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GMX7, an athletic gear company, is making waves with a resistance training tool being used by over half of the Team USA Olympic swimming team.
Seven-time Olympic gold medalist David McCagg founded the St. Petersburg-based company. When McCagg trained for competitions and the olympics in the 1970s, his resistance training came from something called power towers.
When McCagg returned to the sport — after nearly four decades of focusing on his real estate career — he noticed swimmers hadn't upgraded their equipment. “This is no different than what we used, but this is after 40 years,” he tells Coffee Talk.
McCagg set out to make a change, first starting with the size of a power tower. Weighing upwards of 230 pounds, power towers aren’t easily transportable.
“Resistance training is the key to winning,” McCagg says. Noting the importance, McCagg connected with Sarasota-based product design company Robrady to see if some changes were possible.
“They said, ‘no, it couldn’t be done,’” he says. But just a couple of weeks later, CEO and Design Director Rob Brady reached out with an idea.
By the time Brady was done with it, the product was life-changing for swimmers. The X-1 PRO is compact and portable, being only six-inches long. The weighted device is hooked on a line that stretches the length of the pool. The resistance levels provide endless workouts for swimmers of all levels.
“In layman's terms, we developed the iPhone versus the payphone,” McCagg says. The device corrects a swimmers stroke and mitigates injury while providing smooth and consistent resistance.
In partnership with 12-time Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte, GMX7 started out testing the product with elite swimmers. Just a year and a half in, more than 750 X-1 PRO’s have been released worldwide. McCagg says that there hasn’t been a single return or bad review.
The X-1 PRO won a silver medal on the America by Design TV series, where Lochte, in the first episode, discusses the product’s impact on his life. “I’ve tried every resistance tool and, hands down, this is the best one,” Lochte says in the show. “If you don’t have this as a swimmer, you’re going to fall behind.”
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