MOPs & MOEs

We have another research focused episode for you guys this week, and we're diving into the recently published article "Demographic, psychosocial, and physical fitness predictors of successful graduation from U.S. Army Ranger School."

We're joined by the lead author, LTC Timothy Benedict, who has a unique background as both an infantry officer and a physical therapist. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Baylor University – Keller Army Community Hospital Division 1 Sports Physical Therapy Fellowship at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York where he is also the chief of the Physical Therapy Department.

After graduating from the United States Military Academy in 2002, LTC Benedict commissioned as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army. Immediately following graduation from Ranger School, he joined the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vicenza, Italy, and then deployed to Iraq as a rifle platoon leader (2003-2004) and Afghanistan as a company executive officer (2005-2006). He graduated from the Army-Baylor Physical Therapy Program in 2009 and was assigned to the 3rd Brigade, 25th ID in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and deployed to Afghanistan in 2011-2012.

LTC Benedict graduated from the University of Kentucky with a PhD in rehabilitation sciences after completing a randomized controlled trial implementing pain neuroscience education for Service Members with low back pain and post-traumatic stress in 2018. Since obtaining his PhD, Tim has taught and researched about the neuroscience of pain and resilience.

On this episode we each brought five books that have shaped the way we think about human performance and discussed why they had such an impact. And in classic form, we each also brought a few honorable mentions as well.

Drew's books are a little more focused on strength and conditioning, while Alex's books (somewhat unexpectedly) are largely focused on mental health and how exercise affects our brains.

If you're looking for reading suggestions in the human performance space, you have come to the right place. This list spans a lot of different topics, so there's something for everyone.

If you want to get any of them, here is the full list:

Drew's Top 5

Practical Programming for Strength Training (Andy Baker/Mark Rippetoe)

The Science of Running (Steve Magness)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)

Training Talk (Martin Bingisser)

Endure (Alex Hutchinson)

Alex's Top 5

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (John Ratey)

Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)  

How Minds Change (David Mcraney)

Saving Normal (Allen Frances)

Tribe (Sebastian Junger)

Training for the New Alpinism (Scott Johnston/Steve House)

Starting Strength (Mark Rippetoe)

Strongest Shall Survive (Bill Starr)

80/20 Running (Matt Fitzgerald)

Winning (Clive Woodward)

Reactive Training Systems Manual (Mike Tuscherer)

John Kiely Papers: A New Understanding of Stress, Periodization Paradigms in the 21st Century, and Periodization Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth

Michael Pollan books: This is Your Mind on Plants, In Defense of Food, and Omnivore’s Dilemma

Go Wild (John Ratey)

The Nature Fix (Florence Williams)

Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers (Robert Sapolsky)

On this week's episode we're headed across the pond. WO2 Steve Turner is a Quartermaster Sergeant Instructor in the British Royal Army Physical Training Corps, and he's here to help us understand how the British Army approaches physical fitness.

If you're in the US military, it's worth noting up front that Warrant Officers in the British Army are not quite the same as ours. He's much more like what we would call a Sergeant Major.

The topics we covered include everything from how NCOs can take on full time roles as physical training instructors to how they've recently updated their testing to (as listeners have come to expect from us) a discussion of how their soldiers are fed.

Their new Role Fitness Test Soldier is quite similar to our ACFT, they have just started implementing something called EDGE, which parallels our H2F, and although we discuss plenty of differences between our approaches there are clearly some similar challenges and valuable lessons we can learn from their model.

⁠This document provides descriptions of the various fitness tests British soldiers take⁠ at different points in their career, depending on their occupation.

You can find an excellent ⁠hype reel that will have you ready to go try out for the RAPTC here⁠.

If you're ready to try out, ⁠here's an overview of the selection process for RAPTCIs⁠.

On this week's episode we're diving into how strength and conditioning coaches are trained and educated, and we have a perfect guest to tackle this topic. Coach Scott Caulfield is one of the most well-known collegiate strength and conditioning coaches in the industry. He spent 11 years at the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) as a coaching education manager and head strength and conditioning coach.

Scott Caulfield earned his bachelors degree in Physical Education from Castleton University in 2000 and his masters in Sports Coaching from the University of Denver's renowned Graduate School of Professional Psychology in 2017.

Prior to joining the NSCA, he served as an assistant strength & conditioning coach at Dartmouth College from 2008-11. During that time, he also served as the director of sports performance at the River Valley Club, one of the most successful training facilities in New England, and served as the NSCA's Vermont State Director.

After his time at the NSCA he served as the head strength and conditioning coach at Colorado College, and at the same time teaching in the strength and conditioning graduate degree program at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He has given hundreds of public presentations both in the US and internationally.

He became Norwich University's first ever Director of Strength and Conditioning in August 2021. In this role he directs the development and management of individual and group strength and conditioning programs to over 600 student-athletes participating in Norwich University's athletic programs, and as you'll hear in this episode they have a growing relationship with the ROTC programs.

He holds the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist with Distinction (CSCS*D) certification and Registered Strength and Conditioning Coach with Distinction (RSCC*D) designation from the NSCA as well as USA Weightlifting's Level 2 Advanced Sports Performance Coach certification.

This is our heavily anticipated episode on the weight loss drugs that have been receiving a ton of media attention recently, including Ozempic and Wegovy (semaglutide), Mounjaro and Zepbound (tirzepatide), and others.

Since these drugs are intimately involved with our bodies' hormone regulation, we had to bring in an hormone expert to break it down for us. Dr. Karl Nadolsky is one of the best in this space, and is both a nationally recognize expert in obesity medicine, and a Navy veteran who worked extensively on these issues with active duty service members at Walter Reed.

Karl is a clinical endocrinologist and chief of the endocrinology, obesity & diabetes department for Holland Hospital in Holland, MI. He is an assistant clinical professor of medicine for Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. He holds board certification in Internal Medicine, Diabetes Endocrinology & Metabolism, and Obesity Medicine.

You may know him from the Docs Who Lift podcast which he co-hosts with his brother Spencer, who is also a doctor specializing in obesity medicine. Both of the brothers are accomplished athletes in addition to their medical credentials, giving them a unique perspective on the appropriate combinations of medical and lifestyle interventions.

You can listen to the Docs Who Lift podcast on Spotify here (or on your preferred listening app).

You can find Karl's article on obesity pharmacotherapy in active duty military populations here.

You can follow Karl on his Instagram for some excellent health and fitness content, and if you want to follow both of the Docs Who Lift, you can follow Spencer on his page as well.

This episode is all about nutrition in America: How did we get here? (Hint: there are actually some very good reasons for all the processed food) What problems is our diet creating? (Hint: it's more than just obesity) And what can we do to start fixing it?

That's a huge topic, but our guest is one of the most qualified person to tackle it. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian is a cardiologist, Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Professor of Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine, and an attending physician at Tufts Medical Center. Recently he also became the founding Director of the Tufts Food is Medicine Institute. His work aims to create the science and translation for a food system that is nutritious, equitable, and sustainable.

Dr. Mozaffarian has authored more than 500 scientific publications on dietary priorities for obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, and on evidence-based policy approaches and innovations to reduce diet-related diseases and improve health equity in the US and globally. Areas of focus include defining healthy diets, nutritional biomarkers, Food is Medicine interventions in healthcare, business innovation and entrepreneurship, and food policy.

He is one of the top cited researchers in medicine globally, he has served in numerous advisory roles including for the US and Canadian governments, American Heart Association, World Health Organization, and United Nations. His work has been featured in an array of media outlets. Thomson Reuters has named him as one of the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds In 2023, Dr. Mozaffarian was nominated by President Biden to serve on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition (PCSFN).

Dr. Mozaffarian received his B.S. in biological sciences from Stanford University, M.D. from Columbia University. He took his residency at Stanford, and was a fellow in cardiovascular medicine at the University of Washington, where he also received his MPH. He earned a Doctorate in Public Health from Harvard. Before being appointed as Dean at Tufts in 2014, Dr. Mozaffarian was at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health for a decade and clinically active in cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is married, has three children, and actively trains as a Fourth Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo.

For an overview of the initiatives that the Tufts Food is Medicine Institute is tackling see their fact sheet.

If you want to learn more about the Food Compass drama that we briefly discuss in the episode, check out this blog post summarizing the situation.

You can find the text of the SWEET Act here, which is a proposal to tax sugar sweetened beverages and use the revenue from that tax to fund research on diet-related health conditions.

We have Kechi Anyadike-Danes back for round two to discuss the second installment of his planned three part research series looking into the divide between human performance research and education and the reality of actual coaching practice.

This episode is specifically focused on periodization. We chart the history of how periodization theory developed, and then we look at how coaches responded to a variety of questions about core concepts within periodization.

Kechi is a doctoral student at the German Sport University Cologne where he has been looking at various aspects of athlete preparation and how coaches perceive various theories, concepts and strongly held beliefs that exist in the training literature. His doctoral research is being supervised and helped by friend of the pod John Kiely from the University of Limerick and Lars Donath from the German Sport University Cologne. Kechi doesn't just focus on the theoretical, he is also passionate about training and coaching (especially weightlifting).

You can find the full text of Kechi's paper here.

We also discussed Yuri Verkhoshansky's paper "The End of 'Periodization' in the Training of High Performance Sport" an abbreviated translation of which can be found here.

The paper by Matt Clark that we mentioned is available on Modern War Institute here.

Some recommended further reading:

Foundations of Training Periodization Part I: Historical Outline by Jimmy Pedemonte

Foundation of Training Periodization Part II: The Objective of Periodization by Jimmy Pedemonte

From Russia with Love? Sixty years of proliferation of L.P. Matveyev’s concept of Periodisation? by Arnd Kruger

Kechi asked us to include on correction to the section when was discussing a system used in ancient Rome/Greece. The system was called the Tetrad. It is not known whether this was the only approach but it is one that has been popularly discussed due to it appearing in a book called 'On Gymnastics' by Philostratus. Below is the description:

By the tetrad system we mean a cycle of four days, each one of which is devoted to a different activity. The first day prepares the athlete; the second is an all-out trial; the third is relaxation; and the fourth a medium-hard workout. The exercise of the first day, the one that prepares him, is made up of short, intense movements which stir up the athlete and prepare him for the hard workout to follow on the next day. The strenuous day (the second) is an all-out test of his potential. The third, the day of relaxation, so to speak, employs his energy in a moderate way, while on the day of the medium workout (the last day), the athlete practices breaking holds himself and preventing his opponent from breaking away. 

On this episode we have John Mackersie joining us for a little end of year reflection.

John is a strength and conditioning coach with over 15 years of professional experience in collegiate athletics and military special operations. He began coaching in Division I athletics and has been working with special operations since 2013. He has spoken and lectured on numerous occasions at national and regional levels, including preparing aspiring coaches for certification exams. He is a strong believer in all things old school (he and Drew share an affinity for stone lifting) but also in integrating newer technologies. He has both his bachelors and masters in psychology, bringing a unique perspective to the strength and conditioning profession.

We each prepared for this conversation by thinking of three big things we’ve changed our minds on when it comes to human performance. A common theme was the difference between the “textbook” version of strength and conditioning and the reality of working with actual people who have complicated lives, specific preferences, and plenty of other priorities beyond fitness.

As you listen, think about what you’ve changed your mind on

We're back with another foray into some topics that are often considered outside the scope of military human performance, but play important roles in whether these programs achieve their goals: mental health, veteran healthcare, and the veteran disability system. Our guest brings 15 years of experience working as a clinical psychologist in the VA, plus extensive work on multiple initiatives with the special operations community.

Christopher Frueh, PhD is a clinical psychologist by training and Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii. He has over thirty years of professional experience working with military veterans and active-duty personnel, and has conducted clinical trials, epidemiology, historical, and neuroscience research. He has co-authored over 300 scientific publications, including a graduate textbook on adult psychopathology.

His work on “Operator Syndrome” is helping change the way we understand and treat the complex set of interrelated health, psychological, and interpersonal difficulties that are common downstream outcomes of a career in military special operations. He has advisory roles with SEAL Future Foundation, Boulder Crest Foundation, Military Special Operations Family Collaborative, The Mission Within, VETS, Inc., Quick Reaction Foundation, and to the military special operations community in general.

We're actually going to have him back in a couple months to focus on Operator Syndrome because he has a book on the topic coming out, but on this episode we're focusing on his time at the VA, where he worked from 1991-2006. Specifically we're digging into how the VA approaches mental health.

He has testified before US Congress, and served as a paid contractor for Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, US State Department, and the National Board of Medical Examiners. He has also been published, quoted, and cited in a huge range of publications including commentaries in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Reuters, and many others.

We strongly recommend listening to our episode with Dan Gade or reading his book if this is a topic that interests you. You'll hear both referenced a few times throughout this conversation.

Here are a few of the references he mentioned during the episode:

Kessler et al, 2005 - a large scale investigation of lifetime prevalence of mental health disorders.

Frueh et al, 2005 - Chris' own research that the VA attempted to prevent from being published

You asked, and now we've delivered.

We know the Army runs on checklists. Medevac? There's a checklist for that. Call for fire? There's a checklist for that. Breaching an enemy obstacle? There's a checklist for that. And all of these are simple enough that they can be laminated and stuck in a cargo pocket, or even boiled down to an easily memorized acronym.

But the physical training we do every day? Oddly, this is where you're expected to read hundreds of pages of science, guiding principles, and exercises complete with drill and ceremony. How do you simplify that into something actionable? Apparently that's up to you to figure out.

When we floated the idea of a simple form (checklist included) for planning physical training, people seemed very interested. So now you can download it for free on our website! We even included an example filled out version.

Listen to this episode for a discussion of how to use it. You can certainly go deeper on all of these topics, but we've tried to create something simple and straightforward that will get you off to a good start.

Give it a shot and let us know what you think. This will likely evolve based on feedback, and maybe one day the Army will even put it to use officially. And if you're in another service or organization that wants something like this, we'd be happy to collaborate on that too!