Dick Van Dyke has revealed his secret to staying fit and healthy at the age of 99 is that he still goes to the gym three times a week.
The US actor, who rose to fame starring in Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is still working having appeared in a Coldplay music video last month.
Ahead of his upcoming 100th birthday on December 13, Van Dyke said he plans to host a “big party” to celebrate.
“I go back to 1925, I’m almost 100. This is insane,” he told fellow actors, Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen, on their Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast.
“I’m going to have a big party.”
Reflecting on how he maintains his health, he said: “Somebody said, ‘To what do you attribute your age and physical condition?’ and I said, ‘I’ve always exercised’.
“Three days a week, we go to the gym, still. Three days a week. And I think that is it.”
The Good Place star Danson recalled seeing Van Dyke at a gym when he lived in Malibu, saying: “If I got there early enough I would see you literally work out on some weight machine.
“Then, almost like you were doing circuit training, you would not walk to the next machine, you danced.
“You literally danced to the next machine and I watched that for a couple of weeks.”
Van Dyke’s wife Arlene Silver added: “He still does that.”
Danson added that when he asked Van Dyke about his routine at the time, the veteran actor told him that after his gym session he would go home to swim before getting back into bed to take a nap.
Discussing his workouts, Van Dyke said he does “a lot of stretching and yoga” as well as using weighted machines in the gym.
Last month the actor had to flee his home in Malibu after a wildfire broke out in the the area.
“Arlene and I have safely evacuated with our animals except for Bobo escaped as we were leaving,” he wrote on his official Facebook page in December.
“We’re praying he’ll be ok and that our community in Serra Retreat will survive these terrible fires.”
His 99th birthday was marked by the release of a trimmed version of Coldplay’s music video for All My Love, which stars Van Dyke and was shot at his Malibu home.
In the full director’s cut released in December, the actor says: “I’m acutely aware that I could go any day now, but I don’t know why, it doesn’t concern me, I’m not afraid of it.
“I have that feeling, totally against anything intellectual I have, that I’m going to be all right.”
Van Dyke’s career has spanned more than seven decades and earned him an array of awards including four Emmys, a Tony for Bye Bye Birdie and a Grammy for the Mary Poppins soundtrack.
He was inducted into the Television Hall Of Fame in 1995 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
