MOPs & MOEs

LTG (R) Mark Hertling may be best known these days as a national security correspondent for CNN , where you'll often here him discussing the latest developments in Ukraine. But throughout his accomplished military career his interest in the health and fitness of soldiers was a major theme. His 2012 TED Talk "Obesity is a National Security Issue" has over three million views on YouTub...

We have a quick bonus (emergency?) episode here to address the rampant confusion around some Congressional language that has taken the internet by storm the last couple days. On page 17 of the executive summary of the NDAA markup by the Senate Armed Services Committee, one particular sentence alarmed many of you: "Restores the Army's Physical Fitness Test (APFT) as the test of record and...

This episode is a slight detour from our normally military-focused content into the world of wildland firefighting. Katrina Mohr was recently featured on Outside Online where she talked about her path into firefighting as well as the challenges of being a small woman in an extremely physically demanding job. There were some great insights there, so we invited her to join us for a conversation as w...

Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) DeLellis leads research focused on traumatic brain injury, including managing the longest continually running TBI surveillance project in the Special Operations community and co-authoring more than 30 articles on TBI in SOF. But in this episode we aren't here to discuss the research he's had success in, we're here to discuss the research he hasn't been...

COL Michael Kloepper has spent effectively his entirely career as a paratrooper, and now as Commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade he has implemented some really interesting policies around health, fitness, and wellness. There's a good chance you've heard about his "Policy Letter #2 - Cohesion and the Pursuit of Excellence," commonly referred to as the incentives memo. This policy allows soldiers...

This episode is a crossover between the Instagram version of MOPs & MOEs (punchy, oversimplified, sometimes deliberately instigating, etc.) and the podcast version of MOPs & MOEs (more thought out, addressing nuance, etc.). I (Alex) recently connected with Taylor Starch over a discussion about spinal flexion in strength training. Seeing some of Taylor's subsequent content got me thinki...

This is a special episode, in more ways than just being twice as long as the rest. Dr Whitfield "Chip" East literally wrote the book on the history of Army physical fitness, and the incredible depth of knowledge he has on historical physical culture is absolutely astonishing. His insight reveals that many of the problems we're reckoning with today are echoes of extremely similar prob...

We've touched on conversations about veteran disability before, but on this episode we're going all in. To get this conversation right we needed a guest who really understands the VA disability system, and it's hard to imagine someone more qualified to discuss this issue than Dan Gade. Dan is an Army veteran who became an amputee in 2005 while serving as a company commander in Ramadi,...

This week we have Alec Blenis back for round two. If you didn't catch his first episode back in August , it's one of our most popular and definitely worth going back for. Alec has a really unique background ranging from Georgia Tech physics grad to former professional Spartan Racer and competitive ultramarathoner to Murph world record holder. Lately he's becoming a bigger and bigger vo...

This is a "give the people what they want" kind of episode. If you've been following us for any amount of time, you'll know we're not fans of training for the test. But so many people have foundational misunderstandings about what types of training will serve them well on the test that we thought this conversation might be helpful. We start with a little history of how we got...

As a current Brigade Commander Colonel Jon Harvey oversees an embedded team of human performance professionals as part of the Army's Holistic Health and Fitness (H2F) program. Because human performance in a military setting is so dependent on leader buy in, we wanted Colonel Harvey's perspective on how he utilizes this team, and why he is personally so passionate about the program. It is o...

You may have seen headlines the last few weeks saying things like "Exercise is More Effective than Medication for Mental Health" and "It’s Not Just Exercise that Improves your Mental Health – Intensity and Type Matters Too." The research that is driving all these headlines comes from Dr. Ben Singh's team at the University of South Australia, and he's our guest on this w...

Kegan Gill's story is so incredible that the moment we first read it we knew we needed to try and get him on the podcast. We're just lucky we found out about him early on, because he will definitely be a household name soon enough. Without spoiling too much of the story, which he tells eloquently, he was an F/A-18E Super Hornet pilot who experienced an extremely traumatic ejection, fought...

Formally speaking, our guest on this episode is The Honorable Robert Wilkins as he is a presidential appointee. Rob retired as a Master Sergeant after 26 years in the Air Force, but that was just the beginning of his career. While deployed in West Germany during the cold war, Rob got involved in bodybuilding and ended up getting in touch with early leaders in the bodybuilding community, Joe and Be...

This topic has been frequently requested, but since we are not remotely experts in this space, we needed to find someone who was. We've heard great things from a number of women who have benefited from Mamastefit's content and services, and Gina definitely presented some great insights for anyone looking to learn more about fitness for pregnant and postpartum women. Importantly, this infor...

Mike Erwin is a long overdue guest for this podcast, and he brings a wealth of insight that spans everything from his experiences in combat to leading multiple nonprofit organizations to his efforts to reshape education in America. A 2002 graduate of The U.S. Military Academy at West Point with a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics, Mike was commissioned as an Intelligence Officer, serving in...

Our guest for this episode is Newton Cheng, a father, world class powerlifter, engineer, and Google's Director of Health and Performance. In his work he leads a team with the mission to support the physical, mental, social and spiritual health and wellbeing of Google's global workforce. We went into this conversation looking to compare corporate wellness with tactical human performance, bu...

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...