Still shaping the industry
Elaine Lalanne — who revolutionized exercise alongside husband Jack — is a model for aging well
Elaine Lalanne’s morning exercises often begin before she’s even out of bed. Lying on top of the covers, she does two dozen jackknifes. At the bathroom sink, she does incline pushups. After she dresses and applies her makeup, she heads to her home gym, where she walks uphill on a treadmill for a few minutes and does lat pulldowns on a machine.
“Twenty minutes a day gets me on my way,” she said at her home on the central coast of California.
But her biggest daily feat of strength, she says, happens above her shoulders. At 97 years old, Lalanne reminds herself each morning, “You have to believe you can.” She said that belief had not only kept her physically active through injuries and emotional obstacles, but it had also helped her to live the life of someone decades younger. “Everything starts in the mind,” she said.
Lalanne’s habit of speaking in aphorisms (“It’s not a problem, it’s an experience”; “You do the best you can with the equipment you have”) is a product of a lifetime of trying to inspire people to move more and better themselves. For nearly six decades, she was both wife and business partner to the television personality Jack Lalanne, who is widely considered the father of the modern fitness movement, and whose exercise show ran for 34 years, from 1951 to 1985.
“She was the guiding force behind Jack,” said Rick Hersh, Elaine Lalanne’s talent agent for more than 40 years.
While Jack Lalanne was a natural showman — he rose to fame performing acrobatics on Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach in the 1930s — Elaine Lalanne preferred to work behind the scenes, supporting him and managing their sprawling entertainment and entrepreneurial empire, which included not only a TV show but dozens of fitness gadgets, food products and supplements, as well as a gym chain with more than 100 locations nationwide.
Since Jack Lalanne’s death in 2011, however, Elaine Lalanne (whom friends call Lala) has quietly cultivated a following all her own. She still runs her family’s remaining business, Befit Enterprises — which sells archival videos and memorabilia and licenses the Lalanne name — from a ranch nestled among dusty hills and livestock.
She has published two books in the last four years and is developing both a documentary and a feature film with Mark Wahlberg, who has signed on to play Jack Lalanne. And longtime fitness industry power players — 1990s home workout
queen Denise Austin, Tae Bo guru Billy Blanks, bodybuilding legend Lou Ferrigno — seek her counsel on navigating life and business. “She’s almost like a second mom to me,” Ferrigno said.
In 1926, when Elaine Lalanne was born, few Americans made exercising a part of their daily lives, said Shelly Mckenzie, an independent scholar and the author of “Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America.” Nearly a century later, Lalanne is a “testament to the efficacy of a lifelong exercise habit,” Mckenzie said — and perhaps even more important, the power of choosing how you want older age to look and feel.
Raised in Minneapolis, Lalanne dreamed of a career in entertainment. In the mid-1940s, she went west to San Francisco, where she worked her way into the nascent medium of television, eventually becoming a producer and co-host of a live daily variety show, which was rare in an era when few women in the medium moved beyond secretarial roles. By the early 1950s, she had become a local celebrity, whom one reporter called “the sweetheart of San Francisco television.”
A divorced single mother with a demanding job, Lalanne smoked cigarettes, ate candy bars for lunch and, like most Americans of the time, didn’t devote much thought to exercise and nutrition.
Then one day in 1951, the press agent for a local bodybuilder and gym owner called the studio and said her client could do pushups on air for an entire show. Sure enough, Jack Lalanne pulled it off, lifting and lowering his 5-foot-6 frame through a full 90-minute program while the hosts carried on as usual.
Soon after they met, Jack Lalanne walked over to Elaine Lalanne’s desk at the studio and chided her for eating a doughnut and smoking. “She blew him off, literally, taking a gratuitous bite of her doughnut and puffing cigarette smoke in his face,” fitness historian Ben Pollack wrote in 2018.
But in time, she fell not only for him, but also for his beliefs about eating whole foods and exercising — which he adapted from the early 20th-century lifestyle celebrity Paul Bragg, and which he credited for transforming him from a sickly youth to a bodybuilder. It got her thinking, “I don’t want to be old when I’m old.”
With her television background and his charisma, the Lalanne star rose. His appearance on her show eventually led to his own live show on the same network and then “The Jack Lalanne Show” in Los Angeles, which became the first national series devoted to diet and exercise.
As Jack Lalanne was getting settled in Hollywood, Elaine Lalanne would host his Bay Area show and give lectures across the state about healthy living.
She also began running the business details of product development and licensing deals that presaged the modern personality-driven fitness market — including a Jack Lalanne bathroom scale, a “Glamour Stretcher” resistance band and vitamins.
But she was most known for her appearances in front of the camera as a co-host.
“I was always looking for role models,” said Jan Todd, a pioneer in women’s powerlifting and interim chair of the department of kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin. “I grew up before Title IX passed. Mom didn’t go to a gym.” Todd found inspiration in Elaine Lalanne, who, with her blond bob and cheerful disposition, made building muscle seem acceptable for women.
The Lalannes’ greatest legacy, Todd said, may be “showing us the value of exercise in relation to aging.”
As he got older, Jack Lalanne would perform media stunts on his birthday. At 70, he towed a flotilla of 70 rowboats filled with 70 people during a mile-long swim. Elaine Lalanne began writing books about moving through middle age, with titles like “Fitness After 50” and “Dynastride!”
Lalanne said she had slowed down since turning 92. She has also fallen several times over the last decade. But the physical strength she gained at the gym helped her get back on her feet, she said.
Along with her daily exercises, Lalanne devotes time to stretching and hanging from a pullup bar, letting her body hang loose like a rag doll. She uses the same workout equipment she and her husband used for most of their lives, including weight machines he designed in the 1930s and a treadmill the couple purchased in the early 1970s.
“You have to move,” she said. “If you don’t move, you become immovable.”