If you ask the women who perspire at the Ladies Workout Express in the 2900 block of Warwick Avenue what took them so long to get into the gym, they will tell you it’s because they always felt out of place there. Most of the women who attend the Workout Express are just a bit older than the fitness craze that started in the 1980s.

“Here, you can work out without worrying about what the person next to you looks like,” said Jean Geiger, the manager of the Express. “At other gyms, people feel self-conscious and are uncomfortable working out and worrying about what they look like to the people beside them. You don’t worry about that here.”

When Kathleen Mihalko began coming to the gym about six years ago, she liked the clubby atmosphere and the supportive attitude she found among the members. She said that was what encouraged her to stick with a training program.

“A lot of us had gone to other gyms but, like me, they were intimidated,” she said. “This was more like a club and I actually looked forward to coming.”

When the former owner of the Express let the members know that she was going to go out of the business, Mihalko was disappointed that she was going to lose all the friends and intimacy she found there.

“I liked the idea of a ‘ladies only’ gym but I also liked the intimacy of this place,” she said. “So, when the opportunity came up, I made a deal with the former owner, which made sure that we continued to have this place to come to.”

Intimacy may be the wrong term to use about the Workout Express. Small would be more like it, at least in the world of workout centers. In other centers, you can see whole banks of identical bicycle machines against one wall of a supermarket-sized space and banks of weight machines against another, and, when other gyms are going at full tilt, the atmosphere is more industrial than intimate. The Workout Express is about the size of a standard beauty salon, which it probably once was, and the various exercise devices are scattered somewhat casually around the space. They still mean business, but it is not big business.

“Let’s face it,” said Mihalko, “Most of us hate exercise. It’s boring and it’s hard to get enthused about but here you feel good about it and you get the support you need to keep you going.”

This is, literally, what the doctor ordered. Jean Geiger said most women who come here have been advised, or more likely ordered, to come here by their doctors.

“This is about being healthy,” said Geiger. “People are here because they have to lose weight and get their cholesterol and triglycerides down. They are not worried about how they look here. They are concerned about getting healthy.”

Mihalko, who is a retired telecommunications engineer, takes the health mission aspect very seriously and frequently worries when people stop coming. As far as she is concerned, not being able to afford it is not a valid reason to stop. The membership is $19.95 a month, which includes special exercise classes and even self-defense instruction, but she said she is willing to work something out with people who are having a difficult time of things financially.

“Like I said, this place is more like a club where we are friends,” she said. “The important thing is to support each other’s efforts to get healthy, no matter what our ages are.”

And, as good as her word, she offers free memberships to girls from age 13 to 17, to encourage them to make exercise an integral part of their lives. Of course, most kids can use the gym at school but the Workout Express offers a place where the competitive nature of high school girlhood can be left outside the door. More importantly, there are no boys around to make you feel too shy to come out of the locker room.

But, as it is so euphemistically termed, most of the members are women “of a certain age,” which means older women.

Mim Sloan, who retired from Citizens Bank a considerable way back, says she comes four or five times a week and has been coming since the Express opened at that location. She used to swim for exercise but finds the machines at the Express more to her liking these days.

“This place is so much better,” she said. “There are so many different machines to work on and there are classes. I didn’t know about this place. It was a bit of a shock. I didn’t know it was here. Now it’s just like Cheers, where everybody knows your name.”

The friendships also go beyond the gym. The women have been known to take trips together and there is even a “Couples’ Night,” when spouses can come and see the place where their women are spending so much time.

There is a certain irony about places like Ladies Workout Express, where it is the men who are the guests. Back in the late 1800s, when women’s colleges started offering physical education, they were not allowed to use the men’s gyms. Women could come to the sports clubs for dinners or concerts or other special events but they did not use the gym other than on “Ladies’ Days.”

It was the 1970s before women were routinely allowed into men’s gyms and it was well into the 1980s before it became illegal to keep them out. But by then, co-ed health clubs became places for men and women to show off how buff their bodies were. Less than splendid specimens were either embarrassed or didn’t come to the club at all.

But then men and women were becoming segregated again with “men only” or “women only” clubs, but this time, no one felt left out. Now they were looking to fit in their own place, like Ladies Workout Express.

“This is a place for a woman to come and work out for an hour or so and feel better about themselves,” said Geiger. “This is not the place for body building.”