For billy blankstrue fitness is as much about building spiritual strength as it is about physical one.
“Life is not easy,” the creator of martial arts-based training, Tae Bo, tells Yahoo Life. “It’s hard to fix a broken world when you’re broken inside. But when you start to grow from within, suddenly that light that you walk with begins to reach other people.”
That’s a philosophy he’s carried with him since childhood, when martial arts were an escape from bullies who attacked him for having dyslexia. Karate, he says, gave him permission to dream big.
“At the time, no one knew what dyslexia was,” he says of the reading disability. “They put me in special education, thinking I had a mental disability, but I wasn’t. I was a shy kid with a learning disorder. And when I got involved in martial arts, it gave me the confidence to stand on my own and I realized that I could be successful.”
The word “success” is a euphemism for Blanks, 67, who created Tae Bo training (a combination of all his passions: martial arts, boxing and dance) while running a small karate studio in Quincy, Massachusetts, to end of the last century. 1970 At the time, he had no idea that he would become a pop culture phenomenon.
The idea was simple: “Put karate on the music,” understanding that every punch and kick “has to be in your heart,” he says. “I wanted women to feel like warriors.”
Originally called “karobics,” Tae Bo’s name change, intended to appeal to both men and women, combines the word “tae,” which means “legs” in Korean, and bo, a shortened form of “boxing.” His exercise video series would soon become an all-time bestseller, with an estimated 1.5 million sets sold by the late 1990s; today, Blanks’ virtual workouts continue to gather new swarms of fans online.
“It had always been a vision and a dream that one day I would come up with an exercise that would change the world,” says Blanks. His Christian faith has always shaped his philosophies around health and fitness; he even got inspiration for his on-camera persona from watching televised sermons.
“I see and act as my mind and my will” was (and still is) his mantra, he says. “Everything starts from the inside out, not from the outside in.” But that doesn’t mean his faith hasn’t been tested.
Blanks remembers a memorable business meeting in the 1990s in California, where Tae Bo was gaining immense popularity among women. Executives from “one of the largest video companies in the world” told him that he couldn’t “attract white women” in the Midwest because he was a black man.
“They said: ‘Mr. Blanks, you know, we like the stuff you talk about, but being black, we don’t think you work in the Midwest. I said, ‘Okay, that’s it. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it,’” he says, after which he and his manager leave. “My manager, his mouth only [dropped]. She couldn’t believe it.”
“I said, let’s go back to my studio and keep doing what I’m doing, you know, because eventually, maybe one day I’ll end up making a video,” he recalls saying.
Never letting things fester, Blanks says it’s all about “moving on” when faced with challenges. Also, it’s important to “stay humble” when you seemingly have the world at your fingertips.
“Personally, I have to get out of the picture, because if it wasn’t for God and if it wasn’t for the people, Billy Blanks would be nothing. I didn’t let my ego get in that way,” he says of fame. “People tell me: ‘You should retire. You must do this.’ Nerd. I want to go out. I want to be surrounded by people. I want to help people.”
True to his word, Blanks isn’t slowing down. The fitness icon continues to make Tae Bo videos for free on his Youtube channel. His latest video series, Billy’s Boomboxingavailable on ituneswas released in 2019, the first in 19 years. And he has some ideas about aging gracefully.
“I can still get up. I feel vibrant. I feel like I can do anything,” she says. “But if I wake up and start having all these negative thoughts in my head, my day will be horrible. So my goal is to get up, look in the mirror and say, ‘Okay, Billy, you’ve got to… change your mind, change your attitude. Because I know that if I want to have a good day, it won’t come alone. It’s a choice I have to make.”
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