Jack LaLanne, founder of the modern fitness movement, died Sunday at his home in Morro Bay, Calif. He was 96. The cause of death was respiratory failure due to pneumonia. LaLanne spent more than 70 years preaching the power of strength training and healthy eating—long before either was popular. In 1936, he opened the nation’s first health club, a gym that doubled as both a juice bar and health food store, and became the prototype for future fitness spas. He reached the at-home crowd, too, hosting The Jack LaLanne Show, a TV workout program, from 1951 to 1985.
“People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he once told The New York Times. “The doctors were against me—they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive.” When LaLanne was 40, he wanted to prove that he wasn’t past his prime, so he swam the nearly 2-mile length of the Golden Gate Bridge without surfacing, breathing with the aid of two air tanks that weighed 140 pounds. At age 60, he swam 1.23 miles from San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf while handcuffed, with his legs shackled, and towing a 1,000-pound boat. Even as he entered his 90s, LaLanne began every day with a two-hour workout: weight lifting, and then swimming against an artificial current or in place, restrained by a belt.
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