Mar 4, 2020
Dr. Andy is a tenured Professor in the
Center for Sport Performance at CSU Fullerton.
He was born and raised in beautiful Rochester, WA and is a die-hard
Seahawks, Huskies, & Mariner fan. RIP Sonics. As a youth, Andy
played every sport at his disposal, excelling at Football,
Basketball, Baseball, and Track & Field. While not playing, he
worked at grocery stores, gas stations, hay fields, blueberry
farms, and in the road construction business. It was during this
time he discovered Strength & Conditioning.
Andy took his limited talents to Linfield College to join
their Football team and pursue a degree in Exercise Science. While
he experienced great success in both (2004 National Championship
and 2x Captain and immediate inductee into the "All Ugly" Team),
the true reward of this time was the meeting of lifelong friend
(
Doug Larson). The two fed each other's
pursuit of knowledge of human performance and led them to attend
the University of Memphis for the Masters degrees in Human Movement
Sciences. A bit of luck and excellent faculty mentoring led Doug
and Andy to meet
Mike Bledsoe and the man formally known as
"
Barbell Buddha" Chris Moore - all of which
later led to the creation of the #1 Health & Fitness
Podcast in the world
Barbell Shrugged. It also marked the
start of Andy's competitive Weightlifting (culminating in his 7th
Place finish in the 2007 National Championships), Mixed Martial
Arts, and
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
careers.
Needing to know more about muscle, Andy spent 4 years studying
the structure and function of human skeletal muscle at the single
cell level, a feat which earned him a PhD in Human Bioenergetics in
2011. This also resulted in the friendship with frequent
collaborator
Dr. Jimmy Bagley and the
ability to open up his own "
Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise
Physiology Laboratory" at CSU Fullerton.
He now focuses his attention on teaching classes (Sports
Nutrition, Exercise Physiology, Designing Exercise Programs,
Applied Strength and Conditioning, Athlete Assessment and
Measurement, etc.) and running the BMEP lab (which studies the
acute responses and chronic adaptations of human skeletal muscle in
response to high force/velocity/power and fatiguing exercise from
the whole body, down to the individual muscle fiber and even into
the individual DNA. The team does this by taking muscle biopsies
from non-athletes and elite athletes from different backgrounds
(e.g. normal college student, MMA fighter, Boxer,
Weightlifter, etc.) and use highly sophisticated laboratory
techniques and equipment to address questions about single fiber
"type", size, function, protein quantity, diameter, mitochondria,
and myonuclear function. You can get all of our published research
here.
At heart, Andy is simply a story-teller and
teacher.