Coaches
Sondre L. Sørsdal
Coach. Health and exercise physiologist.
I'm Sondre, I'm from Drammen in Norway, and I have a lot of interests. Golf probably takes up an unreasonable amount of my free time, but I'm also really into photography, fashion, interior design, Lego, cars and collecting Pokémon cards. If I could have one car, it would be an '80s Porsche 911 in dark green with brown leather.
I usually describe myself as an extroverted introvert. I genuinely love talking to people, and then I need some quiet afterwards to recharge. Gaming and health have been the two biggest parts of my life, and coaching gamers is where they finally meet.
A photo I took. I worked as a photographer for a while, and it's still a big interest of mine.
It started with my brother's Nintendo 64
Gaming has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It started with my brother and a Nintendo 64: Super Mario 64, Pokémon Stadium and Pokémon Snap, followed by a lot of Pokémon on the Game Boy and later the Nintendo DS.
Pokémon never really left. I still collect the cards, and Absol is still my favorite.
A secret World of Warcraft account
World of Warcraft became the big one. I started around the age of ten, after watching my older brother play with his friends, and I technically wasn't allowed to play yet. So, naturally, I made a secret account and played on private servers until I was finally allowed a subscription of my own.
I've mained Shadow Priest for what feels like forever. For years I played almost nothing but PvP, and over the last few expansions I've moved much more into PvE and Mythic+. Last season I reached around 3.7k Mythic+ rating, mostly on my own, which any Shadow Priest who has waited for a group invite will appreciate.
I grew up on Call of Duty too, from CoD4 on, right through the Modern Warfare 2 quickscoping and trickshotting era. I've played League of Legends, peaking around Emerald as a mid lane Taliyah and Talon one-trick, plus Hearthstone Battlegrounds and the occasional Counter-Strike session with friends.
As I've gotten older, gaming has become much more social for me. I used to be happy playing almost anything alone, and now a lot of the fun comes from sharing it with friends. At different points in my life, gaming has genuinely been my community, and that's one of the reasons coaching gamers feels so natural.
Football, a knee injury, and a bad first attempt
I was a very active kid. I played football (soccer, if you're American) for years, and table tennis too, but after a knee injury I gradually drifted away from sport and spent much more of my time gaming. I got less active, and more and more unhappy with my body.
My first go at fitness was, looking back, pretty terrible. I was a teenager, I knew almost nothing about nutrition, and I basically thought getting leaner meant eating as little as possible and running a lot.
I lost weight very quickly. I also lost a lot of muscle, and I ended up with a really unhealthy relationship with food.
Strength training came into my life gradually after that, and over time the reason for it changed. It stopped being about looking different, and I got genuinely interested in how physical activity, nutrition and health actually affect us.
Why I ended up coaching
I also went through several difficult years with my mental health when I was younger, and that period had a huge influence on the direction I chose. I experienced firsthand how much movement, structure, support and having something meaningful to work toward could matter.
I became more and more interested in helping people who felt overwhelmed by their health, their training or their own situation. That led me to study Physical Activity and Nutrition and to work as a health and exercise physiologist.
The more I learned, the more I realized that health is much bigger than weight, calories or how someone looks. That's a huge part of why I coach today: to help people find their way through a space that can be incredibly confusing, with the knowledge, structure and confidence to look after their health for the long term.
How I got to Gains For Gamers
I started coaching professionally in the second half of 2024. Before Gains For Gamers and alongside it, I've worked with a wide range of people through coaching, gym-based guidance and workplace health initiatives.
That's included people who were completely new to training, people living with obesity or lifestyle-related health challenges, and employees of large Norwegian organizations, some of them in industrial and offshore workplaces.
Gains For Gamers has been an especially good fit, because it brings together the two worlds that have been the biggest part of my own life: gaming and health.
What I'm like as a coach
The most important thing to me is seeing the whole person. Someone's health doesn't exist separately from their job, family, mental health, social life, sleep, confidence, interests or how much energy they actually have, so I try to meet people where they are and build around what they've got.
For me, good coaching is much bigger than helping someone lose weight or get stronger. I want people to understand themselves well enough that they can make good decisions about their own health without needing a coach beside them forever.
That progress looks completely different from person to person. For one client it's learning to cook a few meals each week. For another it's going from no exercise to training twice a week. For someone else it's learning that missing one workout doesn't mean they've failed and have to start again on Monday.
I love teaching the why behind what we do, and I try to make complicated information feel simple and useful rather than overwhelming.
Coaching gamers appeals to me because I understand the lifestyle from the inside. Gaming has been a huge part of my life, and at times my main social community, so I know it isn't something that needs to be fixed. The goal is a life where gaming, health, work, relationships and everything else can exist side by side.
One of the nicest messages I've had from a client said they could tell how much thought went into the things I made for them, that they wouldn't have made the progress they did without my support, and that they could see I coach with real passion. That's probably what I hope everyone feels when they work with me.
My training and qualifications
I have five years of health-related education behind me. These are my qualifications:
Bachelor’s degree in Physical Activity and Nutrition, qualifying as a health and exercise physiologist (Kristiania University of Applied Sciences)
Two-year professional qualification in health counseling
That second qualification focused heavily on behavior change, lifestyle, physical activity, nutrition and public health, and on helping people make sustainable changes in real-world circumstances rather than simply telling them what they "should" do.
This page was last updated in October 2026. Questions go to contact.