Podcast
Health Is A Skill with Todd Vande Hei
Hosted by Todd Vande Hei · EN
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.
16episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Sixty Percent of Your Child's Development Happens by Age Six: What Parents Miss About Airway Structure
May 2800:39:00Tap to summarizeA 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
Transcribe →Why Cushioned Shoes Are Making Your Ankles Weaker — The Barefoot Truth with Colton Danz
May 2100:34:00Tap to summarizeA 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
Transcribe →The Shame Epidemic: How One Emotion Blocks 40% of People From Changing Their Health
May 1400:41:00Tap to summarizeSomething 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
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Half Of Heart Attack Patients Didn't Present With Elevated Cholesterol — The Metric Doctors Miss
May 700:13:00Tap to summarizeSomething 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
Transcribe →HRV w/ Salim Najjar
Sep 26, 2024Tap to summarizeOn this week’s episode of Health is a Skill we’re talking all things HRV, or heart rate variability—the shift in timing between your heartbeats. It’s a topic that’s come into the limelight over the last few years, and for good reason: we’re all arguably more stressed than ever before and we need skills to measure, cope with, and manage that stress in a healthy way. Salim Najjar joins Todd for the latter part of this conversation, lending his expertise in nervous system regulation to today’s episode. Humans have always had the innate ability to manage stress—it’s how we survived and evolved from hunter-gatherers that had to flee from saber-toothed tigers in order to survive. But today we’ve taken that same level of stress and transcribed it onto non-life threatening situations: think a negative email, parenting decisions, using social media, or just trying to get through the day. The result? We’re now more stressed than ever before, and our HRV shows that. Together Todd and Salim discuss what exactly HRV is, what your HRV number means (and why you shouldn’t compare that number with someone else’s), skills for managing your stress, and why putting those skills in place will lead to a longer, healthier, and happier life. Follow Salim on Instagram at @thathrvguy and learn more about his approach to heart rate variability on his website: https://thathrvguy.com/. Get access to Todd's free health resource: https://podtodd.com Learn more about Stark at: https://www.stark.health CHAPTERS 00:00 The Importance of Health Awareness<br>03:01 Understanding Heart Rate Variability (HRV)<br>05:53 The Autonomic Nervous System Explained<br>08:51 The Consequences of Chronic Stress<br>11:47 Perception and Stress Management<br>15:09 The Role of HRV in Emotional Resilience<br>17:59 Modern Life and Its Impact on HRV<br>21:12 Using Technology to Measure HRV<br>24:07 The Journey to Improve HRV<br>26:56 Somatic Awareness and Emotional Healing<br>29:46 The Connection Between Doing and Being<br>33:07 Final Thoughts on HRV and Personal Growth Connect with Stark<br>Personalized inside‑out health programs at stark.health Enjoying the show? Follow, rate, and review to help more listeners master the skill of health. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ 🤔 ABOUT Todd Vande Hei 🤔 Welcome to Todd Vande Hei's channel, where health mastery meets real-life transformation. Join Todd as he shares invaluable insights and practical tips to help you unlock your full health potential. Whether you're struggling with chronic pain, seeking sustainable weight loss, or simply striving to live your best life, Todd's journey and expertise will inspire and empower you to take control of your health and well-being. Join our community of health enthusiasts committed to making positive changes and thriving at every stage of life. Let's embark on this journey to vibrant health together! DISCLOSURE We focus on optimizing every aspect of your well-being. At Stark, our team of expert trainers, doctors, nutritionists and a complete medical support team, led by CEO Todd Vande Hei, is dedicated to helping you become the BEST version of yourself. We specialize in coaching executives, athletes, pop stars, astronauts and other noteworthy individuals in all forms of exercise, diet, lifestyle, stress management and personalized supplement protocols. Our methodology is designed to tackle each facet of well-being comprehensively. We believe that optimal h... 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
Transcribe →HRV w/ Salim Najjar
Sep 26, 2024Tap to summarizeOn this week’s episode of Health is a Skill we’re talking all things HRV, or heart rate variability—the shift in timing between your heartbeats. It’s a topic that’s come into the limelight over the last few years, and for good reason: we’re all arguably more stressed than ever before and we need skills to measure, cope with, and manage that stress in a healthy way. Salim Najjar joins Todd for the latter part of this conversation, lending his expertise in nervous system regulation to today’s episode. Humans have always had the innate ability to manage stress—it’s how we survived and evolved from hunter-gatherers that had to flee from saber-toothed tigers in order to survive. But today we’ve taken that same level of stress and transcribed it onto non-life threatening situations: think a negative email, parenting decisions, using social media, or just trying to get through the day. The result? We’re now more stressed than ever before, and our HRV shows that. Together Todd and Salim discuss what exactly HRV is, what your HRV number means (and why you shouldn’t compare that number with someone else’s), skills for managing your stress, and why putting those skills in place will lead to a longer, healthier, and happier life. Follow Salim on Instagram at @thathrvguy and learn more about his approach to heart rate variability on his website: https://thathrvguy.com/. Get access to Todd's free health resource: https://podtodd.com Learn more about Stark at: https://www.stark.health CHAPTERS00:00 The Importance of Health Awareness03:01 Understanding Heart Rate Variability (HRV)05:53 The Autonomic Nervous System Explained08:51 The Consequences of Chronic Stress11:47 Perception and Stress Management15:09 The Role of HRV in Emotional Resilience17:59 Modern Life and Its Impact on HRV21:12 Using Technology to Measure HRV24:07 The Journey to Improve HRV26:56 Somatic Awareness and Emotional Healing29:46 The Connection Between Doing and Being33:07 Final Thoughts on HRV and Personal Growth 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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