MOPs & MOEs

Many of you have sent in articles or asked questions about the news around Space Force's fitness test (or lack thereof), so we thought we'd bring on an expert to talk about what they're doing. Shep is currently the Senior Human Performance Specialist at the United States Space Force. His three decade career in human performance has spanned everything from orthopedic rehab to world class athletics. His background includes serving as a Combat Medic in the Army, competitive powerlifting,  Masters Degrees in both Physician Assistant Studies and Exercise Science, teaching at the collegiate level, and strength and conditioning roles in settings ranging from the Army, to Fire/Rescue, to now the Space Force.

The Space Force does not yet have an official policy on this stuff published, they're under a one year exception from existing Air Force policy. As a result, we could not discuss specifics in this conversation, but we do talk about their intentions.

To set the record straight, there's a comment in this episode that implies Drew served in the military. He worked for the Air Force for several years and now works for the Army, but he has not served in uniform.

Alec Blenis is a lot of things: Georgia Tech physics grad, former professional Spartan Racer and competitive ultramarathoner, current Murph world record holder, Instagram Q&A master, and coach at Complete Human Performance. With a background like that, it makes sense that he specializes in coaching people who also want to do a lot of things. Specifically, he coaches people who are looking to pursue "concurrent training," with goals spanning both strength and endurance simultaneously. The relevance of this for tactical professionals is obvious, so we brought him on to have a conversation about how he approaches this kind of training as both an athlete and a coach.  

There is probably not a Human Performance demographic that Coach Taysom hasn’t had experience with at this point. He's trained everyone from children to Olympians and NFL players, he's taught high school and college classes, he's worked in senior care and of course the tactical setting. The program he built at Fort Carson, initially known as the Tactical Athlete Program (TAP) and later the Ironhorse Human Performance Optimization Program (IHPOP), has been cited as one of the direct examples of what grew to become H2F. In his own athletic pursuits he was Strongman national champion in 2016 and has a few top ten finishes in the world. The common thread between all of these things is his passion, which is immediately apparent in every conversation with Mark, this one included. Make sure you have a pen and paper for this one, you're going to want to take notes.

We recorded this presentation just prior to a briefing Dan Bornstein gave to Congress on the threat to national security posed by the physical inactivity of America's youth. The briefing discussed the ways that the National Physical Activity Plan, of which Dan is the Chair for the Military Sector, proposes to address these challenges. In 2012, after many years training athletes, Dan completed his PhD in Exercise Science at the University of South Carolina and joined the faculty at The Citadel where he built their tactical strength and conditioning programs. His research and commentary have been featured in numerous scientific journals and over a hundred media outlets including USA Today, Newsweek, Stars and Stripes, and NPR. You may have encountered his research on regional trends in which military recruits are most likely to get injured, which has received significant attention, and we discuss it briefly in this conversation.

We promised a few links would be in the show notes, so here they are:

National Physical Activity Plan: https://paamovewithus.org/national-physical-activity-plan/

National Youth Sports Strategy: https://health.gov/our-work/nutrition-physical-activity/national-youth-sports-strategy/about-national-youth-sports-strategy

CDC Physical Activity Page: https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/index.html

"The Naperville Study" (also know as "Zero Hour PE" and "Learning Readiness PE"): https://iphionline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/P.E._Case_Study_Naperville.pdf 

Vince Paikowski has multiple combat deployments with the 75th Ranger Regiment, won the Best Ranger Competition in 2021 with his partner Alastair Keys, and has been involved in overhauling how the best teams now prepare for the competition. Teams using his training framework recently took 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th in the 2022 competition. Vince's training approach has been heavily influenced by Uphill Athlete, so this serves as something of a continuation from our conversation with Scott Johnston. This discussion focuses on the importance of cardio base building and strategies for incorporating it into your training, but other topics include goalsetting to maintain motivation, strength training to support endurance events, and more.

On this episode we welcome Drew's hero to the conversation: Dr. John Kiely. He established himself as a serious athlete with several Irish national championships in kickboxing and Muay Thai and ultimately won the Irish heavyweight boxing championship twice. After his competitive career he set out on his career in strength and conditioning which has taken him to the highest levels of sport in Europe. He's coached world champions and Olympians in a wide variety of sports, he's coached teams at the highest levels of soccer and track and field. But what he's best known for now is his writing, much of which is critical of periodization theory, especially the way many of its traditional paradigms are based on outdated stress science. At its root, this is a conversation about how humans are not robots, and the non-physical components of training are almost certainly more important than the details of the physical aspect.

Chris Pokorny is a chaplain with Air Force Special Operations Command, and in addition to his Master of Divinity, also has a Master of Social Work degree. It doesn't hurt that he also observes weightlifting as a spiritual discipline, which undoubtedly helped him integrate with the human performance teams he has been a part of in his military career. His dual credentials mean he's very passionate about research at the intersection of spirituality and mental health. We brought him in to have a conversation about the many challenges that surround integrating spirituality into human performance operations, but if you listen you'll also learn a fun story about his un-chaplain-like taste in music.

Sleep is foundational. Insufficient sleep compromises almost everything: marksmanship, leadership, interpersonal skills, decision making, weight loss, and of course physical performance. For this episode, we have an awesome conversation about sleep for tactical professionals with one of the foremost experts in the field. On top of being one of the Army's few active duty neuroscientists, Allison Brager is also a multiple time CrossFit Games athlete, astronaut candidate, frequently published researcher, and author of Meathead: Unraveling the Athletic Brain. There are few people more qualified to talk about sleep in the tactical space, so we hope you enjoy hearing from her!

We invited Chris McNamara onto the pod to talk about assessments in tactical strength and conditioning. Chris is both a seasoned special operations leader and an accomplished athlete and coach. He's the owner of Evolution Athletics, a training facility near Fort Bragg that is home to some incredible athletes, and he's also an accomplished emergency medical professional with numerous combat deployments. This combination gives him a unique perspective for a discussion on how we test tactical professionals' fitness, and some ways we could potentially do it better.

What makes training "tactical"? Is it working out in a uniform? Is it wearing body armor? Is rucking tactical? So many questions, and so few clear answers. In this episode we discuss the concept of "tactical PT" and why the lack of a clear definition is such a problem.