Taking the Brakes Off Human Performance

Introduction

The Vitality Blueprint platform came into being in 2024. But behind it are the years of insights founders Dan Garner and Andy Galpin gained testing and personalizing coaching for world class athletes and high achievers. In this first installment of a four-part interview, Dan takes us inside his back story, explains how Vitality combines objective bloodwork analytics with subjective experiences, and shares why removing constraints improves performance and health.

Interview

I’ve worked with hundreds if not thousands of athletes, including Olympic medalists, UFC world champions, and Super Bowl winners. I began working at the highest level of human performance in 2014, so it's been 10 years at the one percenter level. 

I went to college for physiology, and after that, was interested in functional medicine and utilizing labs to improve health. I saw how connected health is to performance. People would come to me with a health-based symptom like migraines. I’d use what I had learned to address the issue, but, in doing so,  I would also notice something like positive changes in their body composition.

As I continued working with people, I noticed a pattern. Areas like strength, hypertrophy, fat loss, and cognition all seemed to dramatically  improve even when working on conditions  where you’d think there was no relationship at all. I was developing the theory of constraints, in that a system will only ever perform to the degree that it is constrained. You've got your base physiology, and it will perform to the level a constraint allows. When you remove it, you will perform at the next level. 

How did this constraint theory lead you to coaching more effectively and doing the kind of bloodwork that is now the basis for Vitality Blueprint?

A coach named Scott Prohaska in Southern California saw my work and said, “Would you like to come down this offseason to help me coach 10 NFL and 10 NHL athletes?” It was a pivotal moment. I was instantly “the guy” working with these professional athletes. It was fun, but all of a sudden became a high-stress, high-reward situation.  If I messed up and an athlete didn’t get a contract, make weight, or feel good in the most important game of the year, that would be my fault. The moment I didn’t produce was the moment I lost my job. 

That’s when I committed myself to becoming a master of bloodwork. It relieved the pressure. We're all predisposed to biases and try to implement new things that may not work. I sliced through that with labs. They allowed me to convert high stress situations into high confidence ones because I  was now working with data and that's it. 

This also solidified my constraints theory. I identified that everything is connected with data. When you remove a primary constraint, you increase performance cognitively and physically. That became the foundation of my practice. I objectively identified what’s going on with someone with  lab work. As I continued to work this theory, I ascertained what high-performance physiology looks like by developing my own performance ranges. The closer I was able to get people within them, the more constraints they removed and the better they performed.

Over the past ten years, I have worked to perfect this idea. By continually evaluating and re-evaluating this theory, honing in performance ranges, and looking at  relationships and how things connected, my constraints theory slowly solidified. Now, it is the base for Vitality Blueprint.

How did you learn to consider other factors along with the objective data you just described?

You can quantify a lot based on scientific research, and I did just that. I ran all the tests, and afterwards, I would put together massive plans. Slowly, I realized I was still missing something. I thought I was addressing the most pressing constraint for the client but something was still off. I realized I was missing a huge piece to the equation: the client! 

How do you feel? How are you recovering? How do you perform? All of these questions are extremely important.  It's not enough to just quantify someone numerically because they know their body better than I ever will. Things can look pretty damn good on paper, but then they execute as shit in real life. When the subjective piece is put into place, what the individual is actually experiencing, everything really starts to line up. 

So now, Vitality screens for subjective symptoms. If it was an objective-only approach, then we would miss 50% of the equation, which is your life experience. In the Vitality platform, biomarkers are measured and then compared to not only performance ranges but also to one another and characteristics of physiological states found in the research. We call them “patterns” and there are a bunch of them. I have developed patterns for  inflammation, overtraining, brain fog, and a ton more... 

If your bloodwork flags for a pattern like brain fog, Vitality asks evidence-based questions specifically associated with brain fog. If you answer yes to these, we now have subjective confirmation that strengthens what we found in the bloodwork. Then, the program  adds algorithmic weight to the recommendations in your performance plan.

If you flagged for a certain  pattern but tell the system that you don't feel that way at all, then the focus of the performance plan shifts to something that is a larger constraint.

High performers are the masters of knowing the qualitative state of their body and that bled into the Vitality algorithms through confirming symptoms or patterns prior to recommendations being generated for them. 

It sounds like subjective feedback is important for creating context for each Vitality user. How else does the platform do that?

One of the reasons I lean on bloodwork is because somebody would say, “I know I've got a detox problem, so I'm wondering if you can help me.” If you already knew your problem, you wouldn't need me. People self-diagnose and then fail nine out of 10 times. Vitality will detect what's going on and then contextualize and confirm that through their symptoms.

What we see in your bloodwork is going to surface based on ratios, calculations, and markers, and whether these are trending high or low. It will also show patterns of physiology and the relationships between them. All of these factors add weight to everything that a person is feeling. What may be self-diagnosed as a “detox problem” could really be something else. Through bloodwork, the Vitality platform can help find and fix the exact problem.  

Check back soon for part two, in which Dan will share how he and Andy Galpin came up with the Vitality Blueprint concept, why they’re scaling pro-level performance to everyone, and more.