From Almost Passing Out at a Local Match to Building the Product I Couldn't Find
, by Zane Vandergriff, 4 min reading time
I'll be honest — I didn't come into this as some lifelong fitness guy with a supplement
background. Early 2024, I was overweight, looking for something to get me moving, and
somebody introduced me to competitive shooting. That was it. I was hooked from the first
match.
What I didn't expect was that the sport would completely flip my approach to my own health. If you want to move better, perform better, compete better — you have to take care of your body. So I did. Over the next ten months I lost over 100 pounds. Not because I had a plan mapped out from the start, but because I had a reason to show up.
And then one afternoon at a local Tennessee match, in the middle of summer, I almost hit the ground.
I'd been running stages in the heat, eating in a significant calorie deficit, not paying nearly
enough attention to what I was actually putting in my body. A fellow competitor handed me an electrolyte packet and a bottle of water. I felt better within minutes. It was a small thing, but it stuck with me.
So I started digging.
What I found — and what I didn't
I went looking for a product that fit what I was actually doing — hours on a range in variable
weather, standing still and then moving fast, sweating the whole time, and needing my brain to work just as hard as my body. Shooting sports aren't what most people picture when they think 'athletic performance.' But if you've ever stood in a 95-degree Tennessee summer trying to call your shots and execute a clean stage run, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Most of what's on the market wasn't built for that.
The hydration products were mostly designed with endurance athletes in mind — marathon
runners, cyclists, triathletes. Heavy on sodium, light on everything else. Magnesium kept
showing up under-dosed or not at all, which matters because it plays a real role in how your
muscles function and recover. A lot of the products were loaded with sugar or artificial
sweeteners. And none of them were touching the cognitive side of performance.
That last part surprised me. Because in shooting sports, your mental game is half the battle — maybe more. Reading a stage, making fast decisions under a shot timer, staying composed through a multi-hour or even multi-day match. That takes real focus. And I couldn't find a single product that was trying to support both the physical and mental load at the same time.
The science on this actually isn't hard to find once you start looking. Alpha-GPC has solid
research behind it for cognitive function and focus under pressure. L-Theanine has been
studied pretty extensively — it promotes a kind of calm clarity, sharpness without the jitteriness, which is exactly the headspace you want in competition. And magnesium bisglycinate, the form we use in Active x Demand, absorbs significantly better than the cheap oxide forms most products use — your body actually takes it in instead of passing it straight through.
The product I wanted didn't exist. Clean label, no sugar, no artificial sweeteners, no caffeine — just the right electrolytes in the right forms, paired with nootropics that actually support mental performance. I kept searching. I kept coming up empty.
So I built it
Active x Demand didn't come out of a lab or a boardroom. It came out of a situation where I
genuinely needed something that didn't exist and decided to go figure out why.
Every ingredient is in there for a reason. Every dose was chosen intentionally. The goal the
whole time was to make something that handles both sides of what your body needs — the
physical and the mental — without any of the garbage that most products use to cut corners or chase a trend.
If you compete in shooting sports, or really any sport where you're grinding through long days outdoors, this was built with you in mind. Same goes if you work in the heat, train hard, or just take your performance seriously enough to care what you're putting in your body.
I made it because I needed it. I couldn't find it anywhere else. So here we are.
- Zane Vandergriff, Founder - POV Nutrition