Founder Stories | Anthony King, Founder & CEO, Traction Health

My name is Anthony King and I am the founder of Traction Health, formerly known as Origin Athletics, formerly known as Training Effects. I've been a tinkerer since I could pretty much hold a screwdriver. I had been tinkering with things that were not human. You know, the bicycle is the definitive invention of all inventions. It took humanity from being an average mover to and made them the most superior and efficient mover on the planet. So Training Effects was really the beginnings of that, looking at the bicycle and the human body and making them work better together, that ultimately led me down the path to realizing that the human body and a bike is really just an expression of fitness and really not a foundation. So I went looking more for foundational movement, and that led me to form Origin Athletics, which was expanding from the bike into running and movement and lifting and looking at all kinds of different foundational movements. And so I spent a lot of time breaking down running in the same way I had broken down cycling. From that, I created a blueprint for which I call the foundation of Fitness. You know, running is the ultimate foundation of fitness. Cycling is one of the ultimate expressions of fitness. And where a lot of sports injuries come from and a lot of over training come from are the fact that we don't continuously work on that basic toolbox, because those are the foundations of fitness. And so one of the challenges that I faced was when I realized, first of all that the human body, you know, it's not broken, it's beautiful. It's an incredible result of millions of years of evolution. And nothing can beat evolution. So if you want to look for things and see how they work, just look at what you have right now, because it's already a refined instrument. And that was a big paradigm shift for me. And I realized I started out selling products that I thought would help fix the body. And then I realized I don't need to sell products that fix the body. There's nothing wrong with it to begin with. What I need to do is start selling products that help the body adapt to the environment that we've created for it. One real obvious one is flat surfaces. Floors, roads, sidewalks, these are all things that don't exist in nature anywhere. And the human foot, which is by far the most sophisticated piece of engineering anybody will ever see, does not do well on flat surfaces. And that's where a lot of our chronic pain comes from. But there's nothing wrong with it. And that's been why the approach, I think up till now, with orthotics and other things, has been a failure because we are under the assumption there's something wrong with our foot and there's not. I created, but then wound up co creating with somebody else was an insole that essentially acts like an adapter and, and allows the foot to function quite normally on a flat surface. So my first real invention in the biomechanics side of things wasn't really an invention at all. It was a tinkering that led to finding a product and a partner to co develop that with. And so the next creation was looking at standing workstations, which are a great idea. Sitting is not a great idea. But ultimately a lot of people get to stand. Workstations fail because they get too tired. And I was like, this doesn't make any sense. We're built to stand. So why, when we spend all day standing, do we not get better at standing? In fact, we get worse. Back to the flat floor. Well, the thing we're doing, the common element, is that flat floor we're standing on and that fatigues us. So I developed a map which I call ground feel, that essentially creates a constant random surface for you to stand stand on all the time. So you're never standing on a flat surface. And as soon as you stand on it, your foot just relaxes because it's not fighting the intolerance of the flat floor anymore and making standing completely sustainable. So I spend 12 to 16 hours a day standing. I don't even notice that I'm standing. It's just natural to me. So once I completed the mat, I knew I was onto something. Looked at not only just the standing, but how to help people so stand better. And so I developed a specialized wedge that comes along with the mat and you stand on it and it stretches all the key muscles that help you stand. It builds strength in your feet, and you can do this while you're just standing, working away. You don't have to go to the gym to use this thing. It just sits on the floor and you can tinker around with it. If you need to stretch some things out or getting sore, you can do it while you're standing and working. I'm about to launch basically my website blog. I've been coined a few times, the Health Hacker. So I'm going to be launching healthhacking.net and that's going to be the pure educational piece where people can just check out the kind of things that I'm working on or the type of things I'm researching, and then from there you'll be able to follow Traction, health and watch the journey for the next five years and hopefully come and participate. I walked into Lodge Academy after meeting Chefin on an event called Uberpitch. So I found Launch Academy the next day, signed up within a couple days and moved myself in a week later. And I meet Chefin in the hallway. He's like, hey Mikey, I'm here already. I'm here to work the LEAP program. You know, the ultimate goal of the LEAP program is to get you and an investor together and to make sure that, that you don't waste a lot of time. You know, that's ultimately it. And so we had this five week program where we're building our business from scratch. We're building an investable business and a pitch. I was only halfway in to LEAP program and I got my first round of investment to say that, you know, I mean, LEAP is directly responsible for my first round of investment and will probably be directly involved in my second round of investment. You know, I mean, I worked, I worked hard. And like anything, I think Leap teaches you that there is no other option, there is no shortcut. You work hard and fail quickly. If you don't work hard, you'll fail slowly and then you'll really fail. Two months of education here in the, out there in the university environment and wherever would have cost you 50, $100,000. I mean, just ridiculous sums of money and time. Mine. Let me see, my return on investment was what, 20x? I think about 20x. So yeah, I think that's even a VC'd be happy with that.