Jack LaLanne is chiefly responsible for many firsts in the fitness industry. He was the first person to have a national exercise TV show. He was the first to truly preach the benefits of combining exercise and nutrition. He was the first to develop several types of equipment, including the leg extension machine, the weight selector machine and machines with cables and pulleys.

LaLanne was at the forefront of many radical movements, including women working out with weights, seniors working out with weights and athletes working out with weights. One could argue that LaLanne was the first real honest-to-goodness personal trainer. Oh, and instant breakfast? He created that, too.

Perhaps none of LaLanne's firsts is more important than his creation of what is believed to be the first health club in the United States. Jack LaLanne's Physical Culture Studio opened in 1936 on the third floor of an office building at 409 14th Street in downtown Oakland, CA. LaLanne, just 21 at the time, paid $45 a month for rent.

Without health clubs, people would have no place to work out, no place to lift weights, no place for a juice bar, no place for personal training.

Without question, all of LaLanne's innovations could have made him a millionaire a thousand times over. But money has never been as important as helping his fellow Americans get healthier and lead happier lives. He used to tell clients who failed to show at his club for training sessions, “I don't want your money. I want to help you!”

Few people could doubt why LaLanne is the recipient of this year's Club Industry Lifetime Achievement Award. The question is, how many should he get?

“You'll probably need two Lifetime Achievement Awards,” says LaLanne's longtime friend, Kevin O'Connell.

One will do just fine for one lifetime. But what a lifetime it has been.

FROM RAGE TO RICHES

Jack LaLanne was born to French immigrants on Sept. 26, 1914, in San Francisco. As a teen, Jack was anything but the picture of health. He was a “sugarholic” and had bouts with bulimia. He had headaches and pimples and boils on his face. Because of the anger and rage that had built inside him, he tried to burn down his house. He also tried to kill his older brother, Norman, twice. He even tried to kill himself.

Everything changed one night at the age of 15 when LaLanne's mother, a Seventh-day Adventist, took him to hear a lecture by nutritionist Paul Bragg. Arriving late, an embarrassed LaLanne had to sit in a chair on the stage where Bragg spoke. The result of Bragg's speech was a healing, a rebirth, a young man transformed. From that day on, LaLanne dedicated his life to the virtues of nutrition and good health that he has been preaching for 80 years now. He cut out sugar, stopped eating meat and began eating raw vegetables, whole grains, nuts and fruits.

Before opening his first club in Oakland, LaLanne set up a gymnasium in his backyard in Berkeley, CA. There, he began to build the muscles that would make him an attractive bodybuilder. Soon, he began to invite high school friends over to show them how they could sculpt their bodies. Few did it better than LaLanne, who won a national World's Best Built Man contest at age 19 and later finished as a runner-up to Mr. America.

Exercise wasn't widely accepted when LaLanne began his fitness journey. The local YMCA did not have a weight room, so men would sneak into the back room to lift weights. LaLanne privately trained police officers and firefighters. When he opened his club in 1936, LaLanne was called a “crackpot,” among other names.

“You can't believe the crap that I went through, boy,” LaLanne says from his 4-acre estate in Morro Bay, CA, on the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles. “I'm telling you, it's something. Working with weights saved my life. If something saved your life, you'd be enthusiastic about it, wouldn't you?”

LaLanne went out to “sell” his business. He'd take the heaviest and the skinniest kids he could find and go to their houses at night to ask their parents if he could help them get in shape.

Ringing those doorbells wasn't easy for LaLanne. Although he appears to be an extravert, he's really an introvert.

“He'd walk around the block three times before ringing the bell to ask to help train students,” says his wife of 50 years, Elaine LaLanne. “Once he got in there, everything was fine.”

One of the people LaLanne reached was a teenager named Charles McCarl, who stopped by the gym a few years after it opened. However, being only 16, McCarl needed his parents' permission to join the gym, so LaLanne went to McCarl's house to convince his parents to let him do so.

“He was so enthusiastic that he made my parents enthusiastic, too,” McCarl recalls. “We had about six or seven chairs, and he managed to sit in each one of them during the conversation. I have never regretted going down and working out with him.”

The first LaLanne club didn't look much different from clubs that other operators built through the years. It had large mirrors, plants and, of course, the equipment that LaLanne himself designed. A friend of his named Paul Martin was a blacksmith and made the equipment. LaLanne never had a patent for all that equipment.

“He didn't waste any time getting things done,” says McCarl, who at 87 is still a practicing family doctor in Williams, CA. “He woke up in the middle of the night sometimes thinking about how a piece of equipment should work.”

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