Episode 70: Fuel for an Active Lifestyle After the NFL with Greg Olsen

Joel Totoro:

This is The Thorne Podcast: Performance Edition, the show that navigates the complex world of sports science and explores the latest research on diet, nutritional supplements, and the human body. I'm Joel Totoro, director of sports science at Thorne. As a reminder, statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Joel Totoro:

Hello, everybody and welcome to The Thorne Podcast: Performance Edition. Joining me today is Greg Olsen, retired NFL tight end and current Fox Sports broadcaster. Greg, welcome to the podcast.

Greg Olsen:

Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, we're excited. We're going to talk a little bit to Greg today about health and performance, both during his playing career and into retirement. There's a lot to unpack there. But Greg, I think it was a little too simple to just say you're a retired football player. Can you talk a little bit to our audience about your brief background to your career and where you are now and then how you eventually found Thorne?

Greg Olsen:

Yeah. So I just finished up last year. 2020 was my final NFL season. I played 14 years. I got drafted in the first round out of the University of Miami in 2007 by the Chicago Bears. So I played four years there and then going into my fifth season, I got traded to the Carolina Panthers. So I spent the bulk of my career and the most success in my career was here in Carolina. I still live in Charlotte and played nine years for the Carolina Panthers and then played one last year in 2020 for the Seattle Seahawks before I retired. So it was a fun career. It opened up a lot of doors. Obviously, football has always been my life. It's been my passion; it's been all I've done since I was a little kid.

So to live out your dream and play 14 years in the NFL was something that I don't know if I ever thought was possible. But Thorne was a big part of that. I started taking Thorne products, I'd say maybe eight years ago, give or take. I actually first was exposed to it down training in Miami with my trainer, down in South Florida. He used all of the Thorne products. They were NSF, and that was such a big issue for a lot of guys is taking supplements and whatnot during their training that contained substances that weren't on the label or that they weren't quite sure of. So to have the NSF stuff and have such an extensive line, he introduced me to it. And then I continued it on my own here in Carolina for pretty much the entire bulk of my career.

And it became a huge part of my daily routine, both in the morning and obviously before I went to bed each day, and supplementing my training and supplementing my recovery. So it was a long journey and it took a lot of things. To play 14 years, you need a lot of help and steps along the way. And Thorne's products were a huge part of that, just organically. I did no deals with you guys. I had no endorsement. I was buying it on my own dollar, and I just believed in it and felt like it was a worthwhile investment.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. You mentioned you played 14 seasons. We joke in the league that NFL stands for, not for long. So can you talk about some of the things that you did along your career, along with Thorne, to keep you on the field so long and also how you've seen over your career, the individual players approach to wellness, recovery and understanding one extra year is another year of earning, another year of your career. How's that evolved as you've been in the league?

Greg Olsen:

I always viewed my off-season training and my prep, really, as an investment. It was an investment in my career, like you just said. Every year you play in the league, your ability to earn your ability to build your career just compounds. So I always looked at my off season even more closely and more important as the regular season. Actually playing the games is the easy part. That's the part everybody's excited about, that's the part everybody sees. That's the part that guys really get juiced up for. But how long can you be passionate and how long can you really be into the off-season training, starting in February, starting from scratch. After a long season, you take a couple weeks off. How many guys are willing to get back in there and dive back into their training and their nutrition and their recovery?

And maybe you had an injury from the previous season that requires some rehab or maintenance. So it's a nonstop, 12-month cycle. And to a lot of guys, they don't physically burn out, they mentally burn out. And a big part of my approach was, I knew as long as I stayed passionate and I still loved the training and continuing to search for new resources to improve my health, to improve my body, to improve my training and my gains, I knew as long as I stayed really engaged in that aspect, the season would take care of itself. And I can honestly say for 14 years, I always loved the off-season. I always loved seeking out every off-season, a new path, a new turnover, a new stone and see what was under it. What could I implement into my program, into my routine on a daily basis that would just give me that little bit of an edge over somebody else.

And being able to push off aging, push off the decline, I was fortunate that it didn't really happen until the very tail end of my career when I was 36, 37 years old. That part of it, I always loved. And I always tell young guys, if you love the training and you love the off season, you'll have a long career because playing the games is the part everybody loves.

Joel Totoro:

I think you hit on something important there. So few people talk about the passion aspect of it. And yes, it is your occupation, but if it's just a job that the tolls, the negatives are going to by far outweigh the positives. So did you have any mentors or leaders along the way that helped you understand not the football side, but the health, the wellness, the mental side of the game?

Greg Olsen:

I had a lot of guys. Just thinking back to college and just being exposed to training at a high level. Our strength coach at Miami, Andreu Swasey, was really good. He was tough, he was hard. He really worked us hard, but he had a really good background in running and conditioning. And playing down to South Florida, if you couldn't run and you couldn't be in great shape, you couldn't play. So I got acclimated to that at an early age. Even back to high school, my was my high school football coach. He ran the whole program for 30 years. He was the strength coach. He ran the weight room, he ran summer conditioning and spring training and all that. So I was exposed to training and I was exposed to the importance of taking care of your body and what you put in is what you're going to get out of it.

I was exposed to that all the way back to a very young age. And then I took it to another level. When I came out of college, I trained at a place called Bommarito Performance Systems down in South Florida. And I was exposed to Pete Bommarito, who still runs it today. And I was really exposed to a whole new world of training, sophistication, everything from your micronutrient intake of your nutrition plan, all the way up to your periodization of how you train, how you run, how you stagger your workouts from day to day, from morning to afternoon. It was a very, very precise approach, training for the combine. And then my first five years in the league, I would go down to South Florida and I would train with him and continue to build on that.

It was less combine prep now, and it was more football training and just the knowledge and the information that I was able to learn and carry forward. And then every stop along the way, Rusty Jones is an all-time legendary strength and conditioning coach. He was my strength coach in Chicago. He's known for those Buffalo Bills teams, four-straight Super Bowls, and training Bruce Smith. He pioneered a lot of the biomechanics and that whole process. And then in Charlotte, where I played the bulk of my career, our strength and conditioning staff and our training staff was phenomenal. So just everywhere I went, I was put around somebody different, with a different background. Here in Carolina, we had a lot of guys with a lot of more powerlifting and strength background, which was great to go along with a lot of the speed and the on-the-field stuff that I had, and other stuff.

So to put it all together was just a really, really good combination. And the teams that I had played for and the people that they had working with them, just everywhere I went, I wanted to learn information, I wanted to grow. I wanted to pick their brains. And part of that process was to learn to take ownership in your own career and take a little bit of what all these guys were doing and say, "All right, this works for me. I'm going to take it and I'm going to run with it."

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. I think that's such a great point. And I think it's a good idea for everyone to think about is being around these great, amazing resource is one thing, but being coachable I think is really important. And that's one of the things we work with at Thorne is we want to make sure that there's at least as much information as possible going into what you decide to put into your body. And that's why we really love partnering with you and some of the things we've done on, on the Healthy Aging campaign.

But before we dive into that, I think it's really important, you talked about ownership over what goes into your body. And that's one of the things we look at, at Thorne, with the NSF Certified for Sport line, which we touched on briefly, which is just an extra certification or extra level of testing to make sure that the ingredients in our supplements are guaranteed to be banned substance-free. But can you talk a little bit about what a positive test actually means to an athlete? We see it on the news, but what that actually has impact on your career, your reputation, how important it is to stay ahead of that?

Greg Olsen:

Yeah. I think the biggest thing you said is your reputation. Every athlete has a great amount of pride. You don't get to where you are if you don't have a great sense of pride and self-identity and really take ownership and really believe. At the end of the day, if you don't believe in yourself and you don't put yourself at the top of the list, no one else is going to believe in you. And you work so hard over your entire career to build that reputation and to just grow your career and build it. And one negative test, they call it getting popped, one popped test, one positive drug test, your entire reputation is now in question and guys fight their entire career sometimes to earn that back.

And a lot of times, guys do. A lot of times, they are simple mistakes, and it is a single one-time offense, and people will move on and forgive you. I always just looked at it like it wasn't worth it. I would rather just be a little bit, a couple percentages less than what I could possibly be if you just bend one rule or cut one corner. It was never worth it to me. I never wanted to go down that road. I just took such great pride in what I had built in my career and doing it the right way and doing it through training and education and knowledge and routine and discipline, that I never wanted to ever go down that road.

And the fact that Thorne had such an extensive line. There's a lot of other companies that have NSF-certified products. So I think it's important for everybody to know, there are NSF products out there that are fairly relatively attainable. But the nice thing about Thorne was you could get your entire line. You can get all of your vitamins, you can get all your pre, your posts, your recovery shakes, your proteins, your creatine. You could get everything that you would need, whether it's from your blood testing work, if you have to supplement any sort of vitamins or calcium, magnesium, zinc, any of those core ingredients. But also the training stuff, the hydration formulas, and the post and pre shakes and all that. So to be able to just get it all from one source and one point of contact, and just know that it was regulated and it was routine, and it was the same, and it was consistent, was just so appealing to me and so many other guys that I trained with.

So all those things, but at the end of the day, it's your reputation. That's on the line. It's everything you've worked your whole life to build, could come crashing down and be called into question with one bad supplement, one thing you took for granted, one time you were lazy and you didn't really check the ingredients. And with the NSF and the Thorne line, it takes a lot of that question out and you can really be confident that what you put in your body is what they say it is, and you can move forward without having that hanging over your head.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. That's the whole real intent of the depth of the line that we've come out with. We've got a couple people on our team. I worked with athletes, professional and collegiate. Our VP of business development for sport, Wes Barnett, was a two-time Olympian and was competing in weightlifting in the '90s when it was really hard to get access to these products. So the ease at which we're trying to provide these supplements at the level they need to be, and just give you really that peace of mind. So it's just one thing you don't have to worry about as you're rolling into, there's so many things on your checklist of what you need to do, to do every day-

Greg Olsen:

You don't need one more thing to fret about. Our entire day is stress and worry, and did I do enough, and am I ready for practice? And there's so many factors that go into to this lifestyle of being a professional athlete. The last thing that you want to worry about adding to the list is, is every vitamin I take is every supplement I take, am I opening myself up to a risk of, God forbid, the next time I have the note on my locker that it's my turn for a drug test, is there a possibility at all? And it's just one less thing to have, that peace of mind, as you said, is just so important.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. So I'm going to shift a little bit here, now. We say on this podcast a lot, performance is personal. For a long time, yours was every Sunday, make the postseason and that thing, continue your career. You can be as passionate about we talk about somebody running their first 5K is as personal as the training you did. So as you've left the football world, transitioned into your post-playing career, what is your definition of performance or what are you looking to fuel these days?

Greg Olsen:

Yeah. My definition of it right now is very different. I look at it, back when I was playing, I was training. I would always get on guys, be like, "Are you going to go work out?" I was like, "I don't work out. I train." There's a very specific purpose to everything. I do. Every exercise, every pre, every recovery, every warmup drill, every mobility drill. There's a very specific reason for everything I do. I train, I don't work out. Now, I work out. Everything about my life now is just healthy living and quality of life. I want to feel good when I go to the ball fields with the kids and run around with them. I want to feel good playing catch.

I want to be able to go… A couple weeks ago, our foundation, we had our annual 5K. I want to be able, again, I'm not set world records, I'm not running the entire 3.2 miles or whatever it is, but I want to be able to run a mile of it or 2 miles of it and have my feet not kill and have my knees not ache and be able to exercise with my wife and go play tennis and just live a normal active lifestyle. That's where I am right now in this stage of my life. And albeit, a very different quality of action and movement and whatnot. But it's just what I'm doing now. It's what's important to me, is just quality of life. It's being active, being able to play with my kids, being able to go play golf, being able to go walk, being able to go run and just do things that a normal 37-year-old guy should be able to do.

It's just a lot of guys coming off playing a long time in the NFL or whatnot, typically have a lot of things going on. Fortunately, I'm healthy in that regard and I'm going to try to keep it that way.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. That leads us into my next question here. So you've partnered with us on our Healthy Aging campaign, and I really applaud you for starting now. Too many people consider aging when they're 65. We feel like healthy aging is healthy at any and every age. But what does healthy aging mean to you?

Greg Olsen:

I think healthy aging is really a lot of the things that we just talked about. I think if you put me under a scan and you X-rayed me and MRI'ed me, would my joints and would my feet, and would my knees look like maybe someone who didn't play 15 years in the NFL? Yeah, probably. But where I am now, how long can I stay at this state? How long can I push off the real big aging where I'm not able to be active, I'm not able to do the things that I'm accustomed to doing? Being able to prolong my quality of life now is a huge priority for me. I don't want to be the guy at 40 years old, who can't go run in the 5k and who can't go play tennis and he has to act like he's 60. I don't want to be that guy. 

So I think getting ahead of it at an earlier age, I'm still in the grand scheme of things. In the football world. I was like a dinosaur. But now I enter into the real world and I'm a relatively young guy, and that's important for me. There's so many things that I want to do on a daily basis that require me to feel good, to have the energy, to have not only the physical stamina, but the mental clarity to continue to be active and continue to stimulate and challenge myself in new careers or in new endeavors or whatever it is. 

So there's an entire approach to just living, and that's mental, it's emotional, it's physical. And tying all those things together, leads to either a good quality of life or a poor quality of life. And I want to live a good quality of life. I have a lot of things ahead of me. I got three young kids. I got a family. I want to enjoy all of that. There's a lot of things over the years that I haven't been able to enjoy because I was so wrapped up in my career and so wrapped up in playing that now, I don't want that lost time, I don't want to lose out on it. So that's my entire approach to all of this is I have a lot to do and I want to make sure I feel the best I can to do a lot of it.

Joel Totoro:

That's a great mentality, and we look forward to seeing where your next career takes you. But we're going to take a quick break here and when we get back, we're going to get into some questions from our audience.

This is Joel with The Thorne Podcast: Performance Edition. Do you have a health question or suggestion for a guest or topic that you would like to be featured on the show? Reach out to us on Instagram. Our handle is @thornehealth. Ask us a question or topic you'd like covered, and we'll try and cover it in future episodes. And don't forget to subscribe to the show in your podcast app. Get updates on the latest in medical research, the insider scoop on performance and health insights, and more when you subscribe to The Thorne Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Joel Totoro:

All right, and we're back. Let's get into some of the questions from our audience. Greg, actually, a lot of our questions came from the youth or early career audience. You've started a podcast called Youth Inc. to really actually address all of those. So it's not just the one quick question here. Can you talk a little bit about that podcast? And then I think the one we got the most was advice you have for someone early in their career. The intention and the habits that you had built throughout your career, are there any of them you would've started earlier, or wish you had started earlier?

Greg Olsen:

Yeah. So my podcast, we just started a few months back, and it's called Youth Inc. And it's really just a deep dive into the world of youth sports and the changing landscape and the challenges that not only children are facing navigating this world and the pressure's being put on them to pick a sport or pick a path and stick with it at an earlier and earlier age, it seems, with each passing year. And then also, the challenges that youth coaches and parents who are in charge of helping navigate these waters for their children and for these young kids. And a lot of these families out there, including my own, don't have a lot of the answers. So we set forth on this journey through Youth Inc.

And we've really enjoyed it. It's been fun. We've had some really cool conversations with families and doctors and former athletes, current athletes, Olympians, you name them. And just getting their perspective on not only what their path was like as a young athlete growing up, but also now, what it's like navigating it potentially as a coach or as a father, as a mother. It's been really cool. 

And as far as advice that I would give to not only young kids, but maybe somebody, a rookie in the NFL or rookie, it's not so much for the young kids. But really for the guys that are trying to make a career of this, a rookie first year player in the NFL or whatnot, my advice to them was keep “the main thing” the main thing.

And right now you're a football player or you're a basketball player, whatever it is. Guys, all of a sudden, for whatever reason, human instinct is, “I've made it. And now all of a sudden, I believe that I'm a master at everything. I'm a businessman, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm on social media.” All of a sudden they think because they made it in football, that it opens up all these doors. And it does, there's a time and a place later on for football or whatever sport you're playing to open doors to a second career and a next chapter in life. But when you're just setting out, your entire life needs to revolve around what's in the best interest for you to have the longest and the most successful careers possible.

And that's in what you do off the field, that's in what you do at night. That's your sleep, that's your daily routine of your training, your nutrition, what you put in your body, the people you hang out with. Anything that takes away from what you're doing, trying to earn and grow your career, needs to be eliminated. And that obsessive nature, as daunting as that is and as hard as that is for some guys to really build that discipline, I just believe wholeheartedly gets you off to a great start. And then over time, as you settle in and you start earning your stripes and you start building that career and that routine, and you know what works for you and what doesn't, and you have a little more stability in the league or what whatnot, then there's time for other things. And there's going to be plenty of time, the rest of your life.

Like you said, it's not for long. If you give 10 years of your life to your career, you can set yourself up that you're going to retire in your early 30s and you have the rest of your life to do whatever you want. You don't get to ever go back. There's no looking back and saying, "I'm going to go back and give that another run." No, when it's over, it's over. So I tell guys all the time, man, if you get the opportunity to put on this jersey, if you get this opportunity to get a paycheck in the NFL, don't blow it. Because there's so many guys that are ready to take your spot. I've seen so many careers just derailed because guys weren't willing to just lock in and keep what's important, important in the moment because they wanted to be everywhere at any time doing every other thing else. And it's hard, but that's my biggest message to young guys if they want to have a long career.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah, for sure. There's no master's tour in the NFL, right?

Greg Olsen:

Nope. When it's over, it's over.

Joel Totoro:

We have a question here and I think it's an interesting one. The question was what have you taken from football into the booth and, I would say, into retirement? What learnings have you brought to your second career? And then conversely, what has the booth, in retirement, taught you?

Greg Olsen:

I've really enjoyed coming into the booth. I think it was a perfect transition for me coming out of the game, keeping me stimulated. I always wondered, what am I going to do when football's over? Fall of '21 was the first fall since I was 5, 6 years old that I didn't play football. I mean, this was my entire life. This was what I did since I was a young boy. There's always that concern in the back of your head, like when it's gone, what are you going to do? How do you fill that void that you've known for 30 years? I think going into the booth was a really good transition for me. It kept me stimulated, it kept me really engaged in the game, connected with former players and former coaches, continuing to stay up on the nuances and the evolution and the change within the game that happens every single year.

And you take it for granted when you're in it, right? You're in the locker room, you're breathing it, you're living it every day. And then from the outside, the game passes you by if you don't really stay active and following closely to the new trends and the new fads and what's going on within the game. So it was good for me to stay involved. I love talking the game. I love seeing it and taking what I see and trying to present that in a manner in which the viewer can understand it. Not only understand it at its simplest level, but also embrace and love the complexity that is the game of football. So I think finding that balance has always been fun for me. And it was a great first year. I had a blast doing it and I look forward to continuing to study and continuing to improve and see where it takes me.

Joel Totoro:

It's great to hear. Our next question asks about after training for football for so long, what do you do for sport, training and fun now?

Greg Olsen:

So I took up tennis, which I do a couple times a week. I'm not in like a league. I have never really played a competitive match. End of last summer, fall, I started just going to like men's clinics and taking some lessons and just my thought was I'd played golf my whole life, but I'm a bad golfer. I'm like a 90s golfer. I just don't take it serious. I do it more to just hang out with the guys, go out, hang out, play golf, fellowship, play with buddies and just keep it fun. And I always said, I'm never going to turn golf... I take enough things in my life serious. I don't need that to be my stress about that and try to see how good I can get. And then at the same time, drive around in a golf cart and drink a beer.

So I was like, I need something that I can stress to learn, but it's also going to give me a little workout, it's going to give me something to stimulate me physically, mentally. And it was something I had never done before. So that's been fun to start from scratch and just learn something from new. Gives you a great appreciation for just how difficult it is. So there's a mental approach of staying sharp and staying engaged and learning a new skill. That's been fun.

And then obviously, the physical nature of it, running around, change direction, be out there in the heat in the summer and playing. So I've enjoyed that. I spent a lot of time at the fields coaching my kids teams and the end of practice we'll run or we'll condition or whatnot, and I'll do it with them. So I stay active in those settings. I don't go run on the treadmill. I don't go to the weight room and bench press. Those days are over. I just stay active in my normal lifestyle, learning some new things. And again, just to try to have a good quality of life so I can do a lot of the things that I want to.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. You've earned the right to not be looking at your bench max anymore, or your sprint time.

Greg Olsen:

Yeah, those days are over.

Joel Totoro:

We've got a great question, and I'm going to add to it a little bit. So the questions about mentorship. You've been pretty vocal about how lucky you were having your dad as a coach, the coaches you had and the strength coaches and Pete, on the physical side. But the question is how do you start mentoring? And I think what they're asking is when you're a senior or upperclassman in college, you can be mentoring younger people. When you're a veteran, you can be mentoring rookies. I think the question is kind of at what point could you be confident enough to be a mentor?

Greg Olsen:

I think in order to lead… Mentoring to me is like being a leader. I think in order to lead, you have to do, first. I think so many guys want to be leaders, they want to be vocal, they want to be mentors, they want to tell everybody else what to do, but they're not doing it. So I think if you want guys to follow you and you want guys to look at you as an example of, “I want to be this guy I want to get in his pocket and I want to do everything he does,” you got to be seen as the guy who does it every single day. You don't have to tell everybody what you're doing. Guys take notice. And whether that's in high school, whether that's in youth sports or whether that's professionally, people take notice of the people who do the work consistently the right way.

And I just believe in the action first. And over time, you'll learn when it's the right time to take that mentorship. But until you have your own issues at bay, until you have your own career stabilized and you have your own stability, no one's going to follow you. And if you're worried about everyone following you, but you're not taking care of yourself, you're leading people in the wrong direction. So handling yourself first is just so important. There will be a time and place for you to put your arm around somebody and bring them along and show them the right way. But if I'm going to follow someone, I'm going to make sure that I'm following them in the right direction. And in order to do that, that's a daily process. That is a daily routine, that is consistency and discipline that is very challenging.

There's a lot of people that want to lead the pre-game speech. There's a lot of guys that want to be the “rah rah” hype man. But at the end of the day, guys want to follow action. They want to follow the guys who do it on a regular basis. So I would just encourage anybody out there, if you're looking to be a mentor and you're seeking it out, it's probably too early. It'll come to you when you're ready, and that's by focusing on yourself, that's by looking internally and just saying, "Hey, what can I do to improve on a daily basis? What can I do to be a better teammate? What can I do to serve the people around me better?" If you do that, and you take that approach, all of the sudden, you're going to turn around one day and there's going to be people standing behind you saying, “OK, what's next? What's the next drill? I'm just going to do exactly what you do.” It'll happen over time, but I believe it has to be in that order for it to really work.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. I think you've touched on this a few times throughout the conversation here. Just like yourself, and I think a lot of time it's on the person to be seeking out the mentorship as well. But you've talked about, you're always trying to find new information, lifelong learner. So you're still being mentored, even though you've been a mentor to so many people throughout your career. So I think that's important to realize, it's not like you have to be someone's sensei or know everything about everything, right? Like you say, if you're doing it and you're doing an action people try and emulate. Be like, okay, that's what I want. That's what I want from you. I don't think it needs to be as strict, like, "OK, I'm inviting you to be my mentee."

Greg Olsen:

Yeah, it doesn't happen like that. And I'll tell you, I think you made a good point. I think the best people and the best leaders are the ones who realize they don't know it all. And they're the ones that do have the self-awareness of saying, "I'm falling short here," or "I need to go out and seek more information because I don't have the answers in this area." The people who realize they don't have all the answers, they are the lifelong learners. They are the people who are always trying to educate themselves and challenge their thinking and challenge their approach and reevaluating, just because you've done it for the last five years, doesn't mean that year six, that's the best way to do it.

There's always this self-reflection that allows you to grow and continues to allow you to stay up with the times or even be a true leader, be an innovator, be someone who's ahead of the curve. So I think people that fall in the status quo and just resort back to, “Here's how I've always done it. Here's what I do. So I'm never going to change.” I think you can get stale and I think that things can pass you by as well. So I think that idea, like you said, of being a lifelong learner and somebody who's always looking to think ahead and challenge themselves first, those people typically have a tendency of staying ahead.

Joel Totoro:

We got this question from everybody. So we know you're taking some products, but what are your favorite products right now?

Greg Olsen:

So right now, I take the NiaCel. I'm a big believer in the anti-aging stuff. So all the joint health stuff, the glucosamine, the joint health, my knees, my feet. I broke my feet a bunch, so I have some bone stuff going on in my feet from my career. So with calcium and magnesium, anything that promotes bone health, vitamin D, just anything that helps promote bone health, joint health. And then there's all sorts of stuff you can take for your brain development and just anti-aging stuff just to remain like cognizant and sharp. So at this stage of my life, like we've talked about now a lot, it's like just getting up in the morning, feeling good, getting out of bed and moving on.

When I was playing, I took a lot more. I actually had like a whole… I took like a tackle box, like a fishing tackle box. And every Sunday night, I would go through and I would put my pills in each of the little… like pocket, like you make a little square out of the plastic divider, is what I was trying to say. And it would be my routine. And I would take morning, a.m., p.m., a.m., p.m. Aside from all like the bone and the joint health and the vitamins and the supplements and whatnot. And then I would carry with me all my protein, my pre, my post, my recovery, the Catalyte, which is the hydration stuff. So I carried a whole gym bag with me to and from all my training sessions and just made sure I had everything that I needed. I'm not at that extent anymore. I've really scaled down. But it's still a big part of my daily routine to this day.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. I think you hit on something that I found in my career too, is I spend so much time trying to help athletes physically recover and make sure they're on top of their game and they're fueled for the training. But the brain uses 20-plus percent of the calories just to do what it does every day. So anytime we're asking more out of it, it took me entirely too long in my career to put a focus on that. Like, okay, what are the nutrients the brain needs? All right, if we're going to take it out, we need to put it back in. Right? So it's the same idea we have for physically training the muscles, like what do we take out of the muscles? What do we need to put back in?

So I think it's great, stepping back and being like, my brain is my biggest asset right now. For years I asked my body to be a big part of that. And knowing that as we age, we have different demands for what's most important to us. So I think it's great to see that, OK, yeah, this is what was important to me there, this is what's important to me now. And you've done a little bit of testing with us in the past. That's another thing we're expanding on. It's great to, OK, I have a pretty good idea that this is what's happening, but it's always great to prove it and have those data points. How is that idea of getting some actual numbers around just like we talked about, bench press in 40 back in combine days, right? Have those metrics helped you really dial in what you're focusing on?

Greg Olsen:

Yeah. I think it's huge. I think anytime you do any of the... You can do the age testing, the blood work get and get your numbers back. And I think as opposed to just blindly taking X amount of milligrams of this supplement or this, and just throwing darts at the wall, which is better than nothing. To supplement and to introduce quality vitamins and nutrients and supplements into your body is a positive in some capacity. But to really be able to pinpoint where your needs and where your deficiencies are, and then supplement and go from there, both through your nutrition and what you consume, but also through your vitamins and supplements with Thorne, I think that's when you can really make a huge impact, right?

You're not just flying blind. You have some real strong data that says, all right, you're really deficient in these areas, we need to supplement it, not only outside of your nutrition plan, but also within your plan. That's when I saw my best results. And then when you go back and you retest after a few months, six months, whatever it was, and you go back and you retest, and not only now, could you feel the difference in your energy or in your how your joints felt or whatever the category was. But then all of a sudden, when the data matches, you say, hey, yeah, you felt better because we were able to raise your scores, your vitamin D, your zinc level. Whatever it was, we were able to raise those scores out of some really low numbers and bring them back to baseline.

It's no wonder you felt the actual subjective results on the field. It's a pretty powerful tool that we can have and it's super easy. It's as simple as a blood test and you fill up a couple vials and then they send you a pretty detailed report. So I've done that for years. And then to be able to go along with my nutritionist and my team and say, "What's our plan to address some of these things that are out of whack and get everything back to a stable level?" It gave us a target that we could shoot for as opposed to just firing blind.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. I think there's something great about having that feedback and it is so hard to get some of that internal feedback. And I love using the testing more so, okay, this is where we started. I did the work, I want to prove that it actually made a change.

Greg Olsen:

Of course, it's like anything.

Joel Totoro:

We all want to win. We're always a little bit competitive. Right?

Greg Olsen:

Of course.

Joel Totoro:

Even within our own self. But I want to appreciate the time and where we're leading at, but I want to end on talking a little bit about something that's very important to you, The HEARTest Yard foundation. Can you talk a little bit about how that came to be and the work you're doing and just raise some awareness?

Greg Olsen:

Yeah. So back in 2012, my wife and I had a son, TJ, that was born with a very serious congenital heart defect. He was born with half of a heart. He underwent three open heart surgeries in his first two years of life to rework how the heart functions to make him, in essence, a single ventricle, is what they call them, a single ventricle baby. And he had a tough first couple years, but then stabilized and was able to live a relatively normal quality of life. And then actually last summer... Then we started the The HEARTest Yard back in 2013, shortly after his first surgery. And the idea was that we could provide better resources to these families that are going to go down this journey that we did. There's private in-home nursing care and therapies, and there's a lot of care that revolves around these babies once they leave the hospital walls.

And a lot of that was a big burden to a lot of families. So that was our original goal in our original program. And then The HEARTest Yard has really grown. We opened up a comprehensive 25,000-square-foot comprehensive heart center here in Charlotte at Levine Children's Hospital, that we were able to fund and open. And it houses all the multi-disciplines of the pediatric cardiac program here in our hospital, in our region. So that was a really cool project that we opened at the end of 2020. 

And then little did we know last summer, just about a year ago today, our son was diagnosed with heart failure. His heart had given out and he was in heart failure and it was determined that he was going to need a heart transplant. So on June 4, of last year, at 8 years old, TJ had a heart transplant, and it went very well. And he's coming up on his one-year heart anniversary that we're going to celebrate pretty big here in a couple weeks. And we're just so thankful for the journey that he's been on and the amazing care that we have that our program just continues alongside with Levine Children's Hospital here in Charlotte, we're going to about to bring our program to our second location down in Charleston, at Charleston, called MUSC Children's Hospital. And so we're just continuing to expand our resources and our ability to elevate this care for everybody who has a very similar story to us. So it's something we're very passionate about, something we spend a lot of time on. We're very thankful for how TJ's doing, and we just wanted to make sure we do our part to ensure as many kids can have that outcome as we did.

Joel Totoro:

Yeah. It's such an important project there. And great to hear that TJ may be the strongest Olsen in the family.

Greg Olsen:

For sure. Yeah, he's killing it. He's excited because not next weekend's, it's Memorial Day, the weekend after he's got a baseball tournament and it's actually the Saturday, the start of the tournament will be his one year anniversary from his heart transplant. So last year at that exact time, he was laying in an operating room, having his heart taken out and replaced by someone else's. And here we are exactly a year later and he's playing baseball and going to be out in running around, and it's just, it’s pretty cool. We're just so thankful for that.

Joel Totoro:

That's absolutely incredible. And Greg, that's all the time we have. But where can our listeners find out more about The HEARTest Yard, your podcast, how can they keep up with everything Greg Olsen?

Greg Olsen:

Yeah, we got a lot going on. So you can download Youth Inc. wherever you get your podcasts. So Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast, you can download it and listen to it. We have 12 episodes. We have our new episode tomorrow drop in. So we will have 13. So we've got a lot of content on there that I think people are going to love. It's very evergreen. You can listen to it in any order at any time. So I think people will love that. And then they can learn more about our foundation. The website is www.R4R.org, R4R.org. And it'll have all of our programs on there and all the work that we've done and future events and future expansion that we're looking forward to. So I appreciate you helping us get the word out there and appreciate you having me on. This was a lot of fun.

Joel Totoro:

Loved it, man. Appreciate the time. And that was Greg Olsen. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Joel Totoro:

Thanks for listening to The Thorne Podcast: Performance Edition. Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to the show on your podcast app of choice. You can also learn more about the topics we discussed by visiting Thorne.com and checking out the latest news videos and stories on Thorne's Take 5 Daily blog. For this Performance Edition of The Thorne Podcast, I'm Joel Totoro, reminding everyone to stay active and stay hydrated.