Jack LaLanne, nutrition and fitness guru, dies at 96

Jack LaLanne, whose obsession with grueling workouts and good nutrition, complemented by a salesman's gift, brought him recognition as the founder of the modern fitness movement, died Sunday at his home in Morro Bay, Calif. He was 96.

The cause was respiratory failure resulting from pneumonia, said his son Dan Doyle. Mr. LaLanne underwent heart-valve surgery in December 2009.

A self-described emotional and physical wreck while growing up in the San Francisco area, Mr. LaLanne began turning his life around, as he often told it, after hearing a talk on proper diet at age 15.

He started working out with weights when they were an oddity, and in 1936 he opened the prototype for the fitness spas to come — a gym, juice bar and health-food store — in an old office building in Oakland, Calif.

"People thought I was a charlatan and a nut," he remembered. "The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive." But Mr. LaLanne persevered, and he found a national pulpit on television.

"Billy Graham was for the hereafter. I'm for the here and now," he told the Los Angeles Times when he was almost 92.

"The Jack LaLanne Show" made its debut in 1951 as a local program in the San Francisco area, then went nationwide on daytime television in 1959. His short-sleeved jumpsuit showing off his impressive biceps, his props often limited to a broomstick, a chair and a rubber cord, Mr. LaLanne pranced through his exercise routines, most notably his fingertip push-ups.

He first was sponsored by the creator of a longevity pill, a 90-year-old man, but it sold poorly and he obtained Yami Yogurt as his new sponsor. "It tasted terrible, so I mixed it with prune juice and fruits," he told The New York Times in 2004. "Nobody thought about it until then. We made the guy a millionaire."

Mr. LaLanne's show continued into the mid-1980s. It had a second life in reruns on ESPN Classic. "We have over 3,000 shows," he said in 2004. "I own everything."

"He was perfect for the intimacy of television," Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, told the San Jose Mercury News in 2004. "This guy had some of the same stuff that Oprah has and Johnny Carson had — the ability to insinuate themselves in the domestic space of people's lives."

Long before Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda and the Atkins diet, Mr. LaLanne, at 5-foot-6 and 150 pounds or so with a 30-inch waist, was a celebrity, preaching regular exercise and proper diet. Expanding on his TV popularity, he opened dozens of fitness studios under his name, later licensing them to Bally.

He invented forerunners of modern exercise machines, such as leg-extension and pulley devices. He marketed a Power Juicer to blend raw vegetables and fruits and a Glamour Stretcher cord, and he sold exercise videos and fitness books. He invited women to join his health clubs and encouraged the elderly and disabled to exercise.

At 60, he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman's Wharf handcuffed, shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat. At 70, handcuffed and shackled again, he towed 70 boats carrying 70 people a mile and a half through Long Beach Harbor.

No one — not even Arnold Schwarzenegger — could argue that Mr. LaLanne wasn't the best. Schwarzenegger, who met him in the 1960s on the Venice boardwalk, said Mr. LaLanne would try to see who could match him in numbers of chin-ups and push-ups.

"Nobody could," Schwarzenegger said. "No one even wanted to try."

Mr. LaLanne ate two meals a day and shunned snacks. He built two gyms and a pool at his home in Morro Bay, and began each day, into his 90s, with two hours of workouts: weight lifting followed by a swim against an artificial current or in place, tied to a belt.

Mr. LaLanne was born in San Francisco on Sept. 26, 1914, and spent his early years on his parents' sheep farm in Bakersfield. By age 15, the family having moved to the Bay Area, he was pimply and nearsighted, craved junk food and had dropped out of high school. That's when his mother took him to a women's club for a talk by Paul C. Bragg, a well-known speaker on health and nutrition.

That talk, he often said, turned his life around. He began experimenting with weights at the Berkeley YMCA, tossed aside cakes and cookies and studied Gray's Anatomy to learn about the body's muscles. He graduated from a chiropractic school.

Mr. LaLanne brimmed with optimism and restated a host of aphorisms for an active and fit life. "I can't die," he liked to say. "It would ruin my image."

Information from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.