There are a million reasons to love Thorne – our quality, our efficacy, our rigorous testing, and of course, our athletic partnerships.

As some of your favorite teams and athletes get ready to compete on the world’s biggest stage, our in-house experts took some time to explain how Thorne supports their world-class performances with world-class supplements and education.

How did Thorne partner with U.S. National Teams and athletes in the first place?

Today, Thorne is proud to be the exclusive wellness partner with numerous U.S. National Teams and professional athletes, including three-time shot put World Champion Ryan Crouser, professional U.S. tennis player Madison Keys, and 2024 World Champion Boston Celtics Point Guard Jrue Holiday among many others, but we didn’t get there overnight.

Although we were founded in 1984, it wasn’t until 2016 when two-time U.S. Weightlifting Olympian Wes Barnett, Thorne’s Vice President of Athletic & Corporate Business Development, got involved that Thorne was able to enter this highly competitive, very specialized market.

“Thorne was really the trailblazer,” says Barnett. “Before Thorne, National Teams would never consider working with a supplement company due to the risk it posed to the athletes.”

Barnett was working at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), where he saw athletes failing drug tests attributed to contaminated supplements. This inspired him to begin a quest to find a supplement company that made supplements that could provide “peace of mind” for athletes, while safely supporting athletic performance. After a decade of searching, he finally found his answer – Thorne.

Because Thorne started as a brand exclusively for medical practitioners and didn’t enter the direct-to-consumer space until after Barnett found us, he had never heard of Thorne. But once he saw our exceptional quality and safety standards firsthand, he connected Thorne with USOPC leadership and sport dietitians to create a line of NSF Certified for Sport® products, just in time for the Games of 2016.

“People who know me and know what I stand for when it comes to protecting athletes were convinced right from the beginning,” he says. “If Wes Barnett left the USOPC to go and work for a company that made supplements, it must be the best company in the world. They were right.”

Why do athletes trust Thorne’s NSF Certified for Sport® lineup?

Glad you asked. First, let’s start with the quality standards we have in place for all Thorne products.

While many of our competitors test products once or twice, we do four rounds of testing at our NSF-certified facility. That includes verifying the identity, purity, and potency of every raw material and finished product. We also screen for 760 contaminants.

For the products in Thorne’s NSF Certified for Sport lineup, we go even further to ensure athletes are supplementing with the highest quality health solutions possible.

Known as the gold standard for supplement quality, NSF Certified for Sport is a distinction that supplement companies must invest their time, money, and effort into earning. Products that bear the mark are tested for over 300 substances on the extensive banned substances list, providing athletes of all levels with the peace of mind of supplement safety.

“NSF Certified for Sport is the first line of defense to ensure you don’t end up with a positive test,” says Barnett. “But you must go above and beyond and find products that also have the science and research behind them.”

Indeed, Thorne’s quality formulas would be meaningless without the science to back them up. Our team of health-care professionals, researchers, and scientists formulate with well-researched ingredients and Thorne collaborates on clinical research with many world-class institutions to verify safety and efficacy.

What do athletes get out of the partnership?

Thorne’s sports and medical affairs staff work together to provide our partners with individualized guidance through supplement recommendations and education. That could mean everything from specific injury prevention/treatment protocols to getting answers on all things diet, training, recovery, and more.

For Laura Kunces, PhD, RD, and Thorne’s Vice President of Medical Strategy, no two days are the same when advising athletes because each one has such unique human performance issues. 

“Despite being the best at their sport, they are susceptible to the same health issues many of us deal with too – things like Crohn’s, anxiety, mental fogginess, catching a virus, or a nagging injury,” Kunces says.

She starts by first analyzing an athlete’s foundational health. She uses bloodwork or biological testing to understand where they are at with hormones, vitamins/minerals, lipids, inflammation, organ and cell function, and more. These insights help her recommend lifestyle changes, including nutrition and supplementation, to help get those levels within a normal range.

The next step is performance: How can Kunces leverage nutrition and supplementation to help an athlete optimize? Be it burning a little less energy, going a little faster, feeling better for longer, or helping minimize the risk of injury.

It can require trial and error, she says, but it’s worth it to help athletes find the perfect solution for their very specific health needs and goals, whether they’re about to compete on the world’s biggest stage or are trying to maintain their performance over the next four years.

“We really help with the 20ish hours a day your body isn’t doing the sport,” Kunces says. “Things like maintaining appropriate hormone levels, keeping an optimal vitamin D level, reducing inflammation, detoxifying an athlete’s system – it’s all the other hours of the day that the body is being a normal ‘human’ that are important for maintaining health over the years, long after the sport has finished.”

What health topics are these athletes asking about?

For Kunces, there’s a very specific question that immediately comes to mind: What should I be taking?

“It’s a loaded question,” Kunces says. “The answer to that question is, it depends.”

With so many factors at play including an athlete’s sport, deficiencies, health goals, consistency with hitting nutrition targets, personal habits, and starting point, each athlete is different. But once she’s able to speak with the athlete and do some testing, she can recommend the right health solutions.

Other common themes that come up are travel and convenience. Air travel, jet lag, eating new types of food, and interacting with many people can impact your health, so athletes are curious about the best supplements for immune health and sleep.

Plus, athletes, like many of us, are looking for ways to save time no matter where they are, she says. They want to know the best protein shake to take between practices/workouts and which supplements can be taken together.

“So many athletes are moms and dads, work a full-time job, or are students, and they are really dealing with the same stressors that we all deal with including too little time, too much to do, and other obligations,” she says. “In this aspect, athletes are no different from professionals in another field.”

Thorne is thrilled to partner with various U.S. National Teams. For more health and wellness content, stay tuned at Thorne’s Take 5 Daily blog and follow us on Instagram @thornehealth.