How a Vegas fitness influencer built a brand worth millions

That’s the time to beat. And it runs around and around in his mind with a velocity that he aims to mimic with his feet, toes tucked into bright pink shoes.

Troy Adashun eyes the finish line, bookended by a pair of laser timers overseen by his coach for today: former pro football wide receiver Aaron Hargreaves, whose imposing 6-foot-5-inch frame culminates in a pair of brick-sized calves.

It’s a shade past 6:30 a.m. on a Thursday that could use some shade, the sun hanging low and hot over Adashun’s thick, tattooed shoulders, adorned most prominently with a lion sporting a bejeweled crown.

He pistons his knees into his chest, hopping in place, limbering up, getting ready to try to best an Olympic world record in the 100 meters.

The Vegas-based fitness influencer, burgeoning sports nutrition magnate and YouTube star has spent a month preparing for this moment in early August at the Green Valley High School football field. He’s run sprints while towing a weighted sled loaded with 100-plus pounds for weeks on end, studied his form down to the angles of his shins relative to the ground and subsisted on a high-protein, high-volume diet to cut weight to improve his speed.

“Every 3 to 4 pounds you lose, you’re, like, 0.2 seconds faster,” he notes, having dropped 7 of them to get down to 193 pounds.

Now, sprinting is a simple act, or so it seems, but the sport possesses deceptively complex mechanics: To get that all-important burst off the starting line, everything matters, right down to the position of your fingers on the ground and the elevation of your backside.

“I’ve really got to focus today,” explains Adashun, a naturally outgoing, team captain type, exuding an air of anticipation tinged with anxiousness. “I have a tendency where, if no one was telling me my form, my butt wouldn’t be up high enough, and then you don’t create enough horizontal force backwards.”

Superhuman Troy

Adashun, 37, is filming a video, “I Trained Like an Olympic Sprinter,” which follows him for a month leading up to today, when he puts all that training to its final test.

His wife, Kathy Adashun — a fit, frequent presence in his clips and better known to fans as Kitty Gains, which doubles as the name of her fitness clothing brand — sets up a series of cameras around the track and rides alongside her husband as he runs, filming him on her phone.

The 12-minute clip will debut on his Superhuman Troy YouTube page in three days, timed with the finals of the men’s 100-meter race in the Paris Olympics.

Over the past seven years, Adashun has released hundreds of videos like this, earning more than 60 million views and 746,000 followers on YouTube.

During that span, he co-founded fast-growing fitness lifestyle company Alpha Lion, which is on track to earn over $200 million in sales this year, Adashun says.

It’s all made him an increasingly popular figure in an increasingly popular field: According to fitness business website Exercise.com, there are around 50,000 “fitfluencers” on Instagram alone, with the online fitness market generating over $5 billion annually.

Adashun has built his brand with increasingly elaborate, documentary-style clips that often follow some sort of 30-day challenge that can take his video editor 30 hours to construct from all the footage he generates.

As Adashun prepares to make his run, to see if all his efforts will pay off or if he’ll come up just short, he feels the jitters.

“As I walked on the track, I was so nervous,” he confesses in a voice-over. “I was scared I’d give it my all and it wouldn’t be enough.

“If I want to be superhuman, I needed to block it all out and focus,” he continues, dramatic music swelling like a flexed biceps. “And then I took off.”

‘Silly guy at heart’

Gazing into the camera with a wry grin, which is nearly as much of a fixture of his physical bearing as his tattoos, Adashun is threatening to lock himself in a closet for eight hours — with eight snakes.

This would be his self-imposed punishment should he fail to fast for 18 hours every day for a week.

A typical fitness video this is not.

The threat has some teeth to it, literally — Kathy Adashun later notes that a rattlesnake was recently spotted outside their home high in the hills of Henderson.

The scene is from Adashun’s 2023 video “I Went From Fat to Ripped in 30 Days.”

How’d he get “fat”? — i.e., you can no longer bounce a golf ball off his abs.

Sad story: One of his cats, Hulk — he has four others, frequent guests in his videos — died from a tragic accident, and Adashun resorted to binge eating to quell his sorrow.

The clip — funny, heartfelt and full of expert fitness advice all at once — follows him as he labors to drop the weight over the course of a month with a series of weekly challenges.

It also helps answer the question: With tens of thousands of buff-and-bronzed fitness influencers vying for your eyeballs and trapezoids, what makes Adashun stand out?

Well, he’s a character in an industry largely devoid of them.

“Troy is kind of a silly guy at heart, even though he’s got all the muscles,” notes Cordero Roman, Alpha Lion’s brand director, who formerly served as Adashun’s videographer. “A lot of times people with muscles take themselves way too seriously.”

Setting himself apart

Adashun takes his workouts seriously, if not himself: Among the nearly 500 videos on his YouTube page are plenty of extremely demanding training routines utilizing Adashun’s trademarkBalloon Method, a science-based approach incorporating a mix of overload, tension and intensity sets named after the ballooning effect they’re intended to have on your muscles.

Their grueling nature is leavened by Adashun’s Dwayne Johnson-esque mix of physicality and charm, though. Clearly, he loves the camera — Adashun even took acting lessons for a time in his early 20s while living in L.A.

“I was in a few really bad independent movies,” he says. “You can look them up on IMdB.” (We did. “P.U.L.: Project Urban Legend,” anyone?)

His loose, equally self-assured and self-effacing presence is what helps separate him from his perfectly toned peers, plenty of whom are no more mirthful than a barbell.

“At the end of the day, everyone’s in good shape,” Adashun says of his fellow fitness influencers. “What’s going to separate someone from being in good shape and getting a lot of attention and a lot of true fans is personality, being able to connect with people.”

A dream dashed

In a way, Adashun’s success is rooted in failure.

The son of a prominent real estate agent, he grew up in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a town of 40,000 about an hour’s drive north of Milwaukee. But with his tatts, tan and traps, Adashun doesn’t immediately register as the Midwestern type.

“Troy’s, like, the most un-Wisconsin, Wisconsin guy of all time,” chuckles Roman, a fellow native of Adashun’s home state. “I’m like, ‘There’s no way you aren’t from Miami.’ ”

Ever since he was a kid, Adashun felt destined to become a pro basketball player, practicing three to four hours daily to transform his hoop dreams into reality.

“It was basically, like, be a pro basketball player or life has no meaning,” he recalls.

Adashun attended renowned sports prep school IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, which has produced nearly two dozen NBA players since 2005, most recently young pros such as Zach Edey, Jarace Walker and Keyonte George.

“If I didn’t have that experience, I don’t know if the whole ‘superhuman’ thing would ever have come to fruition, because I got to see firsthand the world’s best athletes, like, in high school,” Adashun says of attending IMG. “I was just like, ‘I want to look like that guy; I want to be able to perform like that guy.’ ”

While Adashun played collegiately at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, before transferring to Florida Atlantic University, he began to realize that making the pros as a 6-footer was the basketball equivalent of sinking a jumper from midcourt: the definition of a long shot.

“I could have maybe made a big push and played in some obscure country,” he says, “but I just wasn’t ready to live that kind of lifestyle, live thousands of miles away.

“It was probably the roughest part of my life,” he continues. “I kind of lost my identity a little bit, because I was identified as being this future pro basketball player, and then all of a sudden, I’m just, like, a college dude who knew in his heart he wasn’t gonna make the pros.”

A new dream is born

Adashun pivoted, devoting all of the time he spent on basketball to working out instead.

“I became obsessed with it,” he says. “It was that new thing I could really put all my passion into.”

He started writing fitness blogs to help make ends meet in college and did some fitness modeling. He moved to Los Angeles and, in 2015, was hired to become the face of YouTube channel the Weight Gain Network, which focused on helping skinny guys get jacked, a transformation that Adashun had made himself.

He began to see the potential of online fitness training, launching his own YouTube page on Jan. 1, 2017.

That year, Adashun met his future business partner Jordan Fares, an Australian native living in Colombia, who was doing consulting work for a fitness brand and contacted Adashun about working together.

The two hit it off. Alpha Lion was born.

“We had this idea, ‘Let’s start our own supplement company.’ Because at the time, we saw that there was so many (lousy) formulas and products,” Adashun says, “and we’re like, ‘Why is this formula so bad? This probably cost $3 to make.’

“We were both around 29-30,” he continues. “We’re like, ‘Either we do something now or it’s not gonna happen.’ And we saw supplements as the perfect category to get into.”

Booming business

It’s a Monday afternoon in late July, and we’ve entered the house that Hulk Juice built — or helped pay for, at least.

Troy Adashun reaches for a metal plaque shaped like a little gold shopping bag in his home office.

Small in size, the award from e-commerce company Shopify is much larger in terms of what it represents, earned by Alpha Lion upon hitting a lofty sales milestone.

“We just had our millionth order on our website,” Adashun says. “But that’s just our website. We also are really big on Amazon, which is a massive revenue stream for the company.

“SuperHuman Pre-Workout was the No. 2 pre-workout on Amazon in the U.S. last year,” he notes of Alpha Lion’s energy-generating fitness supplement. “The only one bigger than us is C4, which is like a 20-year-old company.”

The wall to his right embodies Alpha Lion’s booming business model: It’s lined with shelves of brightly colored tubs of dozens of pre-workout supplements with bold, eye-popping graphics commemorating a three-year stretch in which Alpha Lion put out a limited-edition new flavor every month.

The sweet taste of Slaughtermelon

Like Adashun’s videos, Alpha Lion’s product line emphasizes personality and irreverence in a space that has traditionally lacked both, with pun-heavy — and often trademarked — flavors such as “Mango Veiniac” and “Gainy Smith Apple” in addition to Halloween-, Las Vegas- and “Back to the Future”-themed offerings.

“We always just wanted to lead with fun first,” Roman explains. “Most people dread going to the gym, and if we can try to make it more fun and make it more exciting and entertaining, that’s the goal.

“It was like, ‘How do we take the science element of supplementation and infuse more humorous personality?’” he continues. “It’s definitely needed, because all those other brands are all carbon copies of, ‘We’re the best’ and ‘Everything’s extreme.’ I was like, ‘What if we take a step back and we could poke fun — not at the industry — but at the seriousness of it.’”

Hence, the advent of Slaughtermelon Superhuman Sleep Aid and Cinnamon Swole Cereal Superhuman Protein.

“Their branding is a little bit tongue in cheek, a little bit fun, definitely a little bit over the top as well,” says Ken Huntley, vice president of merchandising for GNC retail nutrition chain, which carries Alpha Lion products. “The brand itself kind of carves out a really unique position relative to a lot of the other brands that we have at GNC.

“When you look at their marketing, their branding, their packaging, it sticks with you,” he continues. “It’s catchy, and then you look under the hood a little bit, you look at the formulas, at the products, at the great flavors that they have, and you realize that the product also works, and delivers on that fun.”

Big muscles, big business

According to the Expert Market Research website, the global sports supplement market reached a value of $22.28 billion 2023 and is expected to more than double over the next decade.

Alpha Lion has ridden this wave to great success: Adashun says that the company now has 50 employees and is worth $30 million to $50 million based on standard multiples of the company’s profits this year.

In a way, Adashun is a natural for the industry: He started taking supplements as a teenager and has been immersed in what gets results — and what doesn’t — for decades.

“I knew, like, every supplement, every pre-workout, every protein powder,” he says. “I knew the branding of the supplements that were popular and the branding of the supplements that weren’t so popular. I just had so many years of knowledge on supplements.”

In developing the Alpha Lion brand with Fares, the two dug deep into the science of supplements, trying to shine a light through a murky industry in which products don’t have to go through the FDA-approval process because they’re classified as food products — and so their quality can be hit or miss.

“Even in 2017, there was a lot of studies on different ingredients,” Adashun explains. “It’s just a lot of research of what ingredients combine the best. Nowadays, we have full-time scientists. We have a whole team, but back then, it was just Jordan and myself on our laptops, doing a ton of research, sampling with the manufacturer, getting people to give feedback on it. It was sort of like the Wild, Wild West back in 2017.”

Humble beginnings

Their first year, Alpha Lion did $50,000 in sales with little marketing acumen, just Adashun promoting the brand on his YouTube channel, where he was cranking out a video a day for weeks on end during some stretches.

They didn’t have the dozens of employees they do now. The customer service number was Kathy Adashun’s cellphone.

The next year, they sold five to 10 times as much.

In 2019, the company began generating enough revenue for Adashun and Fares to start taking salaries after reinvesting all of their profits in the company the previous two years.

In 2020, when COVID hit and there was a surge in people working out at home, the business blew up. (When Adashun starting making real money, he moved to Las Vegas because he dug the city and really dug Nevada’s lack of state income tax.)

‘It’s always something’

Alpha Lion subsequently made the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies — this year, it ranked as the No. 465 fastest-growing private company in the country, No. 36 in consumer goods and No. 5 fastest growing in supplements.

“It was an incredibly fast-growing partnership from a growth trajectory,” Huntley says of how Alpha Lion’s products have fared at GNC. “It continues to be a really important brand for GNC.”

In addition to said retailer, Alpha Lion’s about to launch in every Vitamin Shop as well.

“Each week, there’s just so much going on,” Adashun says.

And he’s at the center of it all, along with Fares.

On the day we visit Adashun’s home, he and his wife got up at 5:15 a.m, headed to the UNLV track to shoot thumbnail pictures for his sprinting video at 6:30 a.m. and then hit the gym.

He’s since touched base with the company’s accountant and their head of talent — Alpha Lion is finalizing another new hire, this time for social media marketing manager.

Adashun is juggling numerous projects, including the launch of his upcoming “The Ultimate Superhuman Cookbook” — “I think the cookbook will be a huge revenue stream,” he predicts — and ongoing plans to turn the SuperHuman brand into “the Nike of the energy category.”

At 1 p.m., he has to pause our interview for yet another call.

“It’s a fast pace. Nonstop,” Kathy Adashun says while her husband is on the phone. “Every day is different, either we’re filming or scripting new videos, new ideas. It’s always something.”

An Alpha Lion never sleeps

“Finish! Finish! Finish!”

Troy Adashun is barreling down the track, his breath leaving his body in audible huffs and puffs like steam from a locomotive, as Hargreaves bellows encouragement.

Adashun is about to find out if the last month of dieting and training has paid dividends

He ran a disappointing — by his standards — 12.65 seconds at the beginning of the challenge, meaning that he’ll have to make serious strides to beat 12 seconds, the mark he’s aiming for.

Adashun looks to Hargreaves for his time, chest heaving, face awash in sweat and anticipation.

Then comes a grin nearly as wide as his shoulders.

“I got 11.65,” Adashun beams, goal met.

Oh, about that Olympic record: Did we mention that it’s from 1896, set by Thomas Burke at the first modern Olympic Games?

Like most of his challenges, this one was done with a wink.

‘Why do I even do this?’

As Adashun and his wife walk back to their Mercedes-Benz SUV, he shares some news: Baseball Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. is investing in Alpha Lion, bringing a big name to the brand.

A few days earlier, back in his office, Adashun strikes a philosophical tone as he ponders his company’s success and what it means to him moving forward.

“I spent a lot of time in the last year or two, like, ‘Why do I even do this?’” he says. “’Why do I want to make videos? Why do I want to own a fitness company?’”

His answer may seem superficial to some, life-altering to others.

“If you put an effort in, you can improve your body,” he says, “even though that seems like not that important of a thing in the overall scheme of things, think about how much more confidence you have in every area of your life.

“Like, imagine a guy,” he continues, “you’re really insecure because maybe you’re overweight or you’re really skinny. That affects your work, your confidence, your dating — everything. So, I think it’s a really cool lesson that if I can just put in the work, I can improve my body, I can improve any facet of my life. I can improve my finances.”

He smiles.

“Maybe I can even start my own business.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram.