"When you eat well, you perform well."
Tatu Saareks | MVP #29
Tatu Saareks is 23, from Lappeenranta, and has already been a Finnish Junior Champion in Fitness, a nutrition coach, and is fast becoming a competitive CrossFit athlete not to be ignored.
In January he hopes to start at the Emergency Services Academy in Kuopio to become a rescuer. He bought a ticket to the 2027 Saimaa Cycle Tour. He is aiming to compete at two high-level CrossFit competitions this fall: Unbroken and Boxathletics Challenge.
Tatu's background is in fitness, the kind where judges score your physique and placement depends on how you look on stage. He competed three times: 2021, 2024, and 2025. In 2025 and what turned out out to be his last season he won the Finnish Junior Championship in Men's Physique. Then he walked away.
The decision wasn't difficult. Fitness competitions are judged on appearance, and Tatu wanted more from sports. He wanted to win based on what your body can do, not what it looks like with minimum fat percentage and under stage lighting. After his final competition in spring 2025 he went looking for something where performance was the only currency that mattered.
He found crossfit. In summer 2025 he joined his local CrossFit gym’s on-ramp. Thirteen months later he is qualifying for competitions, and training with the kind of single-mindedness that gets people places.
When he wanted to learn handstand walks over a ramp, he stayed at the gym for an hour and a half after training until he had them. Stubbornness, he says, is a useful quality in this sport. Only after 13 months, the movement that needs more work is double-unders.
The military helped. Before CrossFit, Tatu served in the Finnish Defence Forces, and the physical demands of that environment—varied, functional, demanding across multiple capacities—matched what CrossFit would later ask of him. He had always wanted to be comprehensively fit, not just lean. The Defence Forces pointed him in that direction. Crossfit confirmed it.
The firefighting path follows the same logic. Physical competence, mental resilience, the ability to perform under pressure. Tatu is building a life around these things, not as separate pursuits but as one coherent direction.
The nutrition coaching grew out of personal experience. During his fitness competition years, Tatu tracked everything: same meals every day, precise monitoring, carbohydrates were the first thing to go when competition approached. He was focused on how much and what, and the scale was always somewhere nearby.
Crossfit changed the relationship to food entirely. The deficit mindset that works for stage appearance doesn't work when your body needs to perform. You cannot train at that intensity and run a meaningful calorie deficit. The approach had to shift, from restriction to sufficiency, from control to support. Now he logs what he eats to make sure there is enough of everything, not to make sure there isn't too much. Food stopped being something to manage and became something to use.
He coaches others through the same shift. The biggest mistake he sees is people treating nutrition as a form of discipline rather than a tool. Eat enough. Listen to your body. If you have trained hard and eaten well from good sources and you are still hungry, eat more. Craving chocolate is not the same signal.
Tatu meal preps, works remotely, and schedules training before everything else. He plans the week's training first, then fits work around it. He runs and cycles on top of his CrossFit programming. He has seven years of competitive swimming behind him, which means his aerobic base is stronger than most people his age realize.
Daily nutrition is straightforward by design. Fast, functional, built around real food he prepares himself. Grit Farm Performance Oats fit into that system the way anything has to earn its place in Tatu's routine — by working. The right macros, the right timing, no unnecessary complexity.
On CrossFit and community, Tatu is direct. He was nervous walking into his first box. He didn't need to be. CrossFit, he says, is one big family, and the openness with which people are welcomed is something he still finds hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it. For anyone hesitating at the door, that is worth knowing before they walk through it.
He is going as far as his ability will take him. Right now that means qualifying for Unbroken and for Boxathletics Challenge, hopefully starting firefighter training in January, and then it's time to figure out how to build a long-term plan once the school situation is clear.
Tatu Saares is 23, from Lappeenranta, thirteen months into CrossFit, and already qualifying for national-level competitions. He has a swimming base that took years to build, a military background that forged functional fitness before he ever touched a barbell in a CrossFit context, and a relationship with nutrition that most athletes spend years trying to figure out. He stays after sessions to learn the movements that aren't there yet.
It is too early to make predictions. CrossFit has a way of humbling people who move too fast and rewarding people who stay patient. But the profile is hard to ignore: the aerobic engine, the coachability, the competitive background, the age. If Tatu Saares keeps going at this rate, the question won't be whether he reaches the top of Finnish CrossFit. It will be how far beyond that he goes.
Watch this one.
