John Heiss Of Herbalife On How Athletes Optimize Their Mind & Body For Peak Performance

An Interview With Maria Angelova

Social Interactions: There’s strong evidence having social connections improves cognitive function and longevity. This doesn’t mean you need to plan dinners with friends every day of the week, but the benefit of having quality time with friends, or even having an accountability partner in your fitness journey can’t be overlooked or overstated.

As a part of our series about “How Athletes Optimize Their Mind & Body For Peak Performance”, I had the pleasure of interviewing John Heiss, Ph.D., vice president of Global Product Innovation at Herbalife.

Dr. John Heiss is the vice president of Global Product Innovation at Herbalife, a member of the Nutrition Advisory Board and one of the scientists behind Herbalife24®, a comprehensive sports nutrition line and Enrichual®, a hemp-based line of skin care products.

As a former category 2 competitive cyclist, Dr. Heiss has a keen understanding of the nutritional needs of endurance athletes. He is a multi-time sub-9-hour Leadville 100 mountain bike race finisher, holds an age-group course record at the Furnace Creek 508, a non-stop 508-mile bike race that passes through Death Valley, California as part of a two-man relay team, and he is also an avid backcountry skier and has ran several ultra-marathons.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! What or who inspired you to pursue your career working with high level professional athletes? We’d love to hear the story.

Blending sports and science has been my life path. I played three varsity sports (cross-country running, downhill ski racing, and baseball) throughout high school and received an academic scholarship to the University of Delaware to study Biochemistry. From there, I attended UCLA for a doctorate in biological chemistry. The cool thing about grad school is you end up working oddball hours running experiments through the night, so schedules have some flexibility. It was during this time I got super into endurance sports like ultramarathons and collegiate cycling at a Cat2 level. Back then, I was doing huge volume, 20–25-hour training weeks and consuming absurd amounts of food and on-the-bike fuel but hadn’t found a great nutritional solution.

This was around the mid-2000s when I started to dig more into carbohydrate metabolism and came across a series of publications demonstrating certain combinations of carbs were well tolerated and better utilized for energy than a single carbohydrate during prolonged exercise. Based on this data, and some empirical testing, eventually I created my own formulation that not only worked in the real world and the heat of Los Angeles, but also tasted good. Production was outsourced to a local contract manufacturer and Prolong Energy was born and was eventually sold in 35 retail locations and online.

Fast forward a few years, with over a thousand hours of self-use, and supplying some of the fastest cyclists in the US at that time, I crossed paths with Michael Johnson, the CEO of Herbalife, at a local hill climb time trial hosted by La Grange cycling club in Malibu, CA.

We started working together with a shared vision to create a complete sports line based on published science, pulling in the minds of the PhDs and MDs within the company to further refine and improve the products, utilizing highly tested ingredients from reputable suppliers and using state of the art manufacturing processes to develop what is known today as Herbalife24.

Back in 2010, we discussed not even selling this emerging sports product line so we could make no-compromised formulations and going the extra mile to have them 3rd party lab tested to give athletes complete confidence in the product. It was an incredible experience to fly around the world to first meet with some of the 200 Herbalife-sponsored teams and athletes, including national teams of Costa Rica, Vietnam, LA Galaxy, Real Valencia CF, Athletica Madrid Women, and the famous Indian cricketer, Virat Kholi, to find out what types of products they needed, what they liked, didn’t like and how we could design products to support their performance.

A great case-study in this was developing our isotonic sports drink CR7 Drive in collaboration with Cristiano Ronaldo. We met with him in Madrid five times to assess his needs, speak with his performance doctor, present flavor concepts and eventually landed on a super drinkable, highly effective sports drink that’s ideal for fueling during exercise. It has been a highlight of my career to make products that get into the hands of high-profile sponsored athletes, unsponsored pro athletes (we noticed an Herbalife24 container inside one of the Tour de France support vehicles), and of course, everyday athletes reaching for the product.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?

While there’s something to learn from everyone when you listen, some people emerge as true mentors. Michael Johnson, the Herbalife CEO, has been a mentor figure in my life. He gave a young guy with a dream fresh out of graduate school a chance to work alongside talented and experienced people to turn that dream into a reality. When I first joined the company as the director of product marketing, I was giving a presentation to executives at the office within my first six months on the job and it didn’t go so well. Michael asked how I thought it went: felt embarrassed and had a feeling of shame. He supported me with “learn from it and do better next time.” It was a good lesson in preparation and compassion.

What advice would you give to a young person who aspires to follow in your footsteps and emulate your career?

Following passions usually prevails. There’s so much information available online between published research papers on PubMed, college lecture video series and YouTube. Go to seminars or tradeshows. It doesn’t even matter what industry — dive in, figure out who the key players are and identify where the ‘fringe’ of knowledge is.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

Looking to learn and grow within the science and health space, I took a job at a start-up company based in Silicon Valley in 2020 that was focusing on developing detection and therapeutic strategies for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Becoming familiar with the research, it was astonishing to learn the connection and interplay between lifestyle (sleep, physical activity, eating habits) and brain health.

Most people think Alzheimer’s is largely genetic, while the data is convincing that lifestyle is a major contributing factor. The age-old advice of healthy lifestyle isn’t sexy and takes work. Unfortunately, once the disease has developed, there’s so much damage that is irreversible. The science is strongly pointing to quality sleep being critical to cleanse the brain of daily metabolic waste which is thought to accumulate leading to the classic toxic plaques found in dementia. Physical activity is known to enhance blood flow to the brain, strengthens the heart, and signals vascular tissue to remain elastic. Healthy eating plays a big part in terms of sugar-regulation and managing inflammation.

If more people knew the impact of how decades of imperceptibly small habits and behaviors accumulate to shift the outcome of many chronic diseases, they might be more inclined to make a change. Fortunately, with more and more technology and wearables like continuous glucose monitors and sleep trackers hitting the market, we are for the first time able to start measuring and tracking the impact of lifestyle. And now that I’m back at Herbalife as the vice president of Global Product Innovation, my goal is to ensure our products are updated and formulated to be an efficacious tool to help people in their healthy lifestyle journey.

OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. As you know, athletes often face high stakes situations that involve a lot of pressure. Most of us tend to wither in the face of such pressure and stress. Can you share with our readers 3 or 4 strategies that you practice to optimize your mind for peak performance before high pressure, high stress situations?

Most of the big pro teams now have full-time sports psychologists to train the athletes for this exact question. While I have zero training in psychology, here’s what I’ve found works for me:

1) Race-Stress Desensitization: If you only do one big event or race a year, it focuses all the stress on a singular outcome. Competitive athletes build seasonal schedules with prioritized events, commonly called A, B, and C-events. This gives them many opportunities to experience the adrenaline rush of a race, try different tactics, and get used to the stress and pressure. Almost desensitizing them in a way. Imagine a MLB baseball player who plays 162 games: it’s just another day at the office for them. Of course, world events will always have a lot riding on it and their pre-event routine will be dialed.

2) Develop a Routine: If you’re scrambling last minute, it’s going to spike cortisol, negatively impact your sleep, and distract you from focusing on the event. My roommate is a pro XC mountain biker racing in the World Cup circuit and has dialed routine. His bags are packed nearly a week before he leaves. He completes his bike maintenance well in advance, test-rides everything and has a travel tool kit that’s always ready. He is thinking about nutrition a week or more before the race based on the distance, topography, feeds zones, and the weather. He tries to eliminate everything that takes thought to prepare so he can make the travel and prep as simple as possible. It’s smart and inspiring to see.

3) Visualize the race and where you plan to suffer: It’s helpful, especially in endurance races, to visualize the course and know where you will go easy, and where you plan to suffer. Remind yourself why you’re doing the event and what you’re truly seeking. Are you proving something to yourself or others? You might uncover a deeper cause of the stress. I’ve found having an even or negative-split race to be advantageous, but you need to anticipate and accept people passing you early in the race, knowing you’ll be passing them back later. Plan the race, and race the plan.

Do you practice any special or particular breathing techniques to help optimize yourself?

There’s extensive research on the benefits of breath work and relaxation techniques such as meditation. It helps focus, increases cortical thickness (our ‘human logic’ part of the brain), reduces over-active amygdala function (part of the brain responsible for emotions, but more about how we react to emotional situations), and helps us become more self-aware. Professional sports teams have embraced it for good reasons — it helps performance. There’s even data that a short relaxation practice following training sessions aids recovery, as evidenced by an uptick in heart rate variability (HRV).

Do you have a special technique to develop a strong focus, and clear away distractions?

These ‘techniques’ are referred to as a practice because that’s what it is — you’re always practicing. I hear people say all the time “I’m bad at meditating, my mind wonders.” Well yeah, you’re a human just like everyone else. No one is born a good meditator; it takes practice and even people who have been practicing for years struggle with the swirl of thoughts. There are countless guided meditations on YouTube — pick any 10-min session and try it each day for a few days — you’ll probably notice some benefit after just a few sessions.

How about your body? Can you share a few strategies that you use to optimize your body for peak performance?

Peak performance only occurs when our physical and mental states are aligned and at peak. Physical peaking is a complicated topic of balancing training intensity, volume, and adequate rest for recovery, but not so much where detraining occurs. ‘Peaking’ for a particular event requires planning training sessions far in advance and adapting the plan in real time based on a combination of hard data (e.g., HRV, resting heart rate or RHR) and critically ‘feel’ as well. While the appearance of so many wearable recovery trackers is useful, being honest about how you feel is a valuable training tool not to be overlooked. The key things for people to think about for performance, whether it’s in an athletic situation or feeling good in life, are:

1. Regular physical activity with a balance of intensities and adequate rest for recovery.
2. Healthy nutrition with adequate proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and plant matter for phytonutrients and fibers (think cell signaling between gut and brain, and not for ‘regulatory’).
3. Adequate sleep: this is the time you recover, reconcile memories, build creativity, and it also helps your mood. Sleep impacts hormonal balances which impact the foods you find appealing (poor sleep ironically increases the appeal of unhealthy foods).
4. Social Interactions: There’s strong evidence having social connections improves cognitive function and longevity. This doesn’t mean you need to plan dinners with friends every day of the week, but the benefit of having quality time with friends, or even having an accountability partner in your fitness journey can’t be overlooked or overstated.

Can you share some of the strategies you have used to turn the ideas above into habits? What is the best way to develop great habits for optimal performance? How can one stop bad habits?

There are plenty of books written on this topic alone, one of the best being Atomic Habits by James Clear. A key force required to change as a habit is to identify that deep down ‘why.’ Simple ends-based goals “I want to run a marathon. I want to lose 20 lbs.” might help achieve the goal, but don’t result in lasting shifts in behavior. He described it insightfully as defining your identity. How do you want to be perceived: by yourself (intrinsic motivation: more powerful), or by others (extrinsic motivation, less powerful). Do you want to be known as someone overweight and inactive, or do you want your identity to be someone active?

The other big thing we fight as humans is that our survival brains are wired for instant gratification. It’s easy and feels good to relax, whereas the immediate benefit of something as easy as a daily five-minute stretching routine is hardly noticeable. When the benefits are too delayed from the habitual action, the motivating positive feedback loop isn’t established. This is why we need to think longer-term: imagine the benefits of accumulation or an evolution of identity. Simon Sinek, who has the 4th most viewed TED talk of all time, says it well: “brushing your teeth twice a day, that’s what keeps them clean. But just brushing your teeth for 2 minutes? It does nothing!”

High performance athletes often experience times when things are in a state of Flow. Flow has been described as a pleasurable mental state that occurs when you do something that you are skilled at, that is challenging, and that is meaningful. Can you share some ideas from your experience about how we can achieve a mind state of Flow more often in our lives?

I think about flow state as being “in the zone,” or full absorbed in something. It’s characterized by lack of worry, self-reflection, and conscious thought. You’re unfazed by distractions, senses might sharpen or shift (e.g., vision becomes clearer, or hearing tunes out superfluous noises), and time becomes distorted (things may slow down, or time may pass by quickly). Imagine a World Cup Downhill MTB racer. Fans are cheering, cowbells clanking, chainless chainsaws roaring. To the riders, this cacophony hardly registers. They are in total flow state where reactions are running on full autopilot and there’s hardly conscious thought to their actions. They dance through chicane berms, and skip through impossibly steep rock gardens, without consciously thinking about front or rear braking or where they are positioned relative to the bike. Brain wave patterns, as measured by electroencephalography (EEG) profoundly shift, and reaction times increases.

It’s not just professionals who can be in a flow state. Flow state occurs at the intersection of appropriately matched skill and challenge. An intermediate downhill skier will feel anxious if the slope it too steep, but dial things back to a blue square, and they may enter that coveted flow state. Put a pro big mountain skier on that blue square, and they will be bored.

So, how do you get there? It’s all about setting up the conditions right to match your abilities if sporting, or if in an office work-type context, reducing distractions. It takes time to enter that state. This is why multitasking and switching back and forth between apps, web browsers and that presentation is so costly to performance: you’re not allowing the brain waves to shift from high frequency gamma and beta, into slower alpha and even theta frequencies that begin to mimic meditative states.

Do you have any meditation practices that you use to help you in your life? We’d love to hear about it.

Ha, this one hits home. It’s easier to write about adopting habits than making those changes yourself, right? Far from perfect, but I value being introspective and getting better at reacting calmly in stressful situations. Thinking about how I want to act in general as a person, has been motivational to make time for meditation practice. I’ve been most successful carving out 10–15 min first thing in the morning with minimal or no phone checking. It’s helped set the tone for the day, with productivity and focus at the office.

What do you do to prevent injuries during your workouts or during your competitions?

What’s the saying…mess around and find out? If you do enough sports; you’re going to get hurt. The goal is to minimize the preventable injuries: those that stem from overuse, poor flexibility, muscle weakness, and imbalance. I used to think the more you ski, the better you’ll ski. Then I did a highly focused and diligent pre-ski season dryland program with lots of single-leg strength work, and no surprise, the positive impact on the slopes was astonishing and suffered way less nagging pain in lower back or hip flexors during big backcountry ski outings.

What type of workout regime has helped you to rehabilitate from injury?

Injuries that sideline athletes take a mental and physical toll. You feel like you’ll never get back to your performance pre-injury, and then you’re borderline depressed because activity is your source of endorphins. My friend gave me the best advice: “every day that passes is a day closer to being recovered.” While it feels like you’ll never recover, you see huge names in sport make remarkable comebacks. One of my heroes is John Collinson, big mountain skier, who’s suffered multiple season-ending ski injuries. Look at his Instagram account, and see the work he puts in. It’s inspiring to see what’s possible.

Ok, we are nearly done. You are by all accounts a very successful person. How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Well, first, defining success and projecting if someone is successful becomes a very deep philosophical topic! Regardless, on a small scale, try to make encounters with positive people. Through my profession, I’ve been fortunate to be given the opportunity to not only create nutrition products but do so within a company that’s able to sell them around the world, be consumed to summit Mt. Everest, used during the Tour de France, and been sold by thousands of small business owners to help put money in their pockets and fuel their customer’s sporting adventures.

Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?

“The two things you can control in life are attitude and effort.” This resonates because so much pain, suffering, anxiety comes from worrying about stuff you can’t control. Effort is paramount, because most of the time, the more you put in, the more you get out of something.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you only continued success.

About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.