A Fitness Icon Keeps His Juices Flowing

LaLanne used to regale his audience with his one-armed push-ups done on fingertips. He showed them how to turn their recliners into mini-gyms by pumping imaginary bicycles and doing other chair exercises. In the 1930s, he even began advocating weight training. To go beyond the usual barbells -- and to keep his gym clients from getting bored -- he worked with a blacksmith to develop leg-extension equipment and one of the first adjustable weight machines that are standard equipment in today's gyms.

A chiropractor by training, LaLanne learned about vegetarianism from his mother, a strict Seventh-day Adventist. So while the country dined on meat and potatoes, LaLanne crusaded for eating raw fruit and vegetables and avoiding processed fare.

"Did you ever read the label on a can of soup?" he asks, still exasperated. "You can't pronounce the ingredients. Artificial coloring, additives. Added color. Salt. Sugar."

To baby boomers and their parents, the name Jack LaLanne is synonymous with health, vitality and fitness. But this famous muscle man, who now serves on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Council on Physical Fitness, says he started life "as a weak, sick, miserable kid," addicted to sugar. He dropped out of a San Francisco Bay area high school and was a self-described troublemaker who wandered into a health lecture one day and changed his life.

The speaker advocated eating healthful food -- a tenet that resonated with LaLanne. "I was this young 15-year-old," LaLanne recalls. "What the hell! . . . I wanted to be an athlete. I wanted the girls to like me. I wanted to go through the day without headaches."

That night, he prayed for guidance to help him kick the candy, meat and other foods that he thought were killing him. The next day, he began life as a vegetarian -- a practice that he mostly continues today -- and joined the Berkeley YMCA. "I started working out with weights, and it changed my life," he says. "If something changes your life, you will be enthusiastic about it."

So enthusiastic, that LaLanne is considered one of the first modern health evangelists. "Billy Graham is for the hereafter," LaLanne likes to say. "I'm for the here and now."

He still lifts weights -- a practice that numerous studies show preserves the muscle mass usually lost with aging. (You can see LaLanne in action in a short video at http://www.washingtonpost.com/health.)

"I've said it a million times," he notes. "Exercise is king. Nutrition is queen. Put them together and you've got a kingdom."

It's that combination of activity and nutrition that science shows can control blood pressure, improve heart health, tone muscles, elevate mood, maintain mental functioning, slow aging and stave off premature death.

To celebrate his 65th birthday, he swam pulling 65 boats filled with 6,500 pounds of wood pulp in Lake Ashi, near Tokyo. For his 70th birthday, he towed 70 boats with 70 people 1.5 miles against the current in the Long Beach, Calif. harbor. For his 95th birthday, he'd like to swim from the coast of California to Santa Catalina Island, more than 20 miles offshore. But Elaine says, somewhat in jest, that she'll divorce him if he tries.

Unlike many of their contemporaries, who are in assisted-living or nursing homes, LaLanne still works and lives independently in a home on the central coast of California. He's still such an avid swimmer in his 10th decade that he recently signed on to promote a small resistance swimming pool that is the aquatic equivalent of a home treadmill. In his spare time, he drives his 2005 Corvette around town. "Would I put water in the gas tank?" he asks, not missing an opportunity to proselytize. "Well, what about your body? That's why a lot of people go through life pooping out and die in middle age. You have got to put the right fuel in this machine."