Building Better Athletes: An Illustrated History
Jan Todd, the Roy J. McLean Fellow in Sport History, is a Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin. At the University of Texas Todd directs the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Sport Studies and teaches Sport and Physical Culture History. She currently has three doctoral students studying aspects of the history of strength and conditioning. She also serves on the Sport Management faculty and teaches sport philosophy and sport ethics.
Jan Todd, with her husband, Terry Todd, are the founders and co-directors of the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, the largest archive in the world devoted to the study of physical fitness, resistance training, and alternative medicine. Todd also serves as co-editor of Iron Game History: The Journal of Physical Culture, a scholarly periodical exploring the history of exercise and physical fitness founded by the Todds in 1990.
Todd’s research focuses on the history of exercise, strongmen, strongwomen and the history of strength and conditioning science. 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 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. In addition, Todd has written more than a hundred articles in popular and scholarly journals on various aspects of sport and exercise history, anabolic steroids, strength training, and exercise. Todd lectures frequently and, in 1998, was named the D. B. Dill Historical Lecturer for the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). She was also a keynote speaker at the ACSM’s 1999 Fitness Summit in New Orleans and delivered the Seward Staley Honor address at the North American Society for Sport History in 2008. As evidence of the high regard Todd enjoys in her profession, she was inducted into the National Academy of Kinesiology in 2011, one of the highest honors awarded in the field. She also received in 2012 the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research Gary A. Dudley Manuscript Excellence Award, for an article she wrote with co-authors Terry Todd and Jason Shurley on Thomas L. DeLorme and the use of resistance exercise in rehabilitation during World War II.
Todd’s interest in the academic study of sport 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.” Todd set world records in five bodyweight classes during her 12-year powerlifting career and was the first woman inducted into the International Powerlifting Hall of Fame. In addition to her career as an athlete, however, Todd served as the head administrator for both US and international women's powerlifting in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Todd’s interest in the academic study of strength and exercise grew from her personal involvement in the sport of powerlifting. In the late 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.” Todd set world records in five bodyweight classes during her 12-year powerlifting career and was the first woman inducted into the International Powerlifting Hall of Fame. She has also been inducted into USA Powerlifting Hall of Fame (1992) the National Fitness Hall of Fame (2010); the Oldetime Barbell and Strongman Association Hall of Fame (1990); and she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oscar Heidenstam Foundation in England in 2008.
