Jack LaLanne

Fitness for January:  Jack LaLanne from Polly

     Jack LaLanne has muscled his way though life.

     At age, 95, he’s still at it, lifting weights, swimming, and screaming for better fitness and nutrition in Americans lives.

     The message reverberates loud and clear via a telephone interview from the San Francisco Bay Area where he continues to deliver mankind from its bad habits.

     “Get it out,” he declares, referring to cakes, pies, and the evil junk food that spells out our earthly demise.

     And well, he should know.

     As a teenager, he was addicted to sugar, sickly, and depressed.  Then, his mother took him to a lecture given by fitness advocate, Paul Bragg, and LaLanne turned his back on sweets. He became a football star and a wrestling champ, and at age 22, he opened the Jack LaLanne Physical Culture Studio in Oakland, California.  A culture studio?  Well, nobody had heard of an exercising gym in 1936. But LaLanne studied the anatomy of the human body and concentrated on body building and weight lifting, something that was totally new then.

     “I was the first one to have women, the elderly, and athletes working out with weights; at the time all we had were solid dumb bells,” he says, reminding this interviewer that he was also the first to put exercise machines into motion.   

     Look around the health clubs.  Those leg extension machines, pulley machines using cables, and weight selectors, were some of his first innovations.

     And, co-incidentally, he started the workout organizations.  In the 1980s, LaLanne’s European Health Spas numbered over two-hundred.

     If he couldn’t get people to run with his ideas, he went out and helped them.  He trained policemen, firefighters, and recruited in high schools.

     News of his physical prowess led him to host a daily show in 1951 that captured an audience for thirty-four years, the longest running exercise show in television history.  Back then, TV viewers tuned in to workout with Jack LaLanne.  At first, many thought it was entertaining, they had never seen anything like it before, but soon they were doing “jumping jacks” and “push-ups” in America’s living rooms.

     He became a fitness institution completing legendary endurance tests.

     When he was 40, he swam from Alcatraz to the San Francisco shore, handcuffed.  Twenty years later, he towed a boat across the same waters loaded with weights.

     How did he do it?

     “You work at it, nothing is easy,” he replies, adding that “dying is easy, living is tough.”

     His toughness continues to bear him out.  He still works out on a daily basis, lifting weights for an hour and swimming for half an hour at his home on the central coast of California.                                    

     “I hate it, but, I like the results,” he admits.

     And it shows.  Even at his age, he can flex with the best of them.

     And he will remind you of that, championing the cause.

     “My father wouldn’t listen to me; he died in his fifties.”

       If only he could have gotten his message to him.  He has been a firm believer in weight training and good nutrition in all phases of life.  And, that’s not just something physical.  It goes right to the brain and makes us feel better mentally.  He has developed this healthy life style for himself and devoted his life to helping other people do the same. 

      Overall, he believes we have too much of everything in our country.

      He is alarmed by the rising numbers of obesity.

     “If you get out of condition and I get out of condition, then, America is sick,” he declares.

     His philosophy on eating is short and sweet: he doesn’t eat between meals, and his diet consists mainly of whole fruits and vegetables.

     LaLanne has no plans to retire.

     When reached for this interview, he had just returned from New York after appearing on several morning television talk shows.

     He is celebrating his 95^th year by promoting his fifth book: “Live Young Forever: 12 Steps to Optimum Health, Fitness, and Longevity.”

     According to him, this book has everything.  He has been in the business for eighty years, and it is a combination of everything that he has learned.

     If he had his life to live over, would he do anything differently?

     Not a thing. 

     LaLanne is adamant.  Every day is a face- off with fitness and calories.

     “Exercise is king; nutrition is queen; put them together, and you’ll have a good life.”

  

Photo Op:  I am emailing a picture that Jack sent to me.