S4: Episode 11 – David Weck | Make Every Step Better

David Weck is a man who goes all out, all the time, every-single-day. He was an athlete, worked on Wall Street, an aspiring actor, a personal trainer, and he is the inventor of the BOSU Ball. His path to the invention of the BOSU is fraught with many things that he had to overcome himself. From multiple injuries, to rejection, to trying to find his way. Strap in because David’s life has been interesting.

Let’s start when David was in school. He was an athlete, he played football, and in his Junior year of high school, he broke his elbow. The surgeon who was supposed to help fix him up, actually caused his tricep tendon to rupture. They said that he would never be able to play football again, or perhaps any sport. David wasn’t even able to truly lift his arm above his head. He decided that this wasn’t going to be the end of his sports career, so he used sports tape to tape his elbow so tight that it would hold itself up on it’s own. He wouldn’t be able to bend it, but he could certainly play. He finished out his senior year this way, and he even went on to play college football.

In college, he was studying to go and work on Wall Street. He had just worked a summer job where he made a decent amount of money, and had to sit down with himself and realize that this isn’t what he wanted to do. He had been chasing his dreams his whole life, and now he was going to chase the dollar, and David was not okay with it. So he decided to change his fate.

He went into acting, got himself an agent, and started auditioning. He was rejected for over 2,000 acting gigs. During this time, he decided to become a personal trainer so he could make a living while pursuing his acting dream. Just another step on his fitness journey. He worked in a gym that didn’t pay him very well, but gave him that income.

During these years, he had gotten really into roller skating, and he actually wore them basically everywhere for around 6 years. He definitely tends to go all the way in on something he loves. This did end up causing weakness in his feet, which led to some serious lower back pain. He decided that he had to rehab himself so he didn’t have to live like this forever.

He was doing his rehab on a stability ball, which is a giant plastic ball that you can use to correct balance and strengthen all parts of your body. He started to get very into doing dangerous exercises on the stability ball, and one day he took a particularly nasty fall, hit his neck, and realized that he couldn’t keep putting himself in this danger. That night, he was laying in his bed, and he had an idea: “What if it was only half a ball?” That was the “Aha!” moment that was the first moment of the rest of his life.

From here he made over 100 prototypes of what we know of today as the BOSU Ball. He was making them out of wood. Each one took him over 100 hours to make, and he eventually got a couple big breakthroughs, one being Fitness Magazine. Where he had to make a whole BOSU to deliver to them in one night so they could feature it. He stayed up all night, created it, made it look beautiful, and dropped it off at their office 1 minute before the deadline.

From here, you can imagine that the rest is written in stone. The BOSU Ball is used everywhere for rehab, training, and strengthening balance. David has an incredible outlook on life, and an incredible fortitude and will to keep going forward, even when things are rough. Please, feel free to check out the whole interview so you can hear the story right from the man himself. It’s incredibly interesting and uplifting. Thank you guys, for joining us, and thank you, David, for such an incredible interview. Can’t wait to talk again!