They called us muscle heads: Los Angeles fitness legend Terry Robinson shares his secrets for healthy longevity.

TERRY ROBINSON rises every weekday morning at 3:00, puts on his Sports Club L.A. trainer's uniform, and goes to work. At 4:30, he checks to make sure that the club is clean, all the machines are in working order, and that towels, facial tissues, hair dryers, etc., are at the ready. Then at 5:00 a.m., Terry opens the massive, luxurious health club located in the center of trendy West Los Angeles and begins greeting guests, sharing jokes and family stories, and trading books he's recently read.

Around 6:30, Terry will begin lifting weights for an hour--four sets of twenty-five reps on machine after machine. He'll cool down with a half-hour swim to stretch out his muscles.

Terry Robinson ... is 90.

After his early-morning workout, he'll return home to care for his wheelchair-bound partner in life. Terry met Sylvia 31 years ago. She'd been paralyzed from the waist down after being struck by a drunk driver, and her sister had taken her to the facility for rehabilitation. Sylvia wasn't sure she could live the life of a crippled person until she met Mr. Robinson who turned out to be Mr. Right. "You're not crippled," he told her as he carried her to the exercise equipment. "You're just sitting down." He made her laugh. He still does.

Physical Trainer

Terry has been working as a trainer since 1935 when he served as a professional instructor in a gym in New York. During World War II, he attended the Army's physical training school where he learned to prepare troops who were headed for combat in the Pacific. After the war, he won bodybuilding titles such as "Mr. New York City" and accepted a job training Hollywood's brightest stars for Louis B. Mayer at MGM Studios. "Back then," Terry laughs, "they called us 'muscleheads.'"

Mr. Robinson has outlived all of his critics.

"Today everybody goes to a gymnasium," he says with a chuckle.

Terry represents an affront to every actuarial table ever invented. However he doesn't see himself as some sort of genetic fluke who beat the odds for no particular reason. Instead Robinson credits his lifetime love of training, eating right, and using his brain--an organ not commonly identified with bodybuilders--as the secrets of his longevity. He believes that we can all add years to our lives simply by getting into an intelligent program of weight training and aerobic exercise, no matter how old we are.

"Older people absolutely need weight training," Terry emphasizes. "They don't need to lift heavy weights--that's for the kids. Instead, older people benefit most from lifting relatively low amounts of weight, but doing so with many repetitions. This is what builds endurance. When you get up there in age, endurance is your best friend.

"My best advice to anyone of any age who wants to start working out is to find a trainer," Terry states. "You can get a great trainer at any gym, and they can show you how to maximize the use of your time, get great results, and avoid injury. It's the best way to go, especially for older people."

Mind Exercises

Robinson exercises his mind as much as his pecs and glutes. He reads an average of four books a month, trading recommendations with Sports Club L.A. members, many of whom have written the books they recommend. Robinson reads widely in the classics and lectures to new classes of Sports Club L.A. trainers on the ancient wisdom of Hippocrates, Maimonides, Galen, and other great thinkers.

"Inactivity, saps the vigor of the mind and the body," Robinson says.

"Terry's a legend," says friend and longtime Sports Club L.A. member Larry Field, a 70-year-old Beverly Hills real-estate developer. "I look forward to my breakfast every morning with him and our friends. It keeps us all young."

Robinson's health ministry does not extend solely to gym members and trainers. While at MGM, he grew close to the legendary opera star Mario Lanza. When Lanza passed away at an extremely young age, Robinson adopted the singer's four children and raised them as his own. "I was never looking for medals," he says. "It was the right thing to do."

Today Terry is as much a fixture in West Los Angeles as is the region's dreaded rush hour traffic. It's almost impossible to imagine L.A. without either of them. He continues to train himself, teach other trainers, paint, read, meditate, care for his partner, and share fitness tips with other members (many of whom are a third his age and can't keep up with him on the weight machines).

How much time does Robinson spend looking back on his bodybuilding days of yore, his years at MGM, or his military service? No time at all. "The future," Robinson says. "That's what interests me the most. The future."

At 90, after his daily workouts and swims, the future shines bright for Terry Robinson.

Irvine, California-based businessman and triathlete Michael Levin owns and operates www.Writer2Author.com and www.BusinessGhost.com.