“Hello, goodbye, and toilet paper.”

According to Lloyd “Red” Lerille, owner of Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club in Lafayette, Louisiana, those are the three most important things in business. Considering his successful 63 years in the health and fitness industry and his induction into the HFA’s inaugural Hall of Fame class, it’s hard to argue with his wisdom.

From Humble Beginnings to Industry Pioneer

Red’s journey began as a three-time high school wrestling champion in New Orleans. Inspired by his uncle Harold, Red saw fitness as transformative. In 1953, he trained at Ajax, Joe Gold’s New Orleans gym, honing his skills in bodybuilding and business. He began competing in contests and won the Mr. America title in 1960, before serving a stint in the Navy.

“When Red got out of the Navy, Mike Stansbury had him manage his gym in Lafayette,” recalls Red’s daughter Kackie Lerille. “He came with a bag of clothes and a unicycle. All he ever wanted was to own a little gym like that.”

With a $200 loan from his father, Red and his wife, Emma, opened Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club, a 3,500-square-foot gym in Lafayette, in 1963.

“The first club was small. We joke it was the size of a racquetball court,” says Kackie. “It was really a labor of love. My dad built his own equipment because you couldn’t buy any.”

He eventually moved to his current location in 1965, upgrading to 4,000 square feet. But, as with bodybuilding, staying small was never part of the plan. In 1968, Red made his first addition, adding a vinyl pool. There was no going back.

“Red decided early on he was going to reinvest in the club and do something new every month,” says Mark Lerille, Red’s son, who now manages the property. “It didn’t matter if it was something small or something that would take time to finish, he was going to do something every month.”

It’s a tradition that continues to this day.

SCIENTISTS have revealed the exercise ‘sweet spot’ you need to hit to live longer.

It’s no secret that working out is a key part of staying healthy for longer – but you don’t need to spend hours at the gym each week to reap the benefits, scientists from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland said.

In fact, moderate levels of activity could be enough to lower your risk of death, they suggested.

Finnish researchers studied the exercise habits of 22,750 twins, following up with them after 15 and 30 years to assess their biological age and risk of mortality.

They split participants up into four groups:

• Sedentary
• Moderately active
• Active
• Highly active

Moderate-movers seemed to reap the most benefits from exercise, with a seven per cent lower risk of death compared to people who didn’t work out.

Though higher levels of exercise were found to lower the risk of mortality in the short-term, it actually brought no additional benefit in the long-term, researchers said.

They found that highly active participants didn’t get any more benefit to their mortality risk – essentially, more is not necessarily better.

Associate professor Elina Sillanpää from the Faculty of Sports and Health Sciences suggested that the idea that ‘being sedentary increases the risk of death’ is incorrect.

Instead, he says: “An underlying pre-disease state can limit physical activity and ultimately lead to death, not the lack of exercise itself.

“This can bias the association between physical activity and mortality in the short term.” 

The twins participating in the study were all born before 1958 and their physical activity was assessed through questionnaires in 1975, 1981 and 1990. 

Over a third (38.8 per cent) of the participants from the sedentary class died during the 30-year follow-up period, compared to 30.8 per cent of the moderately active group, 29 per cent of the active group and 25.4 per cent of the highly active group.

Moderately active and sporty participants had a 16 and 24 per cent lower risk of death compared to the sedentary group.

But after researchers factored in lifestyle-related factors and participants’ body mass index, their risk was only reduced by seven and nine per cent.

“But the moderately active and active classes exhibited lower risks of all-cause mortality compared to the sedentary class and highly active class within all pairs,” researchers wrote in the study published to Nature.

The researchers also investigated whether following the World Health Organization’s physical activity guidelines affects mortality and genetic disease risk.

The guidelines advise adults to do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity weekly.

The study found that meeting these guidelines did not lower people’s risk of death or change their genetic risk.

Even for twins who met the recommended levels of exercise over a 15-year period, there wasn’t a difference in mortality rates compared to their less active twin pair.

Finally, researchers estimated the biological age of participants, looking at how it changed according to exercise levels.

They did this by taking blood samples from participants to get a sense of how fast the cells in their bodies were ageing.

Biological age – the age of our cells – measures how well your body functions and how much wear and tear it’s experienced.

It may be a better indicator than chronological age of how long we’ll will live and be in good health for.

Prof Sillanpää said: “We found that the association between leisure-time physical activity and biological aging was U-shaped.

“Biological ageing was accelerated in those who exercised the least and the most.”

Highly active people were on average, 1.2 years biologically older than the moderately active group and 1.6 years biologically older than the active group.

Here’s how exercising outdoors can improve your health and wellbeing.

You burn more calories and blast more fat outside

Taking exercise outside, with its wind resistance, more demanding trails and soft or uneven surfaces such as grass, really does add to the energy demand. Six weeks of running outdoors, when compared with running on the predictable conveyor belt of a treadmill, was found to improve leg muscle strength by researchers reporting in the journal PeerJ, and “induce greater physical fitness improvements”, including a bigger reduction in body fat.

Take strength training outdoors to get stronger quicker

Most studies comparing indoor and outdoor exercise have looked at aerobic activity such as running, swimming and cycling, but last year Henrique Brito, a human performance researcher at the University of Lisbon, examined whether environment makes a difference when it comes to resistance training. Brito and his colleagues tracked 53 adults as they did a body-weight circuit indoors, and another 51 adults who did the same strength workout in a park surrounded by trees. The results, published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, show that the outdoor exercisers achieved “better performance output”, demonstrated by the fact they typically completed a higher number of repetitions of each exercise — about two more crunches, squats and lunges — in a set time than the indoor group. Brito concluded that this could make a real difference to fitness and strength over time.

Outdoor workouts can reduce anxiety

Wood describes one study conducted by her colleagues at the University of Essex which showed that huge “psychological gains are experienced during physical activity in nature”. Published in the Applied Psychology of Health and Wellbeing journal, the team found that outdoor workouts reduced anxiety, anger and hostility and boosted energy. “Aspects of nature have a huge influence on our mental state,” Woods says. “Taking your workouts outside provides additional benefits for the mind and has therapeutic effects for low mood.”

Researchers from Norway and Florida asked participants to walk 500m twice: first along a tree-lined track, then on a treadmill facing a blank wall. On each occasion they were asked to wear a device that measures brain activity. The results, in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, show a dramatic difference in brain responses and activity outdoors, with participants displaying increased connectivity between brain regions involved in reasoning and attention as well as brainwaves that indicated they were feeling more relaxed.

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You are more likely to stick with exercise if you do it outdoors

A recent OnePoll survey conducted by Ordnance Survey revealed that 46 per cent of the 2,000 British adults questioned said they feel more motivated to exercise outdoors, compared with just 22 per cent who felt the same about using a gym regularly. A review of evidence by Wood’s colleagues at the University of Essex found the mood-boosting effects of exercising in nature to be the reason for better engagement and sticking at it in the longer term. “People find they enjoy exercising outside and because of that are more likely to keep it up,” Wood says.

Running indoors really does take more effort for the same fitness gains

Staring at a treadmill screen rather than absorbing the sights and sounds of nature can make running and walking feel like harder work, but a review of 55 studies involving 1,005 participants in the Journal of Sports Sciences last year found that indoor running and walking really does take more effort for the same fitness outcome. On a treadmill people inadvertently tweak their technique, chopping their stride when running and shortening their step length when walking, which results in an increase in the amount of oxygen they use to complete the activity. “Even if the intensity of exercise is comparable, people tend to find it easier outdoors than inside,” Wood says.

There’s another reason to hop off the treadmill and on to the trails: it could reduce injury risk. A study in the journal PLoS One shows that too much treadmill running at too high an incline stresses the body in a way that could lead to injury.

Forget spin classes — for real muscle gains you need to cycle outside

You might think your spin class pushes you to physical limits, but research suggests that you actually work harder cycling outside. When scientists at the University of Nebraska compared physiological and psychological responses to stationary biking in a lab environment and outdoor cycling for a paper in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, it was the outdoor workout that won, with cyclists able to pedal at a higher intensity. Others reporting in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance have shown that elite cyclists produce much higher levels of muscle power when cycling outdoors compared with performance on an indoor bike.

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Open water swimming can boost mood and reduce hot flushes

Swimming anywhere is a great whole body workout, but taking a dip in rivers and lakes has a proven effect on mood. Dr Heather Massey is a senior lecturer in sport, health and exercise science and a member of the extreme environments laboratory and clinical, health and rehabilitation research team at the University of Portsmouth. Her research found that novice outdoor swimmers who took part in a ten-week introductory course had acute and chronic reductions in negative mood as well as a boost to wellbeing.

Meanwhile, Joyce Harper, a professor of reproductive science at University College London, surveyed 1,114 women, all of them regular cold water swimmers and 785 of whom were going through the menopause for a paper in Post Reproductive Health. Harper and her colleagues discovered that 46.9 per cent of the women reported a significant improvement in anxiety, 34.5 per cent in mood swings, and 30.3 per cent in hot flushes as a result of regular swims outside. “Women said they felt it was mainly the physical and mental effects of cold water that helped their symptoms,” Harper says. “For many the effects are lessened if water is too warm, as it would be indoors, and it is both the outdoor environment and the water temperature that has particular benefits.”

Just a 15-minute session outdoors will boost your vitamin D stores

Exercise outdoors from spring to autumn and you get exposure to natural daylight that boosts your mood and vitamin D stores — exposure that you simply don’t get with artificially lit exercise studios. Vitamin D helps to regulate the amount of calcium and phosphate in the body, which is vital for healthy bones, teeth and muscles. Schedule a walk for between 11am and 3pm when the sun’s rays are at their strongest, exposing some skin such as the forearms, face and legs. According to dermatologists at the British Skin Foundation, a daily 10-15 minutes outdoors for lighter skin types and 25-40 minutes for darker skin types from April onwards tops up your vitamin D supplies while also minimising the risks of sunburn and skin cancer.