How To Stimulate The Fastest Muscle Gains and Accelerate Growth Hormone Production

Joining Ben on the podcast today is author, inventor and scientist Dr. John Jaquish. Dr Jaquish and Ben discuss in detail some of the new, cutting edge technologies Dr. Jaquish has studied and developed that are shifting the way people build muscle, trigger more endogenous growth hormone production and stimulate greater bone density. Be sure to listen to the end to get the full details on how YOU could receive a free pass to an upcoming Mi40 camp! Topics Discussed: ⇾ The little known limiting factor behind faster muscle growth. ⇾ Cortisol, fat loss and cardio the truth. The only two things to master for a muscular, lean and healthy physique. ⇾ Ronnie Coleman’s diet and Bpak’s Vegan days. ⇾ The secret behind what Louie Simmons called “getting pasted sticking points”

Time Stamps:

6:35—The life changing news that shifted Dr. John’s trajectory forever. 10:10 – Bone compression and the minimum dose response needed to trigger bone growth in the hip. 17:40—The side benefits of loading bones to trigger growth and how to implement it. 20:00—Dense muscle and myofibrillar muscle growth. 21:05 – The Osteostrong Bone Density Protocol. 23:00—The Vitamin D and other key nutrients for accelerating bone density. 24:00—Reversing Osteoporosis and avoiding fatal falls by building stronger bones. 30:50—Where your muscles are 7x stronger. The need for variable resistance for optimizing training at every point of the range of motion. 32:40—What Louie Simmons used to get his athletes past sticking points. 41:10—Why sprinters have higher growth hormone levels and gymnasts have better bone density. 44:30—IFBB pros and bosu ball squats? 52:30—Cortisol, fat loss and cardio. The keys to building muscular lean and healthy physique. 55:46—The growth hormone and neurological benefits from instability training.

Full Transcript

Ben Pakulski: Welcome to another episode of the Muscle Expert Podcast. I am your host, Ben Pakulski, and as always we’re on the cutting edge of everything to do with upgrading your life, upgrading your muscle, and upgrading your health. Today’s guest, John Jaquish, is the creator of a couple of cutting edge technologies that we’re going to dive deep into. A couple of things that are challenging the paradigm of fitness and muscle building, which you know I love to do. I hate the idea that everyone’s stuck in their bias and they get in their own way because of their own self-fulfilling beliefs. John is definitely outside of the paradigm. He is a creator of something called OsteoStrong, which is a technology that is shown clinically to massively improve bone density, which for many of us isn’t a consideration until it is. I’ll tell you my own experience and share it in this podcast with bone density, and it’s actually something that may be very useful and applicable to you guys. John’s also created something called X3 Bar. He’s named it after three times the possibility for muscle growth. He’s got a lot of research backing his technology, and it’s something you can kind of do on the road. It’s something you could add to your routine to improve what John is going to suggest, endogenous growth hormone production, so your body’s own natural production. He’s just a really smart dude, a really cool guest, and I really enjoyed having him on the episode. Definitely listen to the protocol he’s going to recommend for optimizing growth hormone. I’m also going to give you guys a link in the show notes to a workout that he’s going to customize just for you on how to take advantage of his technology in the shortest amount of time for a immediate increase in growth hormone and thereby fat loss, by John’s suggestion. So, definitely check out the show notes at benpakulski.com/podcasts. This episode is graciously brought to you by ATP Labs. You guys know I have recently aligned myself with ATP Labs. In fact, the reason I did so was because these guys have a cutting edge manufacturing facility, and they bring in only the best ingredients. They literally have a guy on staff who travels around sourcing out the best ingredients, and then they have a team of formulators putting together only the most efficaciously designed products that actually have a purpose. It’s not just a mish-mash of things being thrown together because this one said to do this and this one said to do that. They’re actually doing it from a perspective of complimentary pairings of ingredients to make sure it’s driving the right pathway in the body. And for most of you guys, that doesn’t matter. All that matters is it works, and it works well, and it is what it says on the label, and it is the best quality products that I’ve been able to find anywhere. Check out atplab.com, and we are expanding their line, and as you guys know I will be coming up with my own designs and my own formulations in the near future, not to give myself a shameless plug. Also brought to you by PRIME Fitness USA. If you guys haven’t checked out PRIME Fitness USA, you know it’s the primary brand I use here in the Muscle Intelligence Headquarters in Tampa. Really, really great products for maximum efficiency in your workouts. They’ve got a bunch of other stuff if you’re just someone who wants to improve your workouts like rotate handles, like squat wedges for someone who… You’re not a great squatter, or maybe you want to improve your output in your workouts. Those are some simple things you can add to your regime that everyone can benefit from as well as having some of the best exercise equipment on the planet. Primefitnessusa.com, find them on Instagram and Facebook and also linked in the show notes. I hope you guys love this episode. Definitely stick around till the end to hear John’s recommendation for how to optimize growth hormone naturally, and a offer that we make to you as far as a way that you guys might be able to attend one of my camps here in Tampa for free. Drop me a review, guys, I love to hear from you. You should give me a shout out on Instagram and anywhere, and know that I will be the guy personally responding. So, it’s me and nobody else, and I’d love to hear from you. So that’s ifbbbenpak or themsucleexperts on Instagram. Peace out. Enjoy. What’s up boys and girls? Muscle Expert Podcast. I’m your host Ben Pakulski. I’ve got a friend of mine, John Jaquish on here, who’s got some amazing insights into training that you guys all want to hear about. You know me, being the paradigm breaker, being the paradigm buster, I’m trying to always bring in people who are thinking ahead of the game, people who are maybe doing things that are controversial to what you believe, so that we challenge the paradigm that exists in fitness and muscle building now. As I’ve said before, I believe that muscle building is 30 years behind where it should be. It sounds like a bold claim, but why are we basing our training off of what was designed in the ’60s by Joe Weider and these Weider principles? They’re absolutely ridiculous, and this gentleman happens to agree with me, happens to have some very unique thoughts on how we can not only hack muscle building, get the most out of our time, but also hack bone density. John, how you doing, man?

Dr. John Jaquish: Fantastic. Thanks for having me, Ben.

Ben Pakulski: Thank you for being on here. So, I know you’re doing a lot of really cool stuff. You’ve been in the fitness industry for a long time. You’re doing a lot of really cool stuff based around, like I just mentioned, really hacking bone density, hacking training to get the most of your time and effort. That’s what everyone’s after, right? No one wants to spend two hours in the gym. People want to have the results, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Ben Pakulski: Like, “Don’t teach me how to fish, just give me the damn fish!”

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Ben Pakulski: So ultimately, man, I’d love to dive deep onto talking a little bit about your history and how you kind of progressed into where you are now to start, to give our listeners an idea of who you are and what you’re about, man,

Dr. John Jaquish: Nice, nice. That’s probably the best start. So, actually this journey started, it was kind of a 50/50 between me being a college rugby player and very interested in athletics. I knew that training would get me a lot of places that I wouldn’t otherwise just be able to walk out on the rugby pitch and be successful. So, that was a thing for me. Then my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. She had me a little bit older, and so her greatest anxiety was, “I won’t be able to do the things that my son wants me to do.”

Ben Pakulski: Oh, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re a parent, you know, you want to be there for your kids. And so, she wanted to do stuff with me. She was an active tennis player. She was an athlete, and she’s like, “Oh my God, my bones are falling apart. I’m going to break something.” Then of course, osteoporotic fractures, specifically hip fractures, end almost as many lives, or a comparable number as many lives, as breast cancer.

Ben Pakulski: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Look, a lot of younger women don’t know that. So, she got these statistics and was terrified. And so, she says to me, “What can I do about this?” So I said, “Well, okay, let me look into it.” In looking into it I came to a very different conclusion to the rest of the medical community had come to with this disease. Let me also back up. I also came to the thought process of the fact that, if we can make something work for an elderly person, like if you and I trained somebody and they’re older, and we can show with a particular method we can grow muscle, they’re the most compromised, right? They’re the worst. So, if we can get somebody who’s not in that good of a place to be able to build muscle, and we get the muscle on them, then how does that apply to the rest of the population? Profoundly, that’s how it applies. So, I looked at my mother and I said, “I think I have an idea, because I’ve read all this stuff about gymnasts.” They stood out, gymnasts stood out way beyond what other individuals, other athletes did. Sprinters a little bit, but specifically gymnasts. It’s well studied because in gymnastics people pound on the ground the same way. Their form is exactly the same every time. So, that takes a lot of variables out of it, and you can really understand how the musculoskeletal system behaves in that very controlled environment. So, their bone density is two standard deviations above normal, so that’s super human.

Ben Pakulski: Great.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I thought, “Okay. It’s all about this impact.” However, we tell people low impact exercise is better or we have, for older people, swimming, or even for guys who lift, “You don’t want to be explosive, you don’t want to bounce the bar off your chest. You don’t want to do…” Box jumps have become popular now, but that was not popular when I was an undergrad. I graduated in 2002, so that was not even talked about then. So, what to do? So the joke was, “Hey Mom, you know you can become a gymnast,” and that was completely unhelpful for a woman in her seventies. But what I said was, “What if I could get the benefits of gymnastics without the risks?” And so, that took me down a path of creating a device that creates axial compression. It’s called OsteoStrong. So, it takes the axial bones, so this is the axis of my clavicle, and what I want to do is take this bone and compress it like this, right? But it has to be compressed at a very high rate. So, I learned through this process that 4.2 multiples of body weight, this is important for everybody listening to remember, 4.2 multiples of body weight is the minimum dose response to trigger bone growth in the hip. Now, we don’t know about the other bones in the body. But for the hip, that’s the one that medicine has pretty much focused on, because those are the fractures that kill people. If it’s 4.2 multiples of body weight you think, “Most people squatting are not getting that.”

Ben Pakulski: Not even close.

Dr. John Jaquish: Not even close. So, what I ended up doing, I created a device with a computer screen that’s in front of you that shows you biofeedback. Then you do four movements. So, one’s like an upper extremity movement where it’s almost like a chest press. One’s a lower extremity movement, kind of like a leg press. One’s like a deadlift, and the other one is similar to sort of a core crunch fetal position sort of thing. So, those are the impact-ready positions. So we’re mimicking impact, mimicking high impact forces or the positions that your biomechanics automatically go to. So, you trip and fall, you’re going to put your hands right here, right? 120 degree angle occlusion between the upper arm and lower arm, and your hands basically lined up with your clavicle.

Ben Pakulski: Yep.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re just going to put your hands up here, and you’re not going to put your hands really low. You’re also not going to do this. So, those positions are all known. So we identified all those positions, and there’s lots of research on that, and then allowed people to self-compress bone. So, they’re creating the force. Then they look at a computer screen, and it shows them how much force that they’re capable of producing. If they go to fatigue in those positions… Now, keep in mind this is fatigue that’s very different from what you get at the gym. The first time I did the upper extremity movement I did 700 pounds. So, it’s been a little over 10 years since I’ve been doing that, and now I push 2100 pounds.

Ben Pakulski: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s like 2100 pounds going through the small bones in my wrists. This doesn’t mean I can bench press 2100 pounds.

Ben Pakulski: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: If I could I would have leveled that, I think.

Ben Pakulski: It’s a static movement. Yeah, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Ben Pakulski: How would I lift that in the opening?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, it’s not what you want. It’s not static in that you can see somebody do it, and I’ll send you a link to a video of me doing it when I surpassed 2100 pounds. There is movement, but the movement is from the actual compression of the joint. You can actually see a change. The machine doesn’t move. The movement is from the compression of bone.

Ben Pakulski: This is massive, man. So, every one of my followers has joint problems, and injuries, and tendon things, from probably some degree of deterioration in the joints, tendons, ligaments. So, I think this is massively applicable for everybody, anyone who’s 30 year… I say to everybody, I make this joke like, you hit 30, it’s always the cliché, “Oh, you hit 30, it means we go downhill.” But man, I hit 30 and shit started to hurt. And I do lift heavy, right? But what you’re saying is we’re probably never hitting that threshold of joint compression unless you’re doing something like jumping-

Dr. John Jaquish: Correct.

Ben Pakulski: … and landing repetitively to really hit those thresholds of-

Dr. John Jaquish: And in your biomechanics you’re perfect to absorb that high impact force.

Ben Pakulski: Right, rather than just inaudible.

Dr. John Jaquish: The problem is, as some of us, even when we were little kids got a little something, a sprain, something started compensating, we’re changing our movement patterns. You see people, you can take two runners and they seem to run exactly the same way, and one has joint problems, the other one doesn’t. But it’s the history of the biomechanics that’s so important, because we’re all attenuating subconsciously all sorts of little things that happened when we were younger.

Ben Pakulski: So, man, give me more about this. This is very, very curious to me. I’m sure my listeners are curious. How exactly is this working, and how am I loading my upper body with 2100 pounds?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, basically the thesis for everybody that’s listening: we are capable. We are so capable in the strongest range of motion. Guys who lift have no idea what kind of… It’s like when I talk about this, it’s like The Force in Star Wars. You have no idea what kind of triggers you can pull inside your body that you’re going to find doing this kind of therapy. Where they deal with weights, and there’s a professional wrestler, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to mention his name yet because he wants to do some media thing, I think. But he’s been using it, and a guy with a lot of joint problems, and instantly first session he’s like, “I’m dealing with more weight than I ever imagined I’d place through my body.” He feels fantastic, and of course he’s feeling his joints less. Now what’s going on is, if you have tendonitis in your elbow or if you’re bone on bone in your knee, you’re still going to be bone on bone in your knee, but compressive forces at that magnitude not only are improving bone density but they’re improving the fibrocartilage uptake, or it’s creating fibrocartilage uptake I should say, in the joint capsule. So, they’re improving the integrity of the joint. So, if there’s a bone on bone moment, there’s a little bit more support and pulling away, so there’s not as much contact. So, guys who are at your level, that have joint problems, maybe they can cut their joint pain in half, maybe they can get to another year of going through contests or going to that next lifting meet or something like that.

Ben Pakulski: Have you done any research directly on systemic uptake of mineral efficiency? So, whether it’s that your bones are going to create osteogenesis, right? Is it going to be a systemic increase in calcium and magnesium uptake, or is it typically just like a local thing to the bone that’s getting the compressive force?

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome question, and the answer is magnesium is present in your body if you take it in. Calcium is totally different. Calcium is the only mineral that your body self-regulates. So, the more calcium you take in, the more calcium your body gets rid of. So like a lot of people when, let’s say older adults, they start losing bone density and they think, “Oh, I’ll just take a calcium supplement.” Well, the problem with that is then they’re putting more dietary in, so then they lose bone density faster. There’s some research on both sides of that issue, but it is an absolute fact that your body decides to keep what calcium you have. Because think about it, calcium is giving you the structure of bone, it’s the predominant mineral inside bone, but it’s also the energy system of the central nervous system. It’s the fuel for the central nervous system. Every time axon and dendrite fires to blink your eyes, or breathe, or anything that goes on in your body, calcium is being used. So, calcium is almost like a battery for energy. So, you want to keep more and by compressing the bone then whatever you’re taking in actually gets used. It actually gets sucked into the bone.

Ben Pakulski: What sort of protocol are we talking about here, John? Because I’m very curious for myself. Obviously subjecting your body to this type of load it’s going to load the bones, but it’s also going to be loading the muscles, the ligaments and tendons. I’m very curious about the side benefits of that, because I’m thinking, even if I’m loading where I’m capable of producing the greatest amount of torque, just by loading those muscles, I’m very curious about how much of a transfer I would see into my strength in typical exercises. What I’m asking is, is this going to be a fatiguing protocol? Is it like a pre-workout protocol, or is it a workout protocol, or a post-workout? What would you recommend my listeners, how they apply it, and what exactly is the protocol?

Dr. John Jaquish: You would not do it at the end of a lifting day. You would do it beforehand. It will not exhaust you because the fatigue you’re going to from a muscular standpoint, which is what most of your listeners are thinking about, or have been thinking about because they were never given any talking point about bone, or tendons, or ligaments, what you want to focus on is the fact that you’re taking other tissues to fatigue and you’re taking muscle to fatigue instead of from a fuel perspective. So, when you lift you’re fatiguing your muscle’s ability to hold ATP, glycogen and creatine phosphate, the three fuel systems in the cell, right? Now, when you take that away, when you bypass that, if all we’re doing is fatiguing, well, it’s the structure of the cell, right? So if you fatigue the structure, if you take the cell to a point where the central nervous system has to say, “No more. We’re shutting this down,” so when that happens, if you didn’t run out of fuel there’s only one other type of fatigue and that’s structural fatigue. So, that creates a massive amount of protein synthesis which is myofibril growth. So, I know you’ve researched that, but a lot of listeners probably don’t realize there’s two very distinct types of muscular growth. There’s myofibril, which is like the density of the cell, and there’s sarcoplasmic, which is like the volume of the cell. Now most of body building focuses on sarcoplasmic. However, if you have myofibril growth also you create more density to volumize.

Ben Pakulski: I did a podcast recently with Jordan Peters about exactly that, is you get, off topic, but all these body builders who, the last week before the contest are like, “Oh, man, I lost too much water. I screwed up my last week.” And the reality is, no you didn’t, you just didn’t have any muscle to begin with. So, talking about myofibrillar growth is exactly what people should be after. So neurologically, how fatiguing are we talking about? If I go and apply this protocol today am I going to notice an excitatory benefit, meaning my muscles are going to feel like they’re primed and ready to go? Or am I going to notice a fatiguing result? Tell me about it?

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible, excitatory benefit. You’re going to be fired up. People, they put hundreds or thousands or pounds to their bodies in the lower extremities, thousands of pounds, there’s plenty of people that exceed 4000 pounds of loading through their hip joint, they’ll walk out of there feeling dynamite and ready for a workout of whatever they’re going to do with their day. Now, this is older people and highly athletic people going into these OsteoStrong locations.

Ben Pakulski: Ah, okay. So, run me through the protocol. Is it a long, is it a short protocol? If you don’t mind.

Dr. John Jaquish: No. So, it’s a couple of seconds under load. It takes five seconds to create the record to actually have the biofeedback system capture what you’re doing. I designed the computer system in a way so that nobody would be rewarded for being explosive. So, you want your own biofeedback. You want to be slow loading, that keeps it safe. So, I can punch a wall and break my finger, but no matter how hard I squeeze my fist, I can’t break my own finger.

Ben Pakulski: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Neural inhibition keeps us from doing that. So, my central nervous system is going to be like, “Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Let’s not do that because we might hurt ourselves.”

Ben Pakulski: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, it doesn’t even matter how hard I try, I can’t do it. So, the same thing with the system. So, the computer system wants you to slow load and then slow discharge, therefore it just takes a few seconds, about five seconds to get there, and maybe one or two other seconds holding it to see if you can go a little bit further. Then you offload, and then you go through four movements. So, the whole protocol is 10 minutes, and you only want to do it once a week because bone metabolism is longer than muscle metabolism, muscle crosstalk.

Ben Pakulski: Are there any nutrition considerations for this? Are you actually making supplemental recommendations to people to augment their current nutrition status? Because ultimately doing this kind of stuff in theory is very beneficial, but if they don’t have the building blocks there, are they going to see some negative side effect?

Dr. John Jaquish: One of the challenges with diet is you don’t want to turn anybody off. So you say a heavy protein diet, and it’s like you’re talking to a vegan. There’s a lot of it. It’s like dieting. It’s not like there’s one diet that works and the other ones are bad. It’s that lots of diets work. There are lots of different ways to lose weight. There’s lots of different ways to eat correctly. What we say is, get the proper amount of vitamin D and calcium. You’ve got to know that’s in your diet. People who eat a lot of fish are getting it, people who take a fish oil or vitamin D. Quality calcium over whatever is cheapest at whatever, Target or whatever, we tell people not to do that. Then just general nutrition, whatever plan you follow, because I want somebody who’s doing a paleo diet to understand that in that paleo diet the proper amount of nutrients are there. If they eat enough green vegetables they’re getting enough calcium. A vegan is actually getting enough calcium and sometimes not enough vitamin D. So, the building blocks are there in every responsible diet. We just want to make sure they’re aware of what the building blocks are.

Ben Pakulski: Cool, man.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, crosstalk.

Ben Pakulski: So, I’d like a little bit more of… Go ahead, you were just going to say.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, so I was just going to sort of finish up with the bone building. So, what ended up happening when I was experimenting with this, we reversed my mother’s osteoporosis in 18 months.

Ben Pakulski: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, now she has the bone density of a 30 year old woman-

Ben Pakulski: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: … and she’s 80. So, she’s not going to have to worry about that again, and she’s active, and she goes and gardens and does all the things that she would want to do, but not limited. Now, how that applies to me, I now have two standard deviations above the normal bone density. So, I have a gymnast’s bone density. I just turned 41. So that’s phenomenal, and based on the degradation curve, if I did nothing, if I quit doing OsteoStrong, if I didn’t lift or get any 4.2 multiples of body weight, I would have normal bone density when I turn 90. So that’s how long that lasts. Bone density lasts a long time. So, some of these guys who really want to get to the next level of muscle development, they thought your skeleton is your chassis, right? If you look at a Formula One car’s chassis and you look at an economy car’s chassis, they’re very different. So the more powerful that chassis is, the bigger more powerful the engine it can handle. So, you put a Formula One engine in a Honda Civic you’re going to blow the wheels right off the car, right? It’ll just come apart. But the Formula One chassis can handle that Formula One engine. So what we want to do, what we see a lot of guys doing is, they’re trying to get that Formula One engine with their muscle, but they don’t have the chassis to support it. So, ultimately, neural inhibition happens. So, if you don’t have the structure to have muscles sit on that chassis, that chassis is not there, your central nervous system is not going to let you contract more, not going to let you engage more muscle tissue. It’s just going to say, “We don’t want that force to your bone.”

Ben Pakulski: Ronnie Coleman is a good example that comes to mind, right? Eight time Mr Olympia, squatting 800 pounds. I think he’s had three hip replacements surgeries on both sides now from just bone deterioration, right? Something like this may have been, even though he’s squatting so much weight, it still wasn’t enough to actually improve his bone density because he was so depleted of minerals from admittedly never having eaten anything green. I went through a very similar thing myself, man, as a young aspiring body builder through my teenage years. I don’t know if I was an aspiring body builder yet, but I went through a phase where I was a vegetarian. I didn’t eat any dairy, so I was a vegan. I didn’t eat any dairy and any meat. When I started lifting at 16, 17, 18 my bones would ache when I did bench presses and shit, and it massively inhibited my ability to train my muscles because my bones would hurt more than my muscles. And not many people ever talk about that, but I’m sure there’s other people out there experiencing that kind of thing. If this had existed when I started I’m sure I would have been one of your customers, man, because I didn’t know how to fix it. I was like, “Man, you know what? My femurs feel like they’re going to snap.” I didn’t get it. Or my humerus also felt like they were going to snap. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand bone density when I was a kid and how valuable it is. Then when you could actually start loading those bones heavier, now, all of a sudden, a 300 pound bench press doesn’t feel like it’s going to snap you in half. Now it feels like your muscles are the thing being stressed and not your bones.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’ve got to have everything there. The central nervous system will stop you from overstressing muscle if you don’t have the supporting structure there. So, it’s really a throttle, or you can take that throttle away to muscular gains.

Ben Pakulski: So, this is something that people can actually do at home, or they actually have to go into the OsteoStrong clinics?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, if it was something they could do at home I would have written a book about that, and how to do it at home. I did write a book about this, which was kind of an adaptation of my PhD thesis, but you really need the machine and the computer screen in front of you that gives you the biofeedback.

Ben Pakulski: So where are the facilities located? How many do you have now?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, you’ve got to go to the website osteostrong.me.

Ben Pakulski: Osteostrong.me.

Dr. John Jaquish: Osteostrong.me.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And yeah, there’s 50 plus locations around the United States so far, a couple in Europe coming up. Tony Robbins is a partner in the business.

Ben Pakulski: Oh, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s a recent development. And so, we’re crosstalk.

Ben Pakulski: Congratulations, that’s huge, man. Good for you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. And he connects to a lot of people.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah, and the thing is he’s got integrity, man. I’ve been a Tony fan for over 10 years, and it’s just integrity, man. I know when he says something he actually means that and he has his personality behind it. He’s got his integrity behind that. I think that’s absolutely massive.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Ben Pakulski: So, good for you, man.

Dr. John Jaquish: What’s so interesting about Tony is he is exactly the same guy when you’re sitting on his couch with him as he is on stage.

Ben Pakulski: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when he’s excited and he gets his arms up like this and his hands, they’re huge.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: He is like a raving fanatic about the things that we’re talking about, just like he is on stage. He’s an intense guy. Sitting down with him for a couple of hours is like doing a week’s worth of work.

Ben Pakulski: You find that with all the people who are most successful in the world. It’s like, “I’m the same person now as I am at home with my kids or my parents.” Consistency is a massive thing. We talk about it. This podcast is all just about being the best version of yourself, the best version of a man that you can be, and that’s huge. Integrity and consistency is massive, because people who are one way to your face and a different way behind your back, it says a lot about their character.

Dr. John Jaquish: Totally. So, I’ll parlez into the X3 Bar fitness band bar system.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah, perfect.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. So, after coming out with this product and seeing the results, I did a research study at a hospital in London. And so, they recorded all the loading data, and then we looked at the whole database, so tens of thousands of people. One thing, and you can look up the study, it was my last name, Jaquish, J-A-Q-U-I-S-H, and look it up. It was published in the Journal of Osteoporosis and Physical Activity. So, I learned something about muscle that I didn’t think I would find through this research study, which took me in a different direction for developing something for muscle, specifically sarcoplasmic growth. So, the other side. What I realized when looking at the data from the study is that humans have seven times the capability in the strongest range versus the weakest range, if I look at the American College of Sports Medicine data on loading of the hips. So, they’re taking athletic people and they break it out, athletic people and non-athletic people. This is in their handbook of some fancy name, but how do you load somebody? So they’re looking at educating people who are trainers, physical therapists. So, what they came up with, the American College of Sports Medicine says that the average individual can hold 1.3 if they’re unathletic or 1.53 multiples of body weight through their lower extremities. So, that tells me at the weaker range of motion they can handle that. This is full range of motion. What we were seeing in the study that was done in London was people were holding eight and nine times their own body weight.

Ben Pakulski: At the strongest ranges of motion?

Dr. John Jaquish: In the strongest ranges of motion. So, what this means is people have seven times the capability.

Ben Pakulski: What was the specific loading parameter? How were they doing it, do you know?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, they’re doing-

Ben Pakulski: What muscles were they loading?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, it was just short of lockout, 120 degree angle behind the knee, like that but your leg. 120 degree angle, and sort of the position you would land if you were to stand up on your couch and jump off.

Ben Pakulski: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: You wouldn’t land stiff-legged, you wouldn’t land at a 90 degree angle either. 120 degree angle behind the knee. And then they were self-compressing and looking at the data. Then when I compared it to the ACSM data I’m thinking, “Whoa, we are missing out on training muscle here. We need variable resistance.” Now, Louie Simmons from Westside Barbells, right, he’d been applying variable resistance for a different reason. He would call it, “Getting past sticking points.” Or another way you could say that is you’re offloading the weaker range of motion, so you can get more weight to that same muscle, it’ll trigger more growth.

Ben Pakulski: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t think you would argue with that. That’s exactly what’s going on. But he’s also trained people in the sport of lifting weights. So, he doesn’t want something that’s going to throw the weights away and focus just on variable resistance. So I understand why he did what he did, and that’s why they’ve broken 100 world records out of that one gym, Westside Barbell. However, for the rest of us who are not competing in the sport of bench press, or squats, or whatever, we want to be as strong as possible. So I thought, “Okay, I think I can very inexpensively create a device that…” Because the bone density devices are close to $100,000.

Ben Pakulski: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, no ones going to have those in their living room. Tony Robbins has them in his living room, but other than Tony. How do we create something that gives us X load, so X load when we’re at the bottom, other than a stretch, right?

Ben Pakulski: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: X load here, and then maybe three X here, and then maybe four or five or maybe even seven X here. That’s what we need. And so, I thought, “Okay. What I want to do is create an Olympic bar.” Now this is the prototype. The production one looks similar, but I can have my hand here and the heavy latex bands and thick layered latex bands that hold hundreds of pounds, so not like a Walmart kind of stuff. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds layered latex, very complex. So, I can take my hand from here to here and this, with ball-bearings inside, it’s like an Olympic bar, so your grip is never compromised. So, I created an Olympic bar with these hooks on them that has a 500 pound capacity, and then a plate that goes on the floor that you loop the band around, so you’re creating a second ground. And so, what we can do is free weight movements, and then we can bury the resistance. So, there’s also a study out of Cornell, which shows people doing this type of protocol, growing muscle three times faster than the controls, and it was done athlete versus athlete from Cornell. So, we know that this triggers much more growth in-

Ben Pakulski: That was using specifically your apparatus or just the variable resistance protocols?

Dr. John Jaquish: They made custom power racks.

Ben Pakulski: Got you.

Dr. John Jaquish: They had weight plus bands, but I would say that’s inferior because ultimately you want more variants, not less. So when I do, and I tested this with load cell, when I do a bench press it’s like 80 pounds at the bottom, then it’s 200 pounds midway, then it’s 350 or 400 when I’m at full extension. So, I’m 41 years old. I’m not getting under a bar that’s got 400 pounds on it, wouldn’t even attempt it. But I can hit that 400 or 350 multiple times in my strongest range very safely. Then the load discharges when I’m in the position where my shoulder’s at risk. And so, then I built a protocol for that where, and this is all in the 12 week program, I kind of built it like P90X, you kind of build up. People are used to that.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, what I do is diminish the range. So, first you go full range until you can’t anymore. Then you start doing shorter reps, so you’re working the weaker range with the lower weight that you’ve already pre-exhausted, and so much of your muscle tissue is basically out of the equation now because the central nervous system’s cut it off. So, you end up going finally to fatigue. The last couple of reps may just deal with that 80 pounds, but this is all in one set without letting any blood into the muscle, so that is a far more deep fatigue from a sarcoplasmic perspective. So, the fuels in the cell are just evacuated of everything they need, which is a signal, “Oh, we get to add all this back plus way more,” and that’s why it’s so effective. That’s why you can trigger so much more growth with that.

Ben Pakulski: How many exercises is that applicable to? So speaking to that exercise itself, what muscle group are you thinking to isolate there? Are you just trying to train the movement and get stronger at the movement?

Dr. John Jaquish: With the bar I can put a heavy band around here and throw it around my back, and I can do a chest press. I can run it over my traps and push down, so I can do a tricep push-down. Over my head then loop through the ground-plate, and I can do the overhead press. Or I can do an upright row for the delts either way. Then I can do squats. I can do a front squat where I’m holding the bar like this, and then the band wraps underneath my feet. Or I can do a single leg split squat which, when you get some quad development and you know when all the blood’s rushing to your quads, way better to work one leg at a time. Also, another thing I said in the Dave Asprey podcast, functionally, I was at a conference recently, both trainers and physical therapists, and I said, “Is a two-legged squat functional?” And they were all like, “Of course, it’s the most functional thing.” “Oh, you guys must train kangaroos, because humans walk on one leg at a time.” A couple of things are happening with the two-legged squat. Number one, that’s the position we’re in when we stop, not when we move. Everything else is designed to get us moving. So, very quickly in the 12 week program, we start with the two legged squat because people are used to it, switch people to the single leg split squat. Because number one, if you’ve got blood only rushing to one quadricep and one glut you’ve got a lot more blood available. And also, so I mean, systemically from your heart’s perspective it can supply that firing a lot easier. Then secondarily there’s stability firing the co-insides. Now, Henry Alkire, who’s a young, brilliant researcher, and I, last summer we published a paper that shows that stability firing is one of the keys to triggering growth hormone upregulation. So the reason, and I think you had somebody talking about this at one point, or what they talked about was anabolic differences in free weight movements versus non free weight movements. So last summer what Henry and I published, it was all about stability firing and its association with massive upregulation of growth hormone. We found 23 studies that all said the same thing.

Ben Pakulski: Explain what that means so my listeners have an idea of exactly what stability firing means. Like if I stand on a Bosu Ball and I do a squat?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. A Bosu Ball or some other thing that’s going to give you some level of instability. What happens is reflexes fire all over the body to stabilize you. And those reflexes, they’re going to keep you safe, number one, but number two, it’s putting your body in an extreme environment where the central nervous system is saying, “We need more efficiency from a power to weight ratio perspective.” So we’re going to upregulate growth hormone and down regulate cortisol. So, people who do stability training end up being very lean. Now, who has the most stability firing of anybody? It would be gymnasts and sprinters, right? So, that’s kind of where I started with the research. Do you think a sprinter ever diets? I ask this to people all the time. Yeah. Body builders diet down when they have to, but sprinters are very lean and very strong. But they’ve got to be high energy all the time. They don’t cut calories. They don’t have a pre-race diet.

Ben Pakulski: They’re also doing the ultimate form of high intensity interval training though, like perpetually, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, but let me get to what’s specific about their training. If you look at the head of a distance runner, bobbing up and down like this, right. You look at the head of a sprinter it looks like it’s lined up with a laser. Their whole body is moving. They’re throwing their hand back as fast as they can so they can pivot their pelvis and get a longer stride, but their head looks like it’s not moving.

Ben Pakulski: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: So, what that is is stability firing all over the body to keep that skull in the same place, so they’re more stable, so they can fire more muscle and propel themselves forward faster. When that happens there’s an upregulation growth hormone.

Ben Pakulski: The paradox there though is a sprinter is firing muscles as fast and as hard as they can while still finding that stability, whereas someone standing on an unstable surface is firing as few muscles as they can because they have no capability of producing a contraction with integrity, because there’s nothing to balance off of. So, that would be the paradox, right? I see a disconnect there-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yes.

Ben Pakulski: … between what a sprinter and a gymnast is doing, because that’s an explosive highly contractile movement versus someone standing on a Bosu Ball being just simply unstable. It seems like it’s a different stimulus.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. If you get those two things closer together. So, there’s a couple of things that have been seen that were associated with upregulation growth hormone that had to do with the amount of weight. So, the amount of weight that goes to your system has a lot to do with how much testosterone you secrete, you create in your body, right? Growth hormone was seen as very similar to that. However, I don’t think it’s the amount of weight specifically, it’s the amount of stability firing. Now, when I have a heavy band running through this, and I’ve got it over my head, right, what’s going on, this band… Have you ever seen that bamboo bench press bar?

Ben Pakulski: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: It does this. Right. That is genius. This has the same kind of thing because as stability muscles fire, this becomes unstable, and I’m jack-hammering as I’m coming up to try and stabilize it. So just automatically my reflexes are stabilizing me. So, I’ve got more weight which is forcing higher degrees of stability firing to get that growth hormone benefit.

Ben Pakulski: So, my thought would be there’s always this trade-off between like, “Hey, I can do a one-legged squat on a Bosu, or I can do a one-legged squat on the ground,” where I can produce more force effort, but I still have the balance consideration there if, let’s say, I’m doing a one-legged squat or one-legged plyometric or something that requires me to be explosive and still actually have to find that proprioceptive balance compared to a Bosu Ball where your forced production upper capability’s going to be much decreased. So where’s the trade off, right? Where is the cost to benefit ratio from your perspective?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, see, it depends on where somebody is. So, you know Phil Hernon, right? A 1996 Mr. USA. I hung out with him about six months ago and told him about all the things that we’re working on, that research Henry and I did, and how this is pretty much hands down proven, if I’m 23 data says they find the same thing. So, that study was actually a meta-analysis, so it’s like pulling all the studies on that subject together. And it was from different areas of medicine. Some were like physiotherapy, some were sports science, some were other things. And so, I don’t think anybody else would have really drawn that parallel without really looking for it. So, I had him take his training clients, and he’s training some of the top IFBB pros who I don’t think I’m supposed to mention. But he’s taking them through this stability protocol. He’s focusing on one-legged squats on a Bosu. Now some of them, in a few weeks, they get to the point where they can pretty proficiently do a one-legged squat on a Bosu. So then he gives them this, and so they’re doing stability firing off the Bosu, but they’re adding more weight. So, it’s a combination of being ready for it. And in the 12 week program, that’s why I start people with just the bar right here, and then they do a front squat. They get some stability firing, then they move to splint squat which requires a lot more, and it’s wide stance, so the feet are like this when you first start off doing it. Then they become more lined up as you want to challenge more stability, so therefore you can get both. Because you need the heavy loading, but you also want that stability firing, so you want to be right there.

Ben Pakulski: That’s kind of what I’m after, man, it’s like how much? Is me standing on a vibration plate versus standing on, I don’t know, a soft ground versus standing on a Bosu or standing on a hard ground, there’s a progression, there’s a continuum of possibilities of levels of instability. So would it be like: I want to progress toward the most unstable possible? Or is there just a small necessary amount?

Dr. John Jaquish: You want to be just on the edge of losing stability. You want to feel like, “If it were any more unstable I would tip over.” So, you want to make it challenging from a stability perspective. And everybody’s at a different place. I have seen some of the guys Phil’s training who are incredibly muscular, like IFBB pros, that you feel like if they bend a knee a little bit and lift the other leg up they’re going to tip over, they have very poor stability. Then some of the other ones, we were working with a baseball player who could almost do a pistol squat kind of ass to the floor straight up. So, he was in a totally different place. Then also coincidentally this guy was extraordinarily lean and didn’t really do anything that is normally associated with people being very lean. So, he’s got all kinds of stability firing. So, I said, “It’s kind of obvious here, you’ve been doing something that gives you some stability. You’ve been upregulating growth hormone and you didn’t even know it.” Then the bodybuilder who just had been primarily machines, never squats, always leg press, always leg extension, he didn’t have that there. And so, his training’s gone in a completely different direction focusing on the stability firing crosstalk.

Ben Pakulski: So, you’re suggesting that this type of training is going to see an upregulation, substantial upregulation in testosterone and growth hormone that should thereby influence someone’s body composition.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So when looking at these different studies, so in this meta analysis, there were some studies that had young athletic guys and there were some studies that had elderly people. Now, the young athletic guys had a greater upregulation than the elderly people. But the studies that had the greatest effect, and there was one that showed a 2800% increase in growth hormone. So, this is something that even a bodybuilder doing exogenous through a needle growth hormone wouldn’t even get. It had to do with a combination of heavy loading and the stability firing. So, that’s when we go to that split squat that I was talking about, where I’ll grab the heaviest band and run it right here, and I’m focusing it all on one leg, and then my back toes even with them touching the ground. So, my whole upper body is jack-hammering trying to keep me stable, but I’m still running a massive amount of force through that quadricep. And so, I’m trying to mimic the results of that experience where the heavy loading plus the stability firing, so we can get the benefit of both.

Ben Pakulski: Any thought from your perspective, that it may have to do with simply neurological complexity of the movement increasing the necessity of firing of the nervous system? Because I know that’s been correlated with an increasing growth hormone. Is that as simple as it is? Because that could be creating crosstalk-

Dr. John Jaquish: That’d be crosstalk, yes.

Ben Pakulski: What?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s exactly what it is.

Ben Pakulski: So you can theoretically get the same benefit from doing a snatch, or a squat, or something that may be a little more neurologically complex?

Dr. John Jaquish: This has a lot to do with the great results of CrossFit. Why are Crossers so lean?

Ben Pakulski: I was going to say, CrossFitters are never lean. That’s always the paradox.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, yeah, some of them are leaner than they probably should be considering the fact that they only seem to be lifting weight.

Ben Pakulski: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, yeah, well, the typical CrossFitter probably goes once every other week, and then maybe he’s doing some things they aren’t ready for from a movement perspective. It’s definitely not worth throwing that under the bus because that has made people healthier. But I think that when you see some of the movements that they’re doing, they’re so stability heavy that that has a lot to do with their results.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because they’re firing those patterns in. The more weight and the higher the weight gets, like when you put something across your shoulders for a squat. Or I mean, you’re holding it right here, it’s the same thing. Or like over your head, like the overhead press, with the bands you see a really profound… And even in my videos where I’m trying to be as smooth as possible so it doesn’t look unsafe because I don’t want people to be like, “Oh, that looks too difficult,” I’m jack-hammering. My whole body is shivering as I’m going through these heavy loading moments, especially overhead where I think it’s close to 200 pounds with the band I use. This is the band I use, the heavy layer latex band, it’s five millimeters thick. And so, I’m holding 200 pounds over my head. That’s highly unstable. And so, I’m getting the combination of stimulating the deltoid and upregulating growth hormone to that highest degree that I think possible because I’m just at that level of instability.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah, that’s awesome, and I totally see that benefit from CrossFit and from anything unstable. Just the degree of motor learning, the degree of neurological complexity that your brain is undergoing, the BDNF secretion, all that stuff has to correlate with some type of response if your body is going to be in panic mode and thereby probably respond and start releasing growth hormone, which theoretically can have a massive effect on body fat.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Right. Ultimately this is one of those controversial statements that I always kind of hesitate to make. But there’s 40 years of research that shows us that you upregulate cortisol when you do sustained cardiovascular activities.

Ben Pakulski: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s the opposite of what we want. That’s a mechanism to protect body fat. Basically your central nervous system goes, “Oh, we’re going to have to exert a lot of energy, and we don’t have all that energy here. So, instead of making this individual lean and strong what we’re going to do is make sure body fat doesn’t leave.” And when I see guys, even if it’s fasted cardio, you’re still creating a hormonal situation where you’re just compromised. You’re fighting your hormones when you do cardio. Now, I think cardio is great for somebody who wants to be good at running. If you want to go long distances and have the cardiovascular system to do that, then great, that’s a sport. Good for you. If you want to have a healthy heart, have healthy lungs and carry around as much muscle as possible and be as lean as possible then do not do cardio. If there’s 40 years of research it’s not what you want to do.

Ben Pakulski: We have the exact same view, man. Trying to get lean, as lean as possible through proper dietary practice and intelligent weight training. That’s it, man. It’s so simple.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And add some stability training, and so much of this thing is hard to explain, or we just went through some of the details. I’ve been telling people that you train with us for a couple of weeks, you’re going to see the difference by the day. In fact the CEO of OsteoStrong says, “My wife is seeing differences in my body by the day.” Now he wasn’t an advanced trainer, he was a pretty in-shape guy, but that’s the kind of thing, because he’s getting that… For the first time in his life, he’s surging growth hormone because he’s doing heavy stabilization type workouts before. Probably when he was way younger, because he’s an accomplished martial artist, because there’s some of that in there. But very rarely do we put ourselves in a situation where we have heavy loading at the same time we have stabilization firing. There’s actually research that shows that with variable resistance there’s an upregulation of growth hormone, and it’s for the reason I believe I’m explaining, because it crosses over in my growth hormone research and my bone density research, it totally makes sense. Heavier in the stronger range of motion, more stability firing, more growth hormone upregulation.

Ben Pakulski: Absolutely. So, here’s what I want from you, man. I know exactly what internal feeling that you’re trying to illicit. So you and I have both done very hard, very heavy workouts. You feel like your nervous system’s just amped. So, what I want from you is I want you to send me the best workout that my listeners could possibly do with your apparatus to give them that feeling. Because I know the physical benefit to that physiological internal feeling, and I think right now, what they would need to kind of fill the gap to really feel the benefit of your device is tell me exactly the workout that will allow me to feel that stimulus. So you know that almost like agitated, irritable, my nervous system’s just done a little bit too much that’s forcing it to adapt right now? We may have in the past got it after a heavy squat or a heavy deadlift workout. I know they can achieve that stuff with this instability training with your apparatus. If you could send me a workout that you recommend or some videos that they could follow to actually get that feeling. Because I know the benefits, as for the motor learning benefits and now, as you suggest, the growth hormone benefits. And most people will be just like, “Man, I just don’t know how to feel that. What’s that supposed to feel like?” So, I’d love for you to make some suggestions so they can bridge the gap between this theoretical knowledge and apply it.

Dr. John Jaquish: I will add in the diminishing range also.

Ben Pakulski: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: That just, it’s like the craziest thing you’ve ever experienced.

Ben Pakulski: And the cool thing about it is that the necessity of the amount of work will be very, very small, I’m presuming. Because most people are going to get destroyed just by doing things, one, properly, two, over an extended period of time on this unstable apparatus.

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk set. They do one set per body part where basically my workout is six days a week, four sets per workout.

Ben Pakulski: Right. So everybody listening, yeah, continue to apply your muscle intelligence execution principles and just add the X3 Bar resistance band training system to your stimulus, to your loading parameters, and see how it goes. I mean, you could throw it in on an off day, you could throw it in as a pre-workout and see how it goes. For weak body parts I think there may be a benefit there for the motor learning, and balance, and stability benefits.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes, correct.

Ben Pakulski: Ultimately, man, everything we do you need to learn the skill before you can really load it, so there may be some degree of loading, sorry not loading but learning, the skill for that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Part of the reason we ship the X3 Bar variable resistance training system with three different levels of band, like the strongest one is for very strong people and very strong movements. Then the weaker one, if you watch the whole 12 week program, the 12 week program is designed to take somebody who’s not a lifter right now and take them to the very intense loading, very high loading that they would never even get in a gym and to bridge that gap. So, what I’ll do for your listeners is something much more aggressive, much more closer to what people are at in week 12. But the first couple of weeks, the lightest band with a deadlift, kind of 50 repetitions sort of thing to get that pattern going, because ultimately if that pattern’s not there they might hunch their back, or have their shoulders pulled so there’s stretch situation on their trapezius crosstalk.

Ben Pakulski: Cool, man. So, dude, that’s amazing. I will post links to pick up the X3 Bar resistance band bar system and locations for the OsteoStrong at benpakulski.com/podcast. Anything else you want to give a shout out to, man?

Dr. John Jaquish: The website for X3 Bar fitness band bar system is x3bar.com

Ben Pakulski: John, thank you so much, man. It’s been a pleasure. I’m looking forward to seeing where this thing goes in the future, because I know your brain is constantly thinking of evolution.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think between these two things what we’re doing is we’re pulling some triggers in the body that we just weren’t before.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s really the takeaway. What is this podcast about? Triggers in the body that you didn’t know you could pull. And so, from a muscular size perspective, from a power perspective, X3 Bar portable home gym is going to deliver that, from a bone density perspective, being able to have a chassis to hold more muscle and be less likely to fracture. Better biomechanics, that’s where OsteoStrong comes in. So, I think we’re really getting to the point where we can get more benefit and have less risk.

Ben Pakulski: I love it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Specifically like the people over 35 years old. When you’re 20 you think, “I’ll never get injured because I’m awesome.”

Ben Pakulski: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right? We were all there. But when you’re 35 you think, “Wow, the last time I did heavy deadlifts something didn’t go right.”

Ben Pakulski: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: We’re stiff for a long time. I remember saying to a relative when I was a freshman, and I was getting ready for rugby, how these heavy shrugs I was doing. And he shook his head like, “Yeah, you’re not going to be doing that later. Yeah, just forget that.” crosstalk.

Ben Pakulski: Yeah. I always say, man, I mean when I was 21 I was deadlifting 750 and now people go, “How much do you deadlift?” I go, “I paid my dues, man. I don’t do that shit anymore. I like my spine and my bones.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, you will with this. Because when you put the heavy band in it you’re going to be hitting… I have a video where I would load cells, right. I’d stick a load cell here and then hook a band on a load cell. Where I’m hitting 550 pounds at the top for repetitions, but as soon as I depart from that the weight goes down, and when the joint is exposed to potential injury the weight may be 100 pounds.

Ben Pakulski: Right, and that’s literally what we teach here at the gym. So you’ll get a chance, hopefully if you come to my gym one day, and we have a line of equipment called PRIME, which is basically variable loading parameters, man. You have a variable cam or you have variable loading torque arms, so you apply different plates or load it in different ways with plates. I can make it as light or as heavy as I want it, every part of the range. That’s literally the premise that my entire business is built around, is teaching people how to load this to match what your body’s capable of, to get the greatest amount of output on every rep of every set. It just makes so much sense because typical exercise, like we say, is 30 years old or longer and it’s useless, man. You’re challenging yourself in 10 to 20% of the range. The other 80% you’re wasting your time. That’s why I loved your technology, man.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep. Awesome.

Ben Pakulski: Cool, man. So, I really look forward to hearing what you do in the future and tell Tony I say, “What’s up?” Hopefully I’ll have him on here soon.

Dr. John Jaquish: All right.

Ben Pakulski: John, thank you very much, man. I appreciate your time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay.

Ben Pakulski: All right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks so much.