Your first session is free, and you keep the plan either way Paddington, Brisbane

HomeThe coaches

Five coaches.
One standard.

We do not draw our coaches as photographs on this site. You will meet them in person on day one, which is a better introduction than a headshot.

The standard

What everyone here
has to hold

  • Cert IV in Fitness as a floor, and a degree or a decade for the senior coaches
  • Current first aid and CPR, checked every year
  • A working with children check, because we coach teenagers
  • Twenty hours of continuing education a year, paid for by the studio

Who is on the floor

The five.

DW

Dana Whitlock

Head coach and owner

Dana opened the studio in 2019 after eleven years in bigger gyms, most of it spent fixing programs written by people who never watched the lift. She writes the templates every coach here works from, and she still takes the 6:30 am small group herself.

Squeeze the bar before you lift it. Your shoulders take their orders from your hands.

Exercise science degree Programming Barbell technique 11 years coaching
MR

Marcus Reid

Barbell, and coming back from injury

Marcus competed in powerlifting for nine years and broke enough of himself along the way to be careful with everyone else. He takes the early barbell classes and most of the members who arrive with a referral letter in their hand.

Bar over the middle of the foot. Everything after that is decoration.

Powerlifting Works with physios Open gym 5:45 am crowd
PN

Priya Nandan

Conditioning and running

Priya ran for Queensland over 1500 metres and now spends her time convincing lifters that two easy sessions beat one heroic one. She takes Engine, and writes the running plans for members training for a first half marathon.

If you cannot say a full sentence, you are two gears too high.

Running plans Engine class Heart rate testing Level 2 athletics
TO

Tom Okafor

Small group and first timers

Tom takes Foundations, which means he meets almost everybody first. He is unhurried with people who have not trained in a decade and honest with people who want to start too heavy, which is most of them.

Start lighter than you want to. Week six is where this gets interesting.

Foundations Teens and beginners Strength 45 Cert IV
EM

Elise Marchetti

Mobility, pregnancy and after birth

Elise is a physiotherapist as well as a coach, and she runs the prenatal and postnatal side of the studio. She will happily talk to your obstetrician or your pelvic floor physio, and she keeps the notes so nobody has to repeat themselves.

Ribs down first, then reach. Range you can control is the only range that counts.

Physiotherapist Prenatal strength Return after birth Mobility class

Picking a coach

You are not locked to one. Most members see two or three across a week and every coach works from the same written plan, so nothing gets lost between them.

See who is on this week

Coaching here

We hire one or two coaches a year and we pay for the education. If you coach properly and you are tired of selling memberships, send us a note.

Get in touch

These coaches are invented for a demonstration site. The monograms are drawn, not photographed, and no real person is shown.

Meet one of them
for an hour.

The free consult is with whichever coach fits your goal. Tell us what you are after and we will match you.