Magazine Heavyweight Kennedy in Stellar Shape at 70

Tosca Reno and Robert Kennedy

Robert Kennedy's creations fill newstands everywhere - MuscleMag International, Oxygen, Maximum Fitness, Reps, American Curves and Clean Eating.

September 15, 2008 

By CARY CASTAGNA

Robert Kennedy is a behemoth in the health and fitness publishing world.

Magazine racks in stores seemingly everywhere are filled with his creations - MuscleMag International, Oxygen, Maximum Fitness, Reps, American Curves and Clean Eating.

The Canadian-based newsstand heavyweight is also the author of more than 50 books on fitness, nutrition and bodybuilding.

With all the information Kennedy disseminates, it's no wonder he's in stellar shape at 70 years old - weighing a lean and sculpted 182 pounds at six-foot-nil.

But like most success stories, his begins rather humbly.

The pivotal point in his journey to becoming a publishing mogul, bodybuilding icon and fitness guru dates back to one fateful day when he was about 13. Kennedy recalls that he was in the living room of his family home in England.

"I must've been in shorts or something like that and my father just looked at me and said, 'You're skinny!' " the native of Norfolk, England, tells Sun Media in a phone interview from the offices of Robert Kennedy Publishing in Mississauga, Ont. "That really hit home with me. I guess it sowed a seed that I was terribly thin, which I was."

Not long after, Kennedy sent away for a free brochure advertising the legendary Charles Atlas muscle-building program. He notes with a chuckle that he couldn't afford the actual program so he just studied the brochure.

The skinny teen was soon trying different exercises, some gleaned from early muscle magazines.

When he went to art school in England at the age of 16, Kennedy wound up making his own set of barbells with a like-minded, muscle-hungry friend.

"We would put a pole in a biscuit tin and a few stones, bricks and rocks and then covered it with plaster of Paris, which poured on top and hardened," he explains. "I remember exactly one was 125 pounds and one was 185 pounds and we trained with those at lunch hour."

Although he never had the requisite mass to become Mr. Universe (his arms measured a respectable 18 Ohm inches in diameter in his prime), he was crowned France's Mr. Cannes in 1967.

Kennedy, however, would reach far greater heights as a magazine publisher.

While working as an art teacher in the 1950s and '60s, he wrote articles and created illustrations for Weider publications and many of the other muscle magazines of the day.

Eventually, after immigrating to Canada in the late '60s, Kennedy decided to start his own magazine. In 1974, MuscleMag was born. In the early days, he put the magazine together on a kitchen table in Brampton, Ont.

Nearly 35 years later, MuscleMag is the centrepiece of a stable of six health and fitness magazines that have reportedly cornered nearly 50% of the market with a readership of more than three million.

"If you try things in life, things start to happen and they build up and before you know it you've done certain things," he says. "You never feel that you're a real success in life. It's just OK. I did pretty good."

Throughout it all, Kennedy - obviously bitten by the proverbial iron bug - hasn't stopped pumping iron.

These days, he and wife Tosca Reno lift weights up to five days a week in the gym at their home in Caledon, a town about 60 km northeast of Toronto.

Typically focusing on two bodyparts per workout, they don't dilly-dally.

"She does a set, I do a set," Kennedy explains, noting their weight-training sessions usually don't last more than 45 minutes. "We can still talk, but the talk is usually me encouraging her to do more reps or her doing that for me. We certainly don't get into conversations and sit down and chat or read the newspaper."

The two do cardio separately. While his "maniac" 49-year-old wife often logs four to five hours a week of cardio, Kennedy says he's not quite as ambitious. When he does fit it in, his cardio sessions consist of about 30 minutes of running outside or on the treadmill.

"I should do a little more than I do. I do it, but not that much," he says, noting the couple has also been known to go downhill skiing, ice skating and horseback riding.

Like Reno, Kennedy eats clean 99% of the time.

For breakfast for example, he typically has hot oatmeal with berries, an egg-white omelette and a round of whole wheat toast.

His four or five other daily meals are composed of a variety of wholesome foods, including fish, chicken breasts, steamed veggies and rice.

He doesn't smoke or drink, although he says he's "not averse to a glass of wine now and again."

Indeed, keeping fit is Kennedy's life. And although the senior citizen isn't quite as buff as he once was back in the 1960s and '70s, he is determined to keep practising what he preaches.

"There's no better feeling in the world than being fit and strong," says the famous publisher who still takes an active role with his magazines. "Having a million dollars in the bank doesn't mean a thing if you feel lousy."

Source:  Edmonton Sun