Fitness guru Jack LaLanne dead at 96

LOS ANGELES - Jack LaLanne, the seemingly eternal master of health and fitness who first popularized the idea that Americans should work out and eat right to retain youthfulness and vigor, died yesterday. He was 96.

LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia at his home in Morro Bay, Calif., his agent Rick Hersh said. He underwent heart valve surgery in December 2009.

Though for many years dismissed as merely a "muscle man," LaLanne was the spiritual father of the health movement that blossomed into a national craze of weight rooms, exercise classes and fancy sports clubs.

In 1936, LaLanne opened what is commonly believed to be the nation's first health club, in Oakland. In the 1950s, he launched an early-morning televised exercise program keyed to housewives. He designed many now-familiar exercise machines, including leg extension machines and cable-pulley weights.

And he proposed the then-radical idea that women, the elderly and even the disabled should work out to retain strength.

Full of exuberance and hyperbolic good cheer, LaLanne saw himself as a combination of cheerleader, rescuer and savior.

When he started, he knew that most people viewed him as a charlatan. That's when he decided to do the stunts that made him famous. "I had to get people believing in me," he said.

His first feat was in 1954, when he was 40. He swam the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, underwater, carrying two air tanks.

Other feats during his 40s included swimming the Golden Gate Channel while towing a 2,500-pound cabin cruiser and pulling a paddleboard 30 miles from the Farallon islands to the San Francisco shore.

At age 60, he swam from Alcatraz to Fisherman's Wharf, handcuffed and shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat. The next year, he did it underwater.

And at age 70, he towed 70 boats with 70 people from the Queen's Way Bridge in the Long Beach, Calif., harbor to the Queen Mary - while handcuffed and shackled.

Well into his late 80s, LaLanne continued his personal fitness routine of two hours a day - one hour of weight training and another hour exercising in the pool - beginning at 5 or 5:30 in the morning (a concession to his age; in earlier days, he started at 4 a.m.).

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who met LaLanne in the 1960s on Muscle Beach on the Venice boardwalk, said LaLanne would try to see who could match him in chin-ups and push-ups.

"Nobody could," Schwarzenegger told the Times. "No one even wanted to try."

François Henri LaLanne (nicknamed Jack by his brother) was born Sept. 26, 1914, in San Francisco to French immigrant parents. His father worked at the telephone company and was a dance instructor and his mother, who was a maid, was a Seventh-day Adventist, a religion that advocates "eight keys" to good health, including nutrition and exercise.

LaLanne met his wife, Elaine, whom he called LaLa, in 1950 on the set of a local TV show, where she booked talent.

LaLanne's business interests would grow to include a string of gyms across the United States, workout devices such as the "Glamour Stretcher" and "JLL Stepper," vitamins and supplements and several books.

Besides his wife, who lives in Morro Bay, LaLanne is survived by Elaine's son, Dan Doyle, of Los Angeles; LaLanne's daughter by his first marriage, Yvonne, a chiropractor, of Walnut Creek, Calif.; and the couple's son, Jon, of Kauai, Hawaii.