Andre Heeg

Andre Heeg

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Andre Heeg is a medical doctor (MD, DDS), Managing Director and Partner at BCG, and former Chief Digital Officer at Sandoz. He has spent two decades inside the rooms where senior leaders quietly burn out, and writes about what actually works to stay healthy and perform across decades, not weeks. He created the Upward ARC framework (Activate, Recover, Capacity) and writes a weekly newsletter for executives juggling work and family. Father of three. Based in Berlin.

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My Routines

From one of my latest newsletters:
My Four
Here are mine.
Strength training, two or three times a week. Two is the floor. Three, when I have the energy and the calendar. Sessions are 45 to 60 minutes. Compound lifts. I do not chase variety. I track three or four numbers and try to move them slowly. In each session, I add 10 to 15 minutes of mobility and bodyweight strength work. At my age, the future cost of poor balance and stability is greater than most people think. A 2019 meta-analysis in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology found that resistance training, on its own, was associated with a 21% lower risk of all-cause mortality, independent of cardio [10]. Two sessions a week is the dose where the curve starts to flatten. Three would be marginally better. The flexibility is the point.
Cardio, two or three times a week. Same idea. Two is the floor, three when the body says yes. One Zone 2 session, 40 to 60 minutes at a pace where I could still hold a conversation. Another is harder, focused on VO2 max. Mostly cycling. Sometimes rowing or the echo bike. Sometimes rucking with a weighted vest or pack. Running is not an option for me. My back complains every time I try, and I have stopped fighting it. VO2 max is one of the strongest predictors of all-cause mortality across age groups [11]. The Erickson trial in PNAS showed that a year of brisk walking three times a week increased hippocampal volume by 2% in older adults [12]. The same mechanism is running in your forties. You just cannot see it yet.
Sleep protection. No phone in the bedroom. Lights out by eleven on a normal night. Alcohol has been the big cut. I drink far less than I used to and rarely within four hours of bed. This is the lever everyone wants to swap for a supplement. The supplement does not exist. Slow-wave sleep is when growth hormone pulses and the body undertakes deep recovery [13]. Lose that, and you cannot lift, think, or recover from the rest of your week.
Sauna, twice a week. Twenty minutes per session. This is the goal, and I hit it most reliably when we are at our vacation place, where the sauna is part of the rhythm. The Finnish cohort study from Kuopio followed 2,300 men for over twenty years. Four to seven sauna sessions per week were associated with a 50% reduction in cardiovascular death and a 40% reduction in all-cause mortality compared to one session per week [14]. The mechanism is partly cardiovascular load, partly heat-shock protein expression, and partly stress recovery. Two is not seven. The point is the lever, not perfection.
What I take. Three things, daily. Creatine. Vitamin D through the winter. Omega-3. That is the base load. Anything beyond that, I add only when there is a specific deficit or a stretch of stress I want to counter. Then it comes off again. The default is no.
What is not on the list? Cold plunge. The Oura ring. The Whoop band. Continuous glucose monitor. Tracking apps in general. Most other supplements. The list of what failed the filter is longer than the list of what passed. That is correct.