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!