Our Why

This short essay was written by Kabuki CMO and founding employee Andrei Miclea in 2016. Read our company about page here.

We believe in the power of telling people's stories, in unpacking and sharing our identity from the inside out. The “What” and the “How” of a company are fairly easy to discern; the “Why” however, is another story. We want this short essay to serve as a communique to our community; a writing from the heart of Kabuki Power’s leaders and staff that defines our “Why”. You might be wondering…why is our “Why” important?

Why? This simple, incredibly powerful question helps us discover and connect our values to our purpose.

What started out as a small group of powerlifters training in a garage soon became a full-blown training facility and manufacturing space in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. What started out as a difficult, chaotic upbringing in the high desert of Central Oregon soon became a man with vision to change the world and inspire thousands to live better through strength. What started out as a college football coach and one of the nation’s most successful and decorated homebuilders soon became a world champion masters lifter with a heart for helping others. Kabuki Power is an unconventional company with a unique story, and we'd love to share it with you.

Over the last 6 years, our company has grown from a very small business consisting of our two co-founders to a disruptive force in Strength & Fitness, employing over 50 exceptional individuals as we scale our mission to make the world a better place through strength. Practically, we work to complete our mission through four distinct pillars.

Equipment -- We design, engineer, and manufacture novel strength equipment to push the boundaries of strength, performance, and health.
Education -- Research-based movement and strength education for a diverse range of individuals, from beginners to pro athletes.
coaching -- World-class coaching services for strength athletes around the world and in-person at The Lab.
charity -- Helping others and giving back to the community.

Kabuki's story is one of perseverance, community, strength, vision, and most importantly, mission. This essay will take you through our history, core beliefs, and future from the perspective of these five central elements.

Perseverance.

Co-founder Chris Duffin's childhood is a story deserving of either a book or a movie. Encapsulating in a few short paragraphs the drama and pain of a child growing up in the wilderness removed from society is an arduous task for any writer, much less one who is also a meathead. Although Chris has shared in his own words numerous stories of his childhood, certain details and elements of his upbringing remain well-guarded in a corner of his heart, patiently awaiting to be revealed in one of those rare moments of self-reflection where we pour our soul out onto a piece of paper. And he did, in his recently released memoir-slash-life-philosophy book The Eagle and the Dragon. This writer encourages you to read all that Chris has written, then contrast it to the persona you see online via social media or in the numerous content produced by Chris and Kabuki. What do you notice? What was once a young life blossoming in the midst of chaos became a strong, immovable force of inspiration and motivation to thousands. Chaos breeds strength, as it were. Success, of all things, was the last thing one would expect of a person growing up in the circumstances Chris Duffin did. This isn’t just the opinion of the writer, a psychiatrist Chris talked with was genuinely surprised at his success and mental stability in adulthood considering all the things that took place in his formative years. Let that sink in for a moment…even a professional mind-doctor would have easily bet against Chris having a successful, much less inspirational life. But people can persevere even through the most difficult and impossible of circumstances. Although Chris was able to overcome and emerge victorious from the rubble that was his childhood, he did not do it alone. Alongside every great person lie other people who are just as great.

To learn more about Chris' unique story (and our company's story), make sure to pick up a copy of his book.

“Perseverance is action derived from a pure belief in your own strength, even in what seems like total defeat. Just like Pat and my father, I struggled with alcohol. I’ve stepped close to the edge, lured by the deceitful whispers of the devil who promises that ending it all will bring comfort. My redemption has been a powerful self-realization that my identity is not found in my circumstances or in what happens to me. I am strong. I am my own will made manifest in the world.”

– Chris Duffin, The Eagle and The Dragon

Nowhere better is perseverance embodied and acted upon than in special needs athletes who train their hearts out. We are proud to support Special Olympics Oregon by hosting their powerlifting team for training the last 2 years. Kabuki coach Cassandra and her husband Colby work patiently, diligently, and expertly to help their athletes get stronger, stay healthy, and perform on the platform. As the older brother of an incredible girl with Down Syndrome, I am honored to be a part of an organization that takes the time and puts in the heart to work with those who have intellectual and physical disabilities. Click here to watch a highlight reel of our Special Olympics Powerlifting Team's recent meet!

Community.

Community has been a thread in the fabric of Kabuki Power since our story began those early, formative years in Chris’ garage. A small group of powerlifters found themselves better off working together, rather than alone. The power of community is nothing new, and we’ve all experienced it. Human beings are social creatures that best thrive in a group, rather than alone. But community is about more than just similar people sharing a point in the space/time continuum; community is about human connectivity, diversity, shared passion, and empathy.

These four terms served as the backbone and ethical tenets on which Rudy Kadlub’s Villebois housing community stood. When the State of Oregon and City of Wilsonville decided to sell the plot of land on which the closed and shuttered Dammasch State Hospital stood, they decided to require the chosen community developer to devote a certain percentage of the land to housing the mentally handicapped. Rudy was faced with a difficult and incredibly important task – to figure out a way to house dozens of mentally disabled patients without affecting the property values of new homes and alienating potential buyers. When he visited Washington DC and asked the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for advice – they responded “This is unprecedented and we don’t have any advice for you, but we’ll let you know if you mess up”.

Rudy never heard from them. He was able to become one of the first community builders to successfully integrate housing for the mentally ill within the Villebois community, building homes with live-in providers and staff right next to homes housing healthy people, without violating anyone’s right to privacy or the potential value of the properties in the community. At a ribbon cutting ceremony in Villebois Rudy remarked:

“These folks are people, just like you and me … and residents of the new community are embracing their mentally impaired neighbors.”

– Rudy Kadlub

Invest in People.

Because our company exists as a metamorphosis from a non-commercial entity - a garage gym - we were built on a bedrock of good ol' fashioned blood, sweat, tears, heart, and soul. Most of our leadership team were training partners before we were co-leaders. We built friendships around a shared passion, and turned that passion into a vocation when the calling came. Kabuki co-founders Chris and Rudy from the very beginning placed an emphasis on investing in people. We are proud that our company's turnover rate is hardly measurable, and we continue adding exceptional people to our team from our local and global communities. Our training facility, where it all started for us, lives on today as Kabuki Power Lab. Previously known as Elite Performance Center, today The Lab continues to offer an affordable training environment to our local community and is also the home of Kabuki Coaching and EDU+.

Our community is also made up of a network of tenured professionals in various domains who serve on our Advisory Board, a first for a company in our industry. We are deeply thankful to have relationships with and seek counsel from these highly skilled and influential educators, clinicians, medical doctors, and coaches.

As an organization, Kabuki Power stands humbly at the intersection of two eternal virtues, experience and knowledge. From the very beginning, one of our core, foundational tenants has been education. It is this never-ending pursuit, application, and expression of knowledge that is central to our mission of making the world a better place through strength. We are committed to sharing our platform and working with the clinical, academic, and strength & conditioning communities to teach, coach, and equip more and more people with the tools and knowledge needed to better themselves.

People are the DNA of community, and without beautiful and incredible people Kabuki Power would be nothing but a lifeless shell.

People like Cassandra, a Physical Therapist Assistant who joined the gym and embraced the community only to find herself married to another member and working as a strength coach and educator for the company.

People like me, whose widowed mother quit her nursing job, sold her apartment and all possessions, left a devastated and corrupt post-communist eastern bloc country and emigrated to the US so that her 7-year old son might have a chance at making more than $180 per month – the average monthly salary in Romania.

People like Derrington who moved all the way from Texas to Oregon when confronted with the opportunity to work for Kabuki as a full-time coach teaching the sport he loves to other athletes.

People like Brandon who mentored under Chris and is now our Director of Education. Or Kyle Young, who started as a powerlifting coaching client and today is both Kabuki's Head Coach and Team USA Head Coach for the United States Powerlifting Association.

We're proud to support our team in their continued career development and actively train strength coaches through our intern program.

Kabuki Power IS community. A group diverse yet unified, different yet similar, and most importantly as passionate as can be. But community for the sake of community can find itself dry and bitter. All of us here may have different upbringings, ethics, or belief systems yet we share a similar passion for furthering our version of “the good life” or better put “the meaningful life”. Someone once said “the hardest thing in life is to live well”. What it means to live well may mean very different things to people, but those of us at Kabuki Power can agree that the pursuit of physical and mental discipline is a virtue worth seeking and sacrificing for.

Over the years we have been blessed with opportunities to serve those in our community with the resources we have. In previous years we were able to raise over $10,000 to help build "pods" that will house houseless veterans in our local community as part of a community outreach program called Veteran's Village. Thanks to partners like the HomeBuilders Foundation and Do Good Multnomah, dozens of veterans are able to get a roof over the heads and a warm bed.

Strength.

Many incredible strength athletes have been born out of Kabuki Power's family of lifters and world-renowned training methods. In the early days it was Chris Duffin leading the way as one of the top multiply powerlifters and Rudy Kadlub along with his training partner John Hare, who were both world-record holding masters lifters pushing the barriers and proving that age truly is just a number. Over the years Chris transitioned from geared powerlifting to RAW powerlifting and become a dominating force in the 220lb weight class, at one point becoming the heaviest man in history to squat 4x times his bodyweight. More recently he has performed incredible feats of strength: becoming the first human to sumo deadlift over a thousand pounds…and he did it for almost 3 repetitions. This incredible deadlift was the first part of Chris’ “Grand Goals” campaign, an effort to raise money for the Homebuilders Foundation of Metro PDX via proceeds from sales of Grand Goals apparel. Shortly after, Chris squatted 1000 pounds for 3 repetitions, becoming the first person to do so in history.

At age 74 Rudy continues to compete, coach and inspire athletes across the world, competing and training after countless injuries and setbacks. In his 70s, Rudy has totaled 1604 pounds and come within a mere 35 pounds of Ernie Frantz’ “unbreakable” 1639 total as a masters lifter. Today, Rudy holds over 30 national and world records in the sport of powerlifting. Other athletes from Kabuki Power have won world championships in numerous weight classes and divisions all across the world, competing in international-level meets and invitational meets reserved for only the best-of-the-best.

Chris recently completed Part 2 of his #GrandGoals campaign by squatting 1000lbs for 3 repetitions. This time, we used the platform and attention from Chris' training to help raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society for our friend Connor Green. Connor, who you can see in the picture below, is one of Kabuki co-founder Rudy's 13 grandkids and was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma 2 years ago. Today, Connor is in remission and getting back to the swing of things as a young athlete! To learn more and hear from Connor, Rudy, Andy (Connor's Dad), and Chris - watch this video!

From the very beginning a common denominator among those who trained with Chris and Rudy in Chris’ garage was a pursuit of strength. The powerlifter’s dream is one that most can’t relate to, even remotely. What makes a man or woman painstakingly train hours each day for the sole purpose of lifting heavy metal weights? To those people asking the question, the answer won’t be very convincing. It will, however, share a central element of humanity that is present in everything tangible and intangible that mankind has touched – perseverance.

Vision.

But what does physical discipline have to do with living a good and meaningful life?

We live in an age of dopamine overdoses, of instant gratification and self-contained bubbles we fill with entertainment and our own rapidly ballooning egos. Human history is marked by the pursuit of power and the oppression of mankind, set in stark contrast with the brilliance of mind and the subduing of the very planet we inhabit to serve our needs. Our common story is marked by drama, chaos, war, death, and unimaginable suffering. But that same story is also marked by passion, love, victory, family, and brilliance. What human history has NOT identified with so far is apathy and mediocrity – two poisons of the modern age taking hold of lives with so much potential. The vision of Kabuki Power in one sense is to see people deeply motivated and to live better through strength. For us this isn’t just some mantra to encourage the pursuit of a heavier squat, but rather a universal belief that each individual human being is fully capable of living a meaningful life and we have much more control over our lives than our circumstances or minds may often say.

This is not a moral proclamation. It’s simply a call to unshackle ourselves from cheap pleasures, spoon-fed propaganda and entertainment, overstimulation and overabundance, lack of physical and emotional discipline, and most importantly from our own ego. This is a return to what truly makes us human – drive, grit, will-power, freedom, work, love, and passion.

In a slightly less philosophical and more technical sense, the vision of Kabuki Power is to develop equipment that bridges the gap between clinical and performance worlds, teach correct, clinically-based movement which can serve to improve performance and reduce injury modes, and coach athletes of all levels using traditional and our own proprietary training/programming methodologies. That’s quite the mouthful, but don’t worry, we expand on it further below.

Our vision is to see people live better through strength. But vision without mission and action is nothing but a dream.

Mission.

As a community we have a deep and powerful vision that is a part of our DNA. This is a vision that looks beyond the self. In fact, it requires active participation by it’s community to inspire and influence those outside who are looking in. There are four primary mediums by which our vision comes to fruition – equipment, education, coaching, and charity. The active participation of our community, both internally and at large, is assumed in each of these core tenets.

Equipment – The combination of an engineer and businessman who both share a love for strength sports and deep, practical and academic experinece in exercise science and kinesiology is the perfect foundation on which to start designing and manufacturing equipment in a space ripe for disruption and innovation. Our focus and specialty lies in bridging the gap between the performance and academic/clinical worlds by engineering better barbells and strength equipment. Every product we design and manufacture serves a purpose and can trace its development back to a tangible need we identified and chose to meet. True innovation and novel methods are in our DNA, and our products reflect this.

In an age of commodization, cutting-corners, and snake-oil-salesmen, even in our industry, Kabuki Power is committed to a purpose-driven product development and design engineering processto continue bringing novel tools & methods that solve problems and produce desired outcomes. Alongside countless incredible and passionate innovators, educators, and influencers - we are doing our part to help make the world a better place through strength.

EDUCATION – What started as a friend filming one of Chris’ breathing/bracing drills using a cell phone with a potato camera has become a professional studio production with a full, in-house staff of educators who create and present educational content around strength & human movement to coundless eager minds around the world. The evolution and growth of Kabuki has always emphasized content development and sharing the knowledge we gain with others.

Our primary education platform is the greatest value in strength. Kabuki EDU+ includes 100's of hours of pro strength education and lectures, plus unlimited app programming, all for just $29/mo

Our staff also regularly presents this material to professional organizations (pro sports teams, clinicians, S&C coaches, tactiacl/MPF services) via private seminars and in professional industry settings/conferences. Our industry-leading education and curriculum is backed by an advisory board of world-renowned clinicians, coaches, educators, and academics.

COACHING – In the late stages of his competitive career as an elite powerlifter, Chris personally coached a number of lifters and developed this team and product into Kabuki's industry-leading professional 1-on-1 Virtual Coaching service. This organization isstaffed by full-time coaches who work with athletes and lifters around the world. Kyle Young (Kabuki Head Coach) and Brandon Morgan (Director of Education) – lead a team of professionals who work with individuals of all experineces - from beginners passionate about getting stronger to elite and professional athletes - to gain mastery of movement, get stronger, build more muscle, and live a better life through strength. Kabuki Power coaches regularly pursue continuing education for professional development. We are all just as much students, as we are teachers

CHARITY & community – All of us on our team have a heart for those in need, those less fortunate, and those too weak to go at life alone. We believe strongly in the power of love, of a simple gesture of kindness, of charity, and of being there for someone and saying “I get you, I love you, I want to help”.As a company, we take every opportunity we can to serve others. We believe that making the world a better place through strength goes far beyond selling equipment, coaching, and education people – and this is why Charity & Community is our 4th pillar. Our commitment is to continue using our platform, our people, and our resources to help support those in need.

Thank You.

The purpose of this article and the intent of this writer is to allow for our leadership and team to express to you, the reader, why we do what we do and what we stand for. We deeply believe in our vision here at Kabuki Power, and want to extend an invitation to anyone to join us and participate in our story. We are about as open as organizations and communities get, so if you are in the Portland area we invite you to stop by the Lab and get a training session in and hang out with the staff! Or maybe you’d like to join us at one of our seminars across the US and learn the intricacies of our movement philosophy. And of course, always free to send any of our staff an email or message via social media. If you're not on social media and want to get a live look at what's new - follow us on Instagram!

Thank you to each and every person who has supported or interacted with us in any way, both big or small. From the largest customer to the average joe learning how to improve his squat through our educational content, we appreciate and thank each and every one of you for your support. Community is the bedrock of our company, and we will never take you for granted. Thank you for believing in us.

we Hope and deeply desire for each of you to live better through strength.

– The Kabuki Power Team