Belonging through movement.

I spent eight years in academia and left with an MSc in Earth Sciences, but I kept returning to something that had shaped me far longer: movement, sport and physical performance. Growing up between skiing, tennis, Taekwondo and later rugby, water polo, strength training and surfing, I also spent part of my childhood in a sophisticated sports club in Kyiv. The warmth, quality and sense of belonging there quietly shaped my idea of what a fitness space could feel like.

Yet the more I trained, the more I noticed that my best states rarely came from the most controlled routines. Travelling — and later a long surfing trip — often made me leaner, sharper and more alive, even when my discipline fell apart. The same thing happened at Burning Man: a different environment produced a different version of me. That contradiction stayed with me. It was not about the place. It was about the conditions.

I also learned how much belonging matters. Periods of isolation affected my energy, training and mental clarity just as much as any workout or meal. Health began to look less like separate categories — fitness, nutrition, sleep, stress, social life — and more like one system, constantly interacting. My scientific background pushed me to ask what could actually be measured underneath these experiences.

So I looked for assessments that were rigorous, repeatable and useful outside a hospital or elite lab, and that could guide real decisions rather than simply produce another number. I kept arriving at three domains: body composition, strength and cardiorespiratory fitness. Sentier Club grew out of trying to remove the guesswork from the conditions that let us function at our best.