We sat down with Momentous COO Erica Good to learn more about her background, mission, and goals for Momentous. Erica is passionate about health and wellness, and is eager to help change the paradigm for women in the human performance space.
Tell us a little about yourself. I’m the Co-Founder and COO of Momentous and personally I categorize myself in the human performance space as an adventurer. Living in Park City, Utah, I spend a lot of time outside skiing, mountain biking and hiking. I’m a huge fan of adventure travel which wraps together the novelty of a new place with the intensity of a physical challenge. I’m always willing to compete in something new as I believe doing something that creates a little fear each year is healthy.
What are you personally most passionate about as it relates to health and wellness? What I’m most passionate about in health and wellness is the mind body link. Everybody has a body. It's universal to the human experience, and how we feel in our bodies influences our mental states and how we show up in the world. I also like that neuroscience is shoring up the link between psychology and our physical reality.
Can you explain the gap in the Human Performance space and why you’re excited about where Momentous is going as a company? In pro sport, an entire multidisciplinary team surrounds an athlete to promote the highest levels of performance. Historically this approach has been entirely inaccessible to the average person. Now with the rise of YouTube and podcasting, knowledge from experts and high level practitioners has become more accessible. However, one of the benefits for athletes working directly with practitioners is that the advice is distilled and tailored to them so they know what to do at the right time and in the right way. Therefore, the biggest gap is how to go from available knowledge to curated guidance that feels as 1:1 as possible and plugs into a person’s life. My hope is that we as Momentous can fill this gap by providing tailored guidance along with our trusted products. Who are some of the experts you work with at Momentous? While representing Momentous, I often hear the assumption that women are a small constituent base when it comes to high performance. I don't believe that's true or that the numbers bear that out. The general perception of how many women care about how to get the most out of their bodies is underestimated. There’s a sort of sense that wellness is for women while high performance is for men. The reality is large numbers of women are interested in how to get the most from their bodies, so much so that it makes practical sense for Momentous to focus on serving women in the highest possible way.
Stacy Sim’s work has been the most eye-opening for me. When I first met her she spoke on how a woman’s hormone cycle, whether naturally cycling, on birth control or postmenopausal, creates differences in how she should best manage her body. I was stunned. Never had I heard that covered. At best there are times when separate guidance is given for postmenopausal women but never based on how a woman is managing her birth control. That’s a whole new realm.
What stands out to you about Stacy's work? In my personal life when listening to advice on high performance, I’m always trying to read between the lines to gather whether there's a difference for women. It was incredible to hear someone like Stacy Sims address hormone status in finer deal and it opens another avenue on which women can optimize.
I also greatly appreciate how Stacy acknowledges the research context surrounding high performance for women. Clinical research is majorly lacking to support human performance optimization for women because the vast vast majority of clinical research in human performance is done on men. She does her best with the data that exists to pull insights. One of my early learnings in her Women are Not Small Men course was not to hold back on protein. When a range is given on protein, I like many women, lean toward the low end of the range but she counters this with the data encouraging women to up their intake.
Walk us through your daily routine. The most critical thing for me is getting workouts in. I workout at 5:45pm on weekdays which is a great forcing function to get me out of the office and surges my energy and mood up for the evening. Experts encourage morning workouts for the best sleep but this is one area where I cut against the advice since it works best for my lifestyle. I'm personally a big fan of F45 because of the high level of variety and the ability to arrive and get a great workout without needing to do the work to structure it. I also like the balance between cardio and weights and dynamic exercises that are particularly helpful for skiing. On the weekends, I ski, mountain bike, hike, or paddleboard, depending on the season. We’re based in Park City, Utah which has year-round outdoor sports of some kind so my weekends are always outdoors.
I have also started to enjoy running in the snow. Park City has a very large trail system with packed snow trails that are hard enough to run on. Running at 7,000 feet in 20F with sideways blowing snow sometimes chills me to my core but it really wakes me up. Aside from working out, long-term brain health matters to me a lot from seeing my grandma slip away with Alzheimers. As such, I’m a daily user of creatine and omega-3s and probably will be for life.
