Health is based on three pillars: sleep, nutrition and fitness. I chat with some of the most interesting people I know to discover more about their Health Stacks: the behaviors and products they use to stay healthy and fit.
Olympic hopefuls around the world are currently training for a place at the Summer Olympics finally happening in Tokyo, and we are so excited to celebrate their breakthroughs in mind, body, and spirit. Sleep fitness has always been a foundation of Eight Sleep, as we believe—and know, thanks to scientific research—that your body’s performance can be maximized with the daily (and nightly) practice of optimized sleep. That’s why we’re so excited to be in conversation with one of the most legendary athletes of our time, Apolo Ohno, the speed skater and Eight Sleep member who pioneered the usage of high-performance biohacking to win eight Olympic medals. Since officially retiring in 2010, Apolo has been championing the Olympic mindset as an entrepreneur, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. Read on to find out why it’s not always about speed—it’s about consistency and endurance, too.
Highlights
-
Apolo discovered at an early age that he was a natural at speed skating—but also realized that it takes more than talent to become a world champion, year after year.
-
Apolo went against the grain—literally, he was keto—in his nutrition and training style in order to adapt to new trends in short track speed skating.
-
Apolo replicated his bedroom at the Olympic Village in order to optimize his flow state before competing.
-
Apolo practices mindfulness and meditation in the sauna every day—followed by a cold shower to optimize his bedtime routine.
How did you get into speed skating in the first place?
Short track speed skating is a sport that most Americans didn’t even know about back in the late ‘90s, which is when I began. I had seen the sport while watching the Winter Olympics at age 12 with my father. I had played all of the traditional American stick-and-ball sports like basketball, baseball, and football, but there was something special about short track speed skating—it looked impossible. My father wanted nothing more than for me to do something extraordinary, and so every ounce of his energy went into both taming the hyperactivity that I had as a kid, and also trying to find some passion and drive that I would love in terms of career path later on in my life.
I was invited to join the Junior Development Training Program in Lake Placid, New York. This was in upstate New York, where if you’re a junior athlete, you come train—and they basically cradle and hold your hand through the training process as a junior to hopefully make it to the national team—and then onto being part of the Olympic team.
Within eight months of being accepted into that program and training there, I was ranked number one in the U.S. at age 14. I was technically the captain, but I couldn’t go drinking with the team until seven years later. I didn’t know how good I was at that young age—I was somewhat of a phenom because it came very naturally to me. I didn’t understand the importance of all the aspects that go into squeaking out the last quarter of the one percent of performance, but I started off with a bang.
All right, so you have this natural talent at such a young age. But as you said yourself, there is a big gap between having talent and beating the best in the world. You need to work on that top quarter of that one percent to step up your game. What are the main categories of performance that got you there?
This line of thinking really accelerated towards the end of my career. I felt that I was forced into redefining, reinventing, and adapting to the new era of athletes. In short track speed skating between 1998 and 2002, there was a very specific body type that people had—we were powerful and explosive. We looked like traffic and field sprinters. Then, four years later, athletes started to look lighter, smaller, and shorter—or very lean and very thin if they were tall. This is because athletes with the most efficient technique on the ice are able to glide at higher lap times without using the same levels of energy. If you weigh a certain amount of body weight, you have to push a certain amount of watts per that kilogram of body weight.
There was this massive shift to the Asian style of training, which emphasized not top speed, but sustained speed. The pure sprinter mentality started to go out the window, and we started to see these middle-distance athletes take over.
I naturally weigh around 165 pounds. I’ve always been very strong and could leg press around 1500 pounds. But in 2006, we saw that trend coming, and we had to cut back on some of the things we did. Even though I was very lean and I had cut my body weight from 165 in 2002 to 155 in the 2006 Torino Olympic Games, I was still 20 pounds heavier than the guy who was number one in the world. 20 pounds is a lot to carry through each corner if you’re pulling 2 1/2-to-3 g-forces per leg every corner for nine laps. It’s a lot to hold. You have to be significantly stronger than someone else. After Torino, I saw that my recipe and blueprint for success was not going to be duplicable if I wanted to be competitive in another four years because the sport was rapidly moving in a direction that wasn’t natural to my style of skating.
That’s what led me down the path of thinking, “What type of training do I need to do and focus on? What type of nutrition really works best for my body? How can I lose the excess muscle mass?” I essentially became catabolic, eating the upper body muscle I had—there was no other way to lose it. I stopped carrying bags. I stopped activating my upper body. I wanted pure atrophy in the upper body. I essentially starved myself for most of the summer, to be really transparent.
So, four years before my final Olympic Games in Vancouver, BC, I began this real redefining transformation of body type and style of skating. I had hired a strength and conditioning coach to come live with me at my house to monitor the recovery and training aspects. It was like this delicate blend of three months of stripping away all of the excess muscle mass, three months of introducing this neuromuscular recruitment style of technological advancement in terms of recruiting more muscle fibers without getting bigger and creating hypertrophy. It was very hard, because typically, when we think of strength and muscle growth, we want to activate more muscle fibers, we want to grow more muscle—but we were like, “We don’t want Apolo to get big.”
I mean, I’d gain muscle just from walking by a weight room. Naturally, it was easy for me to build muscle and very difficult for me to maintain a lower body weight.
Fascinating. What were you eating at the time?
We were just trying to change the fuel source that my body was using as a primary means of energy. So instead of using typical glycogen and glucose and sugars and carbohydrates, we switched to using fat. We used a modified cyclical ketogenic diet as a part of my training.
The portions that I was eating were so small, but it was predominantly and dominated by coconut oil. I would have a very small piece of salmon with some asparagus and some broccoli and some other green vegetables that were cooked heavily or doused in either butter or coconut oil. Pre-workout, I had a combination of coconut oil, colostrum, and a few other elements. We kept the carbohydrates very, very, very low. We would add