Wayne Gretzky may have started skating at the age of 2 but he wasn’t hanging from a chinning bar. Igor Klibanov, one of Canada’s top Fitness experts, was doing exactly that. Before the age of one, his father would make him hang off the chin-up bar to develop upper body strength – tough love 🙂
By the age of 6, and living in Israel, Igor was regularly running and swimming on the beach and you guessed it doing more chin-ups. By the time he was 8, he was doing 12 chin-ups and turning some heads along the way.
Through his teenage years, Igor played a few sports and became active in Martial Arts. But it wasn’t until he started competing that fitness became a true calling. In 2002, he started training at the Academy of Integrated Martial Arts (AIMA) and started learning everything he could about exercise and performance enhancement. “I wanted to win. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the best body for martial arts. Short limbs are great for wrestling, but not so great for striking, which put me at a disadvantage. I wanted to know how I can get way above average results with below-average genetics.” He began spending every waking moment reading about exercise and optimizing athletic performance.
Fast forward to grade 12, Igor still thought that he would be a computer programmer. But due to insufficient registrations, the school had to cancel the computer programming class and Igor chose to enroll in an exercise science class. The teacher in that class was Suzanne Gluchy, who Igor credits for getting him to consider a possible career in fitness. Igor went on to study Kinesiology at York University much to the chagrin of his parents who wanted him to study computer programming.
As Igor puts it “a bunch of fluke events causes me to end up where I am today” and things have definitely worked for Igor, his many satisfied clients, and the thousands of people who have read his books and articles.
