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Shannon Mackey is a personal trainer at Northern Illinois Combat Club and she also trains online! She loves helping her clients and she wouldn't trade this job for anything in the world. For her, being a fitness enthusiast not only helped change her life but others as well!

In her teenage days, she made sure she stayed very active. She was in track, cheerleading, and she took multiple dance classes from hip hop, Latin, ballroom etc. She didn't get into bodybuilding until she was in her early 20s. She met a great coach that saw potential in her right from the start. She always had a very high metabolism so it was easy to maintain her weight. She started doing bodybuilding competitions and she raised a ton of eyebrows instantly. With her very first competition, she placed 2nd taking home 2 trophies. This was such a huge highlight of her life. She was hooked on competing and wanted to win so after that she kept moving until her next show came. Next competition, she won! She placed first in Greenbay Wisconsin in 2020. She can't explain how happy she was to have this achievement.

The next thing she wanted to accomplish was passing a course for fitness instructing. She wanted to teach group classes aerobic dances. She went from various schools and gyms to teach elementary students and adults. Every time they came in, she just wanted them to enjoy themselves. For her, being fit is supposed to be enjoyable!

Amanda Essen is 26 years old. She's an EHFA & FISAF Personal Trainer, model, blogger, and IFBB bikini fitness athlete. She lives in Finland but she has followers around the world. She blogs daily and is active on Instagram too. Right now, she has over 51,3k followers.

Her Instagram username is @Svagtillstark which means from weak to strong in Swedish. She recovered from a weak and anorexic, sick, depressed, and burned out person, to a strong both mentally and physically, happy and inspired individual that wants to help and motivate people to get healthy. A lot of the recoveries that she does are with the great help of strength training that she found in 2012-2013, and the interest to start building herself up instead of breaking her down.

She also won the Miss Model of the World 2013 in Finland, but after that, she decided to take a step back from the modeling industry because she understood that it is not the healthiest lifestyle after a couple of model trips to Japan, France, Turkey, the United States, and the Nordic countries.

She's also been in Finnish radio, television, sports magazines, and even interviews, magazines, and media on the web. She also participated in the Swedish book. She became a Confidenza (a book to help and strengthen young women's confidence and self-esteem).

For her, it has been a long road but it's been worth it. Today, she helps with the knowledge and experience and wants to be more than happy to inspire and convey a wholesome and healthy lifestyle. She also competes in the bikini fitness category, works as a Personal Trainer worldwide, Fitness model, and Social Media Influencer.

Victoria Tapp is a NASM certified personal trainer. She's always been active. She grew up playing tennis, basketball, track, cheerleading, volleyball, etc. Once in college and graduate school, her athletic life slowed down like most. She needed to find something to keep her active and something that she also loves. That's where bodybuilding came into her play.

These days, she is traveling around the world a lot. Due to that, she only does online training now. It is a blessing for her to be in this digital age. She's able to obtain more clients and work with people from all around the world. She's also pursuing fitness modeling which is her other passion.

Miranda Maverick is a UFC fighter. She fought in the flyweight division that is 125 pounds, and right now, she is ranked 14th in her weight class in the world. She's been fighting for about six years. She started Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) about 7 1/2 years ago. When she started BJJ, she's almost 17 years old and grew a passion for it in just a couple of weeks. That is also when her MMA journey began. She's now a multiple world champion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and currently a brown belt. In MMA, some of her key accomplishments are turning pro before she turned 19, winning the Phoenix series 2 tournaments for Invicta FC, which was three fights in one night, & finally making it to the UFC after many hardships and times of feeling lost or hopeless

Nikki Bowman is a self-proclaimed athlete and women's nutrition specialist. She loves all things related to fitness, food, and spirituality. Growing up as a kid, she didn't always have the best approach to a healthy lifestyle and as a result, she struggled with many body image issues. When she was 13, her dad introduced her to the gym and began taking her on the weekends with him. Instantly, she fell in love with how weight training made her feel and how it was beginning to change my body. She also began to look at her nutrition more closely and educated herself on the constituents of a good diet so she could support her training. By 15, she made up her mind that the health and fitness field was where she belonged and where she should establish her career. She achieved her Bachelor of Science in human nutrition from the University of Guelph in 2018 and currently working in a health food store where she assists customers with nutritional guidance and supplementary support. She loves her job because it is so rewarding to help someone find empowerment in their own health. According to her, it also allows you to see the incredible impact that good nutrition and natural health supplements can truly have on one's life. She hopes to continue building her knowledge of nutrition and eventually open her own practice to assist individuals who may struggle with their body image or who wish to improve their relationship with food and exercise as this is a matter very close to her heart. 

Tara Jenkins is from Melbourne and has been in the health & fitness industry for the past 8 years & has been a high-level athlete since the age of 10.

She began her fitness career in track & field. She traveled all over Australia competing in 400m, 800m, discus, race walking & the odd pentathlon. She realized at the age of 10 that if she works really hard at something & dedicates herself to it, she can go places & achieve some great things. This cemented her mindset in life & still has that same work ethic to this day.

Once she became tired of track & field, she learned Gridiron & bodybuilding simultaneously as they complemented one another. She represented her state as a full back & running back & also gained sponsors within the bodybuilding industry as her athleticism & physique were in good shape to help promote these companies.

Towards the end of her gridiron career (she was about 28), she dived headfirst into CrossFit as she loved that it was so hard and there's so much to learn. She became obsessed with getting fitter, stronger & perfecting the movements. She focused all of my energy on becoming a better athlete every day and by the age of 31. She also represented Australia in the CrossFit Games.

She has been working on her strength & mindset every day in my garage & holding back until we get it all clear and she can refocus on competing again.  

Ashten Buck is a previous gold-winning competitive bodybuilder. But then, she has decided to give up the sport for something that's a little more... slow. She realized that the prep work of the sport was putting a lot of stress on her body. The overtraining and undereating were causing her hormonal imbalances and chronically elevated cortisol. Over the last few years, she has been incorporating Pilates and HIIT training throughout the week. Slowing down with pilates did not overstimulate her nervous system, and the HIIT training keeps her blood sugars regulated for the week. Even though she doesn't physically feel like she's pushing herself to the limit, her body composition is the best it has been since her competitions.

She is a Naturopathic Medical Student and her daily life is very busy. She has 11-course semesters with practicals. Aside from school, she also works for Healthy Planet, doing product education and creating educational content for their social media. Pilates has become a saving grace for her because she can do them from the comfort of her own home and choose the length/intensity of her workout. In her downtime, she likes to spend it with her partner and her dog Maverick. They usually go hiking, camping, or just hang out at home and do absolutely nothing.

Alyssa Lombardi is a Certified Running Coach, Certified Personal Trainer, and a Clinical Exercise Physiologist. She has been involved in sports all her life and has been at every level from beginner to college stand out and conference champion and this is how she did it. She started out playing soccer as a young child and loved it but found herself loving the running part of it the most. When she got to high school, she did both soccer and track but had a clear love for running. Even though she had a love for running, she wasn’t always the best. She started out running 2-3 miles at a time around 12 minutes per mile during practice, but she always raced pretty fast. She got down to running 5:15 for the mile and under 19 for a 5k.

She then decided to quit soccer and just focus on running so that is what she did. She got to college and she focused only on running. She started out her freshmen year one of the slowest ones on the team, barely being able to keep up with the team on practice runs.

Social media started as her own journal. For the first 2 years, she didn’t tell anyone she had a fitness profile. She felt a little embarrassed by it. But, as time went on, she saw she was connecting with more people so she thought of using her growing platform to help people just like she wanted to from the beginning.

From then, she started posting more educational posts. She has found that many people have learned a lot from her posts so her small social media page that she was keeping a secret has turned into a page where she helps runners succeed and hit goals they never thought they would.

Jenny Blake "the Nutritionist” helps ladies who work out build muscle and decrease body fat. She does a mix between Crossfit and BodyBuilding training. She's a nationally qualifying bikini and figure competitor. Through her experiences, she’s learned that Nutrition has the biggest impact on the outcome of their training. Once she learned the “nutrition strategy” for changing the shape, she went all in and became a Licensed Nutritionist. Now, she has helped hundreds of ladies build muscle and decrease body fat through my program Create Your Shape.

She's 32 years old and has been slow traveling the world for about 3 years now. Over this time she has lived in 5 countries. She even went to a Crossfit gym and took classes that were in a different language. She also loves trying all of the local cuisines. She's very proud that she has all of the nutrition tools she needs to live this lifestyle and still build my shape which motivates me to share it with others.

Currently, she's updating all of her systems in the Create Your Shape program so all of her ladies can implement their dashboard, macros, and implementation tools more efficiently. Between that project and reviewing check-ins, photos, and bloodwork for her clients, she stays pretty busy.  She's also in a Functional Nutrition course which requires a lot of studying. She loves learning all things about the body and nutrition and she finds this very challenging and interesting.

Have you ever been injured and been unable to run?

Maybe it was a sprained ankle, or maybe your knee started to ache after every run. Either way, it’s frustrating when you can’t do the one thing that makes you feel good. You want to get back out there and start moving again! But how do you know what to expect as your body recovers? And is there anything else you can do to speed up the process?

These some great tips for returning to running after an injury so keep reading! It will help give your body time to heal properly while still allowing yourself the chance of getting back into shape. The key is knowing what exercises are best suited for recovery and which ones are best avoided until your muscles are fully healed. By following these 5 simple steps, we guarantee that in no time at all, you’ll be able to return out on the road with no pain or discomfort whatsoever!