Today we’d like to introduce you to Kiya Knight.
Hi Kiya, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Sixteen Years in the Making
Some partnerships happen in a boardroom.
Ours began barefoot in the sand.
In 2011, at Bikini Bootcamp in Tulum, Mexico, our paths crossed for the first time. I was leading fitness retreats. Jaimie Patrick Abbott had arrived from England, exhausted by the pace of corporate life and searching for something she couldn’t quite name. Movement became the doorway. Community became the medicine.
On paper, we made no sense.
I’m a movement inventor from the wild coast of Alaska who built a career teaching women to reconnect with their bodies through martial arts, primal dance and breathwork. Jaimie is a polished British professional with the kind of quiet strength that can command a boardroom and still make everyone feel seen.
Yet from the beginning, something clicked.
Over the next sixteen years we stayed in each other’s orbit. Through marriages and divorce. Through births and loss. Through career changes, celebrations, heartbreak, and countless conversations about the future of women’s health. What started as instructor and participant became coach and client. Client became collaborator. Collaborator became family.
Today, I’m honored to share that Jaimie Patrick Abbott is officially stepping into the role of CEO of AIR BAR FIT.
This isn’t a new partnership.
It’s the next chapter of a relationship that has been tested by time, strengthened through life, and built on complete trust.
In 2017, I founded AIR BAR FIT with one vision: to create a movement system that prepares women for real life. AIR, Active Internal Resistance, blends martial arts, primal movement, dance and breathwork into a modern approach to strength, mobility and nervous system resilience. It teaches women not simply how to exercise, but how to move through life with greater confidence, adaptability and capacity.
Since then we’ve quietly built a global community of women who believe wellness is about far more than aesthetics. It’s about feeling at home in your body, having the courage to evolve, and making sure no woman gets left behind.
This summer we’ll gather in my hometown of Sitka, Alaska, with members of AIR BAR CLUB for a wilderness retreat celebrating the community we’ve intentionally nurtured since 2021.
Then, from October through December, I’ll be joining Jaimie in England as we enter an exciting new season together. We’ll spend three months in a business incubator refining the AIR BAR, our Active Internal Resistance Training Bar, expanding our digital education, filming new classes for our global community, and laying the foundation for what’s next.
The vision extends far beyond one product.
We’re developing world-class movement education, immersive retreats, apparel, supplements, and technology that supports women throughout every stage of life. Everything we create is rooted in one belief: movement should prepare you for life, not just for the gym.
The fitness industry has spent decades chasing intensity.
We’re interested in longevity.
In mobility.
In adaptability.
In resilience.
In helping women cultivate bodies and nervous systems capable of meeting life’s inevitable challenges with grace, courage, and joy.
If this feels like something that appeared overnight, it didn’t.
It has been sixteen years of conversations, friendship, trust, teaching, testing, failing, learning, and refusing to compromise our vision.
Some things can’t be rushed.
The best partnerships are grown.
And ours is just getting started.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Together, Jaimie and I have walked through nearly every season a woman can experience.
Hormonal shifts. Dating. Marriage. Pregnancy. Baby weight. Burnout. Career pivots. Failure. Divorce. Grief. Pride. Success. Reinvention.
We’ve celebrated each other’s greatest victories and held space for each other’s hardest days.
The thread that has always tied us together is movement.
Not fitness.
Movement.
The way the body holds stress. The way energy moves through us. The patterns we repeat until we’re finally ready to break them. For sixteen years we’ve studied our own bodies as deeply as we’ve studied each other’s, learning that healing rarely happens in isolation.
We’ve witnessed one another create miracles.
We’ve also watched each other create absolute disasters.
Sometimes with exactly the same passion.
The difference has never been perfection. It’s been our willingness to look honestly at ourselves, take responsibility, laugh when we needed to, cry when we had to, and keep growing anyway.
Somewhere along the way, our individual goals became a shared mission.
Our pain became purpose.
Our friendship became family.
We’ve discovered that it really does take a village to raise a child. It takes trusted women to help carry each other through life’s impossible seasons. It takes people willing to remind you who you are when you’ve forgotten.
We’re reimagining what it means to build a life together.
To work together.
To care for our families and our elders with dignity.
To celebrate each other’s successes without competition.
To remember that the mission is always bigger than the individual.
The mission is women.
Helping women come home to themselves.
Helping women remember that strength isn’t something you earn. It’s something you uncover.
AIR BAR FIT was born from that realization.
We crossed a threshold where fitness for appearance became movement for healing.
Retreats stopped being vacations and became circles of transformation.
Strength became nervous system resilience.
Flexibility became adaptability.
Breath became medicine.
Our community often jokes that somewhere along this journey we became part scientist, part storyteller, and part modern-day witch. Not because we believe in fantasy, but because we’ve learned to trust intuition alongside evidence, to honor ancient wisdom alongside modern movement science, and to help women rediscover gifts that have always lived inside them.
Every woman carries intuition.
Every woman carries creativity.
Every woman carries resilience.
Our work is simply to help create the conditions where those qualities can wake back up.
(A few extraordinary men have found their way into the circle too… and we happily claim them.)
We believe the next evolution of fitness isn’t about burning more calories.
It’s about awakening more life.
It’s about building bodies that move with freedom, nervous systems that recover with grace, and communities that remind us that we’re never meant to do this alone.
This is more than a company.
It’s a movement.
And after sixteen years, we’re just beginning.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
AIR BAR FIT was founded on one simple belief: your body is your first home, and how you move through it determines how you move through life.
After more than twenty-six years teaching movement around the world, I realized something was missing from the fitness industry. We had become incredibly good at helping people look fit, but not necessarily preparing them to live well.
Women don’t need another workout.
They need a body that can carry children, navigate divorce, survive grief, build businesses, care for aging parents, climb mountains, dance at weddings, and still have enough energy left to laugh with the people they love.
That’s the problem AIR BAR FIT was created to solve.
Our signature system, AIR (Active Internal Resistance), combines martial arts, primal movement, breathwork, dance, strength training, and tactile feedback to improve mobility, balance, stability, coordination, and nervous system resilience. Rather than relying on external weights alone, we teach people how to create resistance from within, building strength from the inside out while reconnecting to the body’s natural movement patterns.
What makes AIR BAR FIT different isn’t just the exercises. It’s the philosophy.
We believe movement is information.
Every squat, every breath, and every step tells a story about how someone is living, coping, healing, and adapting. We teach people to become fluent in that language so they can work with their bodies instead of constantly fighting them.
One of the things I’m most proud of isn’t a product. It’s the community we’ve built.
Every Saturday at 10:00 a.m. Pacific, we host a free live AIR BAR FIT class on YouTube where people from around the world come together to breathe, strengthen, and move. The class is free while it’s live, making our work accessible to anyone who wants to experience it. Replays, our complete on-demand movement library, monthly coaching calls, and our global community are available through AIR BAR CLUB. You can join a live class at https://www.youtube.com/@airbarfit or learn more about AIR BAR CLUB at https://www.airbarfit.com.
For women looking for more personalized support, I also offer one-on-one coaching through Everfit. These year-long coaching programs combine customized movement, breathwork, habit coaching, nervous system education, and ongoing accountability to help women build strength for the life they’re living, not just the body they’re trying to create. Learn more at https://package.everfit.io/VQ579095.
Beyond our online studio, AIR BAR FIT offers transformational programs like the Think You Can’t Dance? 30-Day Challenge, wilderness retreats, movement education, teacher mentorship, and our signature AIR BAR training tool, all designed to help people reconnect with their bodies through movement that heals as much as it strengthens. Learn more at https://www.airbarfit.com/products/think-you-can-t-dance.
As we continue to grow internationally, we’re expanding into education, retreats, apparel, wellness products, and movement technology, all centered around one mission:
To help women build bodies that are strong enough for life, not just the gym.
Because fitness should prepare you for your real life.
Not distract you from it.
How do you think about luck?
People often tell me I’m lucky. Some have even called my life miraculous because of what I’ve been able to survive: addiction, losing 60 pounds, burnout, divorce, financial failure, losing my home in the Malibu wildfire, starting over with almost nothing. Looking back, I understand why it appears that way.
But luck didn’t happen to me.
I practiced it.
For the past twenty-six years, almost every single day, I’ve shown up for my body. More than eighty percent of those days I was teaching movement. When there wasn’t a room full of people, I taught online. When no one logged in, I taught anyway. I showed up because the practice was never about the audience. It was about becoming the kind of woman who keeps her word to herself.
Since losing sixty pounds at nineteen, I’ve nourished my body with whole foods most of the time. Even during seasons when my life was falling apart, I protected the habits that protected me. During addiction, I still moved. After the Malibu wildfire, when I was homeless and rebuilding my life one day at a time, I still trained. I still breathed. I still chose movement.
That’s what I believe luck really is. It’s the compound interest of small promises kept over a very long time.
I didn’t always feel strong. I didn’t always feel motivated. But I stayed in relationship with my body long enough that movement stopped feeling like another thing on my to-do list. It became the place I returned to for clarity, for resilience, and for joy. It became home.
If there’s one thing I hope women take away from my story, it’s this: you don’t have to change everything overnight. Choose one practice. Protect it. Repeat it. Over time, your body, your mind, and your life begin to move in a different direction.
That’s the roadmap AIR BAR FIT was built on. Today, alongside an extraordinary team, we’re expanding that vision through innovative movement education, technology, and community so more people can discover that they have the power to create a little more luck in their own lives.
Pricing:
- AIR BAR CLUB- $27/month $275 year
- Private Training in app weekly Zoom $450 month
- Private Training in app monthly Zoom $99 month
- Think You Can’t Dance? Challenge $99 includes one year AIR BAR CLUB
- Retreats: $2,800-$3,300: Alaska, England, Greece, California
Contact Info:
- Website: https://airbarfit.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/airbarfit
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@airbarfit
- Other: https://pro.everfit.io/Kiya-Knight
