Health Is A Skill with Todd Vande Hei

A stroke arrives at an age when it shouldn't be possible. Not from genetics or bad luck, but from the exact habits that built everything—the discipline, the relentless optimization, the refusal to stop. The body has a breaking point, and stress has a physiology that most leaders never learn until it's too late. In Health Is a Skill, Todd Vande Hei maps the four levers that move heart rate variabil...

All her labs came back normal. Imaging was clear. Nothing wrong, her doctors said. But her body was shutting down—hours collapsed in bed, winded by stairs, words dissolving mid-sentence. Then a mold inspector found it: high levels growing in the walls where she lived. That single discovery unraveled everything medicine had missed, pointing back to a problem documented in Leviticus that modern prac...

A man collapses on a golf course with no warning. The doctors find AFib—atrial fibrillation—silently triggering seizures his body had been hiding for years. A stroke follows, same root cause, still invisible to every annual physical. He was running hard, ignoring every warning light, until his body gave him no choice but to listen. Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, reveals the cascade that high perfor...

Nobody talks about your feet. Not in the boardroom, not in the biohacking forums, not when you're debugging why your knees burn after a decade of "doing everything right." But a guest arrives with a radical claim: the comfortable shoes you've worn your entire life have made you deaf to the ground beneath you. Your body compensates in ways that feel like aging but aren't. High performers who optimi...

There's a moment when the explanation shifts from VO2 metrics to confession: discipline alone didn't carry him through. He broke. Stress accumulated until his physiology couldn't buffer the load anymore. This isn't about training protocols or fitness zones. It's about what happens when a leader running a manufacturing operation discovers that willpower fails when the body fails. In Health Is a Ski...

He paused mid-sentence and stepped away to change his shirt, light dying behind him. When he returned, something had shifted—not just the lighting, but the weight of what was coming. Your nervous system has forgotten something crucial, he said. Most people blame themselves for laziness and distraction, but they're looking at the wrong problem entirely. In this episode of Health Is a Skill, you'll...

A structural problem began in infancy—never named, never addressed—and shaped decades of life. Crooked teeth weren't cosmetic. They were a signal: underdeveloped jaws, narrowed airways, fragmented sleep, a stroke at a young age, exhaustion without explanation. Dr. Shereem Lim brings clarity to what conventional medicine has left invisible: the connection between infant breathing patterns, facial d...

A barefoot walk home. Three-quarters of a mile. Hip pain that had persisted for months—gone. No pills, no procedures, no intervention. Just feet on ground and a body remembering its own design. It's the moment everything shifts, when you realize you've been fighting against the way you were built the entire time. Colton Danz is a strength coach and movement specialist who spent years managing brok...

Something shifts when someone finally names what they've been carrying—a diagnosis, a pattern, a story about who they are that's been reinforced so many times they forgot it was a choice. The conversation opens there, not with solutions, but with recognition. With the work of actually seeing what's been invisible. Brittni Doty works with high performers at Stark Health, people who've built entire...

Something broke—not the heart itself yet, but the man carrying it. Exhausted from running a company, believing discipline alone could absorb the pressure, discovering too late that stress accumulates like debt, that sleep loss compounds, that physiology collapses when it reaches the breaking point. The lesson: you cannot willpower your way through biological limits. Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, c...

Someone sat down and explained why you're addicted to the wrong things—not with judgment, but with precision. Dopamine isn't pleasure. It's the drive to pursue. And when that signal gets hijacked by rewards that arrive without work, something invisible breaks: you stop believing your effort matters. You become a consumer instead of a producer. In Health Is a Skill, you'll learn why young people ar...

There's a moment when the pressure stops being something you endure and becomes something that exposes you. When the decision you make at 2PM—tired, depleted, running on fumes—costs more than you can calculate. When your body, the one thing you thought would carry you through decades of leadership, becomes the thing holding you back from everything you're trying to build. In this solo episode, you...

He assumed discipline would carry him through. For forty years, it didn't—because the foundation he stood on was broken in ways he never examined. The knee pain, the back pain, the stress that wouldn't release: all of it traced to one place most people never look. The ground beneath them. In this episode of Health Is a Skill, you'll discover why your shoes are quietly disabling your foundation, ho...

There's a moment when someone stops apologizing for their own collapse and starts asking why the system that promised discipline failed them. The most disciplined people in the room—the ones who built companies and managed millions—suddenly unable to keep the simplest health habits. Not because they're weak. Because they spent their discipline somewhere else, and there's nothing left. Health Is a...

Half of heart attack patients don't have elevated cholesterol before they have a heart attack. The room shifts. Everything you've been told about health markers suddenly feels incomplete. This episode dismantles a decades-old assumption about how leaders should measure their bodies. You'll discover why cholesterol—the metric everyone obsesses over—might be optimizing for the wrong outcome, and wha...

He sits in the silence after asking the question—the one that makes high achievers stop scrolling. If the number goes up but everything else breaks, what exactly did you win? On Health Is a Skill, Todd Vande Hei examines the dangerous assumption embedded in modern health metrics: that the data leaders chase hardest are the ones most likely to destroy them. VO2 max has become a status symbol—execut...

What if your body is aging faster than your birthday suggests? In this episode, Todd Vande Hei breaks down the science behind epigenetic clocks, DNA methylation, and biological age testing. These emerging tools attempt to measure how quickly your body is aging at the cellular level — not just how many years you’ve been alive. But do these tests actually measure aging? And does lowering your biolog...

Everyone wants to optimize their body. Very few people are training their mind. In this episode, Todd Vande Hei breaks down the concept of mental fitness — the ability to maintain clarity, composure, and forward movement under pressure. You can track HRV, dial in your macros, and train relentlessly, but if your nervous system collapses under stress, your health will eventually collapse with it. Me...

You track your HRV. You try to eat clean. You train. You supplement. You optimize. But your numbers still won’t rise. In this solo episode, Todd Vande Hei explains why HRV often drops in modern life — not because you’re weak, aging poorly, or genetically broken — but because your stress cycle never completes. Stress isn’t the problem. Incomplete stress is. If you don’t physically or emotionally di...

Fasting has become one of the most popular health trends in America. But what if it’s quietly making most people metabolically weaker? In this solo episode, Todd Van De Hei challenges the modern obsession with intermittent fasting and explains why, for the majority of Americans, it may be doing more harm than good. After years of using fasting protocols inside Stark — and later integrating DEXA sc...

High performers don’t think they have a stress problem. They think they have a performance problem.  In this episode, Todd Van De Hei sits down with mindfulness teacher and genetic stress specialist Lane Kennedy to unpack why stress silently compounds in leaders, CEOs, and Type A achievers — and why success itself often becomes the trap. This conversation explores the hidden cost of hyper-vig...

Peptides are everywhere right now—marketed as fat-loss shortcuts, anti-aging hacks, and miracle compounds. But what are they actually doing inside the body? In this episode, Todd Vande Hei sits down with Regan Archibald, founder of Ageless Future and host of the Unreasonable Health podcast, to strip away the hype and talk honestly about peptides: how they work, when they help, and where people get...

What happens when someone stops guessing about their health and fully commits to a system? In this episode, Todd Vande Hei sits down with Stark student Matt Cook, host of The Pull Hook podcast, to unpack a seven-month transformation that reshaped Matt’s body, energy, sleep, digestion, athletic performance, and even fertility. What started as fatigue, weight gain, gut issues, and poor sleep turned...

What if your anxiety, fatigue, joint pain, or low testosterone isn’t a motivation problem or a discipline problem, but a toxicity problem? In this episode, Todd sits down with Kyle Hulbert, co-founder of Longevity Centers of America, to unpack his personal journey through severe mercury toxicity and what it revealed about heavy metals, hormones, and modern chronic disease. Kyle shares how mercury...

In this episode, Todd Vande Hei sits down with Thoryn Stephens, co-founder and CEO of BrainOne, to explore a simple but powerful idea: most people aren’t unhealthy because they lack data — they’re unhealthy because they lack structure. Thoryn shares how a personal injury and a disappointing recovery plan from elite orthopedic care sparked his mission to standardize human health protocols using neu...