Born Francois Henri LaLanne, Jack LaLanne was by his own account living a miserable hell as a teenager in the late 1920s: headaches, a violent temper, bulimia and an addiction to sugar and junk food that led him to drop out of school at 14. In 1929, at 15, he heard nutrition pioneer Paul Bragg lecture against sugar and meat and changed his diet the next day. Bullied for eating raw vegetables, whole bread, raisins and nuts, he ate alone on the football field. He returned to school, made the football team, earned a chiropractic degree and studied Gray’s Anatomy. In 1936, at 21, he opened what the episode calls the nation’s first modern health club in Oakland, California, while doctors warned it would leave people muscle-bound, cause heart attacks and ruin their sex drive.
Without commercial equipment, he built cable pulley machines, early leg extension machines and the prototype of the Smith machine, and pushed women to lift in a co-ed gym, selling resistance bands as glamour stretchers. In 1953 he paid for airtime for a San Francisco morning show; syndicated nationally in 1959, it ran until 1985. His stunts escalated, from swimming the Golden Gate underwater with air tanks at 40 to towing 70 boats with 70 people through Long Beach Harbor at 70. In 2011, at 96, he refused to see a doctor for a week, did his two-hour workout the day before he died, and died of respiratory failure and pneumonia.
- He won the use of two men’s locked box of weights by beating both in a wrestling match.
- Opening a paid gym got him removed from the 1936 Olympic wrestling team as a professional.
- His dog Walter’s name stood for We All Love To Exercise Regularly.
- He followed the rule if man made it, don’t eat it, and said dying is easy, living is a pain in the butt.
- He celebrated his Hollywood Walk of Fame star by doing pushups on it.
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