Pursuing Peak Performance: How to Reach Your Full Potential (Performance & Longevity Series)

< Full Episode

Transcript: Pursuing Peak Performance: How to Reach Your Full Potential (Performance & Longevity Series)

Season 11, Episode 16  | September 18, 2025

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome to Life Time Talks in our series on performance and longevity with MIORA. I’m Jamie Martin, I’m here with Jim LaValle. He is our chief science officer at Life Time. And in this episode, we are talking about optimizing for peak performance. In this series, we’ve talked a lot about a variety of health conditions, but this episode is really all about regardless of where you are, if you’re feeling pretty good, if you’re doing pretty well in terms of your health and well-being, but maybe you’re just not performing at your best. We really want to help you figure out what you can do to really have that peak performance. So Jim, kick us off. Tell us when you think about this topic, what does it bring up for you and why is it important?

Well, I mean, I’ve got a rich history with working with athletes, tactical military, was the clinical director for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Performance Health Program for a period of time. It’s interesting, we look at people and they look fit and we think, oh, wow, they can’t have anything going wrong with them. But the reality is, a lot of times their chemistry is shifting just like the person who may not look as fit. And it’s for different reasons.

But there’s also this piece that is, how do I stay at my peak performance? I love it when I have someone that says, hey, I already feel pretty good, but I really want to look under the hood and understand how I can either get that PR, have a better opportunity for me to train so I can train more frequently. I recover better. Or, you know what? I’ve just noticed the last few months I’m not training as solid as I used to and I’m not recovering, why is that happening?

I’ll give you a good example. I just had the US national champion for ultramarathons and he ran a record level time, his record, beat his PR, did fantastic. And it was all about cleaning his chemistry up a little and getting him more efficient. He didn’t feel bad. He was already a champion.

Already a peak performer.

Already there, yeah. But he was even able to do better. And I think why not get your body tuned to be able to operate at its best. And that means that you’re just going to get better gains out of what you’re doing. It’s not just gains in the gym. It’s gains in your job. Are you in meetings where at midday you’re starting to nod off when you used to be very alert? Or hey, where do these muscle cramps start coming from? Or why am I starting to get little headaches? Or how come I’m noticing that I’m not cognitively as sharp in general?

These are all little signs that, hey, something could be up. But as I said at the start, I love it when people come in and they get tested to find out, hey, how far am I away from my best possible health?

And that’s where you get to really help. That’s the fun and exciting part because it’s like, oh, what do we get to work on here?

Exactly.

That’s cool.

Yeah.

You’ve talked a little bit about athletes, but this isn’t just for athletes. This is for any of us. Like, you were saying, wanting to perform better in different aspects of our lives. So I think let’s talk about this. We have people who are coming through lifetime all the time who are really health motivated. They want to live their healthiest life for as long as possible. So how do you work with everybody to help them determine where to start with that?

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, that was whole purpose of developing the metabolic code platform, because whether you’re an athlete or not, we all have two adrenal glands, one liver. We got two kidneys. One pancreas. Our immune systems all work the same. One brain. So what varies is what’s affecting our chemistry. And look, you could have somebody who’s coming in and not necessarily an athlete, but they’re training hard in GTX or they’re doing Alpha.

So they’re pushing really hard regardless. And they’ve got PR goals that they’ve got. But in the end, all of us end up either being on a path to being optimized for our human performance, or we need work to improve it. And then that work to improve it varies from, gee, I’ve got some kind of symptoms or conditions. Say, hey you know what? I just don’t feel as resilient as I used to be that. I always call — that extra kick in your step, isn’t there.

And I think those are the key things as to why people should be interested in, looking at performance health is who doesn’t want to perform at their best? Because in the end, when you perform at your best, you’re going to age better. And that means you get to enjoy your life better and longer.

So what does it take to reach our full potential for peak performance. What do we need to be considering?

Yeah. So it’s the fact that all of your body systems are working together to either create an optimal result or if something goes wrong, there’s a countermeasure that occurs that a lot of times ends up costing you something. So one of the most important things for people to perform well is how do you make energy.

Yep.

So mitochondrial function. And we actually can even screen for mitochondrial function, which is really an exciting breakthrough in the last year. So cortisol, insulin, thyroid those three relationships between the thyroid gland, the pancreas, and your adrenal glands, that really is the core of performance health. Am I overstressed, meaning am I making too much cortisol?

Have I lost my diurnal pattern for cortisol? Have I become insulin resistant? Is my blood sugar too high and now I’m storing fat? Is my thyroid hormone too low, and now I’m not oxidizing — I’m not creating oxidative phosphorylation to make energy?

So there’s networks of function that occur in your body. And the more that you can optimize all of them the better. So adrenal, thyroid, pancreas is a relationship. Gut, immune, brain — how resilient am I to stress? Am I anxious? Am I nervous? Am I having trouble sleeping? Do I have GI problems? Am I bloated? Am I gassy? Am I getting sick frequently?

If I go into a dusty room, do I get allergies or I go into a moldy area, does it create something like a headache? I mean, understanding that relationship between gut, immune, brain that’s really about how resilient you are. If your brain is not hyper aroused, hey, I can sleep better.

And here’s how these start to connect. If I get under enough stress and I’m pushing cortisol out, eventually, that causes my gut to become permeable. And now that activates a portion of my immune system that then can lead to creating things like autoimmune thyroiditis. So it’s these systems are always communicating with each other. And it’s really not that hard when you go through and get a blood test. It’s not that hard to explain these because they group together and you can see where the problems are and where a person needs to start.

The third network with how do we optimize our health for performance health it’s cardiopulmonary neurovascular. Neurovascular meaning heart rate variability, vagal tone, What’s my resting heart rate like? What’s my two-minute heart rate recovery like? What’s my blood pressure like? So that’s the biometrics of neurovascular. And then of course, the cardiac side is well, what are my lipids like? Am I making bad actor lipids, or the unfriendly lipids that lead to heart disease?

What’s the rhythmicity of my heart? Is my heart rate up because I’m stressed? Is my heart rate off because I don’t have enough magnesium? What are the reasons behind why cardio pulmonary neurovascular systems would be off? And of course, your carbon dioxide is important because it’s telling you whether you’re breathing shallow or not and you’re not oxygenating. So when you think of what causes us to perform in our best, I’ve just created three networks that make it. But we’re not done yet.

I think there’s a couple more. If I’m following you correctly, these are the triads, right?

Yeah.

Metabolic code.

These are the triads of the metabolic code. The reason we developed them this way — and people should know when we develop this thesis, I mean, it passed curriculum committee at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences to be taught, an advanced degree as the capstone course for Integrative Medicine. So, I mean the premise of what we are doing at Life Time with MIORA using the metabolic code, it’s been pretty heavily vetted. It went through a curriculum committee at a major top five medical school.

So the next one is, how do I get my liver, lymph, and kidney functioning? And we call that the detox. So there’s energy with adrenal, thyroid, pancreas. Resiliency with gut, immune, brain, how resilient am I to stress? Cardiopulmonary neurovascular is stamina. And then of course, liver, lymph, kidney is all about detoxification. But it’s more than that because we pick up anemias. Are you low in iron? Are you low in ferritin? Are you low in B12? Do you have what’s called a megaloblastic anemia? You red blood cells are too big, and now they can’t get into all the little microvessels and that, yeah, you’re low on B12. Or you could be hypochromic, not enough iron.

So we look at, are you anemic? What’s going on with your size of your red blood cells? Is your alkaline phosphatase low, which would make you more prone to bone loss?

What are your liver enzymes like? Are your kidneys functioning well? These are all major, major components to am I really optimized. Because I mean, I think what we do is we get one test and we get on a treadmill and we run real hard, and oh, wow, you’re optimized because you can run really fast.

Yes, I’ve done that test. I know which one you’re talking about. Yes, absolutely.

It’s a great test. I mean, VO2 max is a great test and it’s a great marker. And it’s actually an important marker. It’s just that what we’re doing is saying, here’s where your biochemistry is at. And then the fifth one would be, of course, sex hormones. And that is actually the relationship of progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone, and of course, the fact that creates potency in the world. Do I have self-esteem? Am I desire? Do I feel desirable? Then the obvious effects of say, estradiol — reducing cardiovascular risk in women. Same thing for men.

Testosterone — improving sex drive in women. Same thing for men, but it also has a lot more potent effects on mood for men just like estradiol does for women. And then also kidney protection, a whole bunch of different things that happen. But the reality is we want all of these networks working together. And the next piece is when you say, how do you know or what do you look for? Well, the a lot of times people have a lot of symptoms, they have no labs that look bad. And then there’s people that have really bad looking labs, and they have no symptoms.

And then there’s that in-between group that’s probably 80% of the folks or more that hey, I know I don’t feel right. I feel tired midday. I get anxious and nervous if I go too long without eating, my hands and feet getting a little bit numb or my hands are cold, my hair is brittle, my nails are brittle. my blood pressure is a little up, I’m craving food, I’m feeling gassy and bloated, I’m having trouble sleeping.

These are common things that people complain about every day, have problems with energy. Common things. And you have to add that into the equation. Because if I said to you, are you at your best when you’re tired midday, you’re craving foods, you’ve gained weight, you’re not sleeping well, and you have numbness and tingling in your fingers, would you go, man, I’m on top of it?

Absolutely not. No, I’m this obviously not feeling my best right now.

And so you got to combine what you’re feeling with what the labs say with your biometrics.

Yep.

And now all of a sudden, you have a whole person view of what’s going on. And the most important piece to it is because it groups everything into those five areas of metabolic disruption, it’s easy to understand, because there’s a lot of people that have come to Life Time and have gotten the big, thick lab documents, they’ve gotten them from a variety of providers, and they put little smiley faces on them, or they put arrows up and down, and they’re trying to explain what to do on each page. And the person leaves, and they go, I don’t remember what any of this is.

And then you have no idea what to do next. I mean, I think that’s the thing that’s hard, is not knowing what to do next. I mean, I’ll just share a little anecdotally, I have worked with MIORA. And part of the reason I did that was not because I was feeling like I had a major health issue happening, but I’m in my early 40s. I’m someone who wants to feel good and function at my best for as long as possible. And I remember when I was doing that initial assessment of how am I feeling and talking through that with my health care provider, it was really — like, I’m really interested in — because of a family history of cardiovascular disease and all of these things.

And yep, I’m low energy. And it was really interesting to see really my cardiovascular — that triad, the stamina triad.

Number three.

But it was that energy piece that really was an eye opening thing for me. I knew I was feeling fatigued, but it was like, oh, that’s my opportunity to start with. And that’s been something I’m continuing to work on. That was eye opening for me, thinking it was going to be focused in one area and it’s really in another.

That’s exactly right. So it’s looking for where the bigger metabolic roadblocks either through symptoms labs or both. And I think it’s just important for people to understand, for example, if you’re going to work out hard, you need to use adaptogens. You got to take a combination of botanicals or a single botanical that’s going to keep your nervous system more resilient to stress.

Now, if you’re already feeling stress, well, then you have to take something for the stress. But if you’re not feeling it. But you’re working out hard and you’re very busy in your business or your job, you want to protect your ability to keep resilient. And that’s why you want to put a plan together for that.

And the other thing is, if you’re somebody who’s training, you’re doing a lot of endurance events, the more you’re putting time in on the bike or on the pavement, the more you’re going to be prone to create shifts in your immune system and break down your gut. And so you want to be ahead of that. And so what is my plan to keep my gut healthy? Don’t wait until I get — you hear the term runner’s diarrhea.

Absolutely.

That’s a real term. And you don’t want to wait until that happens. It’s what do I do to keep my body performing at peak whether it’s for exercise, work, or pleasure?

Absolutely.

And the biggest one is aging. How do I keep performing at my best as I’m aging? Because you don’t want to be one of those people where you go into your doctor and they say, well, you should feel this way. You’re 40 now.

Like, no, that’s not the answer we’re looking for. It’s like, how do I feel my best regardless of my age? It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting at 40 or 60. There are things we can do to feel better.

I mean, I always tell people this story, and it’s a personal story, but my father was one of the most famous chefs in the world, diabetic most of his adult life. At age 79, he was diagnosed with a duodenal adenocarcinoma. People with diabetes have a much higher risk of developing certain cancers, intestinal cancers being one of them. He had a Whipple surgery done at age 79. If you’re listening, a Whipple surgery is they take off a lower part of the stomach, they take off the duodenum, and then they remove the top head of the pancreas.

And this is the biggest intestinal surgery you can do. Many people don’t survive more than a few years, especially at his age. He never was into health, ever. But he came to live with us. And so I introduced him to the treadmill. I said, this is not for clothes hanging. We’re going to start walking.

Which is this thing.

You’re going to use this, dad. And then we changed his diet around. He ate the way we ate. And of course, there is that other social piece where he had a grandson that he was living with and having joy of seeing his grandchild. I mean, I’m not going to minimize that. But he lived 13 years. And that’s not heard of. But it’s my point is, over the years of working with people, I don’t care whether you’re 8 or 88, you can always get improvement. The body is incredibly resilient.

But the trick is you want to start to realize that as early as you can and get on, I would just say, consistent path towards a healthy way of life. And that includes consistent blood tests, monitoring how you’re feeling, and then being able to change your supplements or change any prescriptive agents like peptides or bioidentical hormones or other things that you may need. Change them as you’re aging as it’s appropriate so that you stay in that zone of operating at your best.

Yeah, I love that. I love that it’s thinking about — it’s taking that proactive approach to our health. So often we hear about preventive medicine and those things. And this is that opportunity, and, again, about empowering us to each be our own best health advocate. And to take care of ourselves so we’re as healthy for as long as possible in these lives that we have.

Yeah, I always when I talk to people who come to me and they’re under a lot of stress, like, oh my God, I can’t cut down my work, all kinds of things are coming out of them. And I’ll just say, if you’re gone — the path you’re on right now is who knows where the next five years. The odds are 5 to 10 years aren’t going to be good. How much will all this overworry and pushing yourself too hard mean? Yes, people depend on you. But you know what’s going to happen. For three days, your coworkers will mourn you, and then that seat’s going to get filled.

Yeah.

And I don’t say that to be cruel. I just try to get people to understand, you’re your own best health advocate. Nobody else is going to care about your health more than you.

And that’s where this approach with MIORA where it really is empowering people to get that support, to think about it in a holistic way, where it’s not just you’re not just focused on nutrition, you’re not just focused on fitness and movement. You’ve got this whole comprehensive picture of things. And again, the earlier the better. In your 20s, that’s when we can start to optimize our health for every decade that follows.

Absolutely. And look, you’ve got a team of people that care. So if you’ve got a team surrounding you that cares about your health outcome and then you put the work in, that’s a winning combination. And I have to say that what has been put together at MIORA, it is a tremendous value because it’s giving people that path to really understand where their chemistry’s at. Don’t wait till something happens. Get in front of it.

So on top of those foundational things, we always talk about, activity and movement, supplementation nutrition, getting time outdoors, having community, managing stress, getting plenty of sleep —

You’re getting excited.

This is like that topic that I think why we do what we do is because it’s all about, how do we empower people with information so they can take that next step? And this is really about that next thing. How do we help you find that next best level for you regardless of where you’re at in life?

I think you kind of been committed to something called Experience Life.

For quite some time.

Pretty passionate.

Yeah.

And yes, without a doubt. And honestly, I no longer think this is an additional step. With everything we know about longevity, with everything we know about performance health, with everything we know about early warning markers, people need to begin to look under their hood, understand who they are, where they’re at, where their risk factors are, and what do they do about it. I think it’s an essential part of health now. It used to be like, yeah, I haven’t gone and gotten a blood test in five years.

Well, we’re at probably the most exciting time that in terms of innovation and understanding of what our bodies do and what’s happening within our bodies. And again, we’ve talked a lot in this series about the wearables that we have and the information they provide, all of those things together add up and give us the chance to do these things and do it for ourselves and what we know about ourselves.

Yeah. And just to a final thought on it, the biggest thing is to take an organized approach to unwinding the metabolic disruption that you have. So many times people are just doing things from five different people that they’ve heard things about, and they don’t really know whether they’re getting benefit or not. They’re kind of chasing their tail a little bit. It’s important to get on a path, measure improvement. Do we get a lot of improvement? Awesome. Do we get some improvement, but yet now we got to work on something else? That’s still awesome.

But it has to be organized, because everybody know they see something on social media somewhere. Oh, I’m going to try that. Oh I’m going to try that. And what I see many times is people are wasting a lot of money instead of getting on a path. So anyway —

Can’t make a long term difference.

Yeah.

All right. Anything else you want to add about peak performance before we sign off today?

Everybody deserves peak performance. Whether you’re trying to create a PR in your next race, whether you’re struggling with your weight, or whether you just have chronic health issues or the desire to live longer, peak performance and the evaluation of your chemistry and how you feel. Sit squarely in the center of how you’re going to perform in your future.

It’s all about how we set ourselves up for down the road.

Yeah.

All right, Jim. If people want to learn more, they can visit miora.lifetime.life. We have all sorts of resources there. So, Jim, thank you. Thanks for joining me.

It’s always fun.

[MUSIC PLAYING]