INSPIRED BY LEGENDS
POWERED BY SCIENCE

Muscle contractions is the absolute best you can do for your body if you want to achieve good health, well being, good shape or are a competitive athlete. From a few to many, from slow contractions to fast and from little to maximal force. Physical exercise and training, however, is much more than the actual meaning of the term “physical”.

It has a profound impact on our existence as whole, human beings. You are your body with heart and brain - muscle contractions is what creates the connection. Hans Søndergaard, founder of YouShape

Our methods can be described very simple - THE BEST FOR YOU!

Of course they are based on cutting edge science - combined with decades of accumulated experience from working with world class athletes. We fit our methods especially to your personal goals and possibilities - taking into account your available time to train, your talent and your mental state.

We design your training to be efficient from a best dose respons point of view if you are a competitive athlete. If you have other needs - like suffering from a lifestyle disease - we set up a time efficient training schedulae that is not necessarily as hard and intensive as with professionals.

You will find us very tolerant and pragmatic with our methods - as long as you will reach the mutually agreed goals. Efficient training is simple with primary and fundamental exercises. The real challenge is often to actually go to the gym and do the exercises - and keep doing them.

We will keep you on track.

I grew up in country as part of a family in nearly constant movement. It could be after physical work in the fields or forest or in the evening and weekends, where all the family members were active participants in gymnastics, athletics or ball games. I was encouraged to participate in all the sports I liked, which was about any sport I could lay my hands on. We were self supplied with food, which we farmed in our fields or got from the cattle that walked the areas around our farm. This was normal at that time.

It only felt obvious that I should attend an education in Exercise Physiology at the University after high school, and after my first degree I moved to Spain and worked as a physical trainer. This allowed me to pursue some of my passions - climbing and surfing - in northern part of Spain. After a couple of years I returned back to Copenhagen to the August Krogh Institute to finish my Master.

Fortunately at the same time as Professor Bengt Saltin - the worlds leading exercise physiologist - founded the Copenhagen Muscle Research Center (CMRC). Even more fortunately, I was recruited by Saltin to be part of his research team.The first of may - considered to be the greatest high altitude research expedition at the time - went to Chacaltay in Bolivia.

For more than a decade I was a part of research group at CMRC. Saltin attracted the most talented researchers from all over the world to Copenhagen. The practical experiments at the Center, with daily muscle biopsies and blood samples from trained and untrained persons, was the cornerstone of knowledge that led to the groups high number of important, international publications.

After the first Chacaltaya expedition I did 11 expeditions to Kenya - with Saltin and Henrik Larsen - researching the physiology of the Kenyan runners. We seem to have solved the secret behind the Kenyans unique running abilities. Superior running efficiency due mainly to thin lower legs. We also did a string of Greenland Expeditions to study how the Inuit lifestyle, exercise and diet, impacted on their physical health - particularly with regards to type II diabetes on the original hunters. During most of this period I trained hard personally and worked as a trainer. Both on an individual level and as a consultant for the Danish Defence working primarily with the Special Forces.

In 2009 I established Youshape - together with an American and a Danish physician. We focus on physical training and Exercise as Medicine, and we are proud to declare ourselves frontrunners in this field. We use exercise in connection with life style diseases as treatment and prophylactic in our Youshape clinics. Apart from that we use all our accumulated knowledge and experience to train athletes and high level executives from various parts of the world.

YouShape was founded by Hans Søndergaard (cand.scient.phys) and Kenneth Smith (dr.med) in 2009. Over the years we have secured a long number of partners who take part in our various activities. Here you can meet a few of them.