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

I started rhythmic gymnastics at seven. My father had been a gymnast; my mother had always wanted to be. The sport wasn't my choice at first, and I'll say openly that I didn't love it in the beginning — what I had instead was discipline, and a stubborn habit of making myself do things I didn't want to do.

It added up. By my early teens I was making individual and team rosters; later, in aesthetic group gymnastics, I competed at World and European championships and became a champion of Ukraine. I also learned the sport's harder lessons — including the feeling of never being "done," where no result is ever quite enough. I mention that one deliberately, because it shapes how I coach: I never criticize honest effort.

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.