Founder of modern aerobics reflects on his career and time in Scouting

Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D., Master of Public Health, the man who first coined the term “aerobics” and changed the way the world thought about the concept of exercise, was 16 years old the first time he saved someone’s life.

It happened when he was working at a restaurant near a lake in Oklahoma City.

Cooper’s regular job was flipping burgers. But on this day, he just happened to have been assigned the task of painting a fence. Because of that, he was in the right spot at the right time to hear a young girl screaming for help from the water.

Having just earned the rank of Eagle Scout, Cooper knew exactly what to do.

“I kicked off my shoes, jumped in and pulled her to shore, which I learned in the Boy Scouts — how to help tired swimmers,” says Cooper.

The lifeguard on duty was fired. Cooper was hired to take his place.

His pay went from 50 cents an hour to $1 an hour. He would go on to spend several summers working as a lifeguard, and he estimates that he pulled as many as 30 tired swimmers from the water in one season.

As it turns out, it was only the start of what would become a lifetime of changing lives.

Cooper, now 93, went on to graduate from medical school and serve in both the U.S. Army and Air Force. In the late 1960s, after spending years studying the effects of exercise on a person’s health, Cooper came to what was at the time a very controversial conclusion: Exercise is, in fact, good for you, no matter your age.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that his first book, called simply Aerobics, published in 1968, changed the world.

Medical, military years

When Cooper was attending medical school in the 1950s, the concept of preventive care was foreign to most doctors and medical students.

“We were told that there’s no profit in health care in preventing disease,” he says.

Doctors feared what they called the athlete’s heart. Like any muscle, the heart can increase in size when it gets a lot of exercise. This was considered by most to be a bad thing after you reach a certain age.

But over the years, Cooper began to think differently — partly because of his own experience.

After excelling in track in high school, Cooper saw his level of physical activity greatly decrease during his six years in medical school when he became laser-focused on getting good grades and less focused on fitness.

He remembers going waterskiing at the age of 29 and having to stop halfway through due to severe chest pains. The only thing wrong with him, it turns out, was that he was out of shape.

After graduating from medical school, Cooper served as a flight surgeon, and during his 13 years in the military, he studied more and more about the benefits of exercise.

As he prepared to publish his first book about what he’d learned, he came up with a unique word that he wanted to use for one of the chapter titles.

The word “aerobic” already existed. It was an adjective used mostly in biology that described anything related to or involving oxygen.

“I thought, ‘Why not put an “s” on it and make it a noun?’” says Cooper. “So I told the publisher in New York, ‘I want to call this chapter Aerobics.’”

The publisher, as it turns out, had an even better idea. They wanted to call the book itself Aerobics.

Cooper was worried that no one would understand the word’s meaning and that it’d be difficult to translate into other languages.

He was right about the second part. But not the first. For whatever reason, the word clicked with readers right away.

“They were right, and I was wrong,” Cooper says.

Impact of Scouting

Cooper joined a troop when he was 12.

“I loved the outdoors,” he says. “Swimming. Hiking. Camping. I only had good experiences in Scouts.”

He remembers going to Philmont Scout Ranch when he was 16.

“It was a life-changing experience,” he says. “The water in the creeks was so clear, you could see the trout in them. We didn’t have any fishing gear, but one guy had lures on his hat. So we fished with our shoestrings. We caught fish like crazy. It was the craziest thing.

“What I learned in Scouts really helped me, especially in my military training.”

He remembers one military exercise in which he was dropped off with a team in the middle of the frozen Alaska wilderness for cold-weather training.

“They left us on a frozen lake,” he says. “It was cold — about 30 below zero. We built up a pile of snow about 6 feet high and built an igloo. We were well dressed.”

One of his friends, who had not been a Scout, radioed for help and was evacuated. Another, who had also been a Scout, did fine.

“It was quite comfortable,” Cooper says. “We had a wonderful time.”

Another time, he was left in a remote area of Florida for jungle training.

“I built a chair and table out of stuff we cut down from the jungle,” he says. “We made some soup from snakes.

“My Scout training was very important.”

The Cooper Clinic

In 1970, Cooper resigned from the military. Later that year, the Cooper Clinic opened in Dallas. It now spans 30 acres and employs around 500 people.

The facility provides patients with physical exams that go beyond the annual physical that most people get nowadays, including skin cancer screenings, nutrition coaching, cardiovascular screening and a CT scan to assess cardiac risk.

The Cooper Institute, a nonprofit research center dedicated to promoting lifelong health and wellness through research and education, opened that same year. The Institute is now part of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

Though the technology has changed, Cooper’s philosophy has remained the same: It’s easier to maintain good health than to regain it once it’s lost.

The key is a greater emphasis on nutrition and exercise, along with the personal responsibility that each person must take on for their health.

“The thing that we’ve emphasized over the years is that your health is your responsibility,” Cooper says. “I had to fight the medical community. They wanted to run me out of town. I was going against the grain.”

The data, Cooper says, is clearly on his side.

The clinic maintains a database of around 300,000 current and former patients. They’ve tracked their health habits and records for more than 25 years.

“These people have had less cases of Alzheimer’s, a reduction in the number of strokes, a reduction in people with cancer … the cost of Medicare was less,” he says. “So we’ve shown you can reduce the chances of having cancer or Alzheimer’s and reduce the cost of health care.”

Nowadays, it seems common knowledge that exercise — no matter your age — is good for you. Athlete’s heart is still a thing — it’s the term used to describe the normal changes that occur in people who exercise a lot.

“These changes are felt to be adaptive — that is, they reflect positive changes that allow the heart an increased ability to supply blood and oxygen to exercising tissues,” according to Stanford Medicine.

(Note that there are other, more dangerous reasons a heart could become enlarged. Always consult a doctor before beginning any fitness program.)

Cooper’s philosophy

To say that Cooper’s philosophy caught on would be an understatement.

In 1982, Jane Fonda released an exercise video called simply Workout. Though Fonda’s ideas were sound, Cooper didn’t like the way she used the phrase “feel the burn.” When a member of the media asked Cooper for his thoughts, he didn’t hesitate to speak his mind.

“That burn could be your heart suffering from angina,” he says. “You don’t know what that burn could be.

“Listen to your body. If it’s hurting, back off. Go at it more slowly.”

Cooper remembers getting a letter in the mail from Fonda a short time later.

“She said, ‘Why don’t we work together to make these things more safe?’” says Cooper. “For a while, she would send her tapes to our research institute, and we’d look over them for her.”

Cooper remembers a discussion in the fall of 2002 with Steven Reinemund, a friend, patient and member of The Cooper Institute board who also happened to be the CEO of PepsiCo at the time.

The two were talking about the benefits of nutrition, and Reinemund admitted that Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, was part of the problem. More specifically, it was the inclusion of trans fats in their chips, which raised bad cholesterol and decreased good cholesterol.

“I said get rid of trans fats and set the example,” says Cooper.

They did.

In July 2003, the Food and Drug Administration issued a regulation requiring manufacturers to list trans fats on food labels. In November 2013, the FDA issued a determination that trans fats are generally recognized as unsafe.

Still physically active

Cooper practices what he preaches.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” he says.

Though his running days are long behind him due to a leg injury he suffered while snow skiing decades ago, his form of daily aerobics includes riding a stationary bike and walking his dogs.

“I say walk your dogs whether you have dogs or not,” he says.

He also does some light weightlifting.

Cooper says childhood obesity is a very real and serious issue in both the United States and around the world. Programs like Scouting — with their emphasis on physical and mental fitness — can help.

“Exercise makes you feel good,” he says. “It gives you a second wind. People get in better shape. It’s a biochemical change. You can get addicted to exercise. You get withdrawal symptoms when you don’t do it.

“Fitness is a journey, not a destination, that you must continue for the rest of your life. I’ve been saying that for years.”

If you’re curious to learn more about your fitness level, consider Cooper’s 12-minute run. It measures how far you can run in 12 minutes, combined with your age and other factors, to produce a grade for your level of fitness.

The only things more important to Cooper than fitness are his family — he and his wife, Millie, have been married for 65 years; they have two children and five grandchildren — and his faith. He’s always been a devout Christian. He and his wife are longtime members of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas.

“God has had his hand in my life,” he says.

To this day, Cooper carries his Eagle Scout pocket card with him everywhere he goes.

“People often ask me my secret to success,” says Cooper. “I tell them it’s discipline. It was instilled in me at a very early age.

“Being a patrol leader … I had responsibilities. It gave me self-confidence. I got that from being a Boy Scout.”

Photos by Michael Roytek