Taco Fleur

I grew up in Amsterdam. It was not easy — children’s homes, years without formal schooling, and circumstances that made me extremely shy and reserved. But even as a kid, something in me was always trying to build things and figure things out.

At fourteen, I had a newspaper route. A kid working for his money. That entrepreneurial instinct never went away — it just kept finding new outlets. Every attempt taught me something, even when it failed. Especially when it failed.

My grandfather bought me a Sharp MZ-800 — a home computer where you loaded everything, including the programming language, from a cassette tape. No hard drive. No operating system. Just you and the machine. I taught myself BASIC on that thing, tinkering for hours. Then came a Commodore 64. That was the start of a relationship with computers that would eventually lead to a career, a search engine, and — decades later — 1.39 million lines of code.

What stayed with me was the resilience. You learn early to read people, to adapt, to figure things out on your own. Those are not bad skills to have when you are building something from nothing.

At sixteen, I voluntarily joined the Dutch Royal Air Force, based in The Hague. The training was hard, but once settled on base it was mostly guarding a deserted Air Force base, playing cards, and walking around in the dark hoping something exciting would happen. I served about a year.

At eighteen I was out on the town for the first time. At nineteen I left the Netherlands — grey weather, too much of everything I did not want — and relocated to Spain.

The IT years

In Spain I built my first IT business. Computer sales, repairs, installations — and then web development. Flash, ColdFusion, custom applications. I built a banking app and a real estate app for clients, plus a real estate app for myself — all without prior experience. You just figured it out.

That is also where I met my wife Anna — in 1998 or 1999, in a bar in Torremolinos. She is Australian, a fitness trainer. Our son Benooi was born in 2001 in Spain. When we decided the party lifestyle was not compatible with raising a family, we moved to Australia.

In Australia, the programming went enterprise-level. Suncorp (bank), Queensland Government, Java, PHP, databases. I also built ClickFind.com.au around 2004 — a search engine that separated products and services before Google did it on Maps.

But years of sitting at a desk were destroying my body. By the late 2000s I had sciatica. I was still young and getting physically worse every year.

That is when I found the kettlebell.

2004. Through opening a gym and getting a lot of kettlebells, I picked one up — sixteen kilograms. That was my first. And when I realized how much you can do with a single kettlebell, everything changed.

Most people pick up a kettlebell and learn the swing. I picked up a kettlebell and started taking it apart — not the bell, but the movement. What does the hip actually do? Why does the knee extend at that moment? What is the foot doing against the ground? What muscles fire, in what order, and why?

When you spend years writing code, you think in systems. You look for patterns, dependencies, and logic. You cannot accept “just do it this way” — you need to know why. That analytical instinct became the foundation of everything I teach. Every exercise broken into steps. Every movement explained from the ground up — literally, starting with the foot.

The same year I got the kettlebell, the sciatica started fading. The body that was falling apart started rebuilding. At half a century of age, I can do more than I could at a quarter of a century. That is not motivation — that is evidence.

The gyms (2004–2014)

Anna and I founded Executive Results in 2004 — what people called the toughest boot camps in Australia. Non-stop forty-five-minute circuit training. We poured everything into it. Twelve to fourteen hour days. Sometimes two jobs and two gyms simultaneously.

In 2009 we opened THE TOUGH SPOT in Brisbane. That is when we bought a lot of kettlebells and the training got serious. We later opened a second location in Albion — an outdoor parking lot, mats on concrete, tires everywhere. Raw. Real. It was also in 2009 that I launched Cavemantraining™ online.

Around 2014, we opened GYM ELITE in Danang, Vietnam — bringing functional training, BJJ, and kettlebells there for the first time. We stayed about a year. The traffic was so dangerous that it was not a question of if something was going to happen, but when.

The reality of running physical gyms was brutal. Competitors stole clients. Trainers got poached. People who trained with us opened rival gyms down the road. More work never meant more money. The lesson landed: no matter how many gyms you set up, you are not going to find the freedom you are looking for. Online provides both the reach and the freedom.

The name

Cavemantraining™ is not just a brand name — it is the philosophy itself. Training evolved from hard boot camps into raw gyms. Functional training. Movements the body needs. Primal, back to basics, barefoot, sledgehammers on tires, no machines. The name captured the ethos before we even realized it needed a name.

Going online (2009+)

The WordPress era started in 2009. Quick to publish, quick to make changes. But as things got more serious — a plugin here, a plugin there — they started breaking. LearnDash LMS became a disaster. Toolset was fine for prototyping, but that is all it was for. More time fighting tools than building the product.

Still, despite the infrastructure, the content kept growing: YouTube hit close to 70,000 subscribers and more than 7 million views. Ten Facebook groups reached 217,000+ combined members. I published more than 40 books. Featured in four issues of Iron Man magazine. The IKU Inner Circle — a community of people working out together on Facebook — ran for over five years and accumulated 300+ workouts.

The commitment

Here is the truth: my problem was always focus. I like to do new things too much. A new idea here, a new idea there, then I get tired of the old idea and move on. At one point I had almost a thousand domains. In the time when domains were four dollars and ninety-five cents, all those things just made you not focus. You would see something in your brain, work on it a bit, and then it got forgotten.

Once I recognized the pattern, it came down to one thing: saying to myself, “You are really going to do this.” And that is what I said in 2009 — not only with the physical gym but with going online. The focus has been there ever since.

Justin

When we were closing the second gym in Albion, we did not tell anybody — that is just not something you do. The moment you let people know, the morale goes down. We wanted to run it to the end and provide the service people came for. We were living in the gym, packing everything, ready to move to Vietnam within weeks.

Then someone knocked on the door at night, at the time we usually ran a class. Justin — a recent member who loved it. He showed up ready to train. My wife and my son were there. We told him we had closed down, that we were moving.

His face changed. He spoke about how much it meant to him, how his life had changed. To this day, we still talk about that image. It is burnt in our retinas.

For most of our lives, we have been nomads. We used to move constantly — even within a country. A year in one house. If two years, that was an exception. We called it the two-year itch.

Why leave Australia? We saw where it was all going — food quality, pesticides. We wanted something more simple. We missed the old character — cobblestone roads, brown cafes. Everything is just new in Australia. There is no old feel to it.

Thailand was beautiful, but I realized early on we would never truly be part of the country. I was not going to check in every three or six months, always feeling like you can lose everything at any given moment.

Back in Spain, we hit the low point. Running out of money. Had to go live with my father — all of us together. I was sleeping on the porch. I looked at myself and thought: shall we go back to working for other people? But the answer was always no.

Why Greece — and why we are staying

The people are nice. We just feel at home here. Absolutely feel at home, like we were born here. Everything is calm. After seeing the whole world — Italy where drivers sit on your bumper no matter how fast you go, Vietnam with non-stop honking — Greece is where the search ended. Kalamata is home. We are here to stay.

Anna plays a big role in how I enjoy kettlebells because we work out together. I push her, she pushes me. She cooks the most wonderful meals — always fresh ingredients, always making sure the food is good and nutritious to help the body heal. When we have the facility to grow food, we grow as much as we can. I completely suck at growing anything, so we would not survive, but I still enjoy doing it.

I was traveling — Australia to Indonesia to Singapore to Sri Lanka for workshops, then heading to Greece. When I got back from Sri Lanka and turned on my computer, Facebook was waiting with a notification: account suspended. Verify your identity.

Look into the camera. Look left. Look right. Look up. Look down. Submit. Approved — but restricted. About a week of limited normalcy. Then the same verification demanded again. This time: denied.

The email said: “Taco, you have 180 days to take action.” Suspended for “account integrity.” No specific violation. No post flagged. No explanation.

I submitted an appeal. The response: “Your review was unsuccessful. Your Facebook account has been permanently disabled. You cannot request another review.”

I emailed their support twice. Two weeks. No response — not even an automated acknowledgement.

People in the community noticed I disappeared. Private messages went to my wife asking what happened. Public posts appeared in the groups asking where I went.

The deletion was not the obstacle. It was the accelerant. I went from twelve-hour days to sixteen-hour days. The launch date moved up. The platform got finished faster. Writing code while others were posting reels.

The domain kettlebell.monster was registered in December 2019. The vision was already concrete enough for that. But the first attempt at building the platform used WordPress — plugins, LMS systems, and endless hacks. You cannot build a professional network on someone else’s infrastructure. I learned that the hard way, and it cost years.

The breaking point came when I looked at what the world’s largest companies actually use — Nike, Walmart, Coinbase, 1Password, Mozilla, PwC. Enterprise-grade technology that does not break when your community grows. That is when I decided: build it properly, from scratch.

Five months of intense, non-stop development. Twelve-hour days in locations where I should have been at the beach. Working while supposed to be on holiday. Building the thing that had existed in my head for over a decade.

The result: a proprietary platform built from scratch for web, iOS, Android and TV. Ten purpose-built training spaces. A social network, a workout engine, a learning platform, a coaching system, a creator economy, and a progress tracker — all in one place. Not a WordPress site with plugins. A real platform — about 1.39 million lines of it, if you count.

I made it myself. The full tech journey, from a Sharp MZ-800 loading BASIC off cassette tapes to enterprise-grade TypeScript and Kotlin — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, ColdFusion, PHP, Java, and now the modern stack. Every language I learned along the way prepared me for this.

I have obtained certifications from both sides of the kettlebell world — because the kettlebell does not care what school you came from. The biomechanics are the biomechanics.

Kettlebell certifications obtained

Other fitness certifications obtained

Notable personal records

By the numbers

KETTLEBELL MONSTER™ is not a product launch. It is a life’s work arriving at its destination. Fifteen years of building content, educating athletes, certifying coaches, and learning — painfully — what does not work, all converging into one platform.

The local gyms

The vision includes physical spaces. Pure focus on kettlebells and some pull-up bars. A clean, empty space that is raw but professional. Kettlebells galore. A place where people share their experience, their knowledge, and work out together. A space where certified trainers and creators can also produce their content — a production-ready environment.

The master trainer network

We are rebuilding a global network of master trainers — people focused on spreading the word of kettlebell and physical fitness, and more importantly, on making training fun. In-person certifications and workshops across the world. IKU courses are Several IKU courses are NASM-accredited and ACE-accredited, because standards matter.

Five years from now

In five years, this platform should have over a million users across the world. It will be on the level of what Facebook was for the kettlebell community — but built for it, not borrowed.

My daily life? Completely surrounded with everything I love doing. Interacting with people, learning from people, working out with people. A large open space in nature — warm, open, where we can film and try new things and create content together. People coming from other countries. Not only kettlebells, but everything that comes with movement — bodyweight, BJJ, anything. Mixed with community aspects of food, nutrition, growing food together, sharing.

Ten years from now

KETTLEBELL MONSTER™ should be self-running. Managed by others. People taking my place who will work on making sure things run smoothly, making decisions, building the network, keeping the quality up, recruiting, and educating.

And I will be in a place that is farming, gardening, physical activities, and teaching workshops. The programmer who built 1.39 million lines of code — his endgame is dirt under his fingernails and teaching people face to face.

The kettlebell deserves its own home. Not a section inside a general fitness app. Not a hashtag on Instagram. Not a Facebook group that an algorithm decides whether to show. A dedicated platform where every feature, every interaction, every piece of content exists because the kettlebell community needs it.

Understanding why matters more than knowing how. Anyone can demonstrate a swing. I teach why the hip extends at that moment, what the foot does against the ground, which muscles fire in which order. When you understand the biomechanics, you do not just perform a movement — you own it.

Methodology neutral — the bell does not care. The kettlebell world has tribal allegiances. Hardstyle versus Sport Style. I have certifications from both worlds — SFG2, IKFF, Russian Girevoy Sport Institute, IKSFA. The bell does not care what school you came from.

You should own your platform. If your entire business, community, and content library can be deleted by an algorithm with no appeal process, you do not own anything. You are renting space on someone else’s land.

Real humans, always. When you need help, you will reach a real person. Not a chatbot. Not an automated reply. Not a wall. That commitment does not scale down. Ever.

Education is the product, not the upsell. Teaching people how to train properly is not a marketing strategy. It is the entire point.

No algorithm suppression. Post something on KETTLEBELL MONSTER™ and everyone who follows you sees it. Chronological, transparent, fair. No black box deciding your content is not performing. No pay-to-play visibility.

KETTLEBELL MONSTER™ is an app of IKU™, International Kettlebell University. IKU LLC is the company behind IKU, Cavemantraining and KETTLEBELL MONSTER. IKU LLC was formed in February 2025 as a New Mexico LLC, with principal offices in Sherman Oaks, California.

Self-funded to date. No venture capital taken, no outside investors so far. Revenue comes from subscriptions, creator fees, licensing, and master trainer workshops and certifications.