Xavier Bertels

I sport. I sweat. Other people also sweat on me because it’s a contact sport. And over time, especially synthetics like rash guards can start to be hard to clean.

You’ll find a lot of instructions online for how to clean your Gi or Rashguard, geared towards the US market, with US products and US measurements. On top of that a lot of them simply did not work for me. So I thought I’d share the European version that works for me every time.

Monthly Deep Clean

It says monthly, but I do this depending on training volume. And I do the smell test. No need to clean more than necessary.

1. Soak 4–6 hours in 5 liters of warm water with 70g of sodium carbonate and a dash of fragrance-free detergent. DO NOT use too much detergent. Tablespoon max.
2. Rinse thoroughly with clean water.
3. Soak 15–30 minutes in 5 liters of fresh water with 250ml of white vinegar.
4. Rinse again and hang dry, inside-out. In the summer: hang outside in the sun.

Maintenance, ASAP After Gym

The sooner after the gym you wash, the less time bacteria have time to multiply.

1. Turn gi/rashguard inside out.
2. Short cold pre-rinse ~10min. My shower sometimes takes a while to heat up, so I use the cold shower water to pre-rinse.
3. Main wash at 30°C with detergent (again DO NOT use too much detergent, this is the cardinal sin), high rpm spin dry.
4. Add 50–100ml vinegar in the softener compartment for the final rinse.
5. Hang dry: never use a dryer or fabric softener.

Your training partners thank you.

At university, I was taught to see by drawing more: live drawing, automatic drawing, redrawing. The simple act of doing that, daily, for years taught me to see things 95% of people miss. It’s a bit of a blessing and a curse. You see beauty where others see ugliness. You see ugliness where others don’t see anything at all. It always reminds me of the famous line from The Matrix: ignorance is bliss. And yet, I would never want to trade seeing for not seeing. Or knowing for not knowing.

Sleepy? Take a nap.

Have an idea? Write it down.

Want to text someone? Send the text.

Play around with new technology? Start to play.

Some things in life are simply better, when you do them now.

In the West, it probably traces back to Socrates; in the East, to Toyota: asking why five times will supposedly reveal the root cause of almost any problem.

Fresh out of design school, I enthusiastically tried this at a client meeting. Big mistake. By the third why, the room was so uncomfortable my account manager had to step in and save the day. My relationship with that client never recovered.

That meeting stuck with me. For years I puzzled over what went wrong, until it finally clicked: first, a 21-year-old repeatedly asking why is probably just weird; second, most people in business genuinely don’t know why they do what they do.

Since then, I’ve learned you should almost never directly ask anyone why. Definitely not five times in a row. It’s more effective to ask questions like “What do you do when X happens?” or “How do you feel when Y occurs?”. The real why usually emerges if you read between the lines.

There’s an asymmetry between the answers you seek and the questions you should ask.

Blockchain and Smart Contracts, also known as Crypto, were always going to be a 25-year infrastructure shift. People continue to mock it. And that’s absolutely fine. Chances are incredibly slim there will be real noticeable billion user direct to consumer applications that are pure crypto. This will most likely remain a big, but niche finance/early adopters thing for a very long time.

Banks, multinationals and AI Agents, however, will need new payments and negotiation infrastructure. It’s finally happening for banks and for multinationals. And AI agents will be next. How else are they going to pay for all of this? Some things are inevitable, even in the face of the biggest critics.