THE ORIGIN OF THE AGILE RACK

THE ORIGIN OF THE AGILE RACK

By Shane Robert

We at Verse have said that the Agile Rack was born out of the Covid-19 pandemic when gyms were closed for extended months, often reaching, in many places, into a year or more. This is true but not the whole picture; it goes back much further.

As I have written in the past, I have been coaching people in one form or another for 20 years, starting at 24 Hour Fitness when I was a mere lad of 19. If any of those early clients are reading, I sincerely apologize. Fast forward 6 years and I took the leap from working for other people into opening my own training business. There was a gym local to my house, about a mile away, that was recently (re)opened and was looking to build out a pool of independent trainers. It was small and grimy, with two of the original York isometric racks as the only places to squat. Frankly, it was perfect for what I wanted. I hung pull-tab posters around the neighborhood and spammed the few internet outlets available at the time, mostly Craigslist, to try and attract new clients.

Michael, the founder of Verse, had been a very good athlete in his school days. He started playing tennis as a child, something he still does, and eventually became equally skilled at basketball. Michael was having the same joint issues that many washed up former athletes in their late 20’s tend to have, specifically shoulders and knees, but wasn’t ready to hang up his shoes entirely, even if it was recreation leagues. He happened to live in the same neighborhood that I was training in and noticed my many posters, eventually pulling a tab and contacting me. Michael was, at this point, already a successful entrepreneur, having invented the PlateTopper and in the process of expanding into the rest of the Topper family—cup, bowl, and ice. Given this background as an inventor, Michael was always looking at gym equipment with an eye for improvement. There is a lot of downtime in training sessions and much of our conversation filling that time centered on how we would change equipment to make it better or more friendly to the garage gym warrior (yes, even then we were thinking about this user group), specifically looking at how to make weight plates take up less space and how to add a noise dampener to metal plates. At the time, of course, this was just banter.

Life carried on and so did we. After a few years of training together, Michael moved and was too far away to continue our sessions with much regularity. We stayed in contact and would meet for training every so often, checking form and discussing new exercises to try to fortify his knees. This worked for both of us as my schedule by this time had become quite full. I had a daughter and was training an average of 10 hours per day, from 6am to 2pm, stopping to pick her up from daycare and then returning to train a couple more clients from 5pm to 7pm before rushing home for bath and bedtime. It was a hectic and tiring schedule but one that I had settled into. Then, suddenly, it all came to a stop.

March 16th, 2020 was the date everything closed. We had some warning, not much, but some,  that it was coming and that we should anticipate a two-week lockdown to stop the spread of Covid, as I am sure most reading this will remember. Two weeks turned to 3, turned to a 6, turned to 2 months, with no end in sight. With gyms closed, many people were mourning the loss of their ability to do more than bodyweight exercises and their lack of access to having a home gym. If equipment was even available, many of those people didn’t have space. I, too, found myself in this situation. While I would happily put a permanent squat rack in my living room, my wife would have none of it. In June, I got a text from Michael. He asked if I had any thoughts on how to make strength training equipment for home users. My thoughts turned back to the weight plate ideas we had in the years prior, before realizing that weight plates were no good if there was no way to use them.

At this time, wall mounted folding racks were starting to get quite popular. They took up less space since they folded up against the wall, but were still not practical for renters or people who lived in small spaces. How, we asked ourselves, can we make something for people like us, something that allows for real strength training without drilling into walls or taking over precious space. Thus was born the DoorGym.

I would love to say that we, Michael and I, are geniuses who recognized the best way to solve this issue, I sadly cannot. Rather than realizing the simplest solution, we decided an immensely complicated solution would be best. It is only with hindsight that I can say we had no idea that we were on the wrong track. Our idea, what we were calling DoorGym, was a kind of proto-smith machine with magnetic weights that lived in a door that could be installed in any house and, when not getting you jacked, could be used as…a door. I won’t get into the details of why this idea would be very difficult to accomplish, but suffice it to say that they are many and significant. It was during this DoorGym period that the idea to simplify came to us. If an ironing board can fold down and be stored in a closet, why can’t a squat rack?

By September of 2020, we had a basic concept and design for a squat rack with uprights that fold down and corners that fold in, dubbed (using our highly sophisticated naming convention) FloorGym. This had to be more than a simple, cheap squat rack. Anyone could make a low-grade folding rack. Heck, I’d used plenty of low-grade non-folding racks. We didn’t want that. It had to be gym quality equipment for the home. It had to be something that I, and my powerlifting clients, not only could use, but would use.

Our first prototype, built from parts ordered from McMaster Carr, was essentially a life-size erector set creation and weighed a ton. It was wobbly but proved that our idea was sound. We knew that there were areas of improvement, but were confident that we would have a product ready for sale by the end of that year. So great was our confidence that, at the same time that we were working on stabilizing the rack, we made plans to start community workout classes over Zoom. These classes, initially using bodyweight, bands and household objects, were a way for us to give back to our community, which was (still) without gym access, as well as acting as the base for a workout app that we intended to release with the rack. We could simply shift the classes to using more traditional barbell movements once the rack was released. The classes were a moderate success; we had decent class attendance and, I think, they were pretty good workouts.

Despite our ambition, our efforts to stabilize the rack were proving much more challenging than we anticipated. The goal we set out to achieve with this product was at home strength equipment for the serious strength trainer, someone who lifts heavy weights. All squat racks, if they aren’t bolted to the floor, have some sway or wobble. We knew that we couldn’t eliminate it entirely but we had to minimize it as much as possible. Many ideas were conceived and abandoned; many were tested as prototypes only to be abandoned. They worked, but not well enough for our standards. As simple as the idea was, a squat rack that folded, finding just the right way to fold it for the smallest footprint possible, while retaining structural stability and strength, was eluding us.

By mid-2023, long past the date that gyms had reopened, we finally seemed to hit upon a design that fit all of our requirements. It folded into a very compact unit and seemed like it would have the strength that we wanted. With the CAD model in hand, we spent the course of that summer searching for manufacturers to make us a high level prototype, which turned out to be harder than we once again anticipated. Finding manufacturers was easy enough. Finding manufacturers that made the product to our specifications and standards was not. Fortunately, we did eventually find a manufacturer who made an amazing prototype and we could, at long last, say that the Agile Rack was born.

By January of 2024, we started fulfilling our first units to preorder customers and by late February we had opened sales to all customers. Not ones to rest on our laurels, we also kept innovating, developing the lowest profile, heavy duty folding bench, which officially launched in March 2025, and a number of attachments and accessories for the Agile Rack, including spotter arms and a carry strap, with more to come.

I did not think, all those years ago training Michael to recapture his youthful glory, that our brainstorming would amount to anything. I certainly did not think that nearly five years after I received that initial text from Michael would feel so much longer than any of us, the whole team, including designers I didn’t even know were a thing, like Jane, our package designer, and Lola, our brand designer, thought it would. As much as we would have loved to have a product that was available to everyone shortly after conceiving of the idea, we know that the slow, meticulous design approach we took ensures all of our products are of the highest standard they can possibly be.