Ten years inside the sport. Then the question that changed it.

I spent a decade in elite Ukrainian gymnastics — training six days a week, competing on the national team, and winning medals at World and European Championships. Those years shaped how I understand movement today.

Years of overload caught up with my back before I turned eighteen, and treatment took me out of the discipline I'd grown up in. It also introduced me to the person who changed my professional life: a physical therapist and yoga teacher who worked with biomechanics and the nervous system as one conversation, not two separate subjects.

That reframing — the body as a system of signals rather than a machine to push harder — became the root of everything I teach. Tight shoulders stopped being a flaw to stretch away and became information: about stress, habits, compensation patterns. My later influences layered onto that base: contemporary-dance biomechanics under my mentor Lena Pul, yoga and psychosomatic work, Pilates as one tool among several.

There was no single moment of becoming a trainer. At sixteen I was covering dance classes; then I had my own groups; then adults started coming to me privately for Pilates. My honest description of that period: more blind fearlessness than confidence. The formal foundation came with a coaching degree from the Kharkiv Institute of Physical Culture — the rest I built through practice, study, and mentorship rather than a wall of certificates.

In 2022 the war forced a move. The real choice was "the US, or stay home" — and I'd wanted to see America since my school years. I wasn't happy about how the move happened. I am, by now, glad it was Las Vegas: it's where my current practice took shape, including the athlete work I'm known for — a professional boxer, US national-team athletes, competitive gymnasts.