About me

My story

Funnily enough, it was injuries that brought me to a career in fitness — a feeling that my body couldn't keep up my pace.

I was never quite a sporty type. Growing up on the autistic spectrum, I was very clumsy and uncoordinated as a child. It took a while to teach me to catch a ball. For half of my life, I would stand at the bottom of a staircase waiting for help, without even thinking of heaving my suitcase up a flight of stairs.

In my late twenties, as an overworked young lawyer, I developed chronic back pain sitting for long hours in front of my computer, drafting contracts. I was 29 when my neurologist showed me an MRI scan explaining that the nerves between my lumbar spine and sacrum were permanently damaged and I would have to get used to living in pain. The front of my left foot felt numb and I couldn't feel the big toe at all.

Being autistic, my way of dealing with problems is to throw a lot of learning at them.

So, over the years, I studied and studied across various modalities of movement and therapeutic exercise. I learnt how to work with my back pain and eventually, my symptoms diminished and disappeared completely. I got so passionate about exercise that I couldn't imagine my life without it. I quit my career in law and retrained as a yoga teacher. I was particularly interested in bodies that didn't respond to one-size-fits-all approaches to fitness, so I went on to do over 1,000 hours of training, mostly focusing on yoga as therapy.

But then, in my mid-thirties, after two pregnancies close together, my back pain returned. I had a 6-finger-wide abdominal separation and my lower back would go into spasm every time I opened a heavy door or lifted my toddler out of the bath.

It was during my second childbirth that I learnt I had a habit of pushing out into my lower belly at effort. Instead of having my abs draw inwards and upwards at exhalation, I would bear down every time I needed my core to work. Even as a movement professional, I had no idea at the time about the difference between activating the deep abdominal muscles and bearing down on my organs.

In the first two years, I had to give up teaching all yoga and fitness classes other than pregnancy, postnatal and senior ones. I became anxious to move. Every time I got carried away enjoying my yoga practice and let my body move intuitively, I would be in pain for days afterwards. So I got obsessed with alignment, breathing and moving 'correctly' to avoid injury.

I trained to be a Restorative Exercise Specialist and spent years practising and teaching gentle corrective exercise without attempting to build up intensity. I never thought I could. I was moving out of a sense of responsibility, rather than joy. There was hardly anything I could find at the time that could effectively connect a physiotherapy and a strength and conditioning journey.

I wonderedWhy does an injury happen and what can we do to get out of the injurious pattern?

Digging deeper eventually brought me to an MSc in sports and exercise biomechanics, focusing on mechanisms of injuries and the biomechanics of ageing. Testing my movements at the uni biomechanics lab, I realised how weak and unfit my body was — despite the gentle exercise I was doing. I understood that rehab could not end with gentle exercise. You need physical challenge to build up capacity to handle challenge.

I also realised that my diastasis recti was not a problem in itself, but a symptom of non-optimal pressure management strategies that my body was using. But I couldn't force my body into breathing, standing, walking differently. Instead, I needed to improve my level of fitness, build strength and capacity to move better.

I started with training my diaphragm, pelvic floor and deep abs and restoring thoracic mobility. I learnt how to manage intra-abdominal pressure better when I moved and gradually added external weight. For the first time in my life, I built muscle. My abs finally got stronger, probably stronger than before the injury.

I had never thought I could be the strongest in my life and the most confident in my body in my mid-40s, as a mum of two.

I always say that my signature method rePower was born out of frustration. It crystallised through 14 years of my learning across the fields of sports and exercise science, physiotherapy, movement, and women's health, and applying this learning both on my body and in my work as a coach. It is a 3-phase system that connects physiotherapy with strength and conditioning training, aiming to get you stronger than before the injury.

Today I coach people whose bodies don't respond to conventional approaches to fitness — people who train with back pain and mysterious injuries that keep coming back, women stuck in the cracks of a gym culture not optimised for women's biology, people with chronic pain. And I teach exercise professionals who meet these bodies in their own classes and sessions.

Do you train with recurring back pain? Start by filling in the Coaching Self-Assessment or drop me a message in the contact form.

Do you train people with back pain? Download our free resource, 10 things to remember when working with someone with a 'bad back'

Ivana x