Coaches
Daniel Lazar
Founder and head coach · Personal trainer · Lifelong gamer
I'm Daniel, and for as long as I can remember, there have been two big things in my life: gaming and training. I've spent more than 10,000 hours coaching people on the gym floor, I reached Grandmaster in StarCraft II, and whenever a new World of Warcraft expansion or patch drops, I still end up back in it. Every single time.
Gains For Gamers is where those two sides of my life finally came together. They just took very different routes to get there.
It started with Pokémon Red
Gaming came first. I started playing when I was very little, on one of the original Game Boys without a color screen, and my first game was Pokémon Red, the one with Charizard on the box. I've been into games pretty much ever since.
One of my clearest memories from back then is my mom walking into my room carrying a Nintendo 64. That was the start of a lot of Mario, and from there it was Zelda and just about every console that followed, until I ended up mostly on PC, which is where I still play today.
Out of everything I've played, the game that has meant the most to me is World of Warcraft, and a big part of that is what it taught me. It taught me social skills, how to put money aside, and English, which tells you roughly how many hours I spent in it. It taught me about consequences, too: ninja-loot something from your group, taking gear that wasn't yours, and people stop liking you fast. And they stop inviting you to the next one.
If World of Warcraft is the game that shaped me, StarCraft II is the one that showed me how competitive I am. When I play, I go all in, which means "just playing something to relax" has never really worked for me. That's how I ended up at Grandmaster: among the top 200 players in Europe, at a time when the competition was at its highest.
Mike, my partner in Gains For Gamers, has been there for a lot of those World of Warcraft hours, and he's still at it; you might know him as Gingi, from Echo's Race to World First broadcast.
Gaming has been with me my whole life. It's a big part of the person I am today, and I'm grateful for that. Training came into my life later, and in a very different way.
Muay Thai got me hooked
The first sport I tried was football, the kind Americans call soccer, from around six to eight. After a while it got boring, and it didn't help that Danish weather spends a good part of the year somewhere between gray and pouring. Training was a long way from home, and in Denmark a kid gets there by bike, so plenty of sessions started with pedaling through the rain to go play football in more rain. Eventually I stopped going, and my mom, very reasonably, stopped paying for it. After that, I went six months to a year without doing much of anything active.
I was around ten at that point, and every other weekend I stayed with what I'd call my second family. My dad died in a car accident when I was three, and that put a lot on my mom, which is how this family became part of my life. They were amazing, and I still talk to them today.
One weekend, when I was ten or eleven, the mom of that family took me aside. In the calmest, kindest way, she told me I'd put on some weight and that I should keep an eye on it. There was nothing hurtful in the way she said it, and it came from love, but for some reason it hit me really hard.
The very next Monday, back home, I started looking for somewhere I could box, because boxing looked cool. But football had left me with decent legs, and it seemed like a shame to waste them. That's how I found Muay Thai, which is more or less boxing where your legs, knees and elbows get to join in. Luckily, there was a club right in Albertslund, the town just outside Copenhagen where I grew up. It was called Mikenta, and I signed up as soon as I could.
I fell in love with it. Over the next three to four years I got pretty good, good enough that a sponsorship sent me to Thailand. I grew up with just my mom, and money was tight, so flying to the other side of the world to train Muay Thai in the country it comes from felt absolutely insane to me at the time. I trained very hard, got into seriously good shape and stayed that way for a long time.
While I was still doing Muay Thai, girls suddenly got much more interesting, and teenage me decided that more muscle was probably the answer. Muay Thai is very cardio-heavy, and the magazines and my friends all said the same thing: if you want muscle, lift weights. Mikenta had a CrossFit room at the time, so I started doing a ton of CrossFit and running, and as I got a bit wiser, that naturally turned into bodybuilding.
That CrossFit period is when Mike and I became close. We'd known each other since we were eight or nine, but it was around twelve or thirteen that we started hanging out for real. We were both in great shape, and our days had a very simple structure: CrossFit together, eat by the book, then straight home to play World of Warcraft together. As far as we were concerned, that was the perfect day, and we saw no reason to ever change it.
Mike and Daniel 16 years ago. Daniel eating dry rice and chicken, Mike drinking green tea because he thinks it'll boost his metabolism (what a silly goose).
From the reception desk to coaching
My parents saw it a little differently. As I got older, they decided I'd put enough hours into the PC and that it was time to put some into a job.
If I couldn't play as much as before, I figured I might as well spend that time around something else I loved, or at least as close to it as I could get. So I got a job on reception at Fitness DK, a Danish gym chain that's called SATS today. It wasn't exactly glamorous, but I was in a gym, around people who loved training, and someone was paying me for it.
After a while, checking people in wasn't enough. I wanted to be out on the floor actually training them, so I got my personal trainer certification and anatomy training, studied nutrition, and once I was certified, I just kept going, one course after another. Eventually I went independent and worked as a personal trainer the traditional way.
Over the years, that's added up to more than 10,000 hours of coaching, one-on-one and in groups, with everyone from older adults and companies to whole school classes, primary school kids up to eighth and ninth graders, who came to my gym so I could teach them to squat and deadlift.
Gains For Gamers started between sets
Mike and I were still training together, and I can clearly picture the day it happened. We were at Fitness DK, he was doing chest presses, and the idea just hit me. I waited for him to finish his set, because you don't interrupt someone mid-set, then asked: "Hey Mike, what if we do something together where we help gamers online?"
He was hooked the moment he heard it. I went straight home and built our landing page, and between Mike's audience on Twitch and everything I knew about health and training, we had our first clients on the very first day.
It turned out we weren't the only gamers who wanted the best of both worlds. That's how Gains For Gamers began.
My training and qualifications
It all started with my personal trainer and fitness instructor education at Fitness Institute in Denmark, and since then I've taken more courses than I can keep track of. These are my certifications:
Personal Trainer and Fitness Instructor, European Health and Fitness Association (Fitness Institute)
Anatomy and Physiology (Fitness Institute)
Examined Muay Thai trainer (Sasiprapha Gym, Bangkok)
Training for Warriors, Levels 1 and 2 (Training for Warriors)
Coaching Greatness (Training for Warriors)
Masterclass in the squat, deadlift and bench press (Maxer.dk)
Pain science course (Maxer.dk, with Jacob Beermann)
People ultimately don't care how much we know if we can't help them apply it. We can know everything there is to know about broccoli, but if we can't get someone to actually eat the damn broccoli, that knowledge isn't very useful.
Articles I've written
Every article on this site is written from the research and read by a coach before it goes live. These are mine.
This page was last updated in September 2026. Questions go to contact.