Jack and Elaine LaLanne and Brain Health

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Very fun inter­view with Jack and Elaine LaLanne by Dave Bun­nell: read it at Meet Fit­ness Leg­ends Jack and Elaine LaLanne | ELDR.com. See some quotes:

  • In 1936, Jack opened America’s first health club in Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia, called the “Jack LaLanne Phys­i­cal Cul­ture Studio.”
  • Through tele­vi­sion shows, pub­lic appear­ances, and books—and by sell­ing health-relat­ed products—they have been the most vocal and effec­tive evan­ge­lists for pre­ven­tive health the world has ever known.
  • “Elaine works out,” Jack replies, “but I work out eight days a week. I spend an hour and a half in the gym, and then a half hour in the pool, and I change my rou­tine every 30 days completely.”
  • “You’ve got to go at it hard and work on dif­fer­ent muscles,” he con­tin­ues. “You know how you stay young, don’t you? You work your butt off. Any­thing you do in life that’s worth­while, there’s a price to pay.”

Jack recent­ly cel­e­brat­ed his 92nd birthday!

We all have to be very thank­ful for their life mis­sion: a recent arti­cle from the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science quotes:

“Every­body knows that exer­cise is good for your heart, but in recent years we’ve gath­ered com­pelling evi­dence that exer­cise is also good for your brain,” says Fred Gage, PhD, of the Salk Insti­tute for Bio­log­i­cal Stud­ies. “We now know that exer­cise helps gen­er­ate new brain cells, even in the aging brain.”

You can check oth­er tips in our brain health blog on how to Improve Brain Health Now: Easy Steps, inte­grat­ing Nutri­tion, Phys­i­cal Exer­cise, Stress Man­age­ment and Brain Exercise. 

In our post The Exec­u­tive Brain and How our Minds Can Grow Stronger, we explore some of the basics of brain exercise…vey sim­i­lar to the con­cepts pro­mot­ed by the LaLannes for phys­i­cal exercise:

  • Intense men­tal chal­lenges pro­vide extra resis­tance to age­ing and improve pat­tern recog­ni­tion and brain “effi­cien­cy”, this is, the abil­i­ty to take on sim­i­lar chal­lenges with reduced meta­bol­i­cal demands
  • Our men­tal activ­i­ty influ­ences the gen­er­a­tion of neu­rons and where they go. The func­tion­al capac­i­ty of our neur­al net­works depends on the num­ber of neu­rons and their con­nec­tions-both short and long
  • Exer­cis­ing our brains is as impor­tant as exer­cis­ing our bod­ies. “Use it or lose it” came from ath­let­ics to brain sci­ence. Even bet­ter, now we know that “Use it and get more of it”

Thanks, Jack and Elaine!