MOPs & MOEs

This episode continues a theme of bringing on guest's who crossed paths with Alex in the Army and helped shape his perspective on human performance. SGM Jaime Espinoza's career started with troubles involving weight gain, mental health, alcohol abuse, and more. But thanks to help from several people along the way (some human performance professionals, but also just fellow soldiers) he managed to o...

One of the toughest challenges in military human performance is how to implement programs that work for reserve service members. With only a couple days a month of direct interaction, how do you improve their health and fitness behaviors the rest of the month? Who better to workshop solutions to this issue with than the Chief of the Army Reserve? Lieutenant General Robert Harter was an H2F skeptic...

In this episode we're discussing endurance training with an extremely qualified guest with a world class competitive ultra marathon resume. Alyssa Clark is a professional mountain runner, coach, podcast host and training plans director for Uphill Athlete. As a military spouse, running and coaching have been the constants she can bring with her no matter the duty station. She is also a multisport a...

In our episode with LTG Gilland we mentioned Shawn "Big Tires Rollin" Robertson as a future guest, and now he's here! Shawn is a paragon of fitness (consistent ACFT 600s, 2nd place in the European bodybuilding championship) who is also passionate about organizational psychology. He joined us for this conversation about the role of fitness in leader development and how leaders can enhance the perfo...

In this episode we're diving into the fundamentals of how to get strong, and our guest is one of the best in the game at taking novices to pretty serious levels of strength. Andy Baker began his career in the strength & conditioning industry in 2001, as an intern while attending Texas A&M University. Like many people in the early 2000s he witnessed 9/11 and thought exercise science lecture...

To prepare for this episode we challenged each other to bring our top three fitness tests from any military around the world. Globally there are a wide variety of approaches, from extremely simple to extremely complex. A few of the ones we chose have been previously mentioned on the podcast (or on our social media) but others we've never discussed before. We also have a few honorable mentions, inc...

After two years of waiting, the Pose Method episode is finally here! You've asked what we think of it, here are our answers. Pose Method® is a proprietary method for coaching running technique developed by Dr. Nichloas Romanov in 1977 in the former Soviet Union. Pose clinics have been taught around the Army since 2009 and the newest version of FM 7-22 put Pose into official Army doctrine. In this...

We've been talking about having Ray on the podcast for over a year now. He brings a unique perspective as a former infantry Marine NCO turned strength and conditioning coach. And more importantly, he always focuses his insight on the real issues. The military human performance space is more about building the right culture than dialing in the Xs and Os of workouts, and he clearly knows that. Ramon...

It has been a long time, but we're back with another "101" episode. This time we're breaking down the considerations involved in assembling a week of hybrid training. If you're in the military, you're already doing hybrid training whether you call it that or not. Frankly, just meeting global health guidelines for physical activity amounts to hybrid training. Every health authority agrees: both car...

We did a contracting episode a few weeks ago where we aired out a few grievances mostly focused on how strength and conditioning coaches in contracted roles with the military are treated. In that conversation we acknowledged that we have limited experience with contracting, and we were open to having an expert come on and set the record straight.  As it happens, this week’s guest is exactly the ki...

Dr. Chris Frueh is back for his second appearance on the pod! If you missed our previous conversation with him we dove into the dysfunction at the VA , with particular emphasis on the disability system. Dr. Chris Frueh, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. He has over thirty years of professional experience working with military veterans and...

A few weeks ago we got the news that Congress was considering directing the military to investigate the potential for adding creatine to MREs. This spurred a lot of discussion on creatine's effectiveness and dosing strategies, and to really get to the bottom of that we needed an expert. Our guest this week is so much of an expert that he is often referred to as "Dr. Creatine." Scott...

Our guest for this episode has been on Active Duty for over 34 years, with much of that spent in Special Operations, and he's still scoring 600s on his ACFTs. Our wide ranging conversation covers everything from how he's maintained a high level of physical performance across his long career to the role that physicality plays in developing young leaders. We even dig into ideas for improving...

Our guest this week is a key player in two important research and policy initiatives. First, she led the Army Comprehensive Body Composition (ACBC) study that led to the recent updates to body composition policy. Second, she leads the Female Elite Warfighter (FEW) research initiative which focuses on identifying the characteristics that make women successful in elite combat training courses. We di...

Contracting is a dominant theme in military human performance because so much of the staffing for military human performance teams is handled through large contracts. In this week's episode we break down some of the key issues with defense contracting that make things harder in human performance. If we can't define the value of coaches, "least price technically acceptable" quickl...

In this wide ranging and long overdue episode we talk about everything from kettlebell training to data literacy. Our guest is something of a godfather in the tactical strength and conditioning space, and if you don't know who he is you're missing out. He's been around the space in both academic and industry roles and is one of the smartest guys in the game. Chris Frankel, PhD, has ove...

In this episode we answer questions submitted by you guys! Topics covered include PED use in the military, NCAA athletes now being allowed to smoke weed, hybrid programming considerations, eccentric training, herniated disc recovery, and more. We discuss several references: This blog post about physical training in the reserve component The first ever study on DOMS from 1902 This blog post on the...

Anyone who's familiar with the Army's Pregnancy and Postpartum Physical Training (P3T) program has probably heard pretty negative things about it. Historically, women have avoided participating if they can get out of it, and if they can't they've been disappointed by what they got out of it. Our guest on this week's episode is changing that. She's bringing modern human perf...

We reached out to our guest for this week's episode after he testified before Congress and used the opportunity to repeatedly highlight military human performance programs. He was also our first guest to tune in from the Pentagon Briefing Room. Troy Black is the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the most senior NCO in the entire United States mili...

Two years into this and we've fielded a lot of questions that relate to injuries. Since we're not experts in that space, we brought a professional on board! John Romanello is a Physical Therapist with experience in both the conventional Army and special operations. In this episode he breaks down the science behind injury risk, what we can do to prevent injuries, and some of the important c...

The ACFT has been a hot topic since the day it was announced. Even now, after a few years, myths and misconceptions persist. We've seen a lot of these in our comments and messages, and we thought it was time to address a few. In this episode we break down a little bit of the history behind how the test was developed, the reasoning behind a few of the events, and the validity (or lack thereof)...

Jessie Graff is probably best known for her athletic achievements on the obstacle course show American Ninja Warrior. In 2016, she became the first woman ever to complete Stage 1 of the Las Vegas Finals course. In 2017, she became the first woman to compete in, and to successfully finish, Stage 2. Her athletic evolution started with circus classes, which led her to gymnastics, then pole vault. All...

If you know the name Matt Chan, then he needs no introduction. Skip this and start listening. His athletic journey started as a high school swimmer and continued as a collegiate water polo player at Western Illinois University. He originally took up CrossFit in his late 20s to help improve his endurance as a firefighter in Denver, Colorado. Despite making his games debut at 30 years old he went on...

Sidney Jaques has logged quite a few firsts for women in the Army. In 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne she became the first woman assigned to one of their infantry battalions. While serving in that capacity, she attended Ranger Assessment and Selection (RASP2) and was selected to serve as the Ranger Regimental S1. Once she graduated Ranger School she became the first woman in the Army to have earned bot...

How to outfit a home gym is always a popular topic, and we get plenty of questions about what equipment we recommend. For this episode we break down our thoughts on a variety of options at different price points. To frame the discussion we broke our options down into less than $100, $100-$500, $500-$1000, and over $1000. We don't agree on every priority, but we definitely agree on the essentia...