About

Thank you for visiting. I hope you find what you are looking for here.

My name is Hans Kremer. I am Dutch, born in a village close to Arnhem, in the east of the Netherlands, not far from Germany. I grew up there with my older brother and my parents in a quiet neighborhood. Things were traditional: my mother ran our household, my father started as a carpenter in road construction and later worked his way up to site director.

We were a blue collar family, and I am proud of that. Both my parents had a craft. My mother kept everything running and could do wonders with the modest means we had. My father could make with his hands, what he imagined in his head.

It was a loving and stable environment, and I cherish the many good memories from that time.

There was no pretense, no excess, and no shortcuts. You showed up, you did the work, and you took care of the people around you. Those values did not leave me when I moved into corporate life. If anything, they became more important the further I got from where I started. I carry them still, and I carry my parents with me in everything I do.

They gave me a springboard too. Both had only gone through grammar school themselves, so they could not advise me on what came next. My teachers did. They recommended atheneum, the university-preparatory track of Dutch secondary education, and my parents followed that advice without hesitation. That decision influenced the course of my life.

I will never forget where I come from.

I must have been six years old when I did my first core exercises. They were part of the warm-up routine in my judo class. A good friend of mine at elementary school had started going to a judo club, and I joined as well. I remember doing sit-ups in pairs, feet interlocked, and leg raises with a partner pushing your feet back down.

At the start I got a white belt, and by the time I was thirteen I had earned a brown belt. Progress felt natural. And then it stalled.

Other boys my age were changing physically. Puberty was doing its work. With me, it was not happening, and that was frustrating. In judo, technique matters most, but strength matters too. I could no longer keep up with boys my age. I started losing interest, and eventually I quit at sixteen. By then puberty had caught up with me. But it had come too late for judo.

It was the late seventies, early eighties. The fitness boom was in full swing. Gyms were opening everywhere.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was on magazine covers. Getting strong was becoming a cultural moment, not just a sport. And one day I decided I wanted in.

The gym I went to was part of a dance studio and judo club. It had a decent training area with free weights and weight stack machines. My career plans after secondary school did not pan out, and I had a gap year. I found work in a nearby factory and mostly worked the night shift. When I woke up in the early afternoon, I quickly showered, ate, and went straight back to train.

After a year or so, I decided to go back to school. I got accepted at a university of applied sciences and shortly after moved to the city to live with fellow students. The city was close enough to my parents' home, so I regularly rode home on my bicycle and kept working out.

During my military conscription I trained with my service buddies. Fitness equipment was abundant at most barracks. After it I went back to civilian life and started my corporate career, and I stuck to my habit. I moved several times and always found a gym where I felt at home and welcome.

When I was on the road or on holidays, I could not follow my routine. That annoyed me. And then one day during a bench press set, not having a spotter nearly got me injured. I had been reading about calisthenics for a while. That was the moment I decided to make the switch. I never went back.

At secondary school, summers were spent as a road construction operative and a janitor. In a gap year I was an operator in an injection molding factory. During my study Logistics, Materials, and Supply Chain Management at the Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen I cleande office buildings. I worked as a bartender at the Korenmarkt and at Papendal, the Dutch national sports centre. None of it was glamorous. All of it taught me something about showing up.

Military service followed, as a field artillery fire direction officer. Thanks to a prior internship at DHL, I entered my supply chain career.

The next two decades were spent moving through operations, planning, and supply chain roles across a wide range of companies and industries, fixing what was broken in different sectors and different cultures. Along the way I trained supply chain professionals from companies like Nike, Heineken, Philips, and ASML as an APICS instructor.

In 2010 I co-founded Inchainge, where I have spent the last fifteen years building corporate academies and delivering experiential learning programmes through business simulations like The Fresh Connection. I have worked with teams from amongst others Mars, AB InBev, MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, and the United States Air Force. I regularly was a speaker at conferences. My activities spanned five continents.

The thread that runs through it all is the same one that runs through HeartKore. Fundamentals first. Practice, practice, practice. Come as you are, do the work, and the results follow.

I am more a linguistic than a math person, even though professionally I have been in corporate roles, where numbers often seem more important than anything else. I love to learn and speak foreign languages, and when I listen to music, I always want to know what the lyrics are about.

That probably explains why the name HeartKore came to my mind. The way I train is basic and no-nonsense. It is about showing up and putting in serious effort. In that sense it is pretty hardcore. Around the time I decided that I wanted to share my method with the world, I started thinking about a name for it.

I did not create HeartKore as a business idea and then built a method around it. I trained this way for twenty years and then named it.

The word hardcore did not cut it for me, it was too much tough guy, too one-dimensional. And also not a name I could claim as a brand that was mine. I wanted the name to signal purpose, emotion and drive. It needed to be an umbrella for a training philosophy, ambitious as that may sound. I decided to spell 'hard' as 'Heart' to express that. It did not take long to see that spelling 'core' as 'Kore' the name included my initials.

Since 2025 I have been competing in HYROX, a global fitness competition that combines running with functional workout stations.

The format attracts athletes of all ages, and competing at fifty or older is far from unusual in HYROX. That is exactly one of the things that makes the competition worthwhile.

I compete as a High Impact Athlete. That means my participation raises funds for causes close to my heart, such as Women's Empowerment and Mental Health. I also compete on behalf of the Dutch Cancer Society. The idea is simple.

I race and have fun, and at the same time I raise funds. In other words I am fundracing.

HYROX fits seamlessly with the HeartKore philosophy. No specialisation, but broad, functional fitness. No excuses, but discipline. And proof that age is no reason not to try something.