MOPs & MOEs

From prevention to treatment, in this episode we're answering all of your questions about anything to do with injuries. And of course to do that we needed an expert, so our Physical Therapist John is back on pod. He has a background working with human performance teams and currently serves in Special Operations. The primary topics we discuss in this episode are: Bracing, sleeves, and wraps - Do th...

Welcome back to part two of our Make America Healthy again breakdown. In this part of the conversation, after wrapping up the last of the key elements of the MAHA platform, we dive into the key personalities. Specifically, we went through many of the participants from "American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion," a roundtable discussion hosted by Senator Ron Johnson. It essentially...

We're starting the new year by diving straight into a politically sensitive topic. According to their platform, Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) seeks to drive a transformative agenda by aligning health-conscious, independent-minded voters with candidates who have the ability to disrupt the status quo. This includes prioritizing regenerative agriculture, preserving natural habitats, and eliminati...

This is a rerun of an episode we did a year ago. As our last holiday rerun before we get into fresh content, this one helps to set the stage for our first couple episodes for 2025 which will discuss the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, aka MAHA. You might be surprised that many of our biggest problems today are the results of solutions to the problems we faced a few decades ago. This episode...

This is a rerun of an episode from 2022, if you joined us recently it's a great introduction to building smarter physical training plans to improve performance and reduce injuries. We'll be back in a couple weeks with fresh content. Until then, happy holidays! No guest this time, just Alex and Drew trying to answer one of the most commonly asked questions we get here at MOPs & MOEs. Many of yo...

Happy holidays! This is a rerun of an episode we published back in March 2023, but this topic has been getting a lot of discussion again recently so we wanted to revisit it! MOPs & MOEs merch is now for sale on our website! Check out the shop for tees, hoodies, stickers, and more. Job Fransen is a skill acquisition specialist working at the University Medical Centre Groningen in the Netherland...

We stumbled onto Michaela's story because of this hilarious video explaining her pretty traumatic experience . We love a good comeback story after injury, especially when it includes a life being saved by strength training. We won't ruin the whole story, you'll just have to listen to the episode to find out, but there are several valuable lessons in here for both service members facing their own c...

The year is coming to an end and there are a few topics that we didn't make full episodes out of that we thought were worth discussing. In this episode we hash out: A grab bag of nutrition topics including eating local, raw milk, processed food, and other hot topics in the nutrition space. Fitness during the holidays (or during travel in general). Some moderately spicy political stuff, mostly tied...

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...