MOPs & MOEs

MOPs & MOEs

Changing the fitness culture of the force. Your one stop shop for all things fitness for tactical professionals.

  1. 2d ago

    Sports Science with Bryce Murphy

    Sports Science at Scale: What the Military Can Learn from IMG Academy Bryce 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.com We 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 What 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 recovery Our All-Access Bundle bundle gets you access to every program MOPs & MOEs has ever released Or try our classic Long & Strong program with a free trial week Join the conversation by signing up for our Discord server Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

  2. Sep 27

    Why Your Training Doesn't Transfer with Dr. Job Fransen

    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.com We 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 Job Fransen Returns: A Taxonomy for Transfer Job 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 from Job Fransen & Franco Impellizzeri — "A Taxonomy for the Transfer of Skills in Sport" Pentagon Warfighter Performance Optimization memo First Job Fransen episode — MOPs & MOEs, December 2025 Our All-Access Bundle is the best place to get access to every training product we offer Join the conversation on our Discord Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

  3. Sep 20

    Army Fitness Drama

    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.com We 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.com Army Fitness Drama, R2 Gets Cut, and the Job Board Blows Up Drew 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/jobs Alex's R2 blog article Jón Páll Sigmarsson — there's no reason to be alive if you can't deadlift General Frost — early ACFT and H2F rollout Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

  4. Sep 13

    How to be a Hybrid Athlete with Alex Viada

    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.com We 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.com What Is a Hybrid Athlete, Actually? — Alex Viada, Complete Human Performance Alex 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 Amazon Complete Human Performance — completehp.com Alex Viada on Instagram — @alex.viada Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

  5. Sep 6

    The Illusion of Certainty with Franco Impellizzeri

    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.com We 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.com The Illusion of Certainty — Franco Impellizzeri Drew 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 Sydney Nielsen et al. — How Much Running Is Too Much? Brandolini's Law Thomas Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Drew's Death of Periodization — mopsnmoes.com/articles Sean Bean's Get Birding podcast — for when you need to decompress Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic → https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-pod Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

  6. Aug 30

    Our Favorite Exercises

    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.com We 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.com Our Favorite Exercises No guest this week. Just Drew and Alex talking about the exercises they actually love, the ones they've quietly stopped programming, and the ones they think the military is completely sleeping on. It goes longer than expected. There's a lot of meat on this bone. What we get into: The barbell reverse lunge keeps showing up in everything Drew writes. There's a reason for that. Single leg work in general gets way less credit than it deserves in the tactical space, and this episode makes the case pretty thoroughly. Pull-ups are everyone's favorite measure of upper body fitness and almost nobody programs them correctly. Volume, frequency, the way units approach it — there's a lot to fix here. Running is the exercise everyone programs wrong. Not because they're running, but because they're running the same pace, same distance, same everything, every single week. Alex also makes an extended argument for trail running that he was technically not supposed to provide context for but did anyway. The Turkish get-up debate — Drew wants more military coaches using them, Alex would rather see a sandbag get-up, and both agree it's the kind of exercise that tells you a lot about a coach based on how they react to it. Jump rope somehow never comes up in these conversations and probably should. Ido Portal shows up briefly. Crawling gets discussed. Nobody is fully sure where movement culture ends and content begins. The episode closes with a rapid fire round — seven questions, no context allowed. Most overrated exercise. Most underrated. Exercise everyone programs wrong. Exercise that changed your coaching. One you used to love but gave up. Ugly but effective. Exercise you wish more military coaches used. Both of them say bench press is overrated and are not happy about it. Mentioned in this episode: Ido Portal — movement, crawling, linen clothing, possibly Jesus Robert Forstemann — the cyclist with the legs Coach Kelleher up in Alaska — rucking conditioning, Jacob's Ladder Military Athlete / Rob Shaul — sandbag get-ups Wednesday leave — take it. This is a public service announcement. Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic All-Access Bundle — all of our programs, rehab plans, and more, all in one place! Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

  7. Aug 23

    Value Capture: When Metrics Take Over with C. Thi Nguyen

    MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the performance operations platform trusted by elite military units and professional spaces 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.com We 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.com Why Gamification Is Ruining Military Human Performance — C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher Drew and Alex have been talking about Goodhart's Law, McNamara's Fallacy, and the tyranny of metrics for a while now. This week they bring in a philosopher who gave them the language to finally explain why — C. Thi Nguyen from the University of Utah, whose work on games and gamification is the missing piece of that conversation. What we get into: Value capture in military human performance — when a unit starts chasing PT scores instead of physical readiness, when a strength coach starts optimizing athlete data instead of athlete outcomes, when a commander starts managing the metric instead of the mission. Value capture is the mechanism behind all of it. It's what happens when a simplified number colonizes your decision-making and you slowly forget what you were actually trying to accomplish. The quantified self problem — HRV, sleep scores, readiness metrics, wearables. All genuinely useful. All capable of becoming the thing you optimize instead of the thing they were supposed to measure. The difference between a tool that informs your judgment and a tool that replaces it is one of the most important distinctions in human performance right now. Why gamification is different from games — games are voluntary, finite, and you walk away from them. Gamification takes the reward loop of a game and attaches it to things that used to have richer value. The PT test was never supposed to be the game. It was supposed to tell you something about readiness. The moment it became a scoreboard, it stopped doing that. The promotion system as a game — what happens to an organization when the people who are best at optimizing the visible metrics rise to the top, and whether military culture has the tools to value what the metrics miss. Echo chambers and epistemic cowardice — why Nguyen's work applies directly to military organizations where rank creates enormous pressure to smooth out disagreement, and what that does to the quality of decision-making over time. Mentioned in this episode: Games: Agency as Art — C. Thi Nguyen Goodhart's Law and the Core Four — see previous episode The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game — C. Thi Nguyen Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic All Access Bundle — all of our training programs and rehab material in one place Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

  8. Aug 16

    Juiced Up: Talking Testosterone with Barbell Medicine

    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.com We 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.com Testosterone — What's Actually True — Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum, Barbell Medicine The DOD just mandated testosterone testing across the force. Alex posted about it. The internet lost its mind. So Drew and Alex went and got one of the most knowledgeable people in the field — Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum of Barbell Medicine — to actually explain what's going on. What we get into: Are testosterone levels really dropping? The short answer is probably not in the way the internet says. The long answer involves a testing methodology problem — older immunoassay tests read artificially high compared to the more accurate mass spectrometry tests that replaced them around 2000. When you only use mass spec data across 100,000 people and 30 years, there's no decline. The real culprit, to the extent there is one, is obesity — specifically visceral adipose tissue, which BMI is terrible at detecting. The DOD testosterone testing mandate — what it actually says, what it doesn't say, and why the Army endocrinology community is about to have a very bad time. Jordan breaks down the difference between having a low lab number and actually having testosterone deficiency, why both criteria have to be met before treatment makes sense, and why testing people without symptoms is going to generate a flood of unnecessary clinical encounters. TRT — who actually benefits, what the evidence says, and what it doesn't. The difference between restoring someone who is genuinely deficient to a normal level versus using it as a performance enhancing drug. What happens to your natural production when you go on exogenous testosterone. Why fertility consequences are a real concern and not being talked about enough in the military context. Lifestyle first — sleep, obesity, alcohol, and opioids are the four biggest modifiable drivers of low testosterone, in that order. Fix those before anyone puts a needle in you. Jordan's framework for the workup and when treatment actually makes sense. The history of testosterone — it started with a French physician injecting himself with ground-up animal testicle extract in the 1800s. It ends with Drew and Alex's Fitness Aptitude Test, which Jordan correctly identifies he would lose on the five-mile run. Mentioned in this episode: Signal: What Your Testosterone Is Telling You About Your Health — Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum and Dr. Austin Baraki, Barbell Medicine Travison 2007 study — the original birth cohort testosterone decline study Barbell Medicine — barbellmedicine.com Department of War testosterone testing mandate — referenced throughout Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

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About

Changing the fitness culture of the force. Your one stop shop for all things fitness for tactical professionals.

Information

  • Creator
    MOPs & MOEs
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    237
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © MOPs & MOEs
  • Show Website
    MOPs & MOEs

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