What Blood Work Can Tell You About Your Performance

By guest writers and friends of The Ready State, Andy Galpin’s and Dan Garner of the Vitality Blueprint: a performance bloodwork company that is defining best practices in the emerging arena of bloodwork as a tool for human performance.

Bloodwork is a powerful healthcare tool when it comes to disease detection. However, bloodwork has utility well beyond screening for disease.

Increasingly, high performance athletes and individuals are using bloodwork as a tool to optimize their physiology across dimensions ranging from sleep, to gut health, and yes, mobility and inflammation as well.

By choosing the right biomarkers to examine and applying interpretive methods that take a performance perspective, it is possible to develop a detailed evaluation of the entire physiology.

This practice can clarify where deficiencies and constraints exist in the body and provide a roadmap to address them. The process of removing constraints from the inside out aims to create an optimized physiology that performs to its potential, returning as much as possible from training, recovering more effectively, and performing consistently at a high level daily.

Constraint Theory

You may be familiar with individual biomarker testing and optimization for markers like blood glucose or hormones like testosterone. Individual biomarker analysis can be a useful exercise, but the practice of performance bloodwork expands on the practice in a key way. Performance bloodwork considers the whole physiology as a coordinated system. Functions across the body work together, and the output is human performance. That’s the quality of performance across the thinking, playing, working, recovering, competing, or whatever it is you’re chasing after.

For example, an effective gut absorbs nutrients more efficiently which boosts recovery and improves return on training investment. Inflammation control improves movement quality, leading to better training and accelerated progress. And so on.

Evaluating the physiology in this way, as a network of functions working together, is the foundation for an idea called “constraint theory”: The theory states that the quality of mental and physical performance are the product of a physiology in which all systems are working in harmony. If a constraint arises along the chain, the system’s output suffers.

Performance bloodwork looks at the physiology end-to-end in an effort to identify where constraints exist for a given individual. Perhaps a micronutrient deficiency is limiting energy metabolism. Maybe sleep pathways are being interrupted by blood sugar dysregulation. Chronic hydration status may be hampering cardiovascular output.

Uncovering these insights is possible by applying a performance-oriented view to your bloodwork – both in the biomarkers you look at (relevant ones to the functions you care about) as well as how you interpret them. That means evaluating results relative to optimal status versus comparing to the population average ranges or disease states used by most labs.

Targeting and resolving suboptimal signals within your bloodwork can deliver outsized improvement in many areas as your physiology finds its most efficient working order.

Choosing Biomarkers

Creating a comprehensive view of your physiology sounds daunting, but bloodwork is uniquely powerful for generating this insight. Blood interacts with every organ and system in the body, delivering oxygen, nutrients, and hormones. Countless markers are picked up and left behind in the blood. These markers can be used to decode how well systems are working and where suboptimal conditions exist.

With thousands of markers to choose from, selecting the right ones is crucial for performance bloodwork. You want markers that tell a full story, identify root causes, and clarify chronic versus acute conditions. At Vitality Blueprint, years of research have refined a list of about 100 markers used for a comprehensive assessment. Within this list, critical markers represent the status of various body systems like gut health, sleep, energy production, and cardiovascular health. Depending on your area of interest, a structured search can surface relevant biomarkers with validated research.
This means that with the idea of system-wide constraint theory in mind, key markers do exist to focus on different areas. Finding constraints ultimately happens by examining individual systems on their own as well as in relation to one another. Dividing the physiology into functional areas for analysis and taking a look at each one allows for a comprehensive view as well as narrow, targeted insights. There are different methods for doing this. Vitality Blueprint uses 13 areas, called “performance categories” to perform analysis:

Energy, Sleep, Stress, Gut Health, Micronutrients, Resilience, Inflammation, Cell Health, Hormone Profile, Toxic Load, Cardiovascular, Brain Chemistry, Hydration

Performance Interpretation

Often, it doesn’t take bloodwork to know when a constraint exists—you can feel it. Symptoms like persistent soreness, reduced mobility, or hydration issues are clear indicators. Pairing these symptoms with biomarker results can clarify the specific cause of an underlying issue rather than treating it generically. Incorporating an individual’s lived experience into bloodwork interpretation helps validate and prioritize results.

The interpretive practice of incorporating real feedback from the individual versus evaluating bloodwork simply as numbers on a page is an important piece of the performance bloodwork process. Making this method available to a broader audience is a large part of the reason that Dan and his partner, Andy Galpin founded Vitality Blueprint.

Individualized interpretive practices are rounded out by using high-performance reference ranges based on optimal condition instead of the average population or a disease state. This practice often illuminates things which you may care deeply about but traditional bloodwork fails to pick up on. After all, performing above average requires holding yourself to a higher standard.

What’s Next?

We hope this introduction to performance bloodwork was insightful. In our next guest blog post, we will put these ideas into practice by taking a look at how bloodwork can be used to understand and address inflammation and mobility in the body.

As a company and a community at The Ready State, we love learning from our close friends (and vice versa!). If you’re interested in more information about how bloodwork can be used to track your mobility status and inflammation in the body, stay tuned for Part II of this blog post by Vitality Blueprint founders and close friends, Andy Galpin and Dan Garner.