told D Magazine<\/a> last year. And people generally have more control over their own fitness than they think, he added. \u201cSome level of exercise, like walking the dog, can have a tremendous impact.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nCooper’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\u00a0summiting all 74 \u201c14ers,\u201d 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 \u2014 who had grown up as the son of a man widely recognized as \u201cthe father of aerobics\u201d \u2014 as a public wellness persona in his own right.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cCooper test,\u201d 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 \u201cgrew up\u201d at the center, the organization would later write on its website.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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Cooper married Angela\u00a0Lang, a former Baylor homecoming queen, in 2002, with whom he had three children. Cooper also served as a Baylor Regent.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks Troy Aikman (left) and Roger Staubach hold a banner for Dr. Kenneth Cooper and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160,162,161],"class_list":["post-474760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-plano","tag-plano","tag-plano-headlines","tag-plano-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}