Army Fitness Drama

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 short version: if you spent two full assignments to infantry brigades and never knew the R2 performance center existed on your installation, that tells you something.

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 — that story lives rent-free in this podcast forever. 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 — mopsnmoes.com/articles

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.