At Stark Health, the Team Is the Treatment

TUSTIN, Calif. —

At most health and fitness facilities, a personal trainer trains. A doctor diagnoses. A nutritionist advises. And none of them talk to each other.

At Stark Health, that siloed model is exactly what founder Todd Vande Hei set out to dismantle when he opened the facility's doors in 2011. Fifteen years later, the result is something the health optimization industry still hasn't widely replicated: a fully integrated team of strength coaches, doctors, nutritionists, and chiropractors who share data, challenge each other's assumptions, and build every student's program together.

"Most people are getting pieces of the answer from different places. A trainer who doesn't know your bloodwork. A doctor who doesn't know how you move. A nutritionist who has never seen your DEXA scan. At Stark, everyone is working from the same picture. That's not just better — it's a completely different category of care."

The Stark model begins with data that most health facilities never collect. Every student undergoes a DEXA body composition scan, comprehensive bloodwork, grip strength testing, and — beginning October 1, 2026 — VO2 max testing. That baseline is shared across the entire care team before a single training session is programmed or a single recommendation is made.

From there, the integration is ongoing. A strength coach at Stark isn't working in isolation — they're in regular communication with the medical team about a student's hormone panel, inflammatory markers, and recovery data. A doctor isn't making clinical recommendations without understanding the student's training load and body composition trajectory. When one practitioner sees something the others haven't — a movement pattern that suggests a structural imbalance, a lab value that explains a performance plateau — that insight is immediately folded into the student's program.

It is a model built on the belief that practitioners sharpen each other.

"The best coaches I've worked with are the ones who are still uncomfortable with what they don't know. When a strength coach is working alongside a naturopathic doctor and a clinical nutritionist every day, they can't stay in a silo. They get challenged. They grow. And the student benefits from every one of those conversations."

That philosophy extends to how Stark develops its practitioners. Coaches are not hired as finished products — they are built inside the Stark system, immersed in the same integrated model they will eventually deliver. The facility is currently developing a formal coaching internship program designed to train the next generation of Stark coaches from the ground up.

The results of the integrated model are reflected in Stark's student outcomes and retention. Approximately 80 percent of new students come through referrals from existing students — a figure Vande Hei attributes directly to the team model.

"When someone's health actually changes — when the weight comes off and stays off, when the energy comes back, when the labs normalize — they tell people. That's not a marketing outcome. That's what happens when the whole team is pulling in the same direction."

Stark Health operates two locations in Orange County — its primary facility in Tustin and a second location in Newport Beach — and serves students across the full spectrum of health optimization, from body composition and hormone health to cardiovascular performance and longevity medicine.