MOPs & MOEs

MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the platform built for military and tactical organizations. From scheduling to accountability to compliance, Teamworks keeps your unit running like a unit. If your team is still doing it with spreadsheets and group texts, there’s a better way. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the training app we actually use to run the All-Access Bundle. Built for athletes who train with a purpose, not just a goal. Programming built for people who have a job to do. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comAlex posted a simple prompt on Instagram: give me your hottest take, I want to fight with you. Turns out that works a lot better than asking for podcast topic suggestions. This week, Alex and Drew work through the best ones: policy, programming, coaching, and a few that ended up in somebody’s LinkedIn mentions.Topics covered:The new Health and Human Performance Optimization Advisory Committee (HHPO) and why having WPO under Personnel & Readiness and HHPO under the Defense Health Agency at the same time is the same fight the military has been having over human performance for over a decadeCunningham’s Law: the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answerTactical athletes are closer to endurance athletes than powerlifters: stamped approved, discussed at length, nothing new here but it keeps coming upH2F coaches suck at run programs: specifically, one told a soldier “I’m not a cross-country coach.” Drew and Alex on whether that’s a coaching problem or a system problemHigher running mileage should be a goal to strive for, and too many people are chasing minimal effective dose instead of building real volume tolerancePT tests should be randomized like your urinalysis: both agree, Drew wrote the blog post, Alex nerds out on the psychology of behavior changeAll branches should have the same PT test: maybe, but only if you decouple the general health test from the occupationally specific one the DoD instruction already says you’re supposed to haveH2F CPS positions are a waste of government funds: Alex bats less than 50%, Drew blames the undefined role; the real issue is H2F conflating cognitive, mental, and brain health as though they’re the same thingMost strength and conditioning billets could be replaced by ChatGPT: the guy who built GPT 4.0 still has a personal trainer, because AI doesn’t make you feel bad when you skip a workoutIf we liked kettlebell swings as much as push-ups, we’d be an unstoppable force: moderate agreement, strong skepticism of the kettlebell cultMost units should do swim PT, even if it means lessons during PT time: agreed, and there is no swim standard to deploy on a Navy ship, which is insaneTrain: https://www.mopsnmoes.com/all-accessDiscord: https://discord.com/servers/mops-moes-1357721021733671043

MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the platform built for military and tactical organizations. From scheduling to accountability to compliance, Teamworks keeps your unit running like a unit. If your team is still doing it with spreadsheets and group texts, there’s a better way. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the training app we actually use to run the All-Access Bundle. Built for athletes who train with a purpose, not just a goal. Programming built for people who have a job to do. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comAlex sat down with Dr. Alex Miller, Chief Technology Officer of the Army at AUSA. Before they got into tech and data, the conversation started somewhere more personal: a photo from a buddy’s wedding fifteen years ago, GoRuck, Spartan, and the moment he decided to take his own fitness seriously.What followed was one of the more honest conversations we’ve had about what technology can and can’t actually do for human performance — from someone who has spent a career at the intersection of data collection, intelligence, and the Army.Topics covered:The switch moment behind a personal transformation — and the difference between being hurt and being injuredWhy technology cannot fix culture by itself, and what the intel community’s data science revolution teaches us about collecting human performance dataThe quote he keeps coming back to: “Data’s a lot like garbage. You should probably have a plan for what you’re going to do with it before you start collecting it.”What Thor 2 and Thor 3 get right — starting with the decision you’re trying to drive, not the sensorWhy “buy-in” means something literal: when you give people things for free, they attach exactly that value to itThe fear and trust problem behind wearable adoption — why even fit soldiers hesitate when they don’t control what happens to the dataFitness as table stakes: it doesn’t matter how good you are at the end point if you can’t get to the end pointWhy changing the PT test shouldn’t change your training program — if you were training for the mission in the first placeThe gamification problem: social media platforms are just databases we convinced people it was fun to put data into — and we haven’t cracked that for human performance yetThe people he’s most worried about: E8s and above on a general officer’s staff Train: https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-pod Discord: https://discord.com/servers/mops-moes-1357721021733671043

MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the platform built for military and tactical organizations. From scheduling to accountability to compliance, Teamworks keeps your unit running like a unit. If your team is still doing it with spreadsheets and group texts, there’s a better way. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the training app we actually use to run the All-Access Bundle. Built for athletes who train with a purpose, not just a goal. Programming built for people who have a job to do. Start your free trial at trainheroic.com.Alex is out this week, so Drew and John brought in a friend of the show: Michael Blevins — high performance coach, consultant, and the guy who trained Henry Cavill for Man of Steel and the Justice League films. This is round three, and we spent it going deep on endurance — what it actually is, how we’ve gotten it wrong, and what it means to build it for life rather than just the next event.Michael’s first psychedelic experience happened on a bicycle in Bulgaria. No substances involved. Just a thirty-minute out-of-body experience while climbing Mount Vitosha, and a 30% PR on his twenty-minute power output. It’s an odd place to start a conversation about endurance training, but it sets the stage for the conversation. Topics covered:Why “endurance” and “going faster” are not the same thing The 90-minute threshold: why most people can’t yet endure long enough to actually train enduranceMore, better, different — the sequence that applies to both business and building an aerobic baseWhy discipline gets you started but self-care is what keeps you goingHow the Hittite Empire was writing periodization programs for war horses in 800 BCEGalen, gladiators, and why rigid programming without accounting for athlete state has always been a problemThe running limitation that has nothing to do with your lungsCardiac drift as a practical guide for building volume without breaking downWhy the question “what do you want to do after the event?” changes the entire programTrain: https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-podDiscord: https://discord.com/servers/mops-moes-1357721021733671043

MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the platform built for military and tactical organizations. From scheduling to accountability to compliance, Teamworks keeps your unit running like a unit. If your team is still doing it with spreadsheets and group texts, there's a better way. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the training app we actually use to run the All-Access Bundle. Built for athletes who train with a purpose, not just a goal. Programming built for people who have a job to do. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comRunning is the most failed event on the Army Fitness Test. It’s also blamed for more injuries than anything else in the epidemiology data. So what’s actually going on, and what can leaders do about it?John is back, and we’re digging into the Instagram comments from a post Alex put up a few weeks ago on running injuries and PT test performance. The responses ranged from thoughtful to deeply unhinged, and we work through all of them.We cover why 27% of recorded Army injuries being “running-related” is a lot less clear than it sounds (90% of injuries in that dataset had no cause recorded at all), what the research actually says about footwear and injury risk, and why the best predictor of future injury (previous injury) may stop predicting once rehab is actually complete.We also get into the zone two debate, why “overuse injury” is the wrong frame, and what the National Guard’s recruit sustainment program can teach us about the real fix: it’s not too much too soon, it’s too little for too long.Topics covered:Why Army running injury data is messier than the headlines suggestFootwear, heel striking, and what the research actually showsPrevious injury as a risk factor — and when it stops being oneThe tissue tolerance and volume tolerance problem PT tests don’t measureZone two vs. intensity: what actually matters and whenWhy “overuse injury” is a misnomer — underuse causes overuseWhat the National Guard does differently in initial entry trainingPractical tools: pogo hops, strides, and why jump rope is underrated💪 Train: https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-pod💬 Discord: https://discord.com/servers/mops-moes-1357721021733671043

72 miles through the Italian Dolomites. 22,000 feet of climbing. 31 meals together.Colonel Mike Kloepper and Dr. Ryan Erbe took a group of West Point cadets into the mountains to work on character development. They join us to talk about how they planned the trip, what they saw in the cadets, and what they’d change next time.What we get into:Physical challenge and reflection. The hiking was only part of it. They built in time for cadets to talk through what happened each day, how they handled it, and what they could learn from it.What they mean by character. Erbe talks about humility, self-control, and caring for the people you lead. Kloepper brings it back to duty, honor, country—and what those words ask of you.Eating together. They shared 31 meals over the trip, without screens. Kloepper explains why sitting down together after a hard day mattered so much, and what leaders could take from that.What they wish they’d measured. Kloepper came home frustrated that they hadn’t collected baseline data. We talk about what that might have told them and whether measuring the experience would have changed it.Doing this closer to home. You don’t need a trip to Italy. Kloepper’s advice: get outside with your team, do something physically hard, and eat together. Make time to do it again.Mentioned in this episode:Team Red, White & BlueSimon Center for the Professional Military EthicWalking the Ridgeline, Colonel Klepper’s SubstackJim Collins, Good to GreatWest Point’s Cadet Character Education ProgramIndividual Advanced Development (IAD) programsThe “what, so what, now what” reflection frameworkTrain with us: https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-podJoin the Discord: https://discord.com/servers/mops-moes-1357721021733671043Subscribe wherever you listen: https://open.spotify.com/show/0RSP5CywOYxn2RHK0zzreQ?si=868021b97f304b56

Sports Science at Scale: What the Military Can Learn from IMG AcademyBryce works with roughly 1,600 athletes across 12 sports at IMG Academy. We brought him on to talk about what actually goes into managing that many athletes, how much of the data makes it into training decisions, and whether elite sport has this whole sports science thing figured out.Spoiler: they're still working on it, too.MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the platform built for military and tactical organizations. From scheduling to accountability to compliance, Teamworks keeps your unit running like a unit. If your team is still doing it with spreadsheets and group texts, there's a better way. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the training app we actually use to run the All-Access Bundle. Built for athletes who train with a purpose, not just a goal. Programming built for people who have a job to do. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comWhat we get into:— Everybody's collecting. Who's actually using it? Bryce watched Catapult take off in American football in 2015. Suddenly everybody was wearing the bra, but the training often looked suspiciously similar. Collecting more information is easy enough. Explaining what you changed because of it gets a little harder.— People and processes. Alex likes graphs. Drew likes tables. A seemingly small detail, until you realize the person receiving your report has no interest in reading it. Before getting too excited about the technology, you probably need to understand how your coaches make decisions.— Same run, very different workouts. Put the whole unit on the same run at the same pace and your fittest soldier gets a warm-up while your least fit soldier fights for his life. We know this. We keep doing it anyway. Bryce sees versions of the same thing in sport, where having the information to individualize training doesn't necessarily mean it happens.— What earns its place at IMG. Bar velocity informs programming. Athlete availability shapes sessions. Mental performance assessments guide group work. But none of that earned a permanent seat at the table just because somebody thought it was interesting. Coaches had to explain why they were collecting something and how they used it. — About that readiness dashboard… We'd all love a little green light telling us to send it. Unfortunately, the human being attached to the dashboard remains a bit more complicated. We get into force plates, Omega Wave, and how much confidence we should put in the numbers. As Bryce put it, placebo is a hell of a drug.Mentioned in this episode:IMG Academy — imga.comCatapult Sports — catapult.comMartin Buchheit — 30-15 Intermittent Fitness TestKinexon — local positioning systemThe Sports Gene — David EpsteinAdrian Peterson — the ACL rehab highlight reel that got Alex through his own recoveryOur All-Access Bundle bundle gets you access to every program MOPs & MOEs has ever releasedOr try our classic Long & Strong program with a free trial weekJoin the conversation by signing up for our Discord serverViews expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the platform built for military and tactical organizations. From scheduling to accountability to compliance, Teamworks keeps your unit running like a unit. If your team is still doing it with spreadsheets and group texts, there's a better way. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the training app we actually use to run the All-Access Bundle. Built for athletes who train with a purpose, not just a goal. Programming built for people who have a job to do. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comJob Fransen Returns: A Taxonomy for TransferJob Fransen is back. Last time, we covered near and far transfer — the gap between what you train and what you actually need to do. This time, we go deeper. Job, along with Franco Impellizzeri, published a taxonomy for the transfer of skills in sport, and it's one of those frameworks that immediately makes you rethink how you're building training programs.The Pentagon's warfighter performance optimization memo is sitting in the background of this whole conversation — specifically the part about elevating cognitive performance as a readiness priority. Drew and Alex think the people writing that memo probably don't know what it means. Job doesn't disagree.What we get into:— Transfer isn't just near or far. Job and Franco's taxonomy breaks it down across 13 dimensions borrowed from Barnett & Cécé's education framework and rebuilt for motor skills. Reach, distance, and likelihood are the three pillars.— Procedure vs. principle. If you know how to cook a steak on your specific pan, you're in trouble the second the pan changes. If you understand the Maillard reaction, you can cook anywhere. This is the chef-vs-cook distinction applied directly to how you design training.— Why shortcuts fail. Far transfer is alluring because it's fast — skip the messy middle, jump straight from generic training to elite performance. The problem is it almost never works. The research says so. The practitioners pitching video game cognitive training to the Pentagon either haven't read it or don't care.— VR and AR are not the answer. We tend to assume simulated environments are close enough to real ones. They're usually not, and the research is starting to catch up to that assumption. Job has a front-row seat to how sporting organizations get pitched these tools and how often they buy them anyway.— The military problem is harder. It's already difficult to design near-transfer practice in sport. Replicating combat — the noise, the stakes, the threat of actual harm — is orders of magnitude harder. The chain of near transfers still has to get built. You just can't use most of the middle links you'd want.— The three moderators that sink good practice design. Exposure, feedback and instruction, and learner disposition. Even if you design a perfect near-transfer task, you can blow the whole thing by getting any one of these wrong.Mentioned in this episode:Barnett & Cécé transfer taxonomy — the education framework Job built fromJob Fransen & Franco Impellizzeri — "A Taxonomy for the Transfer of Skills in Sport"Pentagon Warfighter Performance Optimization memoFirst Job Fransen episode — MOPs & MOEs, December 2025Our All-Access Bundle is the best place to get access to every training product we offerJoin the conversation on our DiscordViews expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the performance operations platform trusted by elite military units and professional sports organizations worldwide. Teamworks brings your scheduling, communications, athlete monitoring, and readiness data into one unified system — so your leaders stay informed, your people stay connected, and your unit stays ready. No more scattered spreadsheets or missed messages. Just one platform built for organizations where performance is the mission. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you're programming for a military unit, a tactical team, or individual athletes, TrainHeroic gives you the tools to build and deliver professional training programs, track athlete progress, and communicate directly with your people — all through one app. Your athletes get world-class programming on their phone; you get the visibility to actually coach them. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comArmy Fitness Drama, R2 Gets Cut, and the Job Board Blows UpDrew is sick. It's not COVID. Apparently nobody cares about COVID anymore, which was news to him. Regardless, this week had more going on than either of them planned for.What we get into:The R2 contract got cut to shreds. A lot of people who work in Ready and Resilient performance centers found out they were losing their jobs, which is genuinely rough — and made worse by the fact that their employer almost certainly saw it coming and didn't say anything. Drew and Alex both feel for the folks caught in that. Alex is also pretty skeptical of the R2 program in general, and he explains why without holding back. The PT test rumors. The Vice Chief of Staff and Sergeant Major of the Army said it was all fake news at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference. Alex's take: that's not true, and it's fine to backtrack when you see the reaction, but let's not pretend it wasn't a thing. The specific rumor — remove the deadlift, remove the sprint drag carry, speed up the run times until it's basically the APFT — is what we're working with. And if your new Army fitness culture mirrors the Air Force fitness culture, Alex has some thoughts on that.The deadlift should stay. The National Guard lieutenant who was considered one of the fittest soldiers in his state, by APFT standards, who threw out his back deadlifting 65 pounds on day one of the master fitness trainer course. Every soldier at some point picks up and carries heavy awkward stuff in chaotic environments. Testing that is not optional.The sprint drag carry is in a weird gray area. A lot of people online are saying it's the most operationally relevant event. What they mean is it has the highest face validity — it looks the coolest and most military. Whether that's the same thing is a longer conversation.The closer lands on something worth sitting with. Alex argues that no amount of data will fix the perception that human performance is a luxury program. What will fix it is senior leaders who experienced H2F firsthand — as battalion and brigade commanders — moving into higher positions and advocating from personal experience rather than a PowerPoint.And on the job board: we launched a talent network this week, the R2 situation sent a wave of people to it, and it turns out cognitive performance is the discipline least likely to have salary listed. Zero out of 61 jobs. Zero.Mentioned in this episode:MOPs & MOEs job board — mopsnmoes.com/jobsAlex's R2 blog article Jón Páll Sigmarsson — there's no reason to be alive if you can't deadliftGeneral Frost — early ACFT and H2F rolloutLong and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the performance operations platform trusted by elite military units and professional sports organizations worldwide. Teamworks brings your scheduling, communications, athlete monitoring, and readiness data into one unified system — so your leaders stay informed, your people stay connected, and your unit stays ready. No more scattered spreadsheets or missed messages. Just one platform built for organizations where performance is the mission. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you're programming for a military unit, a tactical team, or individual athletes, TrainHeroic gives you the tools to build and deliver professional training programs, track athlete progress, and communicate directly with your people — all through one app. Your athletes get world-class programming on their phone; you get the visibility to actually coach them. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comWhat Is a Hybrid Athlete, Actually? — Alex Viada, Complete Human PerformanceAlex Viada was doing this before it had a name. Before the Instagram accounts, before the HYROX boom, before hybrid athlete became a personality type — he was showing up to 5Ks looking wrong and bike races looking wrong and figuring out the methodology anyway. Drew and Alex sit down with him to actually define the thing, argue about HYROX, and talk about what any of this means for the tactical population.What we get into:What a hybrid athlete actually is — and isn't. Alex Viada's definition has held up for over a decade: an athlete who competes in two or more sports whose training adaptations do not specifically support each other. That's it. It sounds simple until you try to apply it, which is where things get interesting.HYROX is not a hybrid sport. Viada has been saying this for a while and he explains why clearly here. When your training specifically supports a single score, you're not a hybrid athlete — you're a sport-specific athlete whose sport happens to involve multiple modalities. How we got here—Drew traces the arc from early 20th-century generalists to the hyper-specialization of the modern era, and Viada confirms it: the mentality that lifting makes runners slow and running makes lifters weak was the dominant paradigm well into the 2000s. The hybrid idea was partly a rebellion against being told to just pick one thing.The interference effect — probably the most practically useful 20 minutes of the episode. How to think about concurrent training, why the order of sessions matters, how much strength work you can do without compromising endurance adaptation, and why the answer is usually more than people think.The military connection — what the tactical population actually needs from a hybrid framework, why the current physical fitness testing paradigm pushes people toward exactly the wrong kind of specialization, and how Viada thinks about programming for people who need to perform across a wide range of unpredictable demands.Metcons — Viada is not a fan. Zero spice on the spice level. Mentioned in this episode:Ultimate Hybrid Athlete — Alex Viada, available on AmazonComplete Human Performance — completehp.comAlex Viada on Instagram — @alex.viadaLong and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroicViews expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

If you're the kind of dedicated follower who listens to our episodes right when they release our All Access Bundle is currently on sale for 25% off with code LABORDAY2026!MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the performance operations platform trusted by elite military units and professional sports organizations worldwide. Teamworks brings your scheduling, communications, athlete monitoring, and readiness data into one unified system — so your leaders stay informed, your people stay connected, and your unit stays ready. No more scattered spreadsheets or missed messages. Just one platform built for organizations where performance is the mission. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you're programming for a military unit, a tactical team, or individual athletes, TrainHeroic gives you the tools to build and deliver professional training programs, track athlete progress, and communicate directly with your people — all through one app. Your athletes get world-class programming on their phone; you get the visibility to actually coach them. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comThe Illusion of Certainty — Franco ImpellizzeriDrew published the Death of Periodization article. It made its way to Franco Impellizzeri — one of the most cited researchers in sports science — who emailed back with some thoughts. One thing led to another. This is the conversation that followed.Fair warning: this one's heady. The real ones will hang around.What we get into:Coaching is a prediction problem. Not in the sense that you know what's going to happen, but in the sense that designing a training program is always an attempt to predict what will. Franco's framing here is deceptively simple, and it cuts straight to the heart of why periodization debates tend to go nowhere: if you can't articulate what you're predicting and why, you don't have a program. You have a habit you're attached to.The state of sports science is messier than the people citing it tend to let on. Franco has spent 20 years studying the quality of research itself — not just the findings. His conclusion: uncertainty in most studies is far larger than what gets communicated on social media. The Nordic hamstring curl debate is a good example of this. The acute-to-chronic workload ratio is probably the most widely cited injury prevention metric in sport right now. Franco was also involved in some of the most critical analysis of it. The data that most directly undermines the ratio is sitting in the same studies that supposedly support it — and almost nobody mentions it because it doesn't fit the model people already believe in.Brandolini's Law: refuting nonsense takes far more effort than producing it. Franco has a more colorful version he prefers, which he shares on air. Drew and Alex have both started using it to explain most of what they observe on the internet.The Nielsen running study makes an appearance in the closer. Doubling your longest single session run roughly doubles your injury risk. Doubling your weekly running frequency without spiking individual session length has essentially no effect on injury risk. Alex has been carefully managing his weekly mileage for months and is not thrilled about this information.Mentioned in this episode:Franco Impellizzeri — University of Technology SydneyNielsen et al. — How Much Running Is Too Much?Brandolini's LawThomas Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsDrew's Death of Periodization — mopsnmoes.com/articlesSean Bean's Get Birding podcast — for when you need to decompressLong and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic → https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-podViews expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.