In 1999, during her senior year of high school, Amanda Wheeler tore her ACL and meniscus on the basketball court. She had played sports every season since she was five, and in one moment that chapter was over.
More than 20 years and 25,000 training sessions later, Amanda, known to everyone as “Wheels,” is a certified strength and conditioning specialist who helps people break free from the all-or-nothing mindset around fitness and food.
And then, from building a gym to expanding her online coaching business with Everfit, her story is a reminder that big things are rarely built all at once. They’re built one piece at a time, by people who keep showing up.
An injury that opened a new door
Amanda grew up an athlete. She played sports from the age of five, until the knee injury in her senior year ended her plans to play in college. Physical therapy was supposed to be about recovery, but it became the start of something new. In rehab, she began lifting weights, and she quickly realized how much it changed the way she felt.
“Getting stronger, especially in the ’90s for women, felt so empowering,” she says. That feeling stayed with her, along with a clear sense of what she wanted to do with it. She wanted to help other people experience the same thing, especially those coming back from an injury the way she had.
From first clients to a lifelong career
What convinced Amanda to commit to coaching for good were the first people she trained. Watching them progress, get stronger, and move with more confidence was a feeling she hadn’t anticipated. The change didn’t stay in the gym, either. As her clients worked toward something physical, she saw it ripple into the rest of their lives. “I was blown away,” she says. “I knew that’s how I felt in my own life, but to experience that alongside other people, I definitely wanted to keep going.”
Personal training was often treated as a side gig rather than a real profession, and Amanda knew early on that this would be her career.
That career has since taken her from Bally Total Fitness in the mid-2000s to co-founding her own gym in Michigan. It then took her to New York City, where she spent 10 years as fitness director at a private studio before going out on her own online coaching four years ago.
From having support, to going on her own
When Amanda left her fitness director role to start her own business, she wanted to reach people all over the world online. She compared several coaching platforms, and on the surface they all seemed to offer the same thing. Then she found the one feature that made the difference: Everfit’s on-demand Studio programs.
With Studio, Amanda can build programs that run 12 or 16 weeks and let clients work through them at their own pace, without assigning workouts to specific days.
For someone who coaches people out of the all-or-nothing mindset, that flexibility matters more than it might seem. With Everfit, a client can train Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday one week and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday the next, with no guilt attached. “That was just a game changer for me.“
Over the past three years, Amanda has taken more than 200 people through her program. Beyond the structured programs, she uses standalone workouts in both video and written formats.
Her clients have also taken to one detail she never expected to matter: the animals that appear when they finish a workout. “They love getting the animals at the ends of their lifts,” she says. “They tell me about it, and they send me pictures.”
Looking back on the past
The moment Amanda had to dig in hardest came in her late twenties, when she and her business partner set out to open a gym of their own.
The first version of the gym was Amanda’s one-car garage, equipped with one squat rack, one barbell, a few dumbbells and kettlebells, and a big tire from the yard. When her business partner moved into a house with a three-car garage, they moved the operation there.
They trained out of that garage for about a year, through a frigid Michigan winter. Clients wore gloves to lift, and they kept coming anyway. “We were like, this is crazy that people are still training with us.”
Then people kept showing up, they kept adding equipment one piece at a time until the gym was fully built out. Eventually, they outgrew it and moved into an 8,000-square-foot facility. That gym, New Species Athletics in Royal Oak, Michigan, is still open today.
Making fitness less scary
Amanda‘s next chapter is Intro to Fitness, a project designed exclusively for beginners. There is so much fitness information online that many people don’t know where to start, and the sheer volume can keep them from starting at all. Amanda wants to strip that back. In her view, fitness comes down to a handful of movement patterns that can be combined in countless ways, and once people understand that, it becomes far less intimidating.
She plans to share more content on TikTok and launch a podcast, a website, and a series of mini courses that help people ease into fitness without feeling overwhelmed. Everfit will be central to that growth.
Having this app that I’ve already been working with, and taking it the next step and offering different things to more people, is going to make such a huge difference
Amanda Wheeler, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist
For a coach who once built an entire gym one mat at a time, starting people from square one comes naturally. Amanda knows that the first step doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be taken, and then taken again.
Ready to make coaching seamless for you and your clients? Start your free Everfit trial today.
Amanda’s story is part of our 6th Anniversary: All On Coach Spotlight Series.
In it, we sit down with coaches in the Everfit Community to talk about the moment they went all in: the decision, the risk, and what it took to follow through. Each story comes back to the same belief. Real progress isn’t powered by willpower alone.
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