Health Is A Skill with Todd Vande Hei

Todd Vande Hei

Welcome to the Health is a Skill podcast with host Todd Vande Hei! Todd is the CEO of Stark, which exists to change the future of health and fitness in the communities they serve. For the last 15 years, Todd has been on a journey to discover what it means to be in a state of peak health. After suffering from a series of seizures and being diagnosed with high blood pressure and atrial fibrillation in his early 30’s, Todd decided it was time to make a change. Those changes fell into one of four categories: lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, and stress management. But the biggest thing Todd learned through it all? Health is a skill. You’re not born with it, like some would like you to believe, and it isn’t acquired by simply buying another product or starting that new diet. Health is something you can create for yourself, and over time it is possible to attain peak health.

  1. 21h ago

    VO2 Max Is Your Cognitive Reserve — Why Executives Operate in Constant Brain Fog

    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 Skill, Todd Vande Hei reframes aerobic capacity entirely—not as a fitness number, but as the clearest window into physiological robustness. Your brain consumes enormous energy. Leadership is sustained decision-making under stress. When oxygen delivery fails, so does clarity, emotional regulation, and cognitive performance under pressure. This episode maps the direct line between VO2 max and longevity, between aerobic capacity and the quality of decisions made when stakes are real. Vande Hei built Stark while operating at a scale where margin for error was thin. His health had to perform but didn't. He speaks here to anyone carrying real responsibility—anyone who has felt the weight of people, capital, and consequences sitting on their shoulders every day—about what it means to build a physiology that can actually handle that pressure, and why treating your body like a system, not a problem to willpower through, changes everything. About the Guest: Todd Vande Hei is the founder and CEO of Stark, a company built on the principle that health operates like any other managed system. He has spent his career applying manufacturing and operational excellence to human physiology, combining functional medicine with the discipline of corporate systems architecture. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

    19 min

  2. Jun 4

    Biology Always Collects Debt — Burnout, Brain Fog & the Price of Constant Stress

    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 discover why flow state has become nearly impossible in modern life—and why the answer isn't more discipline, but something far more fundamental: restoring your physiology to a state where deep focus becomes natural again. Learn how stress accumulates invisibly, how fragmented attention carries a real neurological cost, and why your body always collects the debt. The path back begins with understanding your nervous system as infrastructure, not willpower. Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, built a manufacturing company at scale where the margin for error was razor-thin. He tried to outwork the pressure through discipline alone. It broke him—serious health problems that forced a reckoning: that performance isn't willpower, it's architecture. He rebuilds that architecture here, for anyone who's felt their clarity slipping and wondered if they were just losing their edge. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

    22 min

  3. May 28

    Sixty Percent of Your Child's Development Happens by Age Six: What Parents Miss About Airway Structure

    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 development, and the chronic conditions that follow into adulthood. She unpacks why 85% of sleep apnea cases go undiagnosed, what tongue ties reveal about ADHD misdiagnosis in children, and why the critical developmental window closes by age twelve. On Health Is a Skill, you'll learn how breastfeeding, nasal breathing, chewing mechanics, and even adult palate expansion can restore what early dysfunction disrupted—and why recognizing these patterns in children prevents them from becoming diagnoses in adults. Todd Vande Hei has lived this framework's stakes directly. Narrow airways. Sleep apnea since his thirties. A stroke. Problems he now understands may have originated in his own infancy. This conversation is about recognition—seeing the signals before they calcify into systems-wide failure, and knowing that airway health, like every component of Health Is a Skill, begins at birth. About the Guest: Dr. Shereem Lim is a functional medicine practitioner and airway health specialist focused on the developmental origins of chronic disease. Her work bridges pediatric development, sleep medicine, and integrative health, helping patients and practitioners recognize the early markers of airway dysfunction before they compound into adult pathology. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

    39 min

  4. May 21

    Why Cushioned Shoes Are Making Your Ankles Weaker — The Barefoot Truth with Colton Danz

    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 broken ankles and severe sprains that left him unstable on any surface demanding real foot strength—until he rebuilt his entire relationship with footwear and discovered his feet could actually work. In this episode of Health Is a Skill, Colton and Todd explore how modern life has quietly rewired our bodies: cushy shoes, desk jobs, car seats, couches. The listener will learn why feet are the foundation of everything above them, what proprioception actually means, and which single change in how you stand creates a ripple through your entire kinetic chain. You'll walk away with an immediate lever to pull. Todd Vande Hei built his career understanding systems and assembly lines. He built Health Is a Skill understanding that his own body was the most important system he would ever run. He carries his own version of this reckoning—years spent in shoes that did the work his feet were meant to do, posture that compressed instead of supported. His journey mirrors the problem Colton is solving: how a small architectural shift in how we stand transforms not just movement, but healing. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

    34 min

  5. May 14

    The Shame Epidemic: How One Emotion Blocks 40% of People From Changing Their Health

    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 lives on their ability to execute, to win, to know the answer. But the moment they step into health, that competence fractures. The identity they've spent decades constructing doesn't transfer. On this episode of Health Is a Skill, she reveals how a small change in self-talk—adding a palm of protein to each meal, reframing failure as experiment—can shift what feels impossible. You'll learn how the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies become the limits we enforce, and what it takes to see them clearly enough to change. Todd Vande Hei brings his own deep experience with identity to this conversation—the seizures, the firing, the depression, the work of letting go of who he'd been. Together they explore why the smartest, most successful people often believe most firmly in the limits they've set for themselves, and what it actually takes to help someone discover they can become whoever they want to be. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

    41 min

  6. May 7

    Half Of Heart Attack Patients Didn't Present With Elevated Cholesterol — The Metric Doctors Miss

    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, challenges the metric most leaders obsess over—cholesterol—and redirects attention to a number that actually predicts your capacity under load: VO2 max. This episode is for leaders operating under constant pressure, responsible for outcomes, payroll, decisions that demand clarity even when exhaustion sets in. You'll learn how to build measurable cardiovascular infrastructure that lets you think straight in hour ten of a crisis, that keeps your nervous system from overreacting when stakes rise, and that transforms stress from a liability into a controlled variable. Health Is a Skill teaches you to treat your body like the mission-critical system it is. Todd's early failure—the collision between relentless ambition and biological reality—shaped everything he now builds at Stark and brings to this conversation. He learned that risk management isn't enough. Real toughness comes from building capacity: genuine physiological resilience that your mind can trust when pressure arrives. This is what separates leaders who survive high performance from those who burn out. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

    13 min

  7. Apr 30

    Boredom Is Where Baseline Resets — The Dopamine Truth Young Americans Never Learn

    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 are neurologically fragile, how your dopamine system has been trained differently than any generation before, and what you have to rebuild to reclaim agency. You'll discover the artificial dopamine trap—social media, alcohol, endless stimulation—and why boredom, structured hardship, and tracking real outputs is the only path forward. This is foundational: the belief that when you do something hard, something actually moves. Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, operated at the scale where stress accumulates without a buffer and physiology fails under the load. He learned that for leaders carrying real responsibility, health isn't a hobby—it's infrastructure. That framework shapes every conversation he has: your dopamine system, your capacity to endure, your belief in causation—these are operating systems that determine whether you stay capable or become fragile. About the Guest: Todd Vande Hei is CEO and founder of Stark, a team-based health optimization platform. A Fortune 100 operations executive and author, he has built his career on systems thinking applied to human physiology, helping leaders rebuild the infrastructure that stress and modern life erode. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

    29 min

  8. Apr 23

    When Your Body Crashes at 2PM, Your Decisions Crash With It

    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'll confront a central paradox facing high-performing leaders: they're solving a physiology problem with willpower. Todd unpacks three concrete missed opportunities—decision quality, capacity expansion, and consistency under pressure—and reframes your body as infrastructure rather than something to manage. You'll discover why energy crashes, fragmented sleep, and dysregulated stress aren't personal failures but business problems with measurable costs. Health Is a Skill reveals how metabolic capacity directly impacts your ability to lead and execute under the conditions that matter most. Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, speaks from lived experience. He's operated at the margin where thin errors matter, and his health didn't perform when it had to. This episode emerges from that tension—the recognition that the biggest leaders in industry aren't outworking everyone else. They're differently supported, physiologically. They're the ones who stopped sacrificing health for business and started building the infrastructure to do both. Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

    12 min
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5
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About

Welcome to the Health is a Skill podcast with host Todd Vande Hei! Todd is the CEO of Stark, which exists to change the future of health and fitness in the communities they serve. For the last 15 years, Todd has been on a journey to discover what it means to be in a state of peak health. After suffering from a series of seizures and being diagnosed with high blood pressure and atrial fibrillation in his early 30’s, Todd decided it was time to make a change. Those changes fell into one of four categories: lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, and stress management. But the biggest thing Todd learned through it all? Health is a skill. You’re not born with it, like some would like you to believe, and it isn’t acquired by simply buying another product or starting that new diet. Health is something you can create for yourself, and over time it is possible to attain peak health.

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