TAKING CARE OF healthy people
A bad day on water skis inspired Ken Cooper to create a fitness organization worth $100M
People around the world know Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper as the father of aerobics. But there’s another side to him: Ken Cooper, businessman.
Yes, he’s still a physician first. But being a good businessman has been his great enabler.
Today, the Cooper Aerobics Center is a 30-acre urban oasis with a nonprofit research center, medical clinic, fitness center with a restaurant, spa, luxury hotel and conference center, swimming pool, tennis courts and walking trails, all on some the priciest real estate in Dallas.
The company also sells vitamins and supplements, and offers corporate wellness programs.
The family-owned company generates annual revenue that will approach $100 million this year and is profitable, said his son Tyler Cooper, the company’s CEO.
Once Ken Cooper was labeled a charlatan. Now, at 86, he’s considered an international treasure.
Next year marks the halfcentury of his best-seller, “Aerobics,” in which Cooper told us to get off our duffs and quit our unhealthy ways, and set in motion a national guilt trip.
To mark the 50th anniversary, Cooper is working on an updated version of his seminal book and his memoirs.
The course of Cooper’s life was changed by a water-skiing incident at Lake Texoma in 1960, when he was an out-ofshape, overweight 29-year-old Army medical resident.
He’d gained nearly 40 pounds over the course of med school, his internship and early marriage, and hadn’t been on water skis in eight years.
“I’d gone to pot like 80 percent of my medical school colleagues,” Cooper said.
Once behind the boat, Cooper got nauseated, his heart was racing and he thought he was having a heart attack.
It turned out to be temporary cardiac arrhythmia. But it was a permanent wake-up call.
He lost the weight in six months and ran his first marathon.
Today he’s 5 feet, 11 inches tall (having shrunk a couple of inches) and weighs 168 pounds — exactly what he weighed in high school when he was running track and playing basketball.
“I was prediabetic. I was hypertensive. All that disappeared after I lost that weight. I’ve kept that weight for 56 years now.
“That was divine intervention, I’m sure it was. Otherwise, I was right on the same pathway as my other medical colleagues and I’d be dead already. I’m sure of it.”
In 1970, flush with $25,000 in savings and a 1968 paperback bestseller (“Aerobics”), the 39-year-old colonel and doctor left the Air Force in San Antonio, where he was responsible for the astronaut fitness program, and moved to Dallas to practice preventive medicine.
Most people thought Cooper was loopy.
“People said, ‘There’s no way you can make a living trying to take care of healthy people. People want physicians when they’re sick and not when they’re well,’” Cooper said. “First couple of years, I thought they were right.”
He set up the Aerobics Center in a two-room office in the Preston Center with two employees: another doctor and a secretary.
Cooper’s dream began to manifest in late 1971, when he moved to the Preston Road location, having purchased an old mansion on eight acres and equipment using $1.2 million borrowed from Tyler Corp. Its chairman, the late Joe McKinney, was an early disciple.
Cooper attributes the company’s success to four things: divine intervention, an extraordinary staff that includes 24 physicians, proving to companies that wellness programs increase profits and providing service that keeps patients coming back.
“I’ve tried to impress upon our physicians that our patients don’t have to come back. They pay big dollars to come here. We don’t take insurance,” he said.