office jobs, but also to other factors making the industry trendy.—AFP.