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.
Dan Staton has been relentlessly training year-round for more than two decades, all for one crucial second in time: the moment he pulls back the arrow and makes contact with the animal that will feed his family for the next year.
Dan, of Washington, is an avid elk hunter – although he says it should be called “elk hiking.” Come elk season in September, his personal “Super Bowl,” he puts his body and mind to the ultimate test. Hiking through the mountains while carrying a heavy backpack, trying to keep up with a massive, four-legged animal that seems to effortlessly climb and descend the rocky terrain. Crouched in the trees alone, braving terrible weather and the kind of exhaustion that comes from weeks without a warm meal or bed. Fighting the voice in his head insisting he should quit and go home to a warm burger and beer.
And that’s the easy part.
When he finally downs an elk, he says there’s a mourning process – something many people don’t realize about hunters. Unlike buying meat at the store, he says he feels deep remorse about the loss of the animal and holds respect and gratitude for its sacrifice. After honoring the animal’s contribution, Dan then has to prepare the beast, which includes hauling 100-pound elk hind quarters and shoulders on a grueling six-plus-hour mountainous hike back to his truck.
“My cross-training is a mix of strength and conditioning, intervals, and endurance. I need to be really strong pound for pound to be able to produce enough power to get up the mountain, and strong enough to carry back a heavy backpack and elk quarters,” he says. “And in my training, I need to bankroll the mental dividends needed to do it all. I need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
That’s Dan Staton’s strength – a mental and physical fortitude that he discovered when he first hit the gym in seventh grade; carried with him through training to be an NFL strength coach; fueled his passion of hunting; and enabled him to create a unique business, ElkShape.
Pursuing Strength
Dan grew up in sports: wrestling, football, baseball. But the summer before eighth grade, his life changed. A mentor brought Dan into the weight room and taught him the fundamentals of strength training and nutrition. Dan lifted weights all summer, and with the help of puberty, he went back to school 30 pounds more solid. The other kids didn’t recognize him.
“It did a lot for my self-confidence,” he says. “I realized if I put in the work, had discipline, and ate right, this was the byproduct. I was sold.”
He originally started lifting to help his sports, but he became more obsessed with the training. Before graduating, he knew he wanted to go to school to become a strength and conditioning coach.
He trained people to put himself through undergraduate and graduate school, where he got a master’s degree in sports performance and exercise physiology. He was doing an internship at an athletic performance facility in Arizona, working with professional athletes, when everything changed. Again.
A Different Path
It was a seemingly random idea.
“We should go hunting this fall for organic meat,” he suggested to his father.
Dan was still in college. He remembered going hunting a few times with his dad while growing up. It was casual and at the time, more about being outdoors and father-son bonding. But now he was driven by a passion for eating healthy and also aware of the treatment of much store-bought meat. So Dan and his dad got hunting tags and set out.
Dan went home with a 700-pound elk that filled his entire freezer for the next year.
But something was missing for him. The rifle felt too easy and impersonal. He felt an undeniable pull toward archery.
“This is where my path went a different direction,” he says.
If he continued on his pathway to become an NFL strength coach, he wouldn’t be able to take every September off to go hunting. He’d never master the bow and arrow. He’d have to eat meat he had no personal connection to. He’d never know what he was capable of.
It was an easy decision for Dan. He walked out of the NFL training center and walked toward the trees.
The Battle of the Bow
Unlike the summer before eighth grade, Dan’s progress for this new endeavor didn’t come fast. In the gym, he took a broad functional fitness approach to get fit in every way possible. He practiced shooting until his fingers were blistered. He quit jobs to focus on his goal; he was all in.
The first year he took his bow to the mountains, he came back empty handed.
The second year, too. Despite all his effort and time.
Then the third: nothing. The fourth. The fifth. Nothing. Nothing.
“Each year, I’d come back to the lab and ask: What other stones can I turn over. Do I need more sleep? To eat differently? Train harder? Get a coach? Take more lessons in archery?” Dan says.
He refused to give up.
It was year six. Day 10 of a seven-day hunt. Dan was in major overtime. He was weary, dirty, famished, freezing, and lonely, but more than all that combined: committed.
He had no words for how he felt when, after six long years, his arrow finally made contact. He rushed to the elk’s side and fell to his knees.
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I did it,” he recalls saying. And then, to the animal, “Thank you. Thank you for your life that will feed my family. Oh my gosh, all this hard work paid off.”
It was the same pride and satisfaction he felt when he returned to eighth grade after a summer in the gym, when he saw the evidence that discipline and commitment can transform your life.
“If I can work this hard for this, I can work this hard in other avenues of life too,” he says.
Sharing the Strength
Dan needed a way to blend his two passions: fitness and hunting.
“I wanted to share it with others – whatever their version is,” he says. “I want people to have passion, fire, and something that drives them to jump out of bed every day and live life to the fullest.”
He decided to open his own gym, and he founded ElkShape, a training program designed specifically for hunters and outdoor enthusiasts.
“Most of us, if not all of us, are stronger than we are actually aware of,” Dan says. “Our bodies are capable of so much more than we ask of them.”
But to Dan, the physical aspect of strength is just one layer. His strength starts with faith and family: the foundation of it all. When you’re strong in your faith and family values, fitness is next. This leads to strength in your career and discipline with your finances.
“I see strength in every facet of life,” Dan says.
Above it all, he says, strength means being the leader he was called to be. It’s caring for his family and helping thousands of people pursue their own strength through ElkShape.
The gym pointed Dan toward his life’s purpose and it keeps him tenacious enough to keep carrying the load. At its core, for Dan, strength is a type of connection -- a connection to a like-minded community, to his father, wife, and children. Connection to nature.
"That’s the most valuable part of why I hunt,” he says. “To get away from the constant bombardment of things that don’t matter to reprioritize my values. To get outside and be whole.”
He thinks that’s a missing piece in modern society. Whether you hunt or not, he challenges everyone to spend more time in nature.
“Set yourself free for a few days,” he says. “You’ll come back a better version of yourself. I guarantee it.”
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