MOPs & MOEs

Job Fransen is a skill acquisition specialist working at the University Medical Centre Groningen in the Netherlands and a adjunct fellow at the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation. His research focuses on optimizing skill acquisition in athletes. He has worked with high performance athletes and individuals from around the world, across elite sport, esport...

We’re back with another “Xs and Os” episode about how to plan your training, this time focusing on strength specifically. In this episode Drew lays out his version of the Heavy-Light-Medium framework. His primary influence here was the work of Andy Baker who was in turn influenced by Bill Starr, and you’ll find many commonalities between this framework and some of the most popular templates like S...

How can we navigate a health and fitness space riddled with pseudoscience and misinformation? What does it mean to live in the post-truth era? How can we all train ourselves to become better critical thinkers? We dive into all this and more with Dr. Nicholas Tiller, who we discovered because of his call to action paper about the need for exercise scientists to contest the growing amount of misinfo...

This episode is a roundtable discussion about the experiences of women in strength and conditioning, and especially in the tactical environment. Erica Mansaray, Jaimie Lafler, and Paula Arreola are all coaches working in different parts of the tactical space. Their academic and professional backgrounds are varied, including more and less traditional paths, everything from high school to profession...

We’ve been trying to get Nick Barringer onto the podcast for a few months now, but he’s too professional to get in the trenches with us. At least he was until a recent report came out about the Occupational Physical Aptitude Test (OPAT). Years ago Nick warned the Army that the standards were too low for the OPAT to accomplish its goals, and he took a lot of heat for being publicly critical. Fast f...

Guy Shamam is an Israeli Defense Force special operations soldier who transitioned into the reserve and is now working to address problems with the health and fitness of reserve service members in Israel. He reached out to us looking for advice on developing a program, and we decided to record the conversation because this is the kind of stuff that many of our listeners are working to address. Whi...

On this episode we welcome our first general officer guest, BG Mike Drowley, call sign Jonny Bravo. Brrrrrrt enthusiasts will appreciate that he is an A-10 Warthog pilot which, for the unfamiliar, means he flies an aircraft that is effectively a giant machine gun with wings. Pilots face unique performance demands that revolve around around applying technical skills under pressure while resisting g...

Erin Williams (aka @runstrongmama) is a mom, an athlete, a running coach, and an accomplished Army engineer officer. In this episode we discuss how all of those experiences have shaped her approach to fitness. Erin Williams was a Division 1 basketball player at West Point, and was commissioned as an Army Engineer officer in 2011. Since then, Erin has completed a variety of military schools includi...

After a lot of questions we decided to do a podcast on how to get hired in tactical. Whether it's in uniform, as a federal civilian, or as a contractor, we lay out the basic requirements, pros and cons, and how to set yourself up for success. This is a rapidly growing space, and in addition to coaches getting curious about the tactical space, a lot of people in the military seem interested in purs...

When leaders across the Department of Defense have questions about biosensing, wearable devices, or human performance data, Josh Hagen is frequently at the top of the list of experts they reach out to. He has his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering, Masters in Materials Engineering, and PhD in Materials Engineering all from the University of Cincinnati. Josh executed his graduate research in bioelec...

Scott's first appearance was our most popular episode of 2022, so we're kicking off 2023 by bringing him back to answer your most frequently asked questions about Zone 2 training! This conversation covers everything from how to implement it in group training settings to incorporating rucking and low impact modalities. It's one more step in our mission to #MakeEnduranceGreatAgain. Scott is an accom...

If you asked Santa for more MOPs & MOEs for Christmas, your wish has come true! 2022 is coming to an end, and we wanted to look back at all the ground we've covered in our first year of podcasting. Well, technically it's 3/4 of a year in review since we started this adventure in April. In this episode we shout out our most popular episodes from the first year of the MOPs & MOEs podcast and...

We're trying something new with this episode and diving into the research a little bit. We're reviewing the International Olympic Committee's consensus statement on training load and injury risk. They assembled a panel of international experts and pulled together a huge amount of research to come up with some actionable recommendations for anyone who supervises physical training. This discussion i...

You guys have been asking for a cognitive performance episode for a while, so we brought Mike on to dive into it. We knew he would bring a valuable perspective when he said he had a particular interest in measuring the effectiveness of cognitive interventions. Mike has worked in a variety of research and human performance roles, starting with the United States Naval Academy until he decided he wan...

Reilly is a legend up in the frozen north where he runs JBER Strength and Conditioning. It took us a while to get him on here, but he's definitely the most requested guest we've had on the podcast and the wait was worth it. Especially because all of those requests came from soldiers he has trained who can vouch for the impact he has on everyone who comes through his facility. After well over a dec...

In our continuing effort to not get fired and/or go to jail over this podcast, we thought it might be prudent to talk to a legal professional. Matt's background as an infantry officer turned lawyer gives him a unique perspective on military issues, and as you'll hear in this episode he has a special focus on social media policy. In fact, his work has been a driving force behind recent updates to D...

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 you are tactical professionals out there leading your teams without access to professional coaches. Or there are a lot of you training on your own with no guidance at all. So how do you build a plan that will produce results? This conversation will provide you wi...

Continuing our side quest of talking to the professionals calling BS on their professions, we're chatting with Chiropractor Aaron Kubal. He works specifically with chronic pain patients whose previous treatments have failed. Utilizing education & exercise, Aaron delivers a unique model of care that involves no manipulations whatsoever but rather focuses on graded exposure and patient empowerme...

Angus Bradley is the quintessential Australian. He's a surfer who dropped out of college to tour with his band before getting into Olympic weightlifting which led him to his current career as a personal trainer (although he might really be a comedian). He now operates out of Sydney, Australia training people across the spectrum from gen pop to professional athletes and hosting the Hyperformance po...

On this episode we welcome the owner of what may be the coolest job title on the planet: COL Nick Gist, the Master of the Sword. He leads West Point's Department of Physical Education, which is both an academic department (teaching the Kinesiology major along with a couple fundamentals of fitness courses) and responsible for delivering the physical courses that all cadets must take. We ended up ha...

This time the tables were turned and we were guests on the Not Your Typical Doctors podcast. We're airing it on our feed to give you guys a taste of their content, and if you like what you hear we'd encourage you to go check them out. Sarah and Alyse discuss very similar topics, but from a different perspective that offers valuable insights. In this particular conversation we covered wide ranging...

Based on popular demand from many of you who listened to his previous episode, we brought LTC David DeGroot, PhD back to dive into the research process that led to the development of the ACFT. If you're familiar with the Baseline Soldier Physical Readiness Requirements Study (BSPRRS) he is one of the authors, and therefore played a key role in the creation of the test as we know it. In this conver...

Six months into making this podcast, we wanted to take a pause to talk about how it's going, and more importantly where it's going in the future. There are way more of you listening than we could possibly expected, and we always appreciate your feedback, so this is a quick break for us to talk directly to the audience. It's a short one, but hopefully you like what we're trying to do with this plat...

As our first repeat guest, we brought Chris back to have a conversation about thinking. Specifically, we wanted to cover several logical fallacies that often disrupt well intentioned planning and evaluation. Chris is a seasoned special operations veteran and emergency medical professional with numerous combat deployments, an accomplished coach, and an impressive athlete in his own right. We highly...

Our guest for this episode is former Navy SEAL Jamie Monroe, who still lives near Coronado and has remained involved in the SEAL community including mentoring aspiring candidates. Jamie was a SEAL from the mid 90s through the early 2000s, serving on SEAL Team 1 and eventually transitioning into the Reserve. After his military time he got an MBA from Pepperdine and started pursuing entrepreneurial...