Meet Coach Shannon, one of the newest faces at LEVEL. With a background that spans dance, design, and competitive sport, she brings curiosity, energy, and a genuine love for movement to everything she does. We caught up with her to hear about her journey, what drives her, and why she believes fitness is about more than just reps and sets.

Haaaaaave You Met Shannon:

Hello, and welcome to LEVEL! Tell us about yourself.

Hi everyone! I’m Shannon, and I’m so excited to be a part of the LEVEL community. I’ve been active since I was young. I danced, then moved to softball, and tried my hand at field hockey for a while. My fitness journey really began when I played softball competitively. I fell in love with the sport, and although training was tough, it made me a better player. I started strength training in the gym when I was 17. I had torn my ACL and actually became scared to get back to living a healthy lifestyle. I actually started as a client with a personal trainer and found that I really enjoyed being in the gym.

The habit of showing up at the gym developed soon after that. It didn’t take long before I started wanting to branch out into different methods of training. Since then, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about fitness and overall wellness from all over the internet, other coaches, certifications, and seminars. I decided to become a coach because I wanted to empower people around me, to help others who find the gym intimidating become a little less daunted, to help people find love for themselves through living a life filled with wellness!

Fitness aside, I am a girl who loves food, travel, her friends, sunsets, and the small things in life. Before venturing down the path of building a career in fitness, I was a design student, and I studied fashion. I love creating things and working with my hands. I think my friends would describe me as empathetic, almost overtly sensitive, horrendously clumsy, and terribly indecisive. There’s so much more I can tell you about myself, but I hope to share more of my story in person!

What do you enjoy doing outside the gym?

EAT. I love food so much. Honestly, I have a personal goal to try every restaurant in the vicinity, from all over the CBD to Club Street and Chinatown. I think food is great. I also really enjoy Netflix in bed, with snacks of course!! I truly believe that in moderation, bed-rotting is fantastic.

I also love to create! It’s something I haven’t done in a bit, but I love making things and working with my hands. I love sewing and sculpting clay. I am not the best at painting or drawing, but I’ve always loved oil pastels (not great with them, but it’s fun). And of course, I love to travel. I want to see and experience the world, meet new people, try new foods, see the sights, and simply admire the world around me.

How would you like to chart your journey in the next 3–5 years? What are the things you are aiming to do and are striving toward?

I want to be strong, I want to be JACKED, I want to learn to move as well as I possibly can. When I tore my ACL, I never rehabbed it as well as I should have, and it caused a lot of imbalance in my strength and size. I would love to get back to how I was before surgery—better late than never, right? My current short-term goal, as I write this, is to get back my pistol squat on my injured leg!

Over the longer term, I aspire to be able to move the way children do. I’ve always admired the way children move and play—it truly shows how much the human body is capable of, and that sometimes we’re just so out of practice and sedentary. I want to be able to do handstand walks, swing, and hang off poles; to throw big, heavy weights over my head; to be flexible, mobile, strong, and agile!

I was never the best in school, but I love learning. I hope to learn a lot in the next few years. Not just about nutrition and biomechanics or training and performance—I want to learn more about psychology, philosophy, literature, and everything in between. I really hope to travel more and experience the world.

What do you think are the two biggest ways in which people are miseducated about fitness? Explain!

Eating healthy does not necessarily result in weight/fat loss! Weight loss occurs when you consume more calories than your body burns in a day—this is known as a caloric deficit. Healthy foods can be really high calorie, too! Doesn’t mean it’s bad for you, really just depends on what your goals are. I never understood calories or how they affected my body before I got into the gym and started strength training. I think that finally learning this has helped me so much in how I view food.

Your muscles don’t do the actual ‘growing’ during your workout. The growth happens when you rest afterwards! That’s why it’s so important to prioritise rest, fuel yourself properly with what you eat, and eat enough protein. Other than helping our muscles grow, getting enough sleep helps us feel less tired, eating right will do wonders for you and how you feel, and eating more protein makes you feel a little fuller for longer!

What are three things people don’t know about you? Elaborate as much as you can if you like!

I’ve watched the TV series Gilmore Girls at least 7 times. I always say it was the show that brought me up. It’s my comfort show—something I can play in the background because I know what’s happening in the episode just by the dialogue.

I am terrible on two wheels. I’ve fallen off a bicycle (fully able to ride a bike btw) on a straight road and scraped my knee. Unfortunately, it’s happened more than once, too…

I’m hypermobile! If I could show you through this newsletter, I would. It’s my party trick to let people bend my thumb back—it’s like a really extreme hitchhiker’s thumb, and it freaks people out. That’s always fun…

Enjoy a complimentary Personal Training session

New to Level? Start your first consultation with us.

To make sure this is the right place for you we provide a complimentary personal training session for us to learn about your current exercise program, lifestyle, fitness goals, and for you to experience our facilities.