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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 History of Exercise Is Weirder Than You Think — Bill Hayes, Author of Sweat Bill Hayes spent four years chasing the history of exercise across ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, Kansas City, and the Vatican — and somehow ended up writing the most entertaining book about working out that's ever existed. Drew and Alex sit down with him to find out what he learned. What we get into: Gloios — ancient Greek athletes would scrape the sweat and oil off their bodies after competing, funnel it into a jar, and sell it at the gymnasium for medicinal purposes. Warts. Hemorrhoids. The price depended on how good the athlete was. Christiane Amanpour interviewed Bill on CNN and said nothing had ever seemed so gross to her. She was correct. Exercise began as war training — tenth century BC, not that different from what we do now. Running, endurance testing, strength work. Sparta was the only place that let women train. The Olympic Games formalized competition in the eighth century BC and athletes became cultural heroes — which is why their sweat was worth buying. Bill's dad was a West Point swimmer, Korean War vet, Purple Heart recipient who lost an eye in combat. Bill chose poetry over a military career — an act of rebellion he's pretty honest about. But his dad dragged him to the Spokane Athletic Club every Sunday after church, and that's where the love of exercise started. Girolamo Mercuriale — a Renaissance physician who wrote the first systematic text on exercise, De Arte Gymnastica, in 1569. Bill tracked down a transcription of his manuscripts in a library in Kansas City, Kansas, that hadn't been checked out in 35 years. The Vatican Library story — Bill had a Guggenheim Fellowship and letters of recommendation and still got interrogated in a small room because he didn't have a PhD. He got in. Everything he needed was already in Kansas City. Staying in it across a lifetime — injuries, aging, motivation, and the underrated importance of rest. Bill has herniated discs, a severed rotator cuff, and is still going. The answer isn't finding the perfect program. It's just not stopping. Mentioned in this episode: Sweat — Bill Hayes Girolamo Mercuriale, De Arte Gymnastica, 1569 Isthmia, Olympia, Delphi, Mycenae — Bill's Greek road trip following the original athletic circuit The Metropolitan Museum of Art — has a strigil and gloios pot on display if you want to see it in person 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.

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 Core Four — Four Cognitive Traps Killing Military Human Performance Drew and Alex gave a standing-room-only breakout at the H2F Symposium on this. Now they have time to actually unpack it. Four heuristics that show up everywhere in military human performance — and in every human-run organization. You can't escape them, but you can at least recognize them.  What we get into: Goodhart's Law — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The AFT was designed to signal readiness. The moment it became an incentivized metric, people started optimizing the score instead of the fitness. Same thing happened in Vietnam with body counts. The cure: use multiple metrics, reward more than test scores, and acknowledge what the assessment was actually supposed to tell you. McNamara Fallacy — only what can be quantified matters. The first step is measuring what's easy. The second is disregarding what can't be measured. The third is assuming the unmeasurable isn't important. The fourth is deciding it doesn't exist. Sound familiar? Social cohesion, trust, culture, the music playing in the gym — none of these show up on a dashboard. All of them matter enormously. Every minute a coach spends measuring is a minute they spend not coaching. Hammond's Corollary — what gets measured gets managed, but what most needs managing isn't always measurable. The soldier with a perfect AFT score who can't pick up a ruck without throwing out his back. Fitness versus capability. Athleticism versus fitness. You know it when you see it — and just because you can't put it on a graph doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Nazareth syndrome — no man is a prophet in his own home. The one place Jesus got the most skepticism was Nazareth, because they knew him as the carpenter. The embedded human performance team dealing with real constraints gets ignored. The outside consultant with slick branding and a two-day seminar gets the senior leader's full attention. You can't eliminate this one — but you can use it to your advantage. Mentioned in this episode: Drew's article — The Death of Periodization at mopsandmoes.com Chris Frankel — assessment framework: camera, map, crystal ball, engine VF Ridgway, 1956 — the actual origin of "what gets measured gets managed" Justice Potter Stewart, 1964 — the porn quote. You know it when you see it. The Tyranny of Metrics — Jerry Muller 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.

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 Death of Periodization — Drew and Alex Go to War Drew wrote an article called "The Death of Periodization," posted it on LinkedIn to see what would happen, and then got into fights with people on Instagram for a week. This episode is the full breakdown — what periodization actually is, why it doesn't work for tactical populations, and what to do instead. What we get into: Defining the thing first — because not a single person in the online discourse could do it. The NSCA definition: the logical and systematic process of sequencing training interventions to achieve peak performance at appropriate time points. Every version of periodization, whether block, linear, nonlinear, conjugate, or West Side, shares the same five assumptions. The most important one: that biological adaptations follow a predictable course. They don't. Why periodization is a Soviet export — and what that means. Most of the foundational periodization literature is mapping sports science onto communist economic planning. General adaptation syndrome is not a predictive model. It's a descriptive model. Hans Selye never explained what makes something stressful, never told you how much stress causes adaptation, and never specified when the resistance phase begins or ends. Also, his exhaustion phase was death. Not fatigue. Death. The field of stress physiology left him behind decades ago. The Milo and the bull problem — and why progressive overload is almost universally misunderstood. Milo didn't get stronger because the bull got bigger. He was able to lift the bigger bull because he got stronger. The causal arrow runs the other way. What to do instead — navigating versus forecasting. Shorten the prediction window to what the environment actually allows you to control. A week at a time. The low-hanging fruit problem. You've got people debating intricately periodized strength plans for soldiers who are failing a two-mile run where the passing standard is a ten-minute mile pace. That's what this conversation is really about. Also in this episode: Joey Chestnut vs. Usain Bolt in the Glizzy Gauntlet — one hot dog, then a hundred meters. The Army's new testosterone testing program — rapid fire thoughts, concerns about fertility consequences, and thoughts and prayers for military endocrinologists. Mentioned in this episode: Drew's articles — The Death of Periodization and The Art of Training at mopsandmoes.com John Kiely — Periodization Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth; Periodization Paradigms Thomas Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm shifts Franco Impellizzeri — operational frameworks and self-fulfilling prophecy in periodization Matt Clark — Eight Myths Weaken Combat Readiness 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.

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 Best PE Program in America Nobody's Heard Of — Prescott Junior High Somewhere in Modesto, California, middle schoolers are running sub-five-minute miles, doing a thousand push-ups unbroken, and earning colored trunks through a fitness program that's been running since the 1970s. Drew and Alex sit down with Garrett Beal and Jason Avalar, the PE teachers keeping it alive. What we get into: The program traces back to Mark Wilson, who saw a La Sierra documentary on TV in the seventies, pitched his superintendent, flew out to observe, and came back and built something that's now outlasted everyone who started it. Twenty different physical fitness tests. A colored trunk system where gray is where everyone starts and purple is where almost no one finishes. Records on the wall dating back to 1974 that still haven't been broken. How the point system works — every kid tracks their own progress, logs every test, and gets graded on improvement not just raw performance. Stars for progress, colored trunks for excellence. A 300-pound kid with a perfect attitude and an A in PE because he showed up and worked every single day. The PE assistants — eighth graders who apply in writing, get selected on citizenship and leadership not athleticism, and can lose their shirt for bad grades or bad behavior. Some of the shyest kids in school become the ones leading warm-ups for forty classmates. The records. A girl who ran a 12:27 two-mile as an eighth grader. A boy who did a thousand push-ups unbroken, in perfect form, over an hour. An eighth grade girl who did 143 push-ups and 36 bar dips in a single session. A kid who did 6,500 sit-ups starting at 9am. The mud obstacle course on the last dress-out day of the year. Bear crawls, hurdles, a mud pit, lame dogs, and a fire hose at the finish line. Why this would be nearly impossible to start from scratch today — and why admin support, teacher commitment, and parent buy-in are the three pillars that have kept it alive for fifty years. Alex's commitment on air: connecting Prescott with the folks working on the Presidential Fitness Test rollout. These kids will not struggle. Mentioned in this episode: La Sierra High School PE program — the original inspiration Prescott Junior High Instagram — @prescottstandard Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic All Access Bundle - All of our training, injury prevention, AFT improvement, and more Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

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 Army Just Changed Body Composition Standards. Here's What It Means. Army Directive 2026-13 dropped on the seventh. Drew and Alex break it down — what changed, what was lost, who's affected, and why some very fit people are about to have a very bad time. What we get into: Waist-to-height ratio is now the only authorized standard. Height-weight screening tables are gone. Secondary methods like DEXA, BodPod, and InBody are gone. The AFT fitness exemption is gone. If your waist divided by your height is 0.55 or above, you are out of compliance. Everyone. No exceptions. Why the research actually supports waist-to-height ratio — as a population-level screening tool, not an individual-level diagnostic. The same literature that backs it up also says it should trigger further assessment, not be the final word. The fitness exemption was one of the most progressive things the Army had ever done on body composition. If you performed above a certain threshold, your body composition didn't matter. That's gone now. Commander's discretion replaces the old progression model. No more monthly measurements, no more defined progression requirements. Whether you're making progress and how long you stay enrolled is entirely up to your chain of command. Who's getting tripped up: postpartum women, shorter stockier men with wide torsos, and apparently some serious competitive athletes in very military-relevant sports. Alex's hot take: this feels like malicious compliance by the Army. They spent years and serious money on the Army Comprehensive Body Composition Study. This directive undoes a lot of that work with a two-page memo. No separations will be completed for 180 days while the Army conducts an assessment. Drew and Alex are collecting stories — if this new standard is catching fit soldiers, they want to hear from you. Mentioned in this episode: Secretary Hegseth memo — Military Fitness Standards, September 30 2025 → https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2025/09/30/9c939542/military-fitness-standards-osd010715-25-fod-final.pdf Under Secretary memo — Additional Guidance on Military Fitness Standards, December 18 2025 → https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855613/-1/-1/1/ADDITIONAL-GUIDANCE-ON-MILITARY-FITNESS-STANDARDS.PDF Army Directive 2026-13 — Army Body Composition Program → https://home.army.mil/carson/8117/8345/8209/ARMY_DIR_2026-13_ABCP.pdf Army DVIDS video — Army Updates Body Composition Program → https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1013878/army-updates-body-composition-program-abcp Long and Strong / Workhorse — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic → https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation

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 You Probably Don't Need Electrolytes — Dr. Alan McCubbin Alex posted something skeptical about electrolyte supplements and people lost their minds. So he went and found one of the leading researchers in the field. The answer was pretty much what he suspected. What we get into: Why the post-COVID boom in daily electrolyte supplementation is largely commercially driven — and how the "water doesn't hydrate you" marketing message gets built from a study done on people who were already fully hydrated and didn't need the water they were drinking in the first place. Why milk scored higher than water on the beverage hydration index, and why that has almost nothing to do with electrolytes and almost everything to do with gastric emptying rate — and why adding solid food to the equation makes the type of drink you consume essentially irrelevant for fluid retention. The actual threshold for when sodium supplementation starts to matter: more than four continuous hours of exercise, replacing at least 70% of fluid losses, with total sweat losses of around five liters or more. If that's not you, it's probably not your problem. Why urine color and urine specific gravity are measures of what your kidneys are doing, not direct measures of hydration — and why they're particularly unreliable during or immediately after exercise. The five-hour treadmill study — nine ultrarunners, either replacing 100% of sodium losses or zero, completely blinded. No difference whatsoever in temperature, heart rate, thirst, RPE, or fluid intake. They lost eight to nine percent of their total body sodium and nothing happened. Why sweat testing technology is outpacing the research on what to actually do with the numbers it produces. Season to taste — for anything under four hours, just pick what tastes good and helps you drink an appropriate amount of fluid. Mentioned in this episode: Waterlogged — Tim Noakes This Is Your Mind on Plants — Michael Pollan Beverage Hydration Index study, 2016 Lawrence Armstrong — assessing hydration status, the elusive gold standard, 2009 Lewis James, Loughborough University — placebo-controlled hydration research Fueling Endurance — Alan's podcast for runners, cyclists, and triathletes 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.

If We Built It From Scratch — Drew and Alex Redesign Military Human Performance No guest. No plan. Just Drew and Alex with keys to the kingdom. If you handed us the whole thing tomorrow, what would we actually change? 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 https://teamworks.com/ 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 https://account.trainheroic.com/create-account What we get into: Coach pay comes first. The DOD is on track to become the largest employer of strength and conditioning professionals in the world, which means contracting companies will be too. The contracting model is a race to the bottom on price, with staff salaries absorbing the cuts. That has to change. The five pillars get a rebrand — move, eat, think, recover, connect. Why dropping a dedicated spiritual pillar doesn't mean spirituality doesn't matter — it just means it's woven into everything else. Branding and marketing are undervalued. Embedded human performance has to compete for attention in a way that S1 never does. Drew's pitch: hand the whole thing to an ad agency and see what happens. The personal services contract problem, explained plainly. Coaches meet every FAR criterion for personal services but get treated as non-personal services. Cleaning this up would mean better pay, better working conditions, and actually being able to choose who you hire. GS billets for lead coaches — at minimum the lead strength coach and athletic trainer should be government employees with real career progression, same pay grade as the PT and dietitian. The coach-NCO relationship. Coaches exist to transport people from A to B — that's literally where the word comes from: a 15th century Hungarian horse-drawn carriage. Some coaches are getting fired for leading PT sessions. That's insane. Extender courses are teaching the wrong things. Periodization and physiology when people actually need interpersonal skills and session flow management. Data — stop making it the mission. Just watch what happens to the numbers that justified these programs in the first place. Wearables — a closet full of devices, service members pick what they like, a small subset of data flows to the HP team for trend monitoring and outlier detection, nobody touches a custom military interface. Policy — the Randolph Sheppard Act of 1936 and military dining, credentialing through MTFs vs operational leadership, and why language in DODI 1308.03 may have killed the original ACFT. Mentioned in this episode: Ben Bergeron — move, eat, think, recover, connect framework Kat Oswald — recent podcast guest, helped implement the five factors at Alex's day job Rachel Chamberlain — community-based blueprinting, podcast appearance incoming DODI 1308.3 — DOD physical fitness and body composition program instruction Randolph Shepherd Act, 1936 — federal law governing vending and dining on government property 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.