Former Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks Troy Aikman (left) and Roger Staubach hold a banner for Dr. Kenneth Cooper and his son, Dr. Tyler Cooper, to run through during the unveiling of the Cooper Fitness Center’s new 50,000-square-foot expansion.
Special Contributor
Dr. Tyler Cooper, a preventive medicine physician and one of Texas’ most prominent wellness leaders as president and CEO of Cooper Aerobics, the acclaimed Dallas-based institution founded by his father, died Wednesday following a battle with leukemia. He was 55.
“We are heartbroken,” Cooper Aerobics wrote in a statement published Thursday evening. “From climbing mountains on all seven continents to summiting all 74 14,000-ft. peaks in the contiguous U.S., he lived his life with extraordinary energy and purpose … His impact on health, wellness and preventive medicine will be felt for generations.”
As a longtime leader at Cooper Aerobics, including over a decade as president and CEO, Cooper was credited with expanding the organization’s reach and international partnerships, leading multimillion-dollar campus renovations and steering the mission of a globally influential health business whose portfolio has expanded to include not only a medical clinic and research institute but a fitness center, spa, luxury hotel and various consulting services.
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Cooper, whose passions included skiing and surfing in addition to mountain climbing, was also known as a passionate wellness advocate who argued aerobic fitness should play a larger role in primary care medicine as a vital sign of health.
“Aerobic fitness is a single metric that is by far the most powerful predictive tool for cancer, morbidity, other diseases, and mental health issues,” he told D Magazine last year. And people generally have more control over their own fitness than they think, he added. “Some level of exercise, like walking the dog, can have a tremendous impact.”
Cooper’s own fitness interests were decidedly less common. After drawing inspiration from a childhood climbing trip, as an adult Cooper climbed mountains around the world. In 2021 he completed a decades-long pursuit of summiting all 74 “14ers,” or mountain peaks that are at least 14,000 feet tall, within the continental United States. The successful quest also generated media coverage and helped establish the affable doctor and executive — who had grown up as the son of a man widely recognized as “the father of aerobics” — as a public wellness persona in his own right.
Tyler Clark Cooper was born in 1970 to Millie Cooper and Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a preventive medicine physician and former Air Force colonel who in 1968 developed the “Cooper test,” a 12-minute run designed to measure aerobic fitness, originally for the U.S. military. The elder Cooper established the Cooper Aerobics Center in North Dallas just days before Cooper was born, and Cooper “grew up” at the center, the organization would later write on its website.
Fittingly, the younger Cooper was a star runner as captain of both the track and cross country teams at Baylor University, where he graduated with a business degree in 1994. As a young man, he worked abroad for the family business before attending medical school at the University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio, where he graduated in 2003. Two years later, he completed a Master of Public Health in Health Care Management degree from Harvard University, and in 2006 began working as a preventive medicine physician at the Cooper Clinic. He was named the group’s president and CEO in 2014 with a hearty public endorsement from his father, who praised his business sense and commitment to the group’s mission.
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Cooper married Angela Lang, a former Baylor homecoming queen, in 2002, with whom he had three children. Cooper also served as a Baylor Regent.
In a testament to both Cooper’s public esteem and the wider influence of Cooper Aerobics, a social media post from the organization about his death quickly prompted hundreds of condolence messages.