Health Is A Skill with Todd Vande Hei

Latest Episodes:

Biology Always Collects Debt — Burnout, Brain Fog & the Price of Constant Stress Jun 04, 2026

Show notes

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

Sixty Percent of Your Child's Development Happens by Age Six: What Parents Miss About Airway Structure May 28, 2026

Show notes

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

Why Cushioned Shoes Are Making Your Ankles Weaker — The Barefoot Truth with Colton Danz May 21, 2026

Show notes

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

The Shame Epidemic: How One Emotion Blocks 40% of People From Changing Their Health May 14, 2026

Show notes

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

Half Of Heart Attack Patients Didn't Present With Elevated Cholesterol — The Metric Doctors Miss May 07, 2026

Show notes

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

Boredom Is Where Baseline Resets — The Dopamine Truth Young Americans Never Learn Apr 30, 2026

Show notes

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

When Your Body Crashes at 2PM, Your Decisions Crash With It Apr 23, 2026

Show notes

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

Why Your Body Won't Give You Full Strength (It's Your Feet) Apr 16, 2026

Show notes

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

Why Discipline Fails High Performers — The Real Model for Sustainable Health Apr 09, 2026

Show notes

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

Your Cholesterol Doesn't Matter If Your Engine Is Broken — The Fitness Metric That Predicts Death Apr 02, 2026

Show notes

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

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