The 20-Minute Ritual That Changed Everything For AG1 CEO Kat Cole

While most women spend an hour on lengthy skincare and makeup routines each morning, Kat Cole sneaks into her bathroom, and starts jumping up and down — so hard the ceiling shakes. It doesn’t matter if she’s in her pajamas, whether she’s bleary-eyed or rejuvenated from a long night’s rest. Whatever the 48-year-old CEO of AG1 has going on that day is set aside for 20 minutes as she starts to move through her morning movement ritual. 

“It is very TCM, it looks very Qigong, a lot of stretching and movement,” Cole says of the routine, which she built slowly over a long time, picking up little bits here and there from podcasts and trusted creators on Instagram.

Cole doesn’t know the day she started doing her routine, but at some point, it just became a ritual. 

First come the jumps, where she lets her heels hit the ground with impact to improve her bone density. Cole does 100 of them before starting on the lymph pumping, which she makes sure to do in the right order. “Here, then here, then here, then here,” she shows me as she moves her hand from her collarbone to her neck and down. 

Next up are stretches and twists, followed by side-to-side lunges. Each one she does either 50 or 100 times. “My hips are so tight,” she says. “It’s where we hold our stress.” Twenty push-ups are followed by 20 “elevated pelvis core” moves, which involves doing scissor kicks while supported by a foam roller. 

It’s only after this quick, meditative routine is finished that Cole heads downstairs to make her morning glass of AG1 and drink it out in the sun. Despite growing up in sunny Florida, Cole was never one to pay attention to actually basking in — and reaping the health benefits of — that sunlight. It wasn’t until she started working at AG1 that she started integrating time outside, rain or shine, into her morning schedule. And she’s noticed the impact it has, especially on her sleep and recovery.

“I’m covering my gut health, my nutrition. I'm getting movement. I'm getting sun in my eyes. I've done this for me,” she says. “I believe that there are deep benefits in the compounding nature of such a simple, repeated ritual and so much movement of every core center of the body in the morning.”

AG1 Before The Sun

Cole started at AG1 five years ago, when her kids were two and four. Before getting pregnant with her first child, she had a miscarriage. Several more miscarriages followed before she gave birth to her second child. By 41, Cole decided she was done having children. Her mom also had breast cancer. “I had these wrecking ball moments that are super common, but that made me get more serious about my nutrition and my movement,” she says.

She started listening to Dr. Andrew Huberman’s podcast, Huberman Lab, and did a deep-dive into Dr. Rangan Chatterjee’s five health pillars. Cole was, as she calls it, “maxxing and minning” — testing out hot supplements and trendy workout classes. But none of it was consistent, nor was it laying the foundation for a strong, healthy system.

Around this time, she also started drinking AG1. It was one of her first major entry points into her current morning wellbeing routine. Her hair felt healthier, her skin and gut health improved. “If I look back, everything else in my days changed — work, family, kids. Some were sick, some were healthy. Life was busy, life was slow. Whatever it was, AG1 was the one thing that was consistent,” she says.

A few years after this major wellbeing paradigm shift, Cole started working at AG1, and began a company that preached the benefits of consistent, simple rituals and gave her access to some of the top experts and best research on health and wellbeing in the world. “When you hear something enough times from trusted people, it becomes more true in your mind,” she says. “I can’t unhear that I should get sun in my eyes every morning. I didn’t used to do that.”

As any busy mom and woman will know, the word “non-negotiable” is a tricky one. Lengthy habits, workouts, and “me time” are not always practical with little kids or a hectic work and travel schedules. But she still finds ways to stick to her rituals whenever possible — because they help her feel good and show up, in work and in life. It’s not about doing the most, it’s about doing what works.

“Running a company about daily health had me get more serious about the things that I would do, no matter where I am,” Cole says. 

A CEO’s Stack

These days, Cole doesn’t stop at AG1. She also takes 5 grams of creatine (she’s slowly working on building up to 10 to 15 grams for the cognition benefits), vitamins D3 and K2, and omegas. “Most people, especially women and women in their 40s, you get a blood panel done, [and] you are deficient in vitamin D,” Cole says. 

Cole likes to lean on cottage cheese, yoghurt, and eggs instead of protein powders — and loves steeping traditional Chinese herbs like slippery elm or marshmallow root in tea when her gut is stressed out.

If there’s tech that can measure something in her life, Cole is in. “Oura ring, WHOOP, Eight Sleep. I have it all,” she says. Every year she also gets a full blood panel to check out her whole system. But that doesn’t mean she lives by the numbers and data. Instead, they help her establish a baseline and have made her more attuned to how that feels in her body.

In all things, Cole works on balance, whether that’s enjoying a big slice of cake with her kids, or eating like an athlete while travelling for work to reduce inflammation and keep her body and brain ready for action. And while an intensive supplement stack and health routine certainly work for some people, she’s also dialling in on the simple things she can do to show up as her best self: sun, movement, sleep, nourishing greens. 

If there’s one thing I take away from our meeting, it’s that simplicity — like a comprehensive, all-in-one daily drink that helps your energy, immunity, gut health, and digestion — breeds consistency, and no one knows this better than Cole. “The best routine in the world is not effective if you can't stick with it,” she says. 

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