Staff Directory
Stark Center Director and IGH Co-editor
Terry Todd, Ph.D. began at the University of Texas on a full athletic scholarship in tennis. He
lettered and played in the national intercollegiate championships, but also began lifting weights, and as an
undergraduate won intercollegiate championships in weightlifting in the
super-heavyweight class. He continued lifting during graduate school and over
the next several years won national championships in both weightlifting and
powerlifting, setting national and "world-best" records in the
process. After a year and a half as managing editor of Strength
& Health magazine, the leading journal in the field at that time, Terry
began his teaching career as a faculty member at Auburn University. He later taught at Mercer University in
Terry has published five books __ Inside Powerlifting (Contemporary Books, 1978); Fitness for Athletes (Contemporary Books, 1978); Herschel Walker's Basic Training (Doubleday, 1985 & 1989); and with Jan Todd, Lift Your Way to Youthful Fitness: The Comprehensive Guide to Weight Training (Little, Brown and Company, 1985). He has also published more than 500 articles in both popular and academic publications, including Sports Illustrated, Readers' Digest, the Journal of Sport History, Men's Journal, Iron Man, Muscle & Fitness, Texas Monthly, and the National Strength and Conditioning Association Journal. He lectures often around the nation on the subjects of drugs in sports, conditioning, and sport/fitness history. For the past seven years, Todd has directed the Arnold Strongman Classic a strength contest designed to pit weightlifters, powerlifters, and professional strongman competitors against each other in events that test basic strength.
Terry served as CBS' commentator on sports medicine and drugs in the year prior to, and during, both the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympic Games. He has also worked as a color commentator on sports for CBS, NBC, ESPN, and the BBC and has appeared many times on such shows as the “McNeil/Lehrer News Hour,” the “Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” “ABC Nightly News,” “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “CNN News,” and CNN's “Newsmakers.” He has consulted for many television programs, including “60 Minutes.” He also provided commentaries on sports medicine and history for National Public Radio's Morning Edition for many years.
In 1979 Terry was inducted into the United States Powerlifting Federation's (USPF) Hall of Fame. In 1992 he was honored by the Association of Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen. Todd was selected as an inaugural member into the USA Powerlifting Association's Women's Hall of Fame in 2004. In 2005 he was inducted into the Strength Coaching Hall of Fame. In 2008 Todd received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oscar Heidenstam Foundation.
Stark Center Co-Director and IGH Co-editor
Jan Todd , Ph.D., the Roy J. McLean Fellow in Sport History__is both a sport historian and a
well-known expert on strength training. A Professor in the
Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at The University of Texas at Austin, Jan teaches courses in sport and exercise
history, sport philosophy, and sport ethics and also serves as the
department’s Undergraduate Advisor. For
many years she also supervised the weight training and conditioning classes
taught by the department. She has
written two books: Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful:
Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women (Mercer University Press,
1998) and, with her husband, Terry Todd, Lift Your Way to Youthful Fitness (Little-Brown, 1985), the first popular book to argue that weight training could be used to offset
the aging process.
Jan was also a contributor to the National Strength and Conditioning Association's (NSCA) "Position Paper on Strength Training for Female Athletes" (1989) and received the NSCA's Presidents Award in 1990 for her work on that publication. In addition, Todd has written more than one hundred articles in popular and scholarly journals on various aspects of strength training and exercise. She also lectures frequently. In 2008 Todd delivered the Seward Staley Address at the North American Society for Sport History; in 2000 she was the keynote speaker at the New England ACSM symposium on strength training; in 1999 she delivered the keynote address at the ACSM's Fitness Summit in New Orleans; and in 1998 she was the D. B. Dill Historical Lecturer for the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) at their annual meeting in Orlando.
Todd's interest in the academic study of strength and exercise grew from her personal involvement in the sport of powerlifting. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Todd was considered by both Sports Illustrated and the Guinness Book of Records to be the "strongest woman in the world." In 1982 she became the first woman inducted into the International Powerlifting Hall of Fame. In 1992 Todd received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association of Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen. Todd set world records in five bodyweight classes during her 12-year powerlifting career; her personal bests were 545 pounds in the squat and 1230 pounds in the partial deadlift. Todd was inducted into USA Powerlifting's Women's Hall of Fame in 2004, the Texas Powerlifting Hall of fame in 2005, and in 2008 she was honored by the Oscar Heidenstam Foundation in England for her contributions to the field of physical culture.
IGH Associate Editor and Business/Subscriptions Manager
Kim Beckwith, Ph.D. is a lecturer and the Coordinator of Strength and Conditioning in the Kinesiology Department. Kim met Jan and Terry Todd when she enrolled in a weight training class at UT as an undergraduate. With their encouragement, she joined the Longhorn Powerlifting Team and became one of the premier drug-free, collegiate lifters in the country. She set many American and national collegiate records in two different weight classes, won three national titles, and earned recognition as the strongest collegiate female, pound-for-pound, in the American Drug Free Powerlifting Association for three straight years.
Kim became interested in studying the history of physical culture and exercise while taking classes to earn her master's degree in Sports Administration. She began volunteering her time to Iron Game History as the business/subscriptions manager and offered to help in cataloguing the Collection. Exposure and access to so much unique physical culture history piqued her interest and eventually caused her to obtain her doctoral degree in sport history. Her dissertation examined the life and impact of one of the pioneers of American weight training: "Building Strength: Alan Calvert, the Milo Bar-bell Company, and the Modernization of American Weight Training."
Before returning to graduate school, Kim was a faculty member at Austin Community College, teaching there from 1991 to 2000. Since 1995 she has served as the coach of the Longhorn Powerlifting Team and has directed the USAPL Longhorn Open Powerlifting Championships each fall. She is also currently serving as the USAPL Texas State Chair.
