My name is Antranik Kizirian and my main passion and mission in life is to help others reach physical autonomy. I actively coach and educate everyone on how to increase their strength and gain flexibility through the use of bodyweight exercises, gymnastics strength training and yoga. Another way I do that is by talking about nutrition and sharing inspirational and motivational posts to lift people up. If you’re a nursing or medical student, you’ve possibly arrived here because you’ve also found my hundreds of tutorials on anatomy, physiology or pharmacology.
I started this site as my creative outlet in the Spring of 2011 and then started creating YouTube videos because many things are far easier to teach visually. I focus a lot on educating health and fitness because we all have a body and we all benefit from moving it in mindful ways which keeps us healthy both physically and mentally.
What is my background?
Ever since I was a teen, I was always interested in health, how the body worked and genuinely enjoyed helping others. Unfortunately I was very disenchanted with the health care system and decided against becoming a medical doctor due to how disconnected they were from their patients and only prescribing pharmaceutical drugs as the solution. Instead I played it safe and got a bachelors degree in business as it was another strong suit of mine and worked in the financial services sector in my early 20’s.
After speaking to a therapist, I realized that I should revisit the health-care field again, not as a doctor but as a nurse since I would enjoy the far more direct patient care. So I started going to nursing school to be a Registered Nurse and was so good at it, that I even became a tutor that my teachers recommended. This is partly why I also ended up creating hundreds of blog posts on anatomy physiology and pharmacology.
Simultaneously, I discovered the community at the Original Muscle Beach and became obsessed with all things related to calisthenics, gymnastics strength training and the movement/circus arts. I was reading books and content on these topics like an assassin. I was being taught by world-class ex-gymnasts and yoga teachers that you couldn’t find in those books and applying them to myself and others as a personal trainer. All the kinesiology I was learning in nursing school was being transfigured toward physical training. I had already been doing yoga for several years prior, so I had a good understanding of many concepts, but the formal academic education in combination with these unique sources helped me to stand out in the online world as I was passing the info along on this site and YouTube channel constantly.
As I neared the end of my nursing education, I had already been volunteering at Cedars-Sinai for 2 years on so many different floors and had started to realize two things:
- The nurses themselves were generally unhappy, stressed and often complaining.
- The patients were only there because they let their health get so bad and modern medicine needed to help them in a last ditch effort.
I started to realize that I enjoyed teaching people that were intrinsically motivated to get fit far more than treating sick people who didn’t care enough about themselves to begin with. When I didn’t make it into the masters program at UCLA for nursing, my content had already gone viral countless times on Reddit. My constant contributions garnered me the trust to become a mod of r/bodyweightfitness, r/yoga, and r/flexibility. After much deep reflection, I ultimately decided that all these were signs that I should focus wholly on my online-presence as I was far more effective at helping thousands of people, not just any people, but people who actually wanted to better themselves (like you!) and thus, made it a much more effective use of my life’s mission.
Now I am deeply entrenched in this quest to:
- Help people feel better within their own skin.
- Teach people how to take care of themselves from the ground up.
- Help people figure out what their goals are and what brings them joy.
- Help people go back to the basics and then progress onward and upward.
- Rekindle the mind-body connection and to pass on all the wisdom that comes my way.
Just a quick word on the importance of doing all this sooner rather than later…
The chart below says the more muscle mass and strength and mobility/flexibility you maintain through your peak years as an adult, the more you can minimize the loss of strength as you age, ensuring a better quality of life with a stronger resiliency and ability to rehabilitate yourself in case of injury through your latter years with a lower chance of losing independence or becoming immobile or worse: disabled.
So, if you get strong and flexible, you set yourself up to have this next-level of preventative measure. And you’ll feel much better about yourself, too. You’ll be able to not only play with your kids but also your grand-kids! But you have to actually DO something about it and it’s never too late to start. Start now. Maybe start by getting acquainted with which strength or flexibility training program is right for YOU.
Wishing you the best,
Antranik Kizirian
PS: The best way to stay up to date with my latest content and get discounts regularly is to sign up for my newsletter. And if you ever want to contact me personally, I’m just one click away here.