Note: This year marks a decade since REP hired our first employee. It’s time to tell our story in a different way than we ever have before -- the real reason we’ve dedicated our lives to bringing high-quality, innovative gym equipment to the world.
Our purpose is to empower people to improve and own their lives.
We created Pursue Your Strength to share real stories about how strength training can change the world, one life at a time. Because when you start to feel strong on the outside, it changes you on the inside, too. That opens more options in life. In that, strength is a type of freedom. That's why we do what we do.
We do this for you.
Now here are your stories.
You can’t defeat someone who refuses to give up. That’s the string that weaves throughout Adam Brandt’s nontraditional path to success.
From the outside, Adam is the golden child of REP Fitness. He’s ever-present on REP's website, Instagram, and YouTube, fully confident, effortless, relaxed. Blond hair, blue eyes, big muscles, and a grin that can warm even Colorado’s coldest days. He's that all-American guy next door (yet slightly untouchable, so way cooler).
But Adam’s fight to get here has been everything but effortless.
Growing Up Different
Adam Brandt grew up in Flagler, a tiny eastern Colorado town that you’ve probably never heard of. His class had 11 kids – just enough for a typical football game, although the school could only find enough boys to play a six-man team.
In a far-away farm town, there was not much to do other than play sports, and that’s what Adam did all day, every day. Football, baseball, basketball, swimming – whatever sport was in season. The games taught him how to bounce back from adversity and how to thicken his skin, he says. They also taught him that sometimes success doesn’t look like you expected; it’s not always making the slam dunk but rather stealing the ball that sets up that basket for someone else. Success is hard earned and never linear.
These lessons would come in handy as he grew older and his schoolwork became increasingly challenging.
The assignments that other students were effortlessly sailing through felt insurmountable to Adam. When he sat down to do his homework, he couldn’t get it to click, no matter how hard he tried. And it wasn’t for lack of effort. As an athlete, Adam knew how to work hard and push himself; discomfort was no stranger. But when it came to sitting down and taking a test, his brain got all tangled up.
“You know the information but, in the moment, it just feels like you’re spinning your wheels, and that frustration just spirals,” he says. “The switches are not flipping. That frustration leads to saying negative things about yourself or feeling mad at the teacher who can’t help you find that missing piece to help you do these tasks all your classmates are just breezing through.”
Adam was diagnosed with ADHD. The traditional education system was failing him, but in an isolated town with limited resources, he didn’t have other options.
Hitting Rock Bottom
In seventh grade, Adam’s family moved to the Denver-metro area. He began trying various medications and enrolled in counseling to try to help his ADHD. But as he and his family searched for solutions, he noticed something else helped much more: movement.
His school offered a weightlifting class right after lunch, and he noticed that after exhausting his body in the weight room, his brain had the space it needed to focus. He did significantly better at whatever class came right after lifting.
He thought back on all the times he got in trouble for messing around in the hallway between classes. It was like he intuitively knew if he got that energy out, he’d be able to pay attention in class.
And research backs that up. Exercise has been found to reduce hyperactivity and impulsivity in kids with ADHD, and it can increase the levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, which are crucial for attention and focus. ADHD is often associated with lower levels of these neurotransmitters, so their increase through exercise can help alleviate symptoms. There’s a ton of research supporting the benefits of physical activity for improving attention and academic performance in children with ADHD.
Adam continued playing football, basketball, and swimming into high school, but he found that weightlifting had the biggest impact on his ADHD – so much that he was able to stop taking medication and attending therapy.
But by then, Adam had fallen too far behind in school. His senior year, he learned he wouldn’t be able to graduate.
“I hit a deep rut,” he says. “That was my rock bottom. My come-to-Jesus-moment when I realized I was about to become a high-school dropout.”
The Fight Forward
While Adam’s classmates graduated and moved on, he decided to keep fighting. Even if it took an extra semester, he would get his diploma.
He did it.
It was around that same time – certainly not a coincidence -- that he first saw the CrossFit Games competition on TV. He found a CrossFit gym nearby and began training there. This powerful, new outlet for his mental health gave him the focus and fortitude needed to compete in CrossFit and become a certified CrossFit coach.
“I saw a path to helping other people,” Adam says. “I saw the power it could have to help people, no matter what their issues were, because I knew the power it had in my life.”
Adam was a full-time coach when he ran across a job opening at a growing gym equipment company. He applied. He didn’t hear back. He reached out. No word. Time passed. He applied again, for a sales job. This time he got offered a job, in the REP Fitness warehouse. However, he wanted to help people directly. After a few months, he convinced the company to give him a chance on the salesroom floor.
After two days, they put him back in the warehouse and said it wasn’t a good fit.
He kept pushing. He just needed a second chance – like that second chance to finish high school. The road wasn’t linear, it was bumpy, and he needed a little more time to get there, but Adam was used to that. He had no quit.
They gave him another shot. He applied their suggestions. They loved him.
Adam moved into the salesroom, helping wherever he could, including building equipment for the other departments. One day, they needed someone to be in a video about a new bench. Adam was around, so they asked him to help.
From there, he became the account manager, a product specialist, and then as the partnerships coordinator, working with famous athletes and influencers. He got more and more involved with anything that needed help – until the near-high-school-dropout who didn’t get a call back for his first job application had climbed his way to becoming arguably the most recognizable face of the company.
Today, Adam does it all. He writes the scripts for videos, helps REP’s affiliates, is a critical collaborator in creative marketing projects and engineering brainstorming, and he travels the world sharing REP’s equipment with others.
REP’s mission is the same as Adam’s: to enrich other people’s lives through fitness, just like the gym improved his. It helped him discover an immense well of strength inside a neurodivergent brain. It helped him climb from heartbreaking rock bottom to a dream job: helping others by doing what he loves.
“I still struggle with those ADHD moments,” Adam says. “But the weight room has been the one constant through all of it. I know if I have that, I can do anything.”
