The man who did it on television for thirty-four years

In 1936 a young man in Oakland, California, opened what may have been the first modern health club in America. The doctors of the day told him weight training would give people heart attacks and women would lose their femininity. He ignored them. In 1951 he went on television with a chair, a mat and a dog, and for thirty-four years, every weekday morning, Jack LaLanne taught America to exercise.

He did it himself, and he did it loudly. He swam from Alcatraz handcuffed, towing a boat, at sixty. He did a thousand push-ups in twenty-three minutes at forty-two. He towed seventy boats a mile and a half at seventy. He died in 2011 at ninety-six, having worked out that morning. His message never changed in sixty years, and it fits on an index card: exercise every day, lift weights whoever you are, eat food that comes from the ground and not from a factory, and never stop.

I put him at the close of this stretch of the second month because he is proof of concept for everything in it. Progressive overload, calisthenics, strength for women, strength for the old, muscle as medicine: LaLanne was doing all of it in public before the research existed, and he lived long enough to see the research catch up.

Here's the key, and it's about consistency over everything. LaLanne wasn't the strongest or the most talented. He was the most consistent human being in the history of American fitness. Every day. For seventy years. The genius wasn't the program. The genius was the morning.

Six and a half weeks of walks and logs is the beginning of a LaLanne morning. You're not building a body. You're building a person who shows up. The body follows that person around.