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

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 ...

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a>We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a>Our Favorite ExercisesNo guest this week. Just Drew and Alex talking about the exercises they actually love, the ones they&#39;ve quietly stopped programming, and the ones they think the military is completely sleeping on. It goes longer than expected. There&#39;s a lot of meat on this bone.What we get into:The barbell reverse lunge keeps showing up in everything Drew writes. There&#39;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&#39;s favorite measure of upper body fitness and almost nobody programs them correctly. Volume, frequency, the way units approach it — there&#39;s a lot to fix here.Running is the exercise everyone programs wrong. Not because they&#39;re running, but because they&#39;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&#39;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 JesusRobert Forstemann — the cyclist with the legsCoach Kelleher up in Alaska — rucking conditioning, Jacob&#39;s LadderMilitary Athlete / Rob Shaul — sandbag get-upsWednesday leave — take it. This is a public service announcement.<a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-pod" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic </a><a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/mops-n-moe-s-all-access-bundle?attrib=565490-pod" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">All-Access Bundle — all of our programs, rehab plans, and more, all in one place!</a>Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

Our Favorite Exercises

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 ...

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a>We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a>Why Gamification Is Ruining Military Human Performance — C. Thi Nguyen, philosopherDrew and Alex have been talking about Goodhart&#39;s Law, McNamara&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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:<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Games-Agency-As-Art-Thinking/dp/0197815650" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Games: Agency as Art </a>— C. Thi NguyenGoodhart&#39;s Law and the Core Four — see previous episode<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Score-Stop-Playing-Somebody-Elses-ebook/dp/B0F4QBD54F?ref_=ast_author_mpb" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else&#39;s Game</a> — C. Thi Nguyen<a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic </a><a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/mops-n-moe-s-all-access-bundle?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">All Access Bundle — all of our training programs and rehab material in one place</a>Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

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

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a>We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a>Testosterone — What&#39;s Actually True — Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum, Barbell MedicineThe 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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s Fitness Aptitude Test, which Jordan correctly identifies he would lose on the five-mile run.Mentioned in this episode:<a href="https://www.barbellmedicine.com/shop/learning/signal/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Signal: What Your Testosterone Is Telling You About Your Health</a> — Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum and Dr. Austin Baraki, Barbell MedicineTravison 2007 study — the original birth cohort testosterone decline studyBarbell Medicine — <a href="http://barbellmedicine.com/" target="_blank">barbellmedicine.com</a><a href="https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jul/15/2003961654/-1/-1/1/HEALTH%20AND%20HUMAN%20PERFORMANCE%20OPTIMIZATION%20TO%20ENHANCE%20MILITARY%20READINESS%20OSD004430-26%20RES%20FINAL.PDF" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Department of War testosterone testing mandate</a> — referenced throughout<a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Long and Strong</a> — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

Juiced Up: Talking Testosterone with Barbell Medicine

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a>We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a>The History of Exercise Is Weirder Than You Think — Bill Hayes, Author of SweatBill 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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s pretty honest about. But his dad dragged him to the Spokane Athletic Club every Sunday after church, and that&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t finding the perfect program. It&#39;s just not stopping.Mentioned in this episode:<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620402289?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Sweat — Bill Hayes</a>Girolamo Mercuriale, De Arte Gymnastica, 1569Isthmia, Olympia, Delphi, Mycenae — Bill&#39;s Greek road trip following the original athletic circuitThe Metropolitan Museum of Art — has a strigil and gloios pot on display if you want to see it in person<a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic</a> Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

The History of Exercise is Weirder Than You Think

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a>We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a>The Core Four — Four Cognitive Traps Killing Military Human PerformanceDrew 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&#39;t escape them, but you can at least recognize them. What we get into:Goodhart&#39;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&#39;s easy. The second is disregarding what can&#39;t be measured. The third is assuming the unmeasurable isn&#39;t important. The fourth is deciding it doesn&#39;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&#39;s Corollary — what gets measured gets managed, but what most needs managing isn&#39;t always measurable. The soldier with a perfect AFT score who can&#39;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&#39;t put it on a graph doesn&#39;t mean it doesn&#39;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&#39;s full attention. You can&#39;t eliminate this one — but you can use it to your advantage.Mentioned in this episode:Drew&#39;s article —<a href="https://www.mopsnmoes.com/articles/death-of-periodization" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer"> The Death of Periodization </a>at <a href="http://mopsandmoes.com/" target="_blank">mopsandmoes.com</a><a href="https://www.mopsnmoes.com/podcast/seeking-truth-in-strength-and-conditioning" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Chris Frankel </a>— assessment framework: camera, map, crystal ball, engineVF Ridgway, 1956 — the actual origin of <a href="https://www.mopsnmoes.com/articles/what-gets-measured-gets-managed" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">&quot;what gets measured gets managed&quot;</a>Justice Potter Stewart, 1964 — the porn quote. You know it when you see it.The Tyranny of Metrics — Jerry Muller<a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic</a>Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

The Core Four

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a> We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a> The Death of Periodization — Drew and Alex Go to War<a href="https://www.mopsnmoes.com/articles/death-of-periodization" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Drew wrote an article called &quot;The Death of Periodization,&quot;</a> 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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s new testosterone testing program — rapid fire thoughts, concerns about fertility consequences, and thoughts and prayers for military endocrinologists.Mentioned in this episode:Drew&#39;s articles — The Death of Periodization and The Art of Training at <a href="http://mopsandmoes.com/" target="_blank">mopsandmoes.com</a><a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5856877/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">John Kiely — Periodization Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth</a>; <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22356774/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Periodization Paradigms</a>Thomas Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm shiftsFranco Impellizzeri — operational frameworks and self-fulfilling prophecy in periodization<a href="http://mwi.westpoint.edu/army-physical-fitness-problem-part-1-eight-myths-weaken-combat-readiness/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Matt Clark — Eight Myths Weaken Combat Readiness</a><a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic </a>Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

The Death of Periodization

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">teamworkstactical.com</a> 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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">trainheroic.com</a> The Best PE Program in America Nobody's Heard Of — Prescott Junior HighSomewhere 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 inspirationPrescott Junior High Instagram — @prescottstandard<a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic </a><a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/mops-n-moe-s-all-access-bundle?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">All Access Bundle - All of our training, injury prevention, AFT improvement, and more</a>Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

The Fittest Middle School in America

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a>We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a>The Army Just Changed Body Composition Standards. Here&#39;s What It Means.Army Directive 2026-13 dropped on the seventh. Drew and Alex break it down — what changed, what was lost, who&#39;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&#39;t matter. That&#39;s gone now.Commander&#39;s discretion replaces the old progression model. No more monthly measurements, no more defined progression requirements. Whether you&#39;re making progress and how long you stay enrolled is entirely up to your chain of command.Who&#39;s getting tripped up: postpartum women, shorter stockier men with wide torsos, and apparently some serious competitive athletes in very military-relevant sports.Alex&#39;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 → <a href="https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2025/09/30/9c939542/military-fitness-standards-osd010715-25-fod-final.pdf" target="_blank">https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2025/09/30/9c939542/military-fitness-standards-osd010715-25-fod-final.pdf</a>Under Secretary memo — Additional Guidance on Military Fitness Standards, December 18 2025 → <a href="https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855613/-1/-1/1/ADDITIONAL-GUIDANCE-ON-MILITARY-FITNESS-STANDARDS.PDF" target="_blank">https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855613/-1/-1/1/ADDITIONAL-GUIDANCE-ON-MILITARY-FITNESS-STANDARDS.PDF</a>Army Directive 2026-13 — Army Body Composition Program → <a href="https://home.army.mil/carson/8117/8345/8209/ARMY_DIR_2026-13_ABCP.pdf" target="_blank">https://home.army.mil/carson/8117/8345/8209/ARMY_DIR_2026-13_ABCP.pdf</a>Army DVIDS video — Army Updates Body Composition Program → <a href="https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1013878/army-updates-body-composition-program-abcp" target="_blank">https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1013878/army-updates-body-composition-program-abcp</a>Long and Strong / Workhorse — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic → <a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation" target="_blank">https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation</a>

Army Body Composition Policy: Changes Effective Immediately

MOPs &amp; 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 <a href="http://teamworkstactical.com/" target="_blank">teamworkstactical.com</a>We are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="http://trainheroic.com/" target="_blank">trainheroic.com</a>You Probably Don&#39;t Need Electrolytes — Dr. Alan McCubbinAlex 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 &quot;water doesn&#39;t hydrate you&quot; marketing message gets built from a study done on people who were already fully hydrated and didn&#39;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&#39;s not you, it&#39;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&#39;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 NoakesThis Is Your Mind on Plants — Michael PollanBeverage Hydration Index study, 2016<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17921468/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Lawrence Armstrong — assessing hydration status, the elusive gold standard, 2009</a>Lewis James, Loughborough University — placebo-controlled hydration research<a href="https://fuelingendurance.com/podcast/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Fueling Endurance — Alan&#39;s podcast for runners, cyclists, and triathletes</a><a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic</a>Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

You Probably Don't Need Electrolytes with Dr. Alan McCubbin

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 br...

If We Built It From Scratch — Drew and Alex Redesign Military Human PerformanceNo 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 &amp; 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 <a href="https://teamworks.com/" target="_blank">https://teamworks.com/</a> Also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you&#39;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 <a href="https://account.trainheroic.com/create-account" target="_blank">https://account.trainheroic.com/create-account</a> 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&#39;t mean spirituality doesn&#39;t matter — it just means it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s literally where the word comes from: a 15th century Hungarian horse-drawn carriage. Some coaches are getting fired for leading PT sessions. That&#39;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 frameworkKat Oswald — recent podcast guest, helped implement the five factors at Alex&#39;s day jobRachel Chamberlain — community-based blueprinting, podcast appearance incomingDODI 1308.3 — DOD physical fitness and body composition program instructionRandolph Shepherd Act, 1936 — federal law governing vending and dining on government property<a href="https://marketplace.trainheroic.com/workout-plan/team/leg-tuck-nation?attrib=565490-web" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic </a>Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.

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