Cooperized is energized: Dr Kenneth Cooper is on a mission – but Trump’s not listening.

Dr. Kenneth Cooper, father of aerobics, runs with his son, Tyler.

For a man whose running log is pushing towards 39,000 miles, 94 year-old Kenneth Cooper is a poster boy for longevity through fitness.

Or rather, Dr. Kenneth Cooper who wrote the book Aerobics that started it all off more than half a century ago. Way ahead of his time, he foresaw the collapse in fitness in America and came up with a systematic way of keeping in shape that was based around getting the heart going on a regular basis.

Shame that many Americans still haven’t cottoned on, including Donald Trump, who must rank as the least-fit president since William Howard Taft who, according to legend, once got stuck in the bathtub.

But back to Dr. Cooper. He’s the founder of the Cooper Institutes, all six of them whose purpose is to get people into shape. He developed the fitness programme for astronauts. In 1970 he provided the regime for the all-winning Brazilian football team. He’s lectured all over the world.

Starting with Aerobics, his 29 books have sold more than 30 million copies in many languages and his latest, Grow Healthier as You Grow Older published in June 2025, should be compulsory reading for everybody over 50.

Isn’t that what we all want, after all?

And, a living experiment, he’s still running. As many Americans continue a long descent into a woeful state of fitness, Dr. Cooper has embarked on what may turn out to be his greatest achievement – the restoration of American health through the preventive medicine of that strange thing called exercise.

It’s called “Get Cooperized” and it’s very simple. Somewhat simplified, here are the essential steps: get sweaty most days of the week, avoid rubbish food if you can, stay slim (“a healthy weight”, suggests Get Cooperized), take the right supplements, get regular medical check-ups (“comprehensive physical exams”), don’t get more stressed than you can help, sleep well, and don’t overdo the booze. And, oh yes, ditch the ciggies.

It's impossible to argue against any of these. They really work, as hundreds of studies have proved. I mean, there’s no research that recommends little or no exercise, a diet of hamburgers, smoking and lots of liquor.

The Cooper fitness philosophy doesn’t demand a huge commitment – roughly two and a half hours a week suffices to get you Cooperized and turn around your life. In time many people could handle a lot more – I aim for two hours most days.

A further word about US presidents. According to Men’s Health magazine, Taft felt so ashamed about the size of his girth that he engaged a British physician to prescribe a healthy diet that lost the twenty-seventh president 60 pounds [over 27 kilos]. He never got stuck in the bathtub again.

The twenty-second (and twenty-fourth) president Grover Cleveland didn’t even try. He’s on record as saying that “bodily movement alone…is among the dreary and unsatisfying things of life”. As a result he was known to his family as “Uncle Jumbo”.

Teddy Roosevelt was an “eating machine”, according to his friends, but he aimed to work out for a couple of hours every afternoon when he chopped wood, boxed and played tennis.

The twenty-sixth president understood fitness. “A man whose business is sedentary should get some kind of exercise if he wishes to keep himself in good physical trim,” he said.

And that in a nutshell is what Dr. Cooper says -- “it’s never too late to start moving more.”