Rev3 Motor Shield - motors active on upload?

Hey folks, so just getting started using the Arduino Rev3 motor shield with a Rev3 Uno attached. I'm getting to grips with the shield, but I think it's weird, when I press upload or connect a power source to it without giving it a sketch, the motors in channel A and channel B seem to take on a life of their own, and run forward and reverse at abandon. This seems very weird to me, and is totally undesirable to my project - is this a hardware problem or is this something that I can fix by coding? Just FYI, the first thing I have in the setup loop after serial.begin is setting the brakes for channel A and B to high - still doesn't seem to have any effect. It seems like the shield does whatever it wants until it's asked to brake the motors in the setup loop. Any help you guys could give me would be really appreciated - have a great day (: