By Shannon Young
Personal physician to President George W. Bush, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, traveled from Texas to advise students on their personal health at the campus forum today.
“What Dr. Cooper is going to offer is a program so that you don”t commit physiological bankruptcy, and so that you can increase the length of your life,” said Phillip Allsen, professor of exercise science.
The forum will be at 11 a.m. today in the Marriott Center.
Dr. Cooper is known as the Father of Aerobics. Millions of people around the world were motivated by his research in his 1968 bestseller, Aerobic. He started a worldwide fitness revolution.
Allsen said Dr. Cooper will tell students why they should exercise and explain how to do it.
“Dr. Cooper will never ask a student to do something that he wouldn”t do,” Allsen said. “Here”s a man who really started the fitness movement, not only in the United States, but in the world.
Allsen said for a period of time in South America, people would not say they were going for a jog. They would say they were going for a “Cooper.”
The Cooper Aerobics Center was a clinic and research institute created in 1970, which fulfilled Dr. Cooper”s dream. It has continued to grow and motivate people to exercise.
Dr. Cooper is a life insurance agent. He is selling a fitness policy that will help people live longer.
“Students who will buy his policy of fitness, will not only live longer, but they”ll have a better quality of life,” Allsen said.
“Dr. Cooper will give students the latest scientific information on appropriate exercise prescription and will motivate students to do something about it,” said Gordon B. Lindsay, associate dean of the college of Health and Human Performance.
“The thing that puts Ken Cooper on the map is the understanding that aerobics, exercising the heart and lungs, is the most important component, especially from a health perspective,” Lindsay said.
Dr. Cooper will be having a question and answer session at 8:30-10 a.m. in Room 229 of the Student Athletic Building. He will not answer questions after the forum, because he will be traveling back to Texas.
Randy Shirts, associate professor of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said those who have heard Cooper speak say he”s an enthusiastic and engaging speaker. There are a lot of similarities in his speaking style to evangelical ministers, because he thought about becoming one before he got into medicine.
“Dr. Cooper has completely revolutionized the way that people think,” Shirts said.
