Dr Andy Galpin is the muscle physiologist most masters cyclists have been quoting without realising it. He is a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton, where he runs the Center for Sport Performance and the Biochemistry & Molecular Exercise Laboratory. He has co-authored more than ninety peer-reviewed papers on skeletal muscle, hypertrophy, fibre-type adaptation, and recovery, and he consults for athletes across MMA, motorsport, the NBA, the NFL, and Olympic sport. If you have heard a coaching argument in the last three years that turned on type II fibre atrophy, velocity-based training, or protein dose timing for older athletes, the original work behind that argument almost certainly has Andy's name on it.
He is also the rare academic whose communication ability matches his research credentials. His own podcast, Perform with Dr Andy Galpin, and his appearances on the Huberman Lab series on muscle and strength have done more to translate skeletal muscle physiology into amateur-athlete language than any textbook ever has. That ability to move between the cellular and the practical is the reason this site keeps coming back to his work.
If you take one principle from him, take this: power is the canary in the coal mine for ageing. Long before muscle mass falls off a cliff, the speed at which you can produce force has already started to drop. A masters cyclist who only trains endurance is training the part of the system that was going to be fine anyway and ignoring the part that is actively shrinking. The fix is not exotic — targeted resistance work that respects velocity, single-leg and sport-specific patterns, explicit speed work on the bike, real protein dosing, and a recovery structure that lets the body bank the adaptation. The window does not close. The training has to change.
The Roadman conversations and the masters performance guides linked below are where Andy's framework shows up most clearly across the rest of the site.