Shannon Hunt’s journey to muscle goddess is marked by her battle with multiple cancers.
“They were immediately following each other, kids and cancer: Boom, boom, boom.”
Shannon Hunt’s tale of her fight with multiple cancers and auto-immune diseases sounds draining, but it doesn’t show in the positively glowing photos you see.
The New Orleans-born, but Houston-raised, Hunt says she was a salon owner for a time until an encounter with stage 4 melanoma, cervical cancer and thyroid cancer railroaded her career path.
“I think I was in a little bit of shock at first. I was very young,” she says. “But I got serious about what I was eating and what I was putting in my body.”
That eventually dovetailed into a fitness career. For the past eight years, Hunt has been steadily educating herself and gaining certifications to help guide others on the path of healthy eating and living.
Alongside former bodybuilder Dewayne Morey, she helped develop a new fitness system dubbed “Triple Action,” which works to develop muscle and strength without taxing the joints. From what she described, it appears to be a mix of band resistance training and weightlifting, with a burn-out set of repetitions in between.
That system, plus traditional weightlifting, is what contributed to those glistening muscles you see now. Her fascination with bodybuilding sparked several years ago when she saw models flexing their ripped bodies.
“I’ve probably always wanted to do it. Their physique looks so beautiful,” she said. “I tinkered around with it, and I did one show to get my feet wet.”
Since then, Hunt has competed in Musclemania and other shows, and ended up placing in the “Master’s” category. She’s hoping to compete on the East Coast and obtain a professional card, marking just one more step to the famed Arnold Classic competition.
Courtesy of: Houston Chronicle
