This Olympic Medalist Innovated With Tights That Help Maximize Workouts
An Olympic medalist as a fencer, Keeth Smart co-founded Physiclo and wears the product.
NEW YORK — When Physiclo co-founder and Olympic silver medalist Keeth Smart lived and trained as a fencer in Eastern Europe, he found the equipment to be, well, shoddy at best.
“It’s all rusted crap, stuff we would consider condemned by American standards — like, really dangerous,” Smart said.
Years of stress on his body from negligent trainers and poor facilities in Bucharest, Kiev and Warsaw left his joints tattered and sore. Instead of the normal equipment available, Smart settled on using primarily resistance bands — which, he felt, was the only effective and safe exercise available — and ankle weights. But, it was his overuse of ankle weights, spurred by suggestions from trainers, that has left him with tendinitis and arthritis today.
Smart’s experiences with substandard equipment, subpar trainers and outdated training regimens gave him a sense of higher purpose in his post-athletic career, inspiring him to help prevent athletes from going through the same physical toll that he did during his career. So he co-founded Physiclo, a physical apparel wear company that specializes in resistance band-embedded clothing — an offshoot of the technology he had adored in the former Soviet bloc — used to enhance a user’s workout.
There are four apparel wears available for use: for men, tights and shorts, for women, capris and tights. Each has resistance bands and panels going down different directions of the clothing’s interior. There’s a precise directionality to all band and panel placement in order to ensure equal, proportional resistance to take place no matter where you move your body. For instance, when you move your leg forward, you should feel the resistance trying to take your leg backwards, and when you move your leg backwards, you should feel a strong tug forwards — same goes for movement from side to side — but when you’re standing still, there should be a net tension of zero. This provides a full range of motion of resistance, allowing for harder and more comprehensive workouts.
The mesh fabric used to surround the resistance panels is also pretty unique. It has a high spandex content, and is rather heavy compared to the fabric you’d find in a normal compression short. It has an elastic strength that, if you pull it, feels like you’re pulling on an elastic band. The fabric, in partnership with the aforementioned panels and bands, provide added tension on the body.
The goal of the company, in Smart’s eyes, is to ensure that no other person or athlete that uses his product will ever be subjugated to the trials that Smart was — in the Eastern bloc, but also in Algeria.
From the ICU to COO
Two months before Smart sparred and parried his way to a silver medal in men’s team sabre at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, he was dueling a whole different beast — one of the microscopic variety.
This enemy, rather than poking at his exterior, was eating at his interior. The blood disease, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, or ITP, doctors said, could prevent him from walking ever again. The culprit? Spoiled chicken that he had eaten in Algeria while there for a competition.
“I’ve never been back to Algeria since — I’ll never go back,” Smart said. “At the time, it was like a police state, like out of Mad Max, there were spikes in the road and I was just like, ‘What the hell? Why am I here?'”
After Smart returned back to the United States, he immediately started to develop blood blisters — blood pimples — in his mouth, under his skin and in his eyes.
“I went to the hospital, and the doctors thought I was like The Walking Dead. At that point I knew something was wrong,” Smart said with a laugh.
A human being has anywhere from 150,000 to 450,000 blood platelets per microliter of blood — Smart had 5,000. If he were even to stub his toe, he would have bled to death.
He spent two weeks in intensive care, going through a litany of tests with radiologists, oncologists and hematologists, taking an “aggressive” amount of steroids — in Smart’s own parlance — and coming to terms with the end of his fencing career.
He recovered. After getting out of the hospital, Smart’s goal was to fight back and compete in the Olympics, then retire once and for all. He even made a deal with God to do so. But at that point, despite being ranked No. 5 in the world, a confluence of events unrelated to the parasites nicking away at his insides had worn him down to the brink of retirement anyway. His mother passed away shortly after getting out of the hospital. The aforementioned facilities and trainers in Eastern Europe left a consistent ache on his body.
So, after meeting future CEO Frank Yao in 2013 — who had just won the NYU entrepreneurial business plan competition while attending medical school at the same institution — he decided jump head first into the venture, quitting a six-figure job that he hated at an investment bank and taking over as COO of Physiclo.
Recalling from his experience in Algeria and from his miserable training sessions in Eastern Europe, developing technology of the same ilk was something that he was motivated to carry out.
Growing interest with athletes and David Stern
Physiclo specializes in compression wear that utilizes resistance band technology to enhance a user’s overall body usage and exertion.
Professional athletes are catching on to the new technology. Physiclo counts the New York Knicks, Indiana Pacers, former NFL wide receiver Brandon London, potential Olympic bobsledder Lauren Gibbs, former professional tennis player Patrick McEnroe and Olympic fencer Monica Aksamit as clients.
“The Physiclo gear can really help your mobility around the court, it can help you with that explosive movement, it can also help you limber up,” McEnroe said. “I’m not the most flexible guy in the world — I’ll admit it — so this really helps get my body loose, gets my body warm and gets me ready for that intense activity.”
“You can do anything in them, any workout that you do, you can make a lot harder just by wearing these pants,” Aksamit added.
The company has gotten the attention of not only the athletes who wear them, but investors as well. David Stern, among others, have stake in the company. In fact, Stern has been integral to the developmental process of the company, including the name. Before “Physiclo,” the team ran through a catalog of names, including “Skinesiology,” “Rxactive,” and “Remex,” which Stern nixed immediately.
“It was a play on remix and it’s a type of feather so it was like [supposed to mean] ‘lighter, faster,’” Smart said. “He was just like ‘it doesn’t roll off the tongue. It sucks.'”
Smart says that Stern is a phone call away, and refers to him as “our candid grandfather.”
“He also validates us a lot with the professional teams,” Smart said. “Obviously, you can’t just build a business with professional teams, but he puts us in touch with a lot of their decision makers.”
And while Physiclo has some of the requisite team partnerships and angel investors, innovative physical apparel, like many other industries, is slowly adopted by the general populace. From the ATM or the 3-point line to the Under Armour compression shorts and the Nike waffle sneakers, many innovations of time’s past — while they may have been better technology — took years to be universally accepted.
“It’s hard to change people’s habits, so something we thought would be more convenient for them was to build that activity — build that intensity — right into the clothing so that whatever they’re doing, they get the extra added effect of resistance to engage their muscles more and increase their daily calorie burn as a gateway to a more healthy lifestyle,” said Yao, Physiclo’s CEO and co-founder.
Smart cites physical trainers as the key to beat that generational gap.
“They’re the gatekeepers: the physical trainers,” Smart said. “They’re usually pretty fearful of adopting new products — they’re hard to sway.”
Physiclo’s Community Growth Director Kevin McMahon says that getting over that hump is all about validation.
“As much testing and science that you can do, it needs that hands-on experience, it needs that validation. It needs someone up in the community to start talking about it,” McMahon said. “It’s more about personal validation than scientific validation. The science could be out on a lot of things but people will not and may not want to try it. It’s like a ‘until one of my friends tells me to try it, I’m not going to try it’ type of thing.”
