'Health missionary': Dallas' father of aerobics reaching out to China's 300 million obese

Ken Cooper is doing his bit to close the trade gap with China.

The legendary father of aerobics is exporting himself — not in body, but in spirit.

The 86-year-old founder of the Cooper Aerobics Center recently returned to Dallas after opening the Cooper Aerobics Health and Wellness Center in Nanjing — 7,400 miles from where modern-day fitness arguably began.

The Chinese version is bigger and state-of-the-world and is expected to be the first of several Lone Star iterations in the Land of the Red Dragon. The wellness compound sits on 40 acres within a national forest and is surrounded by three lakes with hiking trails.

Cooper has a lofty mandate: to save the world’s largest population from epidemic obesity and adult onset diabetes and bring it to good health by 2030.

You see, China is getting fatter and more sedentary with nearly half of its people — about 580 million — either a diabetic or at the tipping point. That’s nearly twice the entire U.S. population.

He believes he can come to the rescue by “Cooperizing” China. “This is right down our line, because we concentrate on changing lifestyles.”

Cooper changed the world's attitude about exercise and health in his seminal book Aerobics published in 1968. He opened the Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas two years later.

He's a national hero in Brazil for training its soccer team to a World Cup in 1970.  Jogging is coopering in Portuguese.

Cooper travels the globe giving lectures on the latest developments in health and exercise.

A unique place

Cooper would be envious if his name weren’t on the hotel, conference center and training facility.

“We have things that are the only ones in the world,” Cooper says like a ebullient kid as he flips through slides from his trip at the Aerobics Center. “That’s the largest indoor climbing wall in the world and the only one that’s 360 degrees. This is a beautiful track. It goes up the hill and down the hill. They’ve done everything to perfection. Tyler [his son, fellow doctor and company CEO] and I were blown away.”

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Cooper says he hasn’t spent a penny on the project. A Chinese company has taken a long-term lease on the property and has a licensing arrangement with Cooper Aerobics in Dallas for the use of its name and expertise.

The new center will train personal trainers and physical education teachers to spread the fitness gospel to communities and schools.

It also plans to promote corporate wellness programs and to teach physicians about preventive medicine. Both are foreign concepts in China.

“We’re trying to methodically work out how to improve the health of 1.37 billion people,” says Cooper. “That’s a major, major undertaking. But it could be the greatest thing we’ve ever achieved.”

Growing epidemic

More than 300 million Chinese are obese. A third of its youth are seriously overweight.

“Prevalence of chronic disease in China has risen ninefold in one generation, far faster than the rest of the world,” Cooper says in his rapid-fire fashion. “You think of Chinese as being lean and trim, and all that. Not so.”

You can blame the Western world for the bad habits that have led to this medical crisis, he says.

“I’ve been going to China for 30 years. I’ve been there 10 times,” says Cooper. “In 1988, Beijing had dirt streets, military trucks and no cars. People rode bicycles by the millions. Now you find 100-story buildings, superhighways, Mercedes, Audis, GM’s. People ride motorcycles not bikes. Fifty percent of the people are smoking, and there’s fast-food on every corner.”

To make matters worse, people from China and India are more genetically predisposed to diabetes with less weight gain and 10 years younger than Europeans and Americans.

The Chinese government’s idea to tackle the issue is to make soccer a national pastime and lead it into international glory.

“They want to teach the youth to play soccer so that they can be competitive on the world stage,” says Cooper. “That’s President Xi’s primary goal. He thinks by doing that, we can overcome the epidemic of obesity and diabetes.”

Notice the accent on we.

He’s taken some heat from people who say he’s “working with the enemy.” Cooper feels anything he can do to improve the relationship with China — especially given the troubles with North Korea — is worthwhile.

And besides, they listen to him and respect their elders.

A fortunate meeting

Cooper became intrigued with the idea of exporting his fitness philosophy there after a lecture trip to Nanjing University in 2010.

Vision finally came to reality through a licensing agreement with Cooper’s longtime friend and Chinese native, Wilson Zhu, chairman and founder of a global branding and product-development company in California and a former official with the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China.

Zhu, who shuttles from homes in San Francisco and Nanjing, previously was a top executive with Dallas-based Michaels Stores Inc. That’s how he and Cooper crossed paths.

Last year, Zhu and Chinese billionaire John Chen formed Cooper Aerobics Health and Wellness Industry Ltd. and signed a long-term lease for a relatively but never-used posh retreat built by the Communist party for the exclusive use of its bigwigs.

Over the years, the government had dotted the countryside with similar ritzy outposts. When Xi Jinping became president, he implemented an anti-corruption act and started finding public uses for them,  says Tyler Cooper.

“We decided that if we were going to do business in China, we needed to have a single point of contact who we trust, who can oversee everything and build the brand in China,” he says. “We’ll work with Wilson and John hand in hand, and we’ll give them guidance. But ultimately, we’re trusting their knowledge of that culture as to what’s going to be best accepted to impact health there.”

Cooper Aerobics has a small ownership stake but no financial exposure, he says. It’ll get a portion of the profits, if there are any.

“The most important reason we’re there is the public health perspective and helping a nation in need,” the Aerobics Center CEO  says. “If we do that well, there will be financial ramifications, too. But we’re not making some big investment in China trying to make a bunch of money. We’re there to help the people.”

A mission fulfilled

Ken Cooper, who founded the Aerobics Center in 1970,  feels he’s fulfilling a pledge he made as an 18-year-old summer camper at Falls Creek Baptist Assembly in Davis, Okla. That’s when the high school senior told God he wanted to be a full-time medical missionary in China.

“Don’t ask me why I did that. I have no idea,” he says. “Now, I realize, I’m a health missionary to China. The Lord’s chosen me to do this in an unusual way. So I said, ‘Why did you wait so long to do that?’ ”

Everywhere the Coopers went, they were treated like rock stars.

That’s because Ken Cooper is one. He thinks he’s more famous over there than he is here.

“Have you been to China?” Ken Cooper asks, showing a slide of a massive group-style round dining table in the Cooper Conference Center. “They put the food on the lazy susan, and if you miss it with your chopsticks as it goes by, you’re outta luck.”

That’s one reason he dropped two pounds to 166 on his agile 5-foot, 11-inch frame.

The other is that his days were non-stop from leaving the Cooper Hotel at 7:10 every morning and not returning until 9 at night.

One appearance was sold to him as an piece-of-cake, flat-level 5K walk around a lake.

Then he found out why they called it the Mountain Marathon.

“There were 4,000 or 5,000 people who turned out for it,” says Cooper, who gave up jogging for brisk 15-minute-mile walking after a snow skiing injury in 2010. “They had a drone up in the sky. I said, ‘Lord, you gotta help me. I’m not sure I can do this.’

“Fortunately, my friend from Finland gave me a pair of walking sticks that helped immensely,” he says. “People were amazed that I could still walk that fast, and I didn’t have any problem walking up and down those hills.”

But there was no rest for the weary until he boarded the high-speed train from Nanjing to Shanghai for his flight home.

“I was dead tired, I guarantee you,” he says, in a tough, less-than-Superman admission for him. “That was a difficult week. it was also one of the most thrilling, most productive weeks of my life, truly.”

UP NEXT: Is Ken Cooper heading for the corporate finish line?

Kenneth H. Cooper

Title: Founder and chairman, Cooper Aerobics Center

Age: 86

Born: Oklahoma City

Education: Bachelor of science and doctor of medicine, University of Oklahoma; master of public health, Harvard University School of Public Health.

Personal: Married to Millie for 57 years. They have a daughter, Berkley, 51, and son, Tyler, 46, and five grandchildren.

SOURCE: Kenneth Cooper