TV pioneer Jack LaLanne got viewers off the couch

[kmk420kali]

RIP Jack...you had a long, great life...you helped and touched many!!

NEW YORK – Jack LaLanne began his show seen in dramatic silhouette, a peppy, powerful figure doing [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]jumping [COLOR=#366388 ! important]jacks[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] while an electric organ pumped out "Camptown Races," his bouncy theme.
He was introduced as a "world-famous nutritionist, author, lecturer and physical-culture expert on your figure and beauty," and he was there to give housewives a break from their cooking and cleaning chores.
"I like to consider myself as your personal physical instructor and your health consultant coming into your home every day," LaLanne told the women who made up most of his weekday TV audience.
He was a coach for those women, and more. In the 1950s, when he began his lengthy television run, he gave them a half-hour workout, and a respite: Here was a confidant, virile but safe, who may have understood their wants and hopes better than even their husbands.
While their husbands were away every day making a living, LaLanne was looking out for these women in a way no one else did.
"Make me a promise," he began one episode. "C'mon, raise your right hand. Say, `I promise that I will be with you every day this week, Jack.' 'Cause I have so many fantastic things to show you and tell you, and they're all to you from me."
In those days, a daily exercise show was more than pioneering.
Exercise for anyone was seen as an exotic pursuit, largely limited to disgruntled kids in phys-ed classes, members of athletic teams training for team victory and random "exercise nuts." And few of those categories included women.

LaLanne's notion of fitness certainly wasn't the macho proposition from those ads in comic books: a mail-order course from bodybuilder [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]Charles [COLOR=#366388 ! important]Atlas[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] that would transform the "97-pound weakling" into a ripped Adonis who could teach the world's bullies not to kick sand in his face.
LaLanne, who died Sunday at age 96, found a successful formula for happiness and long life decades before the onset of health spas and healthy lifestyles — a cultural shift for which he paved the way.
Anyone who was watching his TV show a half-century ago heard his mission: to help people feel better, look better and live longer.
Clad in a form-fitting jumpsuit with "Jack" stitched on the left breast, his [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]bulging [COLOR=#366388 ! important]biceps[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] straining its short sleeves, he coached his in-home flock through a series of what he called "trimnastics," none of them requiring apparatus beyond a chair or a towel. He was always warm, encouraging and — in the best tradition of a broadcaster — engaging.
He never forgot the kids who might have been parked in front of the TV when his show came on. He greeted them heartily and directed them to go run and grab Mom. Sometimes, before dispatching the kids with "running music" from the off-screen organ, he treated them to a trick by his big white dog, Happy.
On other occasions, LaLanne did a trick himself, not to grandstand, of course, but to reassure his audience that he was no mere TV personality.
Once, he demonstrated a technique he called the American flag: With both hands gripping a vertical pole a few inches apart, he extended his body horizontally, his arms ramrod-straight. He said no one else could do it. Whether that was true or not, few if any of his dazzled viewers would have argued the point.
LaLanne was a TV trailblazer, arriving in an era before videocassettes (an innovation that put Jane Fonda's aerobics everywhere a quarter-century later), and decades before multiplying cable networks opened a maw that needed programming of all kinds, including fitness shows and uncountable fitness gurus, to fill it.
Among the cartoons, game shows and soap operas of his early day, LaLanne found a pent-up demand for a TV show that promoted health and demanded that the viewer get physical. It was a special kind of appointment viewing.
Did housewives tell their husbands about Jack LaLanne? Or was his show their little secret?

Jack LaLanne, 93, still spreads gospel of exercise

TV fitness star Jack LaLanne celebrates his 88th birthday by doing a fingertip push-up atop his newly unveiled star on The Hollywood Walk of Fame in this September 26, 2002 file photo in Hollywood. Lalanne began his exercise programs in the early days of television in the 1950's.
Credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser




WASHINGTON | Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:44am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life!) - Jack LaLanne, who became a fitness guru to a generation of American housewives, still works out two hours a day and stays away from white flour and sugar -- even at the age of 93.
Considered the father of the modern fitness movement, LaLanne began preaching the value of exercise and eating raw vegetables long before Jane Fonda urged women to "feel the burn."
"I can't die," LaLanne likes to say. "It would ruin my image."
LaLanne said his diet includes 10 raw vegetables daily, eight egg whites, fruit, brown rice and 100 percent whole grain bread -- when he has bread.
"A glass of wine is wonderful," LaLanne told Reuters, pointing to research linking wine to the health of the French.
"They don't get drunk, they have a glass of wine or two."
On the day of interview LaLanne said he swam for 30 minutes and lifted weights for 90 minutes. He alters his workout routine every 30 days.
"Everything I do, I do to muscle failure," he said.
When he was young LaLanne was depressed and moody. In desperation, when he was 14 years old, his mother took him to hear health lecturer Paul Bragg, who urged followers to exercise and swear off processed foods.
The young LaLanne stopped eating white flour, sugar and most fat while eating more fruits and vegetables. By age 15, he had built a backyard gym of climbing ropes, chin-up bars, sit-up machines and weights.
LaLanne opened the nation's first modern health club in Oakland, California in 1936. It had a gym, juice bar and health food store. Soon there were 100 gyms nationwide.
A bigger challenge followed -- getting the first generation of television couch potatoes to try jumping jacks, push-ups and sit-ups.
The "The Jack LaLanne Show," which went national in 1959, showed housewives how to work out and eat right. It became a staple of daytime television in the United States during its 34-year run.
But one person he could not convince to work out was his father, who died at age 50.
"I tried to get my dad to exercise but he just said, 'Oh, that's for you young folks,'" LaLanne said.
To promote his shows, gyms and juicers, LaLanne has done a series of stunts. When he was 45, in 1959, he did 1,000 push-ups and 1,000 chin-ups in 86 minutes.
In 1984, aged 70, LaLanne had himself shackled and handcuffed and towed 70 boats 1.5 miles in Long Beach Harbor.
LaLanne said his focus was always to help people the way Bragg had helped him.
"Billy Graham is for the hereafter, I'm for the here and now!" he said. "The good old days are right now! Focus on this moment! Enjoy life!"

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0716528320070319

 

[HighDesertJoe]

As a kid I liked watching him for the hot chicks and his dogs,
He will be misses.
RIP JACK

 

[Iraganji]

He was an inspiration for me, as well as the Bragg and Gerson families.
They way they lived changed the way I live and vastly improved the quality of my life.

Peace in your passing Jack.

 

[supermanlives]

i thought that guy was gonna live forever, RIP

 

[minds_I]

RIP