by the editors
Testosterone Nation is made up of an eclectic group of people. We have bodybuilding experts, strength and conditioning coaches, nutrition gurus, supplement formulators, fitness trainers, and pharmaceutical phenoms, just to name a few.
And these aren't a bunch of armchair experts either. Sure, they've consulted and trained Olympic and professional athletes and have written a whole library of books and articles, but you'll also find them under the iron and in the trenches themselves. It's that combination of edgy intelligence, education, and real world experience that defines the typical T-Nation writer.
Want to know more? Read on. Meet the men of Testosterone Nation.
Dr. Berardi's philosophy is simple: people from all walks of life, from soccer stars to soccer moms, should have access to the most recent developments in health, exercise, and nutrient science. John has one purpose: to take the latest in advanced nutrition research and teach it to others in an easy-to-understand way that doesn't require the student to have an advanced degree.
Berardi has earned a doctoral degree from the University of Western Ontario with a specialization in the area of exercise biology and nutrient biochemistry. Prior to his doctoral studies, he studied Exercise Science at Eastern Michigan University (Masters program) as well as Health Science, Psychology, and Philosophy at Lock Haven University.
Throughout, John's research has focused on the interaction between nutrition, sports supplementation, and exercise performance. This research has led to the publication of eight scientific abstracts, twelve scientific papers and textbook chapters, and over a dozen presentations at scientific meetings. John has also taught college courses in Strength Training, Exercise Science, Laboratory Techniques in Exercise Science, Nutrient Metabolism, Fitness and Wellness, and Exercise Nutrition. He's also been an adjunct associate professor of Exercise Science at the University of Texas in Austin.
Dr. Berardi has worked in the exercise and nutrition arena for over a decade, working with individuals from all walks of life, from the sedentary to athletes at the highest level of sport. He's the director of performance nutrition for the Canadian National Cross Country and Alpine Ski Teams and the Canadian National Canoe/Kayak Teams. He's also been the performance nutrition consultant to a number of elite level individual athletes, sports teams, and Olympic training centers.
JB has consulted with individual athletes in nearly every sport including professional football (NFL and CFL), professional hockey (NHL and AHL), professional baseball (MLB), professional basketball (NBA) and more. John is also a member of the board of directors for the International Youth Conditioning Association, the premier international authority with respect to athletic development and young athlete-based conditioning.
Dr. Berardi has published over 200 popular press articles and has authored or co-authored four books including: Gourmet Nutrition, Scrawny to Brawny, The Grappler's Guide to Sports Nutrition, and Rev It Up.
Alwyn Cosgrove is one of the most in-demand and exciting coaches, writers, and speakers in the fitness industry today. A native of Scotland, this former martial arts champion turned performance coach is really making a name for himself in the muscle biz. He currently spends his time lecturing, teaching, training, and writing. He's also the owner of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, California.
For the past sixteen years Alwyn has been committed to achieving excellence in the field of fitness training and athletic preparation. Specializing in performance enhancement, Alwyn has helped countless individuals and athletes reach their goals through sound scientific training.
Alwyn has been a featured presenter at several national conferences in the fitness industry and has produced several training manuals and educational DVD's. His no BS approach and fiery opinions make him a real standout in the industry.
Eric Cressey, M.A., C.S.C.S., has helped athletes of all levels – from youth sports to the professional and Olympic ranks – achieve their highest levels of performance.
Eric earned his Master's Degree in Kinesiology with a concentration in Exercise Science from the University of Connecticut. There he was involved in the strength and conditioning of varsity athletes and research in the human performance laboratory. Specializing in functional anatomy and biomechanics as they related to injury prevention, rehabilitation, and program design, Cressey is a highly sought-after coach for healthy and injured athletes alike.
Cressey has also teamed with fellow T-Nation contributor Mike Robertson in creating Magnificent Mobility, a DVD that highlights dozens of drills the two have used to improve health and performance in their athletes.
A much-invited guest speaker at both the regional and national levels, Cressey is also an accomplished competitive powerlifter who holds several state, national, and world records. He trains at the renowned South Side Gym in Stratford, Connecticut.
Dan John may or may not be your typical coach, but he's definitely the kind of coach we wish we would've had in high school and college!
A Fulbright Scholar to Egypt, Dan has advanced degrees in history and religious education. He's traveled the world dealing with parasites, customs officials, and a terrible accent in every language he has learned, so much so that both Turkish and Hebrew speakers have asked him to stop speaking their languages.
When not working as a professor of religious studies, Danny is a fulltime strength coach and Head Track and Field coach at Juan Diego Catholic High School in Draper, Utah. Danny has multiple national and state championships in the discus, Olympic lifting, Highland Games, and the Weight Pentathalon, an event in which he has held the American record.
Dan is also the proud father of Kelly and Lindsay, and the husband of Tiffini, who maintains that "long suffering" should not be her middle name. In his spare time, he can be found dealing with the dog and the cat and throwing things in the backyard, often while wearing a kilt.
With more than his share of degrees in nutrition and exercise physiology to back it up, Dr. Lonnie Lowery has been a writer and university professor for a number of years.
Throughout his years of mild-mannered teaching, research, and academic writing, Lonnie has remained faithful to his bodybuilding and "warrior" roots – lifting, sparring, competing in bodybuilding, and staying involved in a lifestyle that would make many professors cower.
In fact, as far as nutritionists go, he's about as traditional as an Amish TV repairman. But whether he's playing Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, Lowery continues to pursue a lifestyle that heartily expresses the Y chromosome. That pursuit includes reaching a massive "classroom" of like-minded warrior nerds via T-Nation.
Charles Poliquin is a native of Ottawa, Canada. While completing graduate studies in Exercise Physiology, Charles began coaching athletes, a career move that has resulted in hundreds of medals, wins, and personal bests of many elite athletes. He's known worldwide for producing faster athletes. When a country wants a gold medal, they come to Charles.
Coach Poliquin has been hailed as the most successful strength coach in the world, having coached Olympic medalists in twelve different sports including the US female track and field team for the Olympics in 2000.
He's spent years researching European journals (he's fluent in English, French, and German) and speaking to other coaches and scientists in his quest to optimize training methods. Charles has perfected the art of writing routines that produce results, and his books and courses are the culmination of his theories and knowledge.
Poliquin has lectured extensively on practical and theoretical aspects of physical conditioning in eight different countries and in three different languages. He's also written over 500 articles and his work has been translated in seven different languages. Charles holds a B.Sc.in Kinesiology and M.Sc. in Exercise Physiology.
Okay, that pic's really of Regis Philbin and not Bill Roberts. We asked Bill for a pic and some more background info, but he was too busy to get back to us.
We'll just let you know that Bill has a PhD in Chemistry and specializes in chemical delivery systems. Together with Tim Patterson and other members of the Biotest research team, they've come up with some pretty amazing supplements.
Mike Robertson is the President of Robertson Training Systems and the Director of Custom Athletics in Indianapolis, Indiana. Mike has made a name for himself as one of the premier performance coaches in the world, helping clients and athletes from all walks of life achieve their physique and sports performance goals.
Mike received his Masters degree in Sports Biomechanics at Ball State University. His graduate assistantship was performed in the Biomechanics Lab, a division of the Human Performance Lab. In his time there, Mike was responsible for setting up a complete online exercise database, assisting in research on strength and power development, and also playing an integral role in starting up the strength diagnosis clinic.
Working in the athletic weightroom is where Mike found his calling, however, and he put in nearly 1400 volunteer hours as an assistant strength and conditioning coach in two year's time. Mike worked primarily with the football, volleyball, and soccer teams, while counseling and coaching individual athletes from all of Ball State's 26 varsity sports.
Finally, Mike is an accomplished athlete and coach in the sport of powerlifting. He has totaled 1400 pounds in the 198 pound weight class, and has improved in each and every meet he's attended. Mike has coached several national champions in the collegiate ranks, and as an assistant coach for the 2004 USA World Bench Press Team, Mike helped the team clinch a second and first place finish for the men's and women's teams, respectively.
Chris Shugart, assistant editor of T-Nation and feature writer, earned his college degrees in Psychology, English, and Education from Hardin Simmons University in Texas. In the last several years, he's published hundreds of articles, essays, interviews, exposés, and blogs. If you had to put a label on him, you could call Chris an expert in real-world motivation and the psychological aspects of fat loss and hypertrophy.
Shugart has traveled to Thailand and Mexico to write investigative reports on the drug scene. He's also consulted with television producers and has appeared on HBO's Real Sports as well as several popular radio programs.
Dave Tate is one of America's leading authorities in the development of maximal strength and conditioning. Dave is known for his ability to make the complex subjects simple and usable, allowing his audiences to reach levels of strength they never would've thought possible.
Dave has addressed thousands of strength coaches, powerlifters, personal trainers, and strength athletes on the subjects of maximal strength development. Many of these include NFL franchises, D-1 universities, professional athletes, elite powerlifters, and many of the strongest men and women to walk the planet. Through Dave's articles, seminars, consultations, and his business, EliteFTS, he's helped and inspired millions.
Dave has a BS is Exercise Science from the University of Toledo but also has multiple degrees from the school of hard knocks. He's been competing in the sport of powerlifting since 1985, acquiring four elite totals over the years with best lifts of a 935 squat, a 610 bench, and a 740 pound deadlift. Dave has made it his passion to study and discover why people get strong. He's also authored several training manuals, books, and DVDs, including his newest work, Under the Bar.
Dave is married with two children and lives in London, Ohio. He's very active in the community and spends much of his free time doing nonprofit business development training with many small business owners.
Prior to TC, bodybuilding mags were, for the most part, dry, boring, and downright embarrassing. The writing was bad and if the editors didn't have any decent articles, they filled the mag with page after page of fitness models in bikinis.
Enter TC. He established the new bodybuilding journalism: investigative reports, consumer advocacy, and articles with actual scientific references, all written in an exciting style that's often imitated (but rarely successfully).
TC's easily the most-published author in the sport, having written, at last estimate, around 1500 articles since 1990. As Editor-in-chief of Muscle Media 2000, TC was awarded Science Writer of the Year by the now defunct Bodybuilding Academy.
In his career, TC has been threatened, maligned, sued, and occasionally praised. Regardless of what you think of him, he's never boring.
Aside from his writing ability, TC is often referred to as the "star maker" as he's discovered and helped establish the career of several of the world's most renowned writers/coaches.
Today, TC assists his partner, Tim Patterson, in running Testosterone-Nation and Biotest.
TC has a joint BA degree in English Language and Literature, a BS in Microbiology, and postgraduate credits in all three areas. He also has a minor or a near minor in just about every Trivial Pursuit category. Oh yeah, he also knows a thing or two about lifting and is T-Nation's resident expert on the hormone Testosterone.
Christian Thibaudeau has risen to the top of the strength training field in the last few years, earning respect and praise from both athletes and coaches. He's worked with many athletes from more than 26 different sports ranking from the elite junior level to international amateurs and professionals.
Christian believes in the saying "Leaders lead from the front, not from the back" and has competed in Olympic weightlifting, bodybuilding, and strongman. He's the author of the widely acclaimed Black Book of Training Secrets as well as Theory and Application of Modern Strength and Power Methods. He also produced a training DVD called Cluster Training.
A respected speaker, "Thib" frequently gives seminars for the Quebec Bodybuilding Federation and Coach Export with the aim of creating new strength coaches and personal trainers. The topics he covers range from bodybuilding and body composition training up to elite performance training. In that regard, he's one of the most versatile coaches in the business.
In the trenches, he's achieved a 435 pound raw bench press, 525 x 5 on the raw full squat, 345 x 5 reps in the power clean from the hang, and 295 in the snatch (wearing straps). In his academic career, Christian has earned his B.Sc. in Exercise Science and completed his M.Sc. in Biomechanics.
Thibaudeau leads from the front alright, way out in the front!
Chad Waterbury is a physiologist who specializes in performance enhancement and muscular development. He began training at the age of 13 with little more than a barbell set and a few muscle magazines.
Chad soon realized that many of the programs extolled in newsstand publications were of little value to most strength and hypertrophy-seeking individuals. Therefore, he sought higher education and quickly finished two B.S. degrees in Human Biology and Physical Science.
After finishing his first two degrees, he moved to Chicago and secured a position as head trainer at a health club in downtown Chicago. Soon after, he moved to Tucson, Arizona, and started a successful strength and conditioning training business. While working in Tucson, he finished an M.S. in Physiology at the University of Arizona. During his M.S. studies, he extensively researched the neurophysiology of human movement and performance.
Chad currently consults and trains powerlifters, bodybuilders, military personnel, and fitness enthusiasts. In addition, he consults and lectures around the United States. Chad's research, education, and experience combine to produce novel training techniques for individuals at all levels of the fitness spectrum.
Cy Willson is the current Assistant Director of Research and Development for Biotest Laboratories. His undergraduate major was biotechnology with a minor in chemistry. Cy is currently pursuing a Doctor of Pharmacy degree with expected completion in 2007. After that he plans to specialize in pharmacotherapy.
Cy's been writing for T-Nation for over five years, with interests primarily in the pharmacological and endocrinological aspects of bodybuilding drugs and supplements. He's been an avid weight trainer for over ten years and has consulted with collegiate and professional athletes in various sports and events. Cy's also been working with a physician recently on a new application for the drug, anastrozole.
In short, Cy's so smart he scares us sometimes.
In the gym, in the lab, in the library, and in the locker room, T-Nation writers and staff remain on the bleeding edge of training and nutrition evolution. We're glad they've made T-Nation home!
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