Last week fitness guru Jack Lalanne died at the age of 96. He was fit to the end. (Well . . . not the very end . . . eventually he croaked.) Still, I must say, ol' Jack was one of my idols.
As a very young boy (yes, I remember watching Jack on morning TV when I was 4 yrs. old!) I waited in the living room while my mother exercised to Jack's routine. This was LONG before fitness videos, gymnasiums, and the various and latest crazes and wacky abdominal devices came onto the scene. I'm talking 1964/1965. Lalanne was an advocate of weight training, among other things, and his methods were controversial at the time. Some pundits even predicted mothers dropping dead in their living rooms from following Lalanne's TV workout routines.
Weight training still wasn't accepted into the mainstream (not even in professional sports!) until the movie Pumping Iron (with Arnold Schwarzenneger and Lou Ferrigno) brought weight training out of the underground dungeons and off the back pages of comic books. This was 1974.
But Jack Lalanne was the first. He was in the gym long before Arnold had ever dreamed of picking up a barbell and he was trying to set a standard for health and fitness that few, even to this day, have ever achieved. Even in his early 90's, Lalanne was in better physical condition than 90% of Americans. He had the Lalanne juicer to prove it!
Well . . . I'll miss Jack. I just wanted to write this farewell obit as a tribute and thank him for inspiring me when I was four years old. I'm not kidding! Watching Jack do chin ups and crunches every morning at 8 a.m. was part of pre-school routine. I've been doing them ever since.
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