The History of Aerobics (50 Years and Still Counting)

ABSTRACT

Looking back over the 50 years since Aerobics was published, I could never have expected for there to have been a major change in physicians’ attitudes toward the value of exercise in the practice of medicine. In my lifetime, I never thought I would see a stress test be considered a mandatory component of a complete examination, inactivity classified as importantly as high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and cigarette smoking considered a coronary risk factor. I have tried in this Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (RQES) Lecture presentation to document how this slow but gradual transition took place due to my work and the work of many of my colleagues in this field, along with the important work of The Cooper Institute. In June 1970, I chartered the institute 6 months before I saw my first patient at the Cooper Clinic, but now with the Cooper Center Longitudinal Study being the largest database in the world comparing measured levels of fitness, instead of relying only on questionnaires and correlating fitness and health in our more than 700 published peer-review articles, we have proven and can safely say that “exercise is medicine.” In greater detail, I want this lecture to present what we and others have done in this scientific endeavor, and even the harshest critics are now saying that “these results are too impressive to be ignored.”

KEYWORDS:

• Exercise is medicine
• fitness
• health
• youth