OUR New Year’s resolutions often lead us to shell out big bucks for a health-club membership. Whether that membership gets used, however, is often quite another story. Fortunately — for both the determined and the sheepish — health clubs in the Boston area are not only ready to accommodate the surge of bodies looking to get fit, but are gearing up with class schedules offering such variety that new members might actually admit to having fun while they whittle their waistlines.

So what’s getting people fit these days? Mixed in with the ever-popular yoga, Pilates, and step classes are a number of aerobic-dance classes that incorporate contemporary choreography into a cardio workout. Boston’s new ultra-posh gym, Sports Club/LA, offers dance-based classes at all levels, including Fired Up! and City Rhythms, which uses hip-hop, funk, and jazz dance moves set to the latest beats. Ever-expanding fitness chain Boston Sports Clubs (BSC) has scheduled power dance-step, hip-hop-funk, and cardio video-dance classes. The latter is taught at the club’s Fenway location by an instructor with a degree in dance. And the women’s HealthWorks chain even offers a swing class that combines basic swing-dance moves with toning and sculpting.

But if the idea of exercise-as-fun gives you flashbacks to high-school gym, perhaps you’d be better suited to a class like Boot Camp, which is offered at most area gyms, including BSC, Bally’s, and HealthWorks. (Planet Fitness offers a similar class called All That.) Sports Club/LA members pack the house for Jeff Lewis’s Boot Camp, which group-exercise director Jacquelyn Stathis calls "a tough, tough, workout." Indeed — push-ups, sit-ups, even calisthenics whip participants into shape and might even inspire them to enlist. Lewis also conducts the very popular POW!, an equally energetic class that teaches three simple moves to use with a freestanding heavy bag. This class, exclusive to Sports Club/LA, is "easy to follow, but a really intense workout," says Stathis.

In the world of new exercise trends, the Reebok Core Board is one of the latest. According to Tracie Finan, creative-program director of group exercise at HealthWorks, "core muscles are the 35 muscles that attach directly to the sacrum and/or hipbone. These core muscles function with the ligaments and fascia to produce motion and/or stability of the trunk." The Core Board requires those who stand on it to maintain their balance, which improves their agility and overall fitness. "The unique property of recoil causes the body/board to act/react," says Finan. The HealthWorks club in Cambridge received 40 new Core Boards at the start of the new year, and offers Core Board classes. Sports Club/LA also has Core Boards among its equipment, and although the club doesn’t yet offer classes, the personal trainers do use the boards.

If you need some extra motivation, personal training remains popular for those with the desire (and the coin) for one-on-one attention. And there are plenty of personal trainers around to suit every need: the Fenway BSC location alone has 18 trainers. BSC offers package deals with both personal trainers and, for an extra $10 per session, "master" trainers. BSC also offers the 2FIT program, in which two friends with similar fitness needs can work out together while splitting the cost of a session. HealthWorks offers a similar type of session, but HealthWorks personal trainer Kimberly Sobieski warns that working out with a friend means you must share your trainer’s attention. If money’s a factor, though, Sobieski does encourage people to team up: "If they’re going to train, whether they’re getting 50 percent of me or 100 percent, it’s better than nothing." Those who belong to Planet Fitness are spared such a dilemma, since personal training is included with membership. Members are entitled to two half-hour sessions a week, and can take more if they’re in serious training, as for a decathlon or triathlon.

Sobieski sees stability and core training as important things to focus on in personal training this year. In creating a workout, she combines the Reebok Core Board with her background in Pilates and yoga. Says Sobieski, "flexibility is still very important because of high-stress jobs." She emphasizes the need for people to "find the tight spots — where we need to be stretched on our own bodies. It’s important to find these spots so that [we] can prevent injury in the future." Sobieski also tries to steer away from the typical abdominal crunch, an exercise made notorious by Britney Spears’s rumored daily routine of 500. "It’s really boring," she says. "You can learn better exercises in Pilates." Indeed, Pilates is one of Sobieski’s favorite forms of exercise. She uses the Pilates Circle for "deep abdominal core muscles and stabilization through the scapulae [shoulder blades]." More important, though, Sobieski wants to incorporate into her training as many different components of the gym as possible, "making everything full of variety ... focus on needs, add in other things to make it fun."

Personal training in group exercise is also gaining popularity. This type of training teaches the principles given in group classes in the more specialized setting of a one-on-one training session. "Group personal training is becoming more evolved," says HealthWorks fitness director Jennifer Rago. "Offerings range at our clubs from prenatal groups [to] self-defense classes to ski conditioning." Sports Club/LA also offers a full spectrum, including yoga, aqua, REV! (spinning), and even ballroom dancing.

All these class offerings and personal attention are great, but when it comes to how we spend our free time, going to the gym still competes with vegging out in front of the television. To keep us off the couch, almost all gyms now provide some sort of entertainment for their members. Bally’s in Cambridge has televisions bunched in groups of three (each tuned to a different station) scattered throughout the gym. The Brookline HealthWorks offers Cardio Theater, which features Exercise Entertainment systems that allow those working on the cardio machines to choose from 52 different audiovisual sources. Both the Cambridge and Back Bay HealthWorks clubs have Direct TV, and all HealthWorks clubs get their music from a Direct TV satellite. BSC has amenities similar to the Cardio Theater: each piece of cardio equipment has a small TV with a CD and cassette player. Members just plug in their headphones to enjoy their own personal entertainment system. Sports Club/LA has a comparable set-up, offering 60 machines paired with individual TVs featuring access to 107 Cablevision channels.

It seems exercise has become only one part of the total gym experience. These days, members can get a good workout, watch a movie or catch up on the news, enjoy steam or a massage, or even, in the case of Sports Club/LA, grab a gourmet snack. Just make sure it’s low-cal, though; we wouldn’t want all that exercise to be for naught.

Kate Cohen can be reached at kcohen@phx.com