“My ‘why’ came back to love, which is really strange. I never would have thought in a million years that was the genesis of why I wanted to stay healthy – but it was about being fit and healthy for my children and my wife for years to come.“
Keely Wachs is a surfer, a coach, and a marketer who’s spent much of his career around wellness — years of it leading corporate marketing at Clif Bar. He walked into Coya knowing more about health than most people ever will, and his master’s degree in econometrics meant he also came in fluent in the one language most members have to learn: data.
But the thing he didn’t yet have was a system. And when his Coya cohort began with the question, “What is your why?”, he admitted feeling a bit paralyzed. The reasons he’d anchored his health habits to before – staying lean, staying fit, looking good – suddenly felt too thin to be the real ones. What he found underneath carried more weight: he wanted to be healthy enough to be there for his family, for a long time.
So he decided to stop collecting bits and pieces, and take his health seriously, all at once, with a team of coaches and a group of like-minded peers behind him.
Pre-Coya Reality
Between his work at Clif Bar, a coastal California upbringing, and his background as a collegiate athlete, Keely came to Coya with a firm grasp of the fundamentals. But it was piecemeal, picked up in fragments, and not necessarily sustainable.
The systematic and holistic approach Coya promised was the initial draw, and his first taste of it came through the Oura ring. What struck him wasn’t the novelty of the metrics but that the data was finally his own: a baseline unique to him, a way to see how a late dinner or a short night actually landed. “It really is about me,” he says – explaining that he could finally see exactly what impacted his data (for better or for worse) and, with the help of his coaches, make genuinely informed decisions each day. This helped to quickly eradicate the decision fatigue that once slowed him down.
The Experience
Keely holds a high bar for coaches, because he is one. Expertise, to him, is table stakes, and every Coya coach cleared it. What set the experience apart was the approach behind it: nothing prescriptive, just every coach leading with the same question, “how can I support you, specifically?”
The proof showed up in a number he couldn’t explain. His HRV was stubbornly low, and his coach traced it to the culprit hiding in plain sight: a near-constant onslaught of hard pavement runs, six-minute miles, and surfing all stacked on top of each other with no adequate recovery to refill the tank. For lack of a better term, he was crushing himself, over-indexing on training output to move the needle while the inputs that actually restore those efforts (sleep, nutrition, mindfulness) went largely untended.
The fix ran against everything Keely once believed about performance: slow down, walk more, spread the load across sleep and protein and mindfulness. In other words, he needed to pull all the levers available – not just one of them. His HRV climbed, and he performed better, not worse.
Keely also found comfort (albeit with some initial intimidation) in the cohort format, as he found himself sitting alongside a group of inspiring high-performers in their own right. With each person so open and genuinely invested in each other’s progress, it made it far easier for Keely to be honest about both his challenges and accomplishments. “These are my people,” he says – the kind of peers who made the vulnerability feel less like exposure and more like connection and momentum.
The Ripple Effect
Over the course of the program, Keely stopped eating three hours before bed, traded his last hour of screens for reading, and finally put shades on the bedroom window he’d always refused to cover. He started walking the dog every morning with no podcast – just his own thoughts – and began writing down his worries before bed.
But those habits weren’t his alone – eventually, inevitably, they spread.
His wife joined the bedtime routine, and they started cooking more whole food meals together. He’s pulled pieces of it into the optimization advice he gives to his sons – one a collegiate soccer player, one in a professional academy. And he’s referred family, friends, and coworkers into the program.
“I was able to take people I love and give them the opportunity to be part of it,” he said. “To reach their own health potential.”
The Results
Beyond the numbers, Keely feels he is more patient with himself, his family, and his work. His resilience is higher, and he can see stress and illness coming before they land. Most of all, he stopped approaching his health through fear. “Fear can be effective, but it’s not sustainable. Coya gave me a positive way to look at my health – flying toward the light instead of running from something.”
Post-Cohort Takeaway
Keely came in informed, competitive, and motivated – but quietly running himself into the ground. He left with a system, a baseline that was actually his, and a reason underneath all of it all that feels more meaningful and sustainable than anything he anchored his habits to prior.
“If you’re considering Coya, don’t hesitate. Don’t stop. Do it,” he said. “It’ll change the way you think about your health, the way you live, and the way you show up for the people around you – because you’ll be at your best.“
