Show Notes
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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.
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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
72 miles through the Italian Dolomites. 22,000 feet of climbing. 31 meals together. Colonel Mike Kloepper and Dr. Ryan Erbe took a group of West Point cadets into the mountains to work on character development. They join us to talk about how they planned the trip, what they saw in the cadets, and what they’d change next time. What we get into: Physical challenge and reflection. The hiking was only part of it. They built in time for cadets to talk through what happened each day, how they handled it, and what they could learn from it.
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.com Catapult Sports — catapult.com Martin Buchheit — 30-15 Intermittent Fitness Test Kinexon — local positioning system The Sports Gene — David Epstein Adrian 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
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.