Let me start by saying this about my gig at Testosterone Muscle: It would be a dream job, except for the crazy, out-of-control egos of my employers.

Take that 10-year anniversary celebration last May. Have you ever seen such a display of chest-thumping, pelvis-pumping self-congratulation? It's a wonder Tim and TC didn't tear multiple rotator-cuff muscles with all those hubristic pats to their own ostentatiously hypertrophied backs.

Oh, wait. That didn't really happen, did it?

When I asked TC why there was no celebration of the site's first 10 years online, his answer was uncharacteristically subdued: "I toyed with the idea." Which is a humble way of saying, "It would've been fun, but we had better things to do."

Like, say, hiring me as editorial director in July, and then adding staff writer Nate Green in August. We joined a staff that includes TC, our editor-in-chief, writer Chris Shugart, full-time copyeditors Matthew Weeldryer and Chris Colucci, and Figure Athlete editor Olesya Novik, along with graphic artists extraordinaire Rob Grishow, Corey Blake, and Phil Abel, and Senior Web Designer/Internet Manager Matthew Rinehart, and Senior Application Developer/System Administrator Josh Szmajda, and Application Developer Zac Bradshaw.

Think about that for a moment: seven full-time writers and editors and a sizable full-time managerial/support staff on a single-sponsor online magazine that pays for its content but doesn't charge readers to see it. Nor does Testosterone accept outside advertising. I can't say for sure that it's a unique business model, but I don't know of anything else that comes close. And if I did, I'd marvel that it had survived 10 years.

But not only has Testosterone survived, it's kept 10 years' worth of content free to anyone who clicks on it, never changed its single-sponsor business model, maintained its entertaining and iconoclastic editorial voice, and kept alive the magazine's original "WTF, we'll try anything once" spirit of adventure.

What originally drew me to the site in 1998 is what made me want to work here in 2008, and it's the model all of us on the staff strive to build upon.

To me, that's worth celebrating.

The Poliquin Printables

My Testosterone experience started with a heads-up from Mike Mejia. Mike was a personal trainer working in Manhattan, where we did our photo shoots for Men's Health. I had joined the magazine as fitness editor in 1998, and Mike quickly became our most trusted source for training information. He also helped us supervise our exercise photography.

A magazine photo shoot is among the most excruciatingly dull experiences you can put yourself through. Back before digital photography became standard, my job at a shoot involved hour after hour of watching a half-naked male model pretend to lift weights while a photographer clicked roll after roll of film. The only thing more boring than watching it in real time was going through the slides two weeks later to figure out which of dozens of nearly identical pictures was slightly more print-worthy than the others.

When the camera wasn't clicking, there were hours of standing around while assistants adjusted lights or waited for Polaroids to develop so they could decide if the lights needed even more adjusting.

The pure tedium of those pre-digital shoots left Mike and me with hours to talk about training. A lot of those conversations in '98 were about articles we read on Testosterone.net. After Mike told me about the site, which launched May 15, I subscribed to the site's newsletter. Soon I found myself looking forward to those Friday-afternoon emails, with links to the week's new articles.

I'm pretty sure I was the first mainstream journalist to read Testosterone religiously, and it wasn't long before its influence began to show up in the workout features of Men's Health.

Before, it was rare to see a truly innovative, interesting, or even functional exercise in a newsstand fitness magazine. "New" exercises tended to be silly variations on movements everyone knew — a cable front raise performed while lying down in front of the weight stack, for example. (To anyone who actually went into a gym and tried that one, I apologize.) I cringe when I look back on some of the workouts that appeared in Men's Fitness and Men's Health on my watch.

But thanks to Testosterone, things began to change. In the October '98 issue of MH, for example, an article written by Mike quoted Charles Poliquin, and featured exercises like Cuban presses and plyometric push-ups between boxes.

Poliquin saved us from ourselves.

Sometime in the early '00s I had a conversation with a journalist friend whom I hadn't been in contact with since my days at Men's Fitness. He was surprised to hear I was still working the fitness beat, and even more surprised to hear that I wasn't absolutely fucking miserable with the course my career had taken.

"You told me that once you get beyond the whole machines-vs.-free-weights thing, there aren't too many new ways to describe how to do a curl," he reminded me. "And unless someone reinvents human physiology sometime soon, you thought this gig would eventually be a dead end."

The quote was accurate, but it still caught me off guard. I'd blocked out memories of the days when I viewed training articles as a monochromatic loop of biceps curls, bench presses, and ab crunches.

Thanks to TESTOSTERONE, the world I wrote about now seemed infinite.

There Are No Small Exercises, Only Small Fitness Journalists

The human body, of course, is the same collection of flesh and fluid that Shakespeare described as "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals," and, in the next breath, "the quintessence of dust." (Which description more closely matches your perception probably depends on how often you listen to AM radio.)

But my view of how to train the human body had expanded exponentially. After reading this article, I knew about Louie Simmons and his radically different approach to training for strength and power. It took a while, but eventually phrases like "dynamic effort" and "max effort" showed up on my workout logs. And not long after that, I hit PRs in all my lifts. Though my numbers are undoubtedly humble compared to yours, I thought it was pretty cool to be stronger than ever in my mid-40s.

Thanks to this article by Ian King, I learned the difference between training to build your body and training to trash it.

Thanks to any number of articles by Poliquin, I had something new to try every time I went into the gym. Arm exercises on a Swiss ball? Sure, why not? Snatch-grip deadlifts off a platform? Worth a try.

But if there's a single article that changed my approach to training — and, by extension, the way I assigned, edited, and wrote articles about training — it's this one by Don Alessi.

The title is "Booming Biceps, Part 1," but it was the subhead that grabbed me: "How to unleash your core strength to achieve explosive arm development." The key to its impact was this single line: "Once your core is stabilized, priority is placed on the muscles further up the line."

The article ran in October 2001, and although it took a while for the message to sink in, the idea that everything we want from our workouts starts at the center of the body became more important to my view of training with each passing year. It's why I jumped at the chance to edit Mark Verstegen's book, Core Performance, which came out in 2004, and why the training programs in the books I've worked on since then have such a strong emphasis on basic structural development and spend hardly any time on direct work for the biceps and triceps.

Alessi: a man of core values.

First Principles

What I learned from reading Testosterone was important to me, personally and professionally. But whom I learned it from was the key to some of my most successful and gratifying projects.

The first example is Ian King. After reading his articles on this site, I got in touch with him. We developed a series of workout features for Men's Health, and soon after wrote The Book of Muscle together. Five years after publication, you can still find it at Borders and Barnes & Noble in its original form — an oversized, $35 hardcover.  

Then there's Chad Waterbury. I didn't know what to expect when I heard Chad would be attending the 2005 JP Fitness Summit in Little Rock. He'd been writing for Testosterone for three and a half years, but I hadn't yet tried any of his workouts. I was impressed by his presentation at the summit, and soon after contacted him about a book I was thinking about writing.

The book was a nonstarter, but the program Chad wrote for the book was so amazing that I decided to scrap my project and help him edit his own book, Muscle Revolution. The program he wrote for my book became the centerpiece of his.

Two years later, at the 2007 JP Fitness Summit, Chad gave a presentation on his latest idea, which he summed up several weeks later in an article called "Everything Is About to Change."

We wrote a proposal for a book called The Size Principles, based on the lecture and article. That book, now titled Huge in a Hurry, comes out December 9.

But one of the most interesting and successful relationships I developed with a Testosterone author was based on the fact that I refused to work with him. John Berardi has never let me forget that.

I met John at the 2000 ACSM conference in Indianapolis. He was a grad student, presenting a paper on ribose supplementation. (John's first article for Testosterone was a review of that conference.)

I crushed John's spirit that day in Indy — or would have, if he were the type to give up when faced with a challenge. He asked, politely, if he could submit articles to MH. I told him no.

It had nothing to do with his actual qualifications. At the time, he was a Ph.D. candidate at Western Ontario, where he was studying under Peter Lemon, a researcher whose studies we referred to regularly at the magazine. (Dr. Lemon designed the workout programs for Hard Body Plan, one of the first books I worked on. It came out a few months after I shattered John's hopes and dreams.)

The problem was, John didn't clear two significant MH hurdles. He wasn't a registered dietitian, and didn't have an advanced degree. (He'd left a master's program to work on his doctorate at Western Ontario.) We could've quoted him in an article, if we were writing about a subject he'd explored in his published studies. But we couldn't give him a byline unless he wanted to turn into a journalist, interviewing other people who'd published studies.

To John's credit, he never held the spirit-crushing thing against me, as I discovered three years later, when I bumped into John at the ACSM conference in San Francisco. I hung out with him and his friends throughout the event, including an extraordinarily fit and attractive young woman named Cassandra Forsythe. John, Cass, and Dave Barr wrote a three-part series summing up the conference for T-Mag, the site's name in those days. (Part 1, written by Cass, is here.)

You may wonder why this is important. To you, I confess, it isn't. To me, it made a world of difference, because when I needed a female coauthor for The New Rules of Lifting for Women, Cass was the first person I thought of.

John? I think he'd agree that things worked out pretty well without my help at that formative stage of his career. After building a rep and developing an enthusiastic base of readers here, he published two books with my former employer, and now runs a thriving company called Precision Nutrition. He also got that graduate degree, allowing him to change his first name to "Dr."

But he still busts my chops about the time I thwarted his ambitions, however temporarily.

Berardi's career got huge in a hurry.

Gnarly and Me

So far, as you may have noticed, all the benefits of faithful Testosterone reading seem to be flowing in one direction: to me. Which is totally fine, if you happen to be me, or one of the four others who depend on me for food, shelter, and the occasional DVD rental.

(And I haven't even mentioned the interview I did with Chris Shugart back in 2004, in which I offered this assessment of magazine fitness editors: "Well, of course we know our shit! We read T-Nation!")

I made minor contributions to the Testosterone brand over the years. TC hired me to copyedited his book, for example, which wasn't exactly heavy lifting. The most I had to do was convince the author that the plural of "sailor" isn't "semen."

Mostly, though, I just enjoyed the content. Whether it was called Testosterone.net, T-Mag, T-Nation, or, roughly translated from the Russian, "those panty-sniffers," there was always something here that I found enlightening or entertaining.

If you asked me to name my all-time favorite articles, the answer I give you one day might be entirely different from the list I'd offer the next. Catch me in the gym, and I'd probably say that my favorites are the ones that combine fresh knowledge with exercises I haven't yet tried — Mike Boyle on core training, Nick Tumminello's fresh look at push-ups, Christian Thibeaudeau's primer on the power snatch, and Eric Cressey's "10 Uses for a Smith Machine" are all perfect examples.

Ask me the same question over beers one night, and I'd probably mention Chris Shugart's otherworldly interview with Paul Chek, "Rash Riprock's" expose of sexual perversity in professional bodybuilding, or TC's annual Soy Awards (the first one is here.)

Ask me when I'm sober and I'd be likely to mention Chris' "Merry Christmas, Bob" or "Jared Is Still a Dork". (True story: Jared Fogle and his Subway Diet were unleashed upon the world by MH; he was one of four guys featured in an article in the December 1999 issue called "Stupid Diets... that Work!" To protect his privacy, he was identified only as "James." When a rep from Subway called, trying to get in touch with him, our office manager dutifully called Jared to pass along the message. His response: "Why would they want to talk to me?")

And I couldn't begin to figure out which of TC's Atomic Dog columns made me laugh harder than any others. The story I told in my blurb on the back cover of the book is true: I reviewed the galleys of Atomic Dog while sitting in the middle of the back row of a 757. The woman to my left was reading a Bible while I giggled over TC's collected wisdom and dick jokes (I might have been reading this column, although I can't really be sure). Which was weird enough on its own. But then we hit turbulence while flying over one of the flyover states. Nothing creates social distance like being the only one laughing while everyone else is wondering if they're going to shuffle off the mortal coil in a wheat field in Kansas.

For that — along with all the other laughs, information, exercise tips, and coauthors I've gotten over the past 10 years — I have Testosterone to thank. And if the site fails to provide future readers with the same quality of advice and entertainment you and I have enjoyed, Testosterone has me to blame.

That's a heavy burden, but I think it's about time I started giving something back.