Blazing a Trail for Fitness and Better Lives

Joe DiMaggio transcended the sport of baseball. More than an American icon, he achieved nearly mythic status while he was alive. No wonder the media couldn’t stop talking and writing about him after he died two weeks ago.

As always happens when someone of greatness passes on, I felt sad that the great man himself didn’t get to hear all the lovely eulogizing. My sense is that we shouldn’t wait until they’re gone to tell the people we love how much we care, and to honor those who matter most in our lives. That’s why I’d like to take this space today to pay tribute to another American icon, one who’s very much with us still, and probably will be for many years to come: Jack LaLanne, the father of fitness.

Interestingly, there are some biographical coincidences that join Jumpin’ Jack (he invented the term) to Joltin’ Joe. Jack is 84, the age DiMaggio was when he passed away. Both grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. And in 1936, when DiMaggio broke into the major leagues with the Yankees, Jack opened the nation’s first modern health club, on the third floor of an old office building in Oakland. He was 21 years old.

The way Jack tells it, he’d been a sickly kid until age 15, when he heard nutritionist Paul Bragg speak about the dangers of sugar. Resolving to change his life, he began experimenting with free weights at the Berkeley YMCA, and reading every book in the library about anatomy and physiology. Soon he was robust and muscular, having put into action the knowledge he’d gleaned.

By the time he opened his gym, Jack believed he knew more about the human body than most physicians. “Doctors were against me,” he said to me recently. “They said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and make them lose their sex drive.” Even professional and collegiate coaches warned that athletes who lifted weights would get muscle bound. And everyone, of course, believed that women who lifted would end up looking like men.

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As for the elderly, well, Jack believed that one was never too old to begin a fitness program, including weight training. You can imagine the laughter and snickers that resulted when he said that, especially from the medical community.

Jack didn’t care. He kept preaching the gospel according to La-Lanne, and people--some of them, at least--kept listening. If nothing else, Jack practiced what he preached, so the evidence was right there for them to see. No one could argue with that.

Continuing to refine his training techniques, he developed a unified approach to exercise and nutrition. He also invented the first models of some exercise machines whose offspring are found today in gyms and health clubs everywhere, like a leg-extension machine that used pulley, cables and weight selectors.

By the early 1950s, Jack’s reputation allowed him to reach out to the skeptical masses through television, which was then in its childhood. Day after day for years, Jack cheerfully endured the hot lights, demonstrating for us that an active body makes a healthy body and mind. At a time when people Jack’s age were considered to be on the downhill slope and not far from the Shady Grove home--DiMaggio retired from baseball in 1951--Jack appeared to be getting better, not older.

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To dramatize his message for the cameras, Jack pulled dozens of great stunts over the years. At 40, for example, he set a world record by swimming the length of the Golden Gate Bridge while hauling 140 pounds of equipment. The following year, he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco--while handcuffed. At 42, he did a record 1,033 push-ups in 23 minutes on the TV show “You Asked for It.” And he once towed 70 small boats containing 70 people from Queen’s Way Bridge in Long Beach Harbor to the Queen Mary, a distance of 1 1/2 miles. He did it while handcuffed, shackled and fighting strong winds and currents. He was 70 at the time.

In any event, Jack and his message have triumphed. After decades of blazing trails alone, Jack LaLanne can look back with deep satisfaction, knowing that his once radical ideas are now conventional wisdom. As a fitness professional, I owe him a great deal. But the truth is that all of us owe him our deepest gratitude for working to make our lives better and healthier.

Thank you, Jack. Long may you continue to show us what’s possible.

Copyright 1999 by Kathy Smith

Kathy Smith’s fitness column appears weekly in Health. Reader questions are welcome and can be sent to Kathy Smith, Health, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. If your question is selected, you will receive a free copy of her book “Getting Better All the Time.” Please include your name, address and a daytime phone number with your question.