The elastic-plastic behaviors of three body-centered cubic metals, tantalum, tantalum alloy with 2.5% tungsten, and AerMet 100 steel, are presented over a wide range of strains (15%), strain rates (10(-6)-10(4) s(-1)) and temperatures (77-600 degrees F). Johnson-Cook and Zerilli-Armstrong models were found inadequate to describe the observations. A new viscoplastic model is proposed based on these experimental results. The proposed constitutive model gives good correlations with these experimental results and strain-rate jump experiments. In the next paper (Liang, R., Khan A.S., 2000. Behaviors of three BCC metals during non-proportional multiaxial loadings and predictions using a recently proposed model. International Journal of Plasticity, in press), multi-axial loading results on these materials and comparison with the proposed model will be presented. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.