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

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, how midfoot collapse creates a chain reaction through your ankles, knees, hips, and breathing, and why highly cushioned comfort actively prevents your body from accessing real strength. You'll learn the specific mechanics of force transfer, the connection between foot stability and stress resilience, and what corrective work actually looks like—so you can stop treating symptoms and start rebuilding from the ground up.

Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, carried the weight of running a manufacturing company at scale, where margin for error was thin. His health couldn't keep pace with the pressure until he understood that his feet—literally his foundation—had been broken for decades. This conversation is for anyone whose performance is slipping despite discipline, and who suspects the answer isn't another supplement but something more foundational.

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

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 Skill cuts through the willpower myth. On this episode, learn why standard health advice—work harder, be more disciplined—actually accelerates collapse in high performers. Discover the specific mechanics of how pressure accumulates in driven bodies: the compounding stress, the sleep debt, the decision fatigue that no amount of motivation can override. You'll walk away with a different model entirely—one where meaning, not motivation, creates the structures that protect your health across decades, regardless of how much responsibility you carry.

Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, speaks from the manufacturing floor of his own body. He ran a company, watched his health deteriorate despite extraordinary discipline, and learned something that changed everything: structure must come first. On Health Is a Skill, he breaks down why structure only emerges when the stakes feel real enough to matter—and how leaders can build systems that actually survive constant pressure.

About the Guest: Todd Vande Hei is the CEO and founder of Stark, where he applies systems architecture from Fortune 100 manufacturing to human health. His personal journey through seizures, job loss, and complete health collapse led him to develop the frameworks taught on Health Is a Skill, including the Wheel of Health and the L.E.N.S. Framework. He is also the author of Stark Naked and creator of the team-based health model that has transformed how high performers approach long-term optimization.

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

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 what actually predicts whether you can think clearly at hour ten of a strategy meeting, recover from brutal travel, or stay steady when pressure rises. The conversation moves from biochemistry into something more personal: what it means to have real capacity under load, and why training for it changes not just your heart, but your psychology. Health Is a Skill isn't about metrics that look good on paper—it's about building the infrastructure that performs when it matters.

Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, leads this exploration from a particular vantage point: someone who has operated at scale where the margin for error was thin. He's built his own health as infrastructure, not hobby, and he's asking the leaders listening to do the same. For Todd, this conversation cuts to the core of why he started this show—the recognition that your body's performance capacity directly determines your capacity to lead.

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

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—executives post it, founders compete on it, wearables turned it into a leaderboard. But four to five weekly high-intensity sessions stacked on strength training, calorie restriction, and chronic sleep deprivation don't produce better health. They produce testosterone crashes, HRV collapse, sleep destruction, and abdominal fat accumulation while the watch celebrates the win.

This conversation separates hard from effective. Leaders in their forties and beyond are playing a completely different game than the athletes they're trying to imitate. You'll leave with a reframed understanding of what optimization actually costs—and what it should deliver instead.

Todd Vande Hei built Stark because he learned this the way most people do: by breaking first. His seizures, his firing, his financial collapse—they taught him that the assembly line model works for bodies the same way it works for Fortune 100 operations. Sustainable. Measurable. Built to last.

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

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 biological age score really mean you’re reversing aging?

Todd explains how methylation works, why biological age testing is promising but still limited, and why true longevity is driven by system-wide resilience, not a single biomarker.

In this episode

• What DNA methylation actually is and how it affects gene expression
• How epigenetic clocks estimate biological age
• The difference between chronological age and biological age
• First-, second-, and third-generation epigenetic clocks
• Why lowering methylation age does not mean “reversing aging”
• How lifestyle changes influence biological aging signals
• Why longevity is a systems problem, not a single metric
• The functional health markers that matter most for lifespan

Biological age testing can provide interesting insights, but it shouldn’t become the North Star.

Longevity is about building resilience across multiple systems — metabolic health, cardiovascular fitness, recovery capacity, and cognitive clarity.

To learn more about how Stark approaches real, measurable health optimization, visit https://stark.health.

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

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.
Mental fitness isn’t about avoiding stress. It’s about training your nervous system to handle it.

In this episode:
• Why mental fitness is upstream from physical health
• How stress perception drives cortisol, sleep, testosterone, and inflammation
• The difference between mental fragility and mental resilience
• Why modern comfort makes people neurologically weaker
• The four pillars of mental fitness
• How voluntary discomfort strengthens the nervous system
• Why high performers often live in chronic fight-or-flight
• Simple daily, weekly, and monthly ways to train mental resilience

Mental fitness isn’t about eliminating stress.
It’s about becoming larger than the stress you experience.
To learn more about Stark’s approach to building real, sustainable health, visit https://stark.health.

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

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 discharge activation, your nervous system stays partially “on,” and HRV reflects that immediately. This episode breaks down the biology of stress completion and how to restore adaptability at any age.

In this episode:
• What HRV actually measures (and what it doesn’t)
• Why stress must complete its cycle to allow recovery
• The difference between activation and discharge
• How modern life keeps the nervous system partially “on”
• Two versions of the same stressful day — and why one restores HRV
• What it really means to metabolize stress
• How movement, sleep, and emotional resolution improve HRV
• Why HRV isn’t a trophy — it’s feedback
• The single most powerful lever to improve HRV

If you’re tracking HRV but not seeing progress, it may not be your age, your hormones, or your genetics.
It may simply be that your stress isn’t finishing.
To learn more about how Stark measures and improves nervous system adaptability, visit https://stark.health.
Complete the cycle. Let your body recover

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

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 scans into their system — Todd and his team noticed a troubling pattern: people were getting smaller… but they were also getting frailer.

The real issue isn’t calories.
 It’s muscle.

Todd breaks down why muscle is your metabolic currency, how protein intake underpins nearly every system in your body, and why fasting layered on top of stress, low protein, and sedentary living often accelerates insulin resistance, hormone dysfunction, and chronic disease.
Fasting isn’t evil.
 But for most unhealthy, under-muscled Americans, it’s mistimed.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
• Why intermittent fasting often leads to muscle loss — not just fat loss
• What DEXA scans revealed about fasting inside Stark
• Why most Americans are “under-muscled,” not just overweight
• How low protein intake contributes to insulin resistance
• Why fasting is a physiological stressor — and why that matters
• The connection between muscle mass, hormones, and metabolic health
• How protein supports detoxification, gut repair, and immune function
• The difference between intermittent fasting and extended fasting
• Who should avoid fasting altogether
• When fasting may actually make sense

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

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-vigilance, chronic sleep deprivation, and identity-level attachment to productivity. Lane shares how genetics, sleep windows, mindfulness, and practices like yoga nidra can help high performers evolve into their next chapter — without sacrificing ambition, clarity, or drive.
This isn’t about slowing down.
It’s about becoming sustainable.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why stress often goes unnoticed in high performers until it shows up as exhaustion, irritability, or poor sleep
• How success creates a powerful feedback loop that eventually turns against your health
• What a “sleep window” is — and why missing it sabotages recovery
• How chronic sleep debt impacts leadership, mood, and decision-making
• Why high performers resist stress management — and what finally breaks that resistance
• How genetics influence burnout, cognitive load, and long-term performance
• Why mindfulness doesn’t need to look like meditation — and how to build a practice that actually works

Key Takeaway
You don’t lose your edge by evolving — you lose it by refusing to.

About:
Lane Kennedy
Mindfulness teacher, genetic stress specialist, and leadership guide
Website: laneKennedy.com

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