30 Years of Sweat

Look around.

The treadmills. The jogging trails. The exercise tapes, bicycles and spandex shorts.

The gym memberships. The Air Nikes. Nautilus. Heavyhands. The 10K races and protein shakes.

It’s all very commonplace now--a $3-billion exercise industry. But it wasn’t always this way.

Much of America’s fitness revolution can be traced back to 1968 and the frustration of a lieutenant colonel at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

It began in green fatigues and a shower of U.S. military sweat when that drop-dead serious, if slightly maniacal, flight surgeon decided to test his notion that intense cardiovascular exercise might help people overcome high blood pressure, fatigue and flabbiness.

One day, enchanted by his finding that vigorous exercise appeared to improve health dramatically, Kenneth Cooper thumbed through a dictionary and hunted for a word to describe the phenomenon.

Aerobe.

Hmmm, this might do.

Aerobe.

Well, he hated the sound of it. But--ever the scientist--the definition fit: “a microorganism that can live and grow only where free oxygen is present.”

He would call his exercise program “aerobics.”

Picking up a pen, Cooper described his research on aerobics in a slim soft-cover book that was sold via coupons affixed to tubs of margarine. But Reader’s Digest came upon the little book and published an excerpt under the title, “How to Feel Fit at Any Age.”

And so Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the staid, God-fearing, brilliant son of a strict, Baptist dentist found himself in a most unlikely place: ground zero of the aerobic fitness revolution.

“What he did was evoke an enthusiasm to exercise in the public,” says Dr. Gerald Fletcher, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., and an American Heart Assn. spokesman. “He was one of the few people who was able to catch the eye of the public.”

*

If there is a theme to Cooper’s 30-year career, it’s that he’s always out in front of the curve--even if he’s sometimes hanging by a thread on a point of controversy.

And yet, whatever it is that he’s proclaiming--whether it’s the value of treadmill stress tests or the benefits of antioxidant supplements--he’s usually right.

His commercial and personal success, which he readily owns up to with a strong sense of pride, is softened by the fact that Cooper has done much good for so many people--not to mention those who have grown rich from his ideas. The personal trainers, aerobics queens and exercise equipment manufacturers must sing his praises while staring at their profit margins.

“Ken has spawned so many millionaires,” proclaims Cooper’s spitfire of a wife, Millie, a Libby Dole look-alike.

Cooper, too, is now a rich man. He has written 14 books. He owns his stately 30-acre, five-building fitness compound in north Dallas. And, in November, he signed papers to become a partner in the construction of a $19-million fitness complex in Vero Beach, Fla., which will become the second Cooper clinic / fitness center in the United States.

Best of all, his 27-year-old son, Tyler, has seen the light. The mild-mannered, former ski instructor will hit medical school in the fall, giving his 66-year-old father a possible retirement date of sometime around 2007.

This news came during an interview in Cooper’s office one splendid day in October at the Cooper Clinic.

“Ken, I hate to interrupt, but you just have to see this,” gushed Millie as she and Tyler burst into Cooper’s expansive, oak-paneled office. She was waving Tyler’s medical school entrance exam score of a respectable 29.

“Do you believe it, Ken? Twenty-nine!” says Millie, as Tyler stands by quietly, smiling.

“Great!” says Cooper, rising to greet them. “This is a surprise. Boy! Congratulations, son! I’m as proud as you are. That is great news! Twenty-nine! Let me see that. I don’t believe it.”

It is a lovely moment that seems too private to be shared with outsiders. But Cooper is candid about his desire to see his son find his place in the world. (His daughter, Berkley, 32, is married and works with disabled children at a Dallas hospital.)

“Most medical schools wouldn’t consider anyone with a score under 28,” says Cooper after Millie and Tyler depart. He grins, the most emotion--positive or negative--he is ever likely to show.

“That pretty much guarantees he’ll get into medical school. I think we could have gotten him in anyway. But better to let him get in on his own.”

In addition to their corporate success, the Coopers seem like sure-handed parents. Tyler was not forced into his future.

“I had no desire to go to medical school. I majored in business,” says Tyler, who graduated from Baylor in 1994.

“We never, once, ever, said one word to Tyler about going to medical school,” confirms Millie. “He didn’t take a single science course in college!”

(One gets the distinct feeling that this fact, nevertheless, made Mom’s and Dad’s hair stand on end.)

But now, with Tyler on track to take over the family business, a Cooper vitamin supplement (called Cooper Complete) set to go on the market, the Dallas center bursting with business and plans on the drawing board for the Florida fitness megaplex, Cooper seems to have reached the summit.

But he isn’t sitting back and monitoring his resting heart rate just yet.

“I can’t retire with my son just getting into medical school. I’m going to have to be about 75 before I think about retiring,” says Cooper, who does a radio interview almost every day, travels extensively, giving about 15 speeches a month (at $10,000 to $15,000 per event) and still sees patients. “We have developed a niche in medicine that, right now, is just exploding.”

Still, the Coopers are more insistent these days about getting away to relax for a few days at a time. Their favorite retreat is their six-bedroom, six-bath vacation house within a stone’s throw of ski slopes in Beaver Creek, Colo.

Millie would prefer to see her husband extricate himself from the business burdens after 30 long years.

“Ken has no hobbies, no interests. It’s very hard for him to take time off. He has a mission. He was born to do what he’s doing,” she says. “I’d like to have some financial freedom, which we probably won’t ever have because Ken is going to continue to try to develop his concept. And you can’t do that if you are just interested in money.”

There was a time when money was the least of Cooper’s interests. Millie’s, too. They just wanted respect.

*

In 1970, Cooper retired from the military to devote his career to the study of aerobic fitness. He opened a tiny office in Dallas and almost immediately raised eyebrows by putting his heart patients on treadmills to test their cardiac functioning. In those days, it was felt that cardiac patients should avoid exertion.

“He had to go before the Board of Medical Censors to justify doing the treadmill tests,” Millie says. “Ken is a scientist who has always been on the cutting edge.”

But Cooper wasn’t frightened away. He continued to write books on aerobics in the 1970s before branching into other areas of preventive medicine in the 1980s (including making early recommendations on the value of screening for osteoporosis, and breast and prostate cancers).

“There are so many things that have been so controversial that I’ve been involved with,” says Cooper, who talks at maximum speed because he has “so much to say.”

“But we have proven that it’s cheaper and easier to maintain good health than to regain it once it has been lost,” he adds.

*

Meanwhile, he purchased his compound in north Dallas, which now includes his clinic, a fitness center, 63-room guest lodge, a conference center and the Institute for Aerobics Research. All the buildings are red-brick colonial structures set amid lush grounds with tall trees, a duck pond and a jogging trail.

The centerpiece of the compound is the nonprofit research institute. Institute scientists are able to access the Cooper Clinic’s database of 400,000 person-years of data to study how patients fare over time. And, under the guidance of Steve Blair, who is the director of research, the institute has published many noteworthy research papers.

“We have a blend of critical thinkers here: scientists, physicians and computer specialists,” says Charles L. Sterling, executive director of the Cooper Institute. “But it all starts with Dr. Cooper and his ability to attract and maintain top scientists. It’s his credibility.”

Cooper is proud of the institute’s work and is salivating over the recent yet-to-be-published research drawn from the database that shows with greater certainty the value of the treadmill stress test in people 40 or older--even those who have no risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

“No one had any objective measures of fitness before we started our work here,” Cooper says.

But his attention never stays fixed in one place for long. In recent years, he has begun to study diet and the role of antioxidants in preventing heart disease. His 1997 book “Advanced Nutritional Therapies” (Thomas Nelson Publishers) touts vitamin and mineral supplementation to maintain good health.

“We hope, over the next 27 years, to do with nutrition what we have done with exercise,” he says, adding: “We can’t rely on what we have done in the past. The whole field is changing.”

*

In spite of the fact that his ideas are often proved correct, he generates so much controversy en route to the conclusion that people tend to remember the controversy more than his record of being on the mark.

Barbara Moore, president of the fitness institute Shape Up America, which was founded by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, admires Cooper and yet has reservations about his turn toward nutritional therapy.

“When I was young, I bought this little paperback on exercise by Dr. Cooper, and it had a big impact on me. For that, I’m very grateful. I think he has had an ability to reach people at important points in their lives,” Moore says. “But I feel that people in this field often turn to diet because it’s easier to get people to make changes in their diet than to get them to exercise. But exercise seems to have the more powerful effect on physiology and metabolism.”

Would she like to see Cooper return to a pure message stressing physical activity?

“You bet I would.”

*

Cooper is quick to admit he is human. He has had to retract some of his advice over the years--including an early belief that diet didn’t matter as long as one exercised and an endorsement of excessive exercise, such as running marathons. (He now argues--again controversially--that strenuous exercise, such as running more than 30 miles a week, causes a breakdown in the body that releases harmful free radical molecules that can destroy healthy tissue.)

Moreover, as a doctor, he admits he is stumped by the question of how to motivate people to exercise before they become sick. (He tried to address the question in a 1995 book on religion as a motivator, saying, “It says in the Bible that we’re commanded to glorify our bodies as well as our spirits.”)

And, in the most obvious display of his vulnerability, Cooper nearly lost faith in his operation a few years ago, coming close to selling the entire north Dallas compound.

“I almost panicked,” he says, sheepishly.

It was in the early 1990s and, Cooper says, colleagues in medicine were warning him that he could not sustain his practice under the economic forces of managed care, which was unlikely to pay big bucks for the kind of comprehensive preventive care that Cooper offered.

“My colleagues were all telling me if I didn’t get involved with an HMO I was going to starve,” he says.

So, when an HMO came knocking, offering to purchase the enterprises from Cooper under the condition that he would continue to manage the clinic, he picked up his pen and prepared to sign.

“It would have made me very rich,” he says. “But I would have had to work for them for five years as a consultant. And then they started telling me how they were going to run the operation.”

Cooper’s blood ran cold at the description. The nonprofit research institute would be shut down. The number of patients seen at the clinic would have to increase dramatically.

“The closer we got to finalizing this deal, I realized they were going to destroy my practice,” Cooper says. “They couldn’t see the importance of the research institute. I couldn’t believe that. That is where Steve Blair made his name. That is where I started collecting data back in 1970. But they felt this organization had to generate a whole lot more profits than we were generating.”

To be sure, the clinic was seeing a mere four patients a day. But, Cooper retorts, each patient spends two hours with a doctor, undergoes multiple tests and pays $1,200 to $1,500 for the visit. More than 90% of the patients pay out-of-pocket. (The Cooper Institute also houses a health club for the area’s elite, and there is a waiting list.)

“My patients do pay a big price,” Cooper says. “But 65% are return patients, and they sure aren’t coming back if they don’t think their dollars are well-spent. I tell my staff physicians that our patients are equally concerned about how much we care as about how much we know. That is what the American public wants and needs. And that is what we are losing with managed care.”

Cooper backed out of the project. And, much to his delight, he has watched the public’s interest in diet, exercise and preventive health explode in the later half of the ‘90s, enabling him to stay in business without a managed care contract.

*

Perhaps as a result of the controversy he generates, Cooper seems compelled to defend himself almost continually, whether it’s to the media or in public speeches. In a more grating personality, his pontification might be off-putting. But he so obviously wants his ideas and programs to succeed for the sake of bettering humankind that his boasting is easily forgiven.

“His commitment to medicine is the driving force behind Dr. Cooper,” says Sterling, a 17-year employee. Of Cooper’s many faces--physician, researcher, author, lecturer, businessman--Sterling says Cooper is first and foremost a doctor--a characteristic that dominates his actions.

“If he is better at one area, I think that it’s being a great physician,” Sterling says. “He is uncanny in his ability to diagnose disease. He could have quit seeing patients years ago, but he enjoys that aspect of it.”

Of course, his patients would make any doctor shine his stethoscope and put on a clean lab coat. They are top corporate executives, far-flung millionaires and such local bigwigs as Ross Perot and Gov. George Bush Jr.

“I have one of the most fascinating practices in America,” Cooper says, dropping the names of some of his patients. “I’m throwing out names. But these are my patients. These are my friends.”

His services are in such high demand that Cooper agreed to build the Florida facility, which is targeted for completion in 1999. It will be a stunning complex featuring a hotel, 22,000-square-foot fitness center, a medical clinic, conference facility, Olympic-sized swimming pool and adjacent villas and a championship golf course, all nestled next to a beach and marina.

“We are saturated here. We can’t handle the load anymore. We can’t expand our facilities here anymore. The hotel is filled up all the time with meetings and conferences,” Cooper recites, sounding slightly annoyed.

He pauses and thinks for a moment.

“It’s sort of a nice problem to have.”

* UNSOLVED MYSTERY

Health experts wonder how to get more Americans moving. S6

The Good Doctor’s Advice on Exercise

Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s recommendations for physical activity (choose one):

Moderate exercise:

* Walk two miles in less than 30 minutes, three times a week.

* Walk two miles in less than 45 minutes, four times a week.

* Walk two miles in less than 40 minutes, five times a week.

More vigorous exercise:

* Run two miles in less than 20 minutes, four times a week.

* Walk three miles in less than 45 minutes, five times a week.

* Participate in four 45-minute aerobics classes per week.