Jack LaLanne and the Limits of Human Mortality

You probably know by now that Jack LaLanne celebrated my 54th birthday on Sunday by dying at his home. He was 96.

I had one chance to meet LaLanne. It was late 2004, and I was wrapping up a photo shoot when an editor called and asked me to meet the fitness icon the next day in New York. I can’t remember why I couldn’t do it — I’m pretty sure it was a family obligation — but I’ve always regretted the lost opportunity.

I wrote about LaLanne several times in the past few years. Here’s a T-nation article from 2006, in which I put LaLanne at #5 on my list of the 10 most influential muscleheads of all time:

Here you have a guy who was there at the creation, but also not there. He opened a health club in Oakland, California, in 1936, when he was just 21. He hung out at Muscle Beach with the bodybuilding legends of the 1940s, and had the first fitness show on TV. He invented the leg extension machine, cable pulley systems, selectorized weights, the calf machine, and the wrist roller.

On his website, he claims to have been the first to encourage athletes, women, and the elderly to train with weights, and also takes credit for inventing “scientific” training. The older he got, the crazier he got, until he was celebrating birthdays by towing barges through San Francisco Bay while handcuffed and shackled. I have no idea how he did it, just as I can’t fathom how Sandow lifted some of the things he lifted or claimed to lift.

So how influential was LaLanne?

Well, unless there’s been a spate of shackled septuagenarians towing barges through commercial waterways, I’d say his influence is important but perhaps exaggerated by the man’s longevity and penchant for self-promotion. Like everyone else on this list, he may have been an innovator, but in LaLanne’s case, it’s hard to say how continuous his influence was. I’m a lifelong fitness enthusiast, and LaLanne was the first fitness guru to whom I was exposed, and I can’t think of one routine I’ve ever done that he inspired.

If you read through the comments, you’ll see that lots of readers respectfully disagreed with my assessment of LaLanne’s influence. Here’s one from the third page:

Yea, you got many right on but you totally missed the LaLanne impact. You don’t have to remember any LaLanne routine to have felt his immense impact. He never intended to push endless routines on people. What he did was teach you that getting up and moving was the right thing to do, regardless of exactly how you did it.

It’s a fair point. We can’t go back in time and measure LaLanne’s influence because we had no mechanism for measuring fitness participation. And even if we did, it’s hard to sort out any individual’s influence. Interest in healthy living goes in cycles, and LaLanne did most of his work before the current exercise boom began.

I also criticized LaLanne in this 2007 post from the Male Pattern Fitness blog. The context was a profile of LaLanne that quoted him saying some crazy (and inaccurate) things about nutrition and fitness. You can click through for the particulars. Here’s my summary:

For most of his life, LaLanne has been held up as a role model. But if you showed details of his workouts and diet to any trained clinical psychologist, and didn’t reveal anything else about the person’s age or fame, you’d probably come away with a suggestion that this person has symptoms of disordered behavior.

It works for him, which is wonderful. I just hope nobody reads stories like this and comes away thinking that any of this is normal or healthy.

In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t such mean things about the guy. But I also haven’t changed my mind. I still don’t know what his impact was back in the ’50s and ’60s, when he was America’s foremost and perhaps only fitness icon, and I still don’t know if his famous fitness stunts decades later did anything to advance the idea that exercise was something normal people can and should do.

So let’s change the subject.

Assume that LaLanne was as fit as a man in his 90s could possibly be. Assume that his diet was as healthy as possible, and that he took every supplement that could possibly enhance his health. (In the link above, he boasts of taking 30 to 40 vitamins a day.)

He lived to 96. If you exercise vigorously, eat the minimum amount of food you need for survival, avoid every known carcinogen and intoxicant, and dodge whatever vehicles and projectiles life throws your way, is that the upper limit of human longevity? How could you possibly live a cleaner, more vigorous life?

Tags: Tags: exercise, fitness, healthy living, jack lalanne, longevity