Story

My name is Chris Cirillo and I am the owner of Kodiak Bodybuilding Apparel.

In 1998 I was a 13 year old kid with a mullet. I came from a working class family and lived 40 minutes south of Pittsburgh. I was fat, unathletic, and wanted to be like my heroes I saw on pro wrestling shows every Monday night. So of course my brother and I did what every other kid was doing in the late 90's and started doing backyard wrestling with the neighborhood kids.

Ten years later, I enrolled in the NWA East pro wrestling academy. It was during this time I also attended my first bodybuilding show. After 9 months of training at the wrestling academy, I dropped out. I discovered that I enjoyed spending time in the weight room more than I enjoyed spending time in the ring taking bumps. I had found a new passion in bodybuilding.

The challenge;
how hard I could push myself.
The hard work,
and the results it produced.

I developed a true love for training.

I never liked team sports. I never understood how people could get behind a team as a fan- or the appeal of being on one as an athlete. In bodybuilding there was no team. It was solely up to the individual as a competitor to outwork his competition in order to make something better of himself. The individual knew when he gave his all and knew when he did not. Accountability in it's purest form.

Through magazines like Muscular Development and Flex, I learned about top pros such as Jay Cutler, Branch Warren, and Dorian Yates. I admired these men not just for their awesome physiques, but for their relentless work ethic, their ability to demand more from themselves when others would crumble, and their undying devotion to their passion.

I attended the Mr. Pittsburgh competition every year and other local shows as well. As much as I liked the pros, I had just as much respect for the local level competitors. Eventually I also would step on stage.

As an homage to old school bodybuilding and the work ethic that goes with it, I founded Kodiak Bodybuilding Apparel in the fall of 2017. But it was in the summer of 1998 that the first ever Kodiak shirt was created by a 13 year old kid with a mullet. The shirt was a black tank top purchased from the dollar store. I hand sewed a piece of another shirt on it and wrote "Kodiak" on it using black and red sharpies. Today the name takes on an entirely different meaning.

We as bodybuilders train hard for the sake of training hard. We do it because we love it. We don't do it for attention or validation. We enjoy testing our mental toughness and taking our physiques to the absolute limit. Not everyone can do this.

Either it's in your blood or it's not. The hard work, the dream, the passion. You can't fake it.

This is what bodybuilding has taught me.