For successful coach and entrepreneur Tor Ahman, strength is all you need To Succeed
If diPulse were a person, it would be Tor Ahman. A former hockey player turned CrossFit trainer and a successful entrepreneur, Ahman is the embodiment of motivation meeting talent. A serious knee and back injury almost kept him out of the professional fitness world but, fearless as he is, Ahman managed to overcome these difficulties and emerge stronger. Now back in Sweden, he is busy running his own gym while juggling an active social life, a busy family, and of course, a personal training program that few could keep up with. His motto? You can never be strong enough - so keep moving.
Tell us about your hockey career
I started playing hockey when I was almost three years old. I played until I was 24 and then injured my knee so badly I, unfortunately, had to quit.
I also know that you're a CrossFit athlete..
I started CrossFit training twelve years ago and I have been running my own gym for eight and a half years. If you take my sporting career, I started to play hockey three years ago and went through the hockey academy in Sweden, which is a bunch of different camps. After that, I ended up in Gothenburg and Frölna, on a junior team and played for them for a year, moved over to the United States, and played junior pro for a year. I played college hockey for one and a half years before my knee injury. After that, I made the decision to step away from hockey because of the injuries in my back and my knees. I now live with my wife and two kids here in Boras, Sweden.
I'm one of the Swedish pioneers of CrossFit. So I started to compete extremely early and competed in the Swedish Championships. Still, it is difficult to have an elite CrossFit career and run a gym at the same time, and to have two kids makes it extra difficult. So when my youngest child arrived, I decided to quit competing and just focus on training other people.
Many people are passionate about CrossFit. What makes it so exciting and unique, to you?
What interests me most is the variety. It’s not a routine where you do the same thing. You always implement new things and you learn and develop the body in different ways. You can develop strength, endurance, cardiovascular health, and mobility. I like training in groups and enjoy the competition part of it where you can compare yourself to others and see what you’ve achieved. When it comes to the training part, I feel there’s no other training that can exert the body physically in so many different areas in such a short time. I like skiing, I like snowboarding, I like mountain biking and I like to be extremely active for a 40-year-old. And CrossFit helps me to be prepared for whatever I want to take on.
And you do have kind of a training philosophy when you work with people?
My overall philosophy is that strength should never be a weakness. You can never be strong enough, and strength - or the lack of it - should not be what stops you from achieving something. If you're strong enough, you can do anything.
So would that be the one fitness advice you’d give to the readers?
Yes. Strength is what makes the body move forward. Say, for instance, you want to run up a hill. You may have the conditioning part, but if you don't have the strength, you can’t lift the leg to move forward. Strength should always be your priority, and if you're strong enough, you can do it. That is my target in training - make sure that you are strong enough for whatever tasks you want to do. That doesn't mean that you have to look like a bodybuilder but you should be strong enough to fulfill everything you have in mind.
So how does diPulse fit in?
After Richard introduced me to diPulse this winter, I started to include muscle stimulation in my training and recovery. As a coach, I work with people ranging from five years old up to 76 years old so I know that some of the movements add a lot of stress on ligaments, the knees, and the shoulders. With diPulse, I can train a person with the same muscle stimulation but with lower external weights. diPulse also enables me to train wherever I am. When I travel I can’t take all my equipment with me but I can still train my muscles the same way as I would do in the gym. Then it’s the recovery part. I get up at 4.30 in the morning, I have classes all day, I train, and I have two kids so I'm constantly running on empty. I love to train hard and then I can put on the diPulse ancillaries, recover while doing something else and then train again!
How do you feel you would have used diPulse back when you were competing?
After I injured my knee the rehab period was tremendously long. You have to do so much work to get back on track, and I'm 110% sure that my rehabilitation period would have been way shorter if I were able to increase muscle activation as I do with diPulse. It all comes back to my philosophy that strength should never be a weakness. Strength comes from training the muscles. So if you have strong muscles, you have a strong body. If you have a strong body, you have a healthy body and a healthy body means you can do whatever you want. So everything is part of a cycle. Currently, there’s a lot of discussion in Sweden about what type of body image should the fitness industry promote. What should a woman look like? What should a man look like? For me as a coach, it's not about this – it’s all about strength.
