Ultimate Growth Hormone Hacking with Dr. John Jaquish

How to exercise for growth hormone and bone density? Dr. John Jaquish PhD is an inventor and scientist in the field of osteogenics and he’s built many devices that can give you superhuman bone density.

Hear about:

• Poor Bone Density and Mortality Rates 01:25
• How Dr. Jaquish Cured His Mother’s Osteoporosis 04:49
• All About Boosting Growth Hormone 12:45
• Variable Resistance Training 21:21
• What Is the X3 portable gym 28:20
• How to Activate the Anabolic Trigger for Muscle Growth 33:25
• What Makes Muscles Grow 42:01
• Which Foods Build Muscle 47:45
• Difference Between Strength and Size 01:02:16
• How to Incorporate the X3 variable resistance exercise system Into Traditional Lifting 01:10:00

And Much More…

Full Transcript

Dr. John Jaquish: 50% chance of death after 50 years old with a hip fracture. Yeah, and 50 is not that old. You’re putting your body in an environment where your cells are able to notice, “Wow, we’re in a really different environment all of a sudden. We need to change.” The only thing the central nervous system can do is change based on environment. You can’t look in the mirror and say, “Wow, central nervous system, I’d really like to lose 10 pounds.” That’s not the way to communicate with your central nervous system. The way to communicate with your central nervous system is to create an environment where you can’t have that 10 extra pounds of body fat. It’s compromising your health.

Siim Land: Body Mind Empowerment.

Announcer: Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land: Everything the body needs.

Announcer: Control your mind.

Siim Land: Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment podcast. I’m your host, Siim Land and our guest today is Dr. John Jaquish. Dr. Jaquish is a scientist, researcher, and entrepreneur in the field of osteogenics. He has a PhD in biomedical engineering. Dr Jaquish, welcome to the show.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me.

Siim Land: Yeah, I’m pleased to have you. When I was doing my backstory research about you, then I found out that you actually have a really inspirational story of what got you into the field of improving people’s bone health. Can you give a little story about it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. I did this to treat my mother’s osteoporosis. That’s how I completely got started on the physical medicine path. Physical medicine, by the way, for those that haven’t heard that term, it’s using a physical intervention like exercise or nutrition or physical therapy to treat a dysfunction, as opposed to pharmaceutical medicine. Yeah, my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis and she was upset about it. I read the statistics and I said, “Wow, mom. If you had a fragility fracture in your hip, that could really challenge your mortality.” Hip fractures have an associated, the same level of breast cancer death rates.

Siim Land: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: What happens is, they break their hip and then it’s complications. Either they can’t survive the surgery or it doesn’t heal correctly and they can’t walk again. Then, there’s just a very rapid decline. 50% chance of death after 50 years old with a hip fracture.

Siim Land: Wow, that’s crazy.

Dr. John Jaquish: 50% after 50. Crazy statistic.

Siim Land: That’s insane.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and 50 is not that old.

Siim Land: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sometimes every once in a while I mention osteoporosis and people are like, “Oh, that’s for like 90-year-olds.” No. Now, I talked to somebody in the US military at West Point, the elite training academy for the Army, and they told me that they see osteoporosis in their recruits, these are 18-year-old kids. They’re playing video games and they’re eating garbage food. Their bone mass is declining.

Siim Land: What do you think is the main cause of declining in bone mass, then?

Dr. John Jaquish: Chronic cellular inflammation and lack of activity. It’s the combination of those two things. Ultimately, you can eat all the wrong stuff and if you’re active, your body is still trying to reach homeostasis based on your environment. So, if you live in an environment where there’s hard impacts, there’s greater likelihood that you will build bone mass even with poor nutrition. When you have both, you don’t have the proper nutrients. Almost every single person with an eating disorder, with anorexia, bulimia or the other associated things, has osteoporosis or compromised bone mass, because they just don’t take in the nutrients. The poor nutrition is almost a guarantee.

Siim Land: Wow, that’s really crazy, it’s always also reflective in the way people eat especially like older people. Everyone knows that in most cases, everyone’s grandma is eating bread, processed bakeries, and they’re not lifting anything. They’re not exercising.

Dr. John Jaquish: Every meal is a pastry.

Siim Land: It’s quite crazy. But what did you do to fix your mother’s osteoporosis then?

Dr. John Jaquish: What I did, I looked at the pharmaceutical interventions. She was not happy with the recommendations that were there. Didn’t like the side effects of the drugs and I was like, “Good, mom. I don’t like them either.” So what I ended up doing was I said, what if I could find a group of people that have superhuman bone density? Maybe there’s a type of athlete out there that has incredible power in their bone. And then if I figure out what they do, maybe I can build a device that will give that same effect. And it was interesting, because that one idea, once I started doing the research, there was a crystal clear example, it was gymnasts. Gymnasts have superhuman bone, because of the rate at which they hit the ground, when they dismount. Sometimes when they do a dismount from the uneven bars, where they flip back and forth between the two bars, they get levels of force through their hip joint that are above 10 times their body weight.

Siim Land: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. But nobody lifts in a gym 10 times their body weight. Maybe not even three times their body weight. We looked at some of the even strongest lifters in the world, three times their body weight is an incredible amount of force that they can lift, full range. So they’re just not getting it. So we’re getting these incredible forces through high impact. Now, of course, I wasn’t going to have my mother in her 70s doing this. So I said, what if I could create a device that will give us the benefits of high impact without the risks? And she was cautiously optimistic. I designed the world’s first robotic musculoskeletal stimulus device, where it puts people in a position where you can naturally absorb these high impact forces. So, basically, if I were to show you just with the upper body, if I’m going to get in a position where I’m going to absorb force like this, I’ve got a 120 degree angle right here, between my upper and lower arm, and I’m going to hold my hand, so the back of the hand is in line with the clavicle. So if you trip and fall, this is how you want to protect yourself. You wouldn’t want to do this. And you wouldn’t lock your elbows either, right? So, we want to get people in this position and then allow them, so the robotics get them in exactly the right position. And we allow them to self-create force. So, it works like squeezing a fist and if you squeeze a fist hard enough, can you break your own finger?

Siim Land: Maybe. Some people might.

Dr. John Jaquish: The nervous system won’t let you. It’s a process called neural inhibition. You will protect yourself. In fact, your central nervous system will protect you to the point where it’ll actually turn muscles off, like you can’t do it. So it was all self-regulatory, and then there’s computerized biofeedback right in front of the user. And so once it was developed within 18 months, my mother went from osteoporosis to having the bones of a 30 year old and she still does. They don’t even DEXA scan her anymore because her bone density is so high. She went from like the dysfunctional state to having abnormally high bone density.

Siim Land: Wow. That’s really cool. So basically you’re stimulating this high force production at the most beneficial range of motion so to say, like where you are most effectively stimulating bone density growth the most.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Now, so I took that device and I filed patents and now, it’s been licensed, the intellectual property is licensed to a company that was created to build a clinic just around my invention. That’s called OsteoStrong, you can see I’m wearing this shirt. So there are 70 locations around the world, most of them in the United States. We have a couple in Sweden, a couple in Spain and we’re opening in Denmark, in Greece, in the next I think two months. So, just a matter of time before you guys have one where you are. They’ll be all over the world.

Siim Land: I’ve actually seen that Tony Robbins also uses that, if I’m not mistaken.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Tony’s a partner in the business.

Siim Land: Nice. Yeah. I’ve also heard that Tony also has superhuman bones or something.

Dr. John Jaquish: He does now.

Siim Land: Because he does like a lot of jumping up and down and rebounding and other things as well.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I had to break his heart and tell him that the rebound, he’s not building bone mass. The osteogenic loading is, which is provided through the device I created. Rebounding is, the real benefit of rebounding is the lymphatic.

Siim Land: Yeah. That’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: Also, you have to keep in mind, when something is researched, I’m a researcher. I have to, very frequently, I have to explain to people like how research studies work. It’s like you take a group of people, you take another group of people, and you test these people, and then you give these other people some nonsense test, or you give them the standard, whatever the standard is, and then you compare the results. And sometimes studies look at sort of silly metrics that don’t really have anything to do… There was a growth hormone study a couple years ago, that determined that exogenous growth hormone, like therapeutic injections of growth hormone do nothing. Because they tested, it was blood pressure. That was their metric, it was like, wait a minute. This was in I believe it was in the New England Journal of Medicine. I read it and I said nobody said growth hormone reduces your blood pressure. So why would you even test that? It would be like taking any particular supplement and going, well, it didn’t grow my hair back. So, obviously it doesn’t work. But nobody said it would. Sometimes these research studies can be not necessarily misleading, but you got to look at the tests that they’re running. And coincidentally, the people who wrote the article were cardiologists, so they were testing something based on their field. But it got picked up by the media, the growth hormone is just a worthless hormone, it doesn’t do anything. So just people who don’t understand the research were interpreting it incorrectly.

Siim Land: How would the OsteoStrong machine affect growth hormone? Does it have any effect in this sense?

Dr. John Jaquish: Not per se. The osteogenic loading process, we haven’t tested it, but I’ll get into the axis of growth hormone in a little bit, because I did a meta analysis on how to get your body to trigger growth hormone. I found 23 different studies and then I combine them all into one study using statistical analysis. That’s what a meta analysis is. In that way, awesome. It totally establishes a new principle of human physiology when it comes to growth hormone. But that’s not quite what’s going on with OsteoStrong. OsteoStrong is mostly about, and if somebody wants to google the word mechanotransduction, which really means putting mechanical force through the body, and having it change. I tell everybody this, but when I speak at like OsteoStrong locations to groups of physicians, because groups of physicians get invited in, to see if it’s right for their patients. And so what I say to these physicians is, you guys don’t study adaptive response very much. They’re not looking at what environment you put the body in. Ultimately, your central nervous system, everything you do and the other podcasts I’ve watched, you’re putting your body in an environment where your cells are able to notice, wow, we’re in a really different environment all of a sudden, we need to change. Because the only thing the central nervous system can do is change based on environment. You can’t look in the mirror and say, wow, central nervous system, I’d really like to lose 10 pounds. That’s not the way to communicate with your central nervous system. The way to communicate with your central nervous system is to create an environment where you can’t have that 10 extra pounds of body fat. It’s compromising your health by having that. And so growth hormone goes up, cortisol goes down, you start losing body fat very quickly. Sprinters are the best example of that. Do you think they ever eat at a caloric deficit? Never. They got to be high energy, right? They’re not dieting, yet they’re completely lean. How? Because their growth hormone is sky high from what they’re doing. Again, I’ll get into that in a second.

Siim Land: It is true, like your nervous system is the gateway between you and the world so to say and everything you experience physiologically is mediated through the nervous system. And the body and the cells are constantly detecting, okay, what environment are we in? And what adaptations do we need to carry through? And everything that is related to your body is the result of adaptation and the necessity of having to produce a bunch of growth hormone or having to strengthen the bones or having to grow muscle or having to burn fat. Nothing happens without a stimulus or a necessity.

Dr. John Jaquish: You just have to create the environment. I think that so much of exercise and training, even physiotherapy is missing the idea that… The way it goes is, first there’s the central nervous system to decide the change needs to be made in the body and then comes endocrine effects. I think very frequently, I’d say the most common, I don’t want to call it a mistake, but let’s call it a false positive that fitness professionals make is they look at electromyography. We read so many studies about activation of muscle, right? Like you see, it’s cheap to do an electromyographic study. You see the leads like all over the pectoral and you see the guy who’s in the thing and he’s contracting his pectoral in different angles or whatever and trying to work the muscle at different positions and they’re all looking at activation. But does activation equal growth? The biggest forearm pump I’ve ever had was riding a bicycle or working in the yard with a chainsaw. Do people who use chainsaws have gigantic forearms? No. Do cyclists have gigantic forearms? No. So, why the hell are we looking at EMG? So what my approach was, where are the signals that create that environment for the central nervous system? And then to confirm that the central nervous system noticed where are the endocrine changes, where are the hormonal changes? Are there any? Because if there are not, then we’re not doing anything, and it’s such a massive mistake I see all the time. I remember watching some video of some… I forget who it was, some pro bodybuilder that was like doing EMG tests on himself to figure out exactly what exercises activated the most. I remember watching, I already was where I am mentally and just thinking, wow, like you are just missing the boat here. And a lot of people are doing exercises that have no endocrine effect at all. So, a like leg sled versus a squat. You have incredible stimulus of growth hormone in a free weight squat. You have none in a leg press, zero. So, if your body is creating an anabolic hormone immediately after you’re done exercising, is that a pretty good signal that your body wants to grow muscle there? Yes. If there’s no endocrine effect at all, it pretty much tells you that what you are doing was like trying to get a tan with candles. It’s not doing anything. The central nervous system doesn’t see that as like an emergency. It’s just like, I don’t even know what that was. So, just ignored signal, you tortured yourself for no reason.

Siim Land: So what would be this appropriate signal then for the nervous system to do build muscle?

Dr. John Jaquish: Let me step forward from where we were with my mother. So my mother, reversed her osteoporosis, now we’re doing it for, I think we’re up to 20,000 people are regularly being treated at OsteoStrong, and they’re growing bone density very quickly. Also, it’s funny, sometimes it doesn’t work for people right away and they take another bone scan, and it doesn’t show any growth. And then we tell them to get their thyroid checked, and they have a dysfunctional thyroid. So there’s nutritional aspects of that and there’s some medications to treat thyroid for those people who aren’t willing to go down the nutritional path. But ultimately, as soon as they control the thyroid, then typically the bone density starts growing very quickly. But it’s great, because it helps us catch these thyroid dysfunctions and that’s fantastic. I didn’t even see that one coming. I was just like, wow, we’re really helping people out.

Siim Land: That’s interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, because anybody with a dysfunctional thyroid is miserable. And they don’t know why. Because they can’t lose body fat, they have low energy and they just think, oh, I’m getting old. And no, it’s not it, you have a dysfunctional gland in your body, and we can fix it very easily. So, that was fantastic. And that business is just flying and Tony is thrilled with the progress, and it’s made some pretty aggressive steps over the last few years to be really improved. The robotics are great, user interface that people use is great, the customer experience we’re going in, OsteoStrong is fantastic. So when doing this, I know this is your favorite part is where you wanted me to get to was, I looked at the loading data, how much force a human is capable of in these impact ready positions. It was incredible. We had people, females in their 90s putting 500 pounds, 237 kilos, through their lower extremities with their legs.

Siim Land: That’s crazy.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you think like, wait a minute. I don’t mean we trained them for two years before they could do that. They do that on day one and they thought they were weak. And so I’m thinking it looks like we’re very powerful in our stronger range of motion. Our impact ready range of motion. I took that data, and then I compared it to what the American College of Sports Medicine has for lower extremity loading over a broad population. And what they determined is non-exercisers versus exercisers can typically on average put 1.3 multiples of body weight to 1.53 multiples of body weight through their hip joint. Now, the minimum dose response for bone growth is 4.2 multiples of body weight. That was established a couple years after I got started developing these therapy devices, but it’s like, okay, no wonder people get osteoporosis. The gym isn’t going to save anybody from osteoporosis, anybody. 4.2 multiples of body weight is far higher than what people are using in the gym. And that was great for me, because I was like, oh, okay, I guess everybody has to go to an OsteoStrong, there’s just no other option. But from a muscular standpoint, I thought wait a minute, I’m probably the most hated guy in fitness for saying this, but I looked at the data and I said this pretty much invalidates weight training in general. Because if we’re that capable in our more powerful ranges of motion, that means we’re not using a whole lot of our capability in that stronger range, set a different way. And somebody mentioned this to me the other day, it was a physician that said this, when we lift, we overload joints and under load muscle. And if you think about like on a bench press, the weight you select is whatever you can handle back here. What do we know about back here? The shoulder is in the worst possible position, and the muscles are in the weakest possible position, but that’s the place we go to fatigue. And so we’re really activating very little muscle in that position, and we’re torturing our joints. So when you’re a kid, when you’re 16 years old, you first start lifting weights, your joints are a lot more powerful than your muscle is. So it doesn’t bother your joints at all, and you start activating muscle. As soon as you get a little bit stronger, then you start feeling pain in your joints, neural inhibition happens. Basically, the pain in the joints shuts the muscle off, and you stop growing. So, everybody remembers when they’re 16, I put on like 10 pounds of muscle in a couple of weeks when I first started lifting, when I was 16. It just stopped. I know guys who years and years go by and I haven’t changed at all and so that’s why. I thought, okay, we need something other than weight training. We need a variable resistance device. Now, there had been studies with bands done where like somebody would take some exercise bands and put them with weights. So they’re holding like x weight here and 1.2x here. Well, based on my data, it’s like no, that just scratches the surface. And by the way, the guys who were training with bands were breaking world records. So just that little bit more of activation in the stronger range, yielded them some of the greatest strength that’s ever been seen in the world. I thought, yeah, but they don’t understand exactly how much capability they have in the stronger range of motion, but I do. I’m going to develop the world’s most powerful variable resistance device. I had custom made like the thickest layered latex bands, I should grab one. I’ve got them around here. Thick latex bands. Then, a bar to manage that process. So that like an Olympic bar. If I’m pushing forward and the band rotates, if I’m going and doing an overhead press, grab the bar like this and then change the position to press upward, that the band doesn’t wrap or get twisted or change the loading dynamics in my wrist, which would cause an injury. And then a high density platform to create a second ground to attach the bands to. So, the thickest latex, the Olympic bar that was made to adapt to these heavy layer latex bands. And then these ground plates to protect the small joints, because if you look at exercising just with bands by themselves, they twist your wrists and your ankles. It’s okay for rehab, they use bands in rehab. But if you want a serious strength force to go through a joint, you’ll destroy your joints trying to use just a band, if you’re going heavy enough. It needed the Olympic bar and the plate and once developing the prototype, the first year I used it, I put on 30 pounds of muscle. I had been lifting like my whole life. I was one of those guys who I put on mass when I was 16 and then maybe a little bit more in university and then nothing. When I started, I was 198 at 20% body fat and now I’m 210, 100 kilos with 9% body fat.

Siim Land: Wow, that’s crazy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, that second year I put on an additional 15 pounds of muscle. I put on 45 pounds of muscle. I’m in my 40s. That doesn’t happen, that’s doesn’t happen with anybody.

Siim Land: It looks like it does.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Siim Land: So that’s the X3 Bar exercise band bar system then.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, X3 Bar resistance band training system, x3bar.com is the website, and that thing just works. Fantastic. And the funny thing is, it’s the greatest muscular stimulus device for growth, ever. And it’s inexpensive. I’ve used that over a whole gym and the thing is just a little over $550.

Siim Land: At first, when I first tried it, I was also quite skeptical of, okay, how can just using these resistance bands make you build more muscle and make it more effectively? But even after the first workout, I was like, okay, yeah, this is some a different stimulus completely and it feels very effective. You see like immediate results even from after a few workouts already, you can see more, let’s say, even like more muscle density as well as improved strength. So yeah, I would have to say that it does provide a completely novel stimulus for the muscles and joints. So that’s really something interesting to be looking out for.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, and injury free. It’s funny, I talk to younger guys about avoiding injury, and they obviously haven’t been injured yet, because they’re like that’ll never happen to me. All I need to do is lift heavy and I’m like, yeah, you’ll call me later.

Siim Land: What would make it more different from traditional resistance training? You mentioned briefly that with regular weights, you’re only limited by the most weakest range of motion, or you’re limited by the amount of weight where you’re weakest at, but with the X3 Bar fitness band bar system, then you can scale it up to where you are able to deflect the maximum amount of weight. What’s the actual difference physiologically?

Dr. John Jaquish: For example, in the chest press, I use the elite band, it’s the heaviest band that we have. I’m holding 500 pounds, 237 kilos out here. I do however many reps I can do, this is key for using it right. I might do 15 reps where I’m hitting that 500 pounds at the top, and then all of a sudden, I can’t get there anymore. But I can get to the mid range, which is only 300 pounds. I keep going with that and I might get four or five more repetitions in the middle, until I can’t get there anymore. And then I do one inch repetitions, just at the bottom, but that’s where the joint is compromised, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m only holding 100 pounds.

Siim Land: So you’re stimulating all ranges of motion, all of them until near failure for every range of motion.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, it’s the only way to completely fatigue a muscle. I only do one set, also. The only reason people do multiple sets is because the stimulus is lousy in lifting weights. You’re activating a very small amount of muscle when you go to fatigue. So that’s why people saw better results doing more and more sets. That’s why volume training exists. Well, volume training only exists because weightlifting, it’s just not as good as it could be if we had variable resistance. So, with variable resistance, you do one set, you’re done. Just wait two days and you’ll grow. Another thing, I really push this hard, is hit every muscle every two days. The reason is protein synthesis ends in 36 hours. I don’t care what you do, 36 hours. So, now somebody can say like, I train and my legs are sore for four days. That’s called damage. That’s not a growth stimulus. The idea of like the micro tears create the growth. No. Micro tears happen because you damaged muscle. That has nothing to do with growth. Nothing. Cyclists have more micro tears than weightlifters do. Do they grow more muscle? Absolutely not.

Siim Land: That’s a good point. Yeah, you don’t necessarily grow muscle by breaking it down constantly. You grow muscle by creating the environment where the body recognizes that, okay, we need to build muscle because it’s necessary for in the future. Sending the right signal to the nervous system, so to say.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Let me get into the anabolic trigger. So, while developing this, I was also doing hormonal research on… I’m one of the editors of the Journal of Steroids and Hormonal Science, a medical journal. It’s one of my favorite medical journals, because it’s looking at both exogenous, meaning external use of anabolic chemicals to treat diseases, as well as getting the body to trigger anabolic hormones itself, which is where I wanted my field of study. A lot of my biomedical engineering background was looking at that. How do we get the body to decide to make more testosterone, more growth hormone and suppress cortisol? If we can figure out how to do that, everybody’s just a walking Formula 1 car. So, how do we get there? I found 23 different datasets. I had a theory, and it was based on sprinters. Remember what I said about sprinters earlier? They are super lean, they have super high growth hormone. They don’t cut their calories, ever. They can’t. You can’t be low energy and run like that. Some of them are ketogenic. Some of them do fast. But ultimately, you can’t be at like, the bodybuilders who are doing a 500 calorie deficit per day and they’re low energy and they’re angry all the time. crosstalk can do. So, how are they doing it? So when I look at a video and this was the moment that switched in my mind, when I’m looking at a video of somebody sprinting, they’ve got a huge stride. They’re using their arm to throw back, so that they can pivot their pelvis with the momentum of their upper body shifting for a longer step, a longer stride. Everything is moving more than with a distance runner, except one thing, except the skull. The skull looks like it’s lined up with a laser, it doesn’t move. And so it’s just a major difference. They’re moving more. Every joint is moving more with a sprinter, whereas the distance runner… The distance runner, you look at their skull and their skull is bouncing up and down like this, like the rest of the body. So, the distance runner wants to activate the least amount of muscle to carry them forward, because they’re trying to conserve energy. The sprinter is not trying to conserve energy, the sprinter is trying to go fast. So, in an effect of going fast, you need great balance. To get great balance, you need great stability. So, there’s stabilization firing going all over the body to keep that skull just totally lined up. I thought, okay, stabilization firing. Has anybody looked at that? So what I ended up finding, and I decided to do a meta analysis, so if I can find however many studies that there were out there that could confirm this, we could potentially find another, an actual physiological mechanism of triggering growth hormone upregulation. So the theory was stabilization firing equals growth hormone upregulation. And so what I ended up finding was 23 different datasets from different areas of medicine, most of them using vibration or just stabilization in general, because vibration makes you unstable. And all 23 of these studies confirmed that there was a massive upregulation growth hormone when the stabilization was challenged, when a muscle is recruited involuntarily, it’s called the spinal reflex. It’s called that because the signal doesn’t even go to your brain, it goes to your spine, then bounces right back, less than a millisecond is how long it takes to trigger a spinal reflex. So every time you lose your balance, you trigger a spinal reflex. When your physician hits your knee with a mallet, the same thing. So that’s what we need in rapid succession to upregulate growth hormone. Now, that also explains the study, and this was one of the references in this paper, was the study that looks at the squat in free weight versus the leg press. So, with a squat, the guy who’s squatting, he’s having to activate his core, activate his femoris erector, his quadratus muscles, everything to keep stable, to keep from tipping over with that big weight. Some guys are like this, doing it forward. That’s the smarter way, by the way. So these guys who are squatting, and trainers have known for years, you just get better results out of the squats, even though you use more weight with a leg press. For some reason, squats just work better. And that’s why, because your body knows what that is. And the upregulation of growth hormone coinciding with the exhaustion of muscle, you created the hormone and the receptor at the same time. So, the hormone goes right to the receptor. And that’s one of the problems with exogenous use, when somebody injects a hormone in their body, the hormone can go wherever it wants to go. It’s not necessarily going to go where these people want it to go. It’s much better to upregulate naturally, the stabilization firing was tremendous. Now, with X3 Bar portable home gym, because you’re showing the body stabilization plus force, which equals more stabilization, if I’m doing an overhead press with X3 Bar fitness band bar system, I’m holding the weight over my head. So, it’s a lighter weight here, which is easier on my shoulders. As soon as I get it over my head, I’m holding way more than I ever would hold, I’d even ever be able to get in the gym. So my whole body like jackhammering as I’m coming down, because I’m holding a weight that’s way beyond anything I’d ever used. But then once I get down in the weaker range of motion, the weight drops off, because the latex isn’t stretched. So, massive stabilization firing, plus more load than I can ever handle equals more stabilization firing, tremendous growth hormone results, which is why when people use X3 resistance bands system, they lose a ton of body fat too.

Siim Land: I’ve also seen that most of the growth hormone during exercise is also released during the eccentric contraction. So if you’re doing like with the X3 workout bar system, then you’re experiencing a tunnel like eccentric contraction, as well if you’re hitting the crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: And controlled. And when you control it, especially when you move slow, when you see… A lot of people skip the videos that I did, there’s a 12 week program that comes with it. A lot of people look at the picture of the exercises and they go… and I see them, they’re doing this thing and I’m like no, you got to move real slow. If you watch me in the video, I’m going so slowly, moving up and down and you see like I’m shivering going up and down the whole way. crosstalk too.

Siim Land: Whenever I myself am using it as well, then it is like constant contraction all the time and stabilization is always involved. And it requires you to always be careful with not going too fast, because you can lose it, lose the stimulus a little bit and it is like doing the one set that you’re going to do. What would make muscles grow? We mentioned growth hormone, but growth hormone itself isn’t the key part for stimulating muscle growth. What would be the other factors?

Dr. John Jaquish: The other one is testosterone and testosterone usually is upregulated based on weight. So it’s the heaviness of something, how much muscle gets recruited? Well, obviously, based on how X3 Bar exercise band bar system works, you’re recruiting more muscle than you’ve ever recruited your life. You can even be doing it like in a light, I can do a set where I go 30 repetitions, the repetitions are higher also. I think a lot of people don’t expect that. And the reason is, because you’re handling so much more force in the strongest range of motion, it takes a hell of a lot more effort to exhaust the strongest range of motion. It’s something most people have never done before, ever. So, people who lift have never done it before. So, once that happens, there’s a major testosterone upregulator that contributes to the idea that it’s total body transformation. You’re dropping body fat really quickly and putting on mass.

Siim Land: It’s funny that you mentioned that, people tend to lose some body fat with it. I do notice that it is almost like a cardio workout with the X3 Bar resistance band bar system as well, because it really gets your heart rate going. And it gets the muscles firing.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s four sets, you do four sets in one workout. And you’re like completely wiped out. You think how the hell am I wiped out after four sets? That’s why.

Siim Land: Yeah, and it’s not like wiped out completely as you would when going to the gym. Like, for instance, you hit the gym and you basically destroy your one muscle group and then you can’t train for an entire week or something. With the X3 Bar resistance band training system then you’re doing it, because it’s like so much lower in the sits and lower in total volume, you will also recover faster, and you’re able to stimulate the same signal more frequently throughout the week, which is itself is going to result in more muscle growth, so they say.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, you have more growth phases per week. You only get so much out of one growth phase. So, wouldn’t it be better to have more phases of growth? So each muscle in my body has three phases of growth per week, whereas most people have one or two.

Siim Land: Yeah, it is, like even in traditional weightlifting, they see that generally, more frequent workouts and more frequent full body workouts tend to be causing more muscle growth and even greater strength gains as well. Because of like the higher frequency and the ability to overload the muscles more frequently with that as well.

Dr. John Jaquish: True.

Siim Land: But how long, you mentioned that the muscle building signal or the protein synthesis remains elevated for up to 36 to 48 hours and such. What would you do in the meanwhile, after having done the X3 Bar workout and having given yourself the stimulus, what would you do afterwards to help with the process?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s no way to, other than proper nutrition you mean?

Siim Land: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re obviously getting the proper nutrition, which I’m making a lot easier for people. God, there’s so much misconception. I told you earlier today, social media is really making people misinformed, because there’s no filter of what’s wrong and what’s right. And so, people share what they like as opposed to what’s correct. So, when Dave Asprey says fat is good for you, people are like, oh, cool, because I love cheese pizza, and that’s got a ton of fat in it. I guess that’s healthy. That’s what these people are sharing and I’m generalizing here, but all stereotypes exist for a reason. I see the pattern of behavior, whereas the people with lesser intelligence seem to have more time on their hands. And they seem to be sharing more stuff on social media, which means the quality of information is worse, because they have no ability to judge what’s correct and what’s not. So, yeah, it’s like the global nexus of fitness nutrition and political misinformation. It’s just garbage.

Siim Land: It is true.

Dr. John Jaquish: You don’t need to have any qualifications to hit that share button. So, that’s why this thing happens.

Siim Land: People tend to also get the results based on the quality of information that they’re getting, so to say. If they are taking bad advice, then they’re not going to get any good results either. And only the people who actually adopt some quality information or listen to quality sources, then those people tend to see greater results as well, just because of that. We mentioned this quality nutrition and such. So what foods will be then stimulating this muscle growth and sending the similar response to your muscles to grow?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it’s been known for a long time that for muscle growth, protein is key. And a lot of the fears of kidney damage, no, those have all been dispelled. And there have been populations that ate almost exclusively protein with a little bit of fat and no carbohydrate, and they live just as long as everybody else. So, the higher protein, higher fat diets are fantastic. The launch of X3 Bar fitness band bar system was on Dave Asprey’s podcast and Dave and I have been friends for a long time. So obviously, I’m a fan of ketogenesis and I try and get most people who use X3 Bar portable home gym, like we have a nutrition program which is pretty easy to follow. The biggest push is just getting sugar and refined carbohydrates out of your diet. But what I tell people to do is something really easy to follow. What I do personally is a little tougher to follow. But I’m a pretty open about that. I’m pretty much pure carnivore. So, I’m pretty steak and water.

Siim Land: What do you think about people telling that things like mTOR from eating meat and such is going to be like giving you cancer and such?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s all been disproven. A lot of those studies were epidemiology studies, and the problem, so the problem, the big colon cancer study, which was the one that everybody ran, this is six or seven years ago, where it was like meat causes cancer. Well, if you read the study, it wasn’t about meat. It was about nitrate meat. Well, is it nitrates? Or is it meat which is causing people problems? Also, they found people, I think it was 1,000 people they found and these are all based on survey, which don’t control for other points of data. So, they found people, 1,000 people who for 40 years ate nitrate meat every single all day. So, nitrate meat is like a hot dog, right? In Eastern Europe, I don’t even think you have processed hot dogs. I think you have German sausages, which is completely a different thing. In the United States, super highly processed, you can keep them in your freezer for years, and then throw them on the grill and you can eat them. I wouldn’t, but you can. So, if somebody is eating a cheap, loaded with preservatives hot dog every day for 40 years, are they doing that for health reasons? Are they doing that because they don’t care about anything? Probably the latter. So, these individuals probably also drink more alcohol. Probably, were more likely to smoke cigarettes. They’re also probably likely to have unprotected sex, do all kinds of other things that they didn’t care about the impact of their health, obviously. And even that, even with all those other factors that couldn’t be controlled for, it was only a 2% difference in the likelihood of colon cancer. Since then, they’ve done some better epidemiology studies that did control for more things. Alcoholics were excluded from the study and people who were habitual smokers, people who did other things that were associated with challenging their longevity. And what they found was that the vegetarian lifestyle and the meat eating lifestyle, there’s no difference in mortality, none, they’re the same.

Siim Land: What I’d like to also point out is that it doesn’t make sense that mTOR is going to give you a cancer, it can mechanistically but at the same time mTOR is also necessary for surviving, you wouldn’t survive without mTOR. Because mTOR is the anabolic switch that helps to build muscle and helps your cells to survive, so to say you. You would die if you didn’t have any mTOR at all. So it’s always a matter of context. And for instance, if people are doing resistance training, and they are lifting weights and such, then mTOR is actually going to beneficial for their longevity, because it can help them to build muscle. And muscle is actually one of the best predictors of healthy aging and increased heart rate as well.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, the more muscle mass you have later in life, the longer you’re going to live. You got to give your organs something to supply. If they have nothing to supply, they stopped functioning.

Siim Land: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So, it leads me to one of the things that I say frequently is, there’s no such thing as a bad hormone. Cortisol isn’t like a bad hormone. We talk about it like cortisol, you don’t want that. Well, yeah, except it has reasons it exists. Think about cortisol as like the brakes on your car. Well, nobody wants to slow down until you have to, till you want to avoid hitting another car. So, there’s reasons that cortisol is there. Now, you don’t want to over saturate your body with cortisol. Otherwise, you’ll be obese and you’ll be in chronic inflammation. But inflammation and cortisol exists for a reason. And as long as you let them exist for a reason, and you’re managing yourself to only have those instances when they need to happen, then it becomes-

Siim Land: A matter of context always. Nothing is either good or bad. Only the context.

Dr. John Jaquish: Saying mTOR causes cancer is like saying muscle causes cancer.

Siim Land: That’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: No. Here’s another thing, the stabilization firing upregulates growth hormone. Growth hormone is associated with specifically IGF1, which is regulated along with, their symbiotic mechanism. Basically, growth hormone comes out at that point. Someone says, you have regular growth hormone, you’re increasing your chances of cancer. I said, okay, rephrase that, what you’re saying is exercise causes cancer. Is that what you’re saying?

Siim Land: It’s the same with crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: The last I checked, human reflexes were part of everything we do athletically. So does that mean every dancer is going to have cancer because they dance? Because they have higher growth hormone. They go through stabilization firing in mass all the time. They’re also lean.

Siim Land: For instance, like heats saunas also upregulate growth hormone. And there’s a lot of studies that people who take regularly heat saunas, they have like less cardiovascular disease. The heat sauna is going to increase growth hormone, which will increase IGF1, which is going to give you cancer, but at the same time prevents you getting a heart disease, so it doesn’t make sense. It’s always like a matter of context and these hormones get expressed in different scenarios differently.

Dr. John Jaquish: Also, remember what I said about upregulating within the body, and then creating a receptor site. When you are doing an exercise, when you’re doing that stabilization overhead press or deadlift, same thing with X3 Bar exercise band bar system, upregulating growth hormone, well, at the same time, exhausting muscle, which upregulates the receptor sites. So basically, your body creates a hormone when it’s got a place to put it and use it. But the people who are using hormones that they take in a pill or in an injection, those go wherever the hell they want, wherever they end up, which is why bodybuilders have these huge stomachs. Because what happens is the growth hormone goes into the intestines and grows the intestines. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Siim Land: I’ve seen those, those are crazy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Distended stomachs, where it looks like they have a sea turtle in their stomach. A huge shell sticking out. And that’s why, because they’re also eating a lot of food. So, there’s very active intestines, so the growth hormone ends up in the intestines and grows the intestines. So, that’s the massive downside of exogenous hormone use. You want endogenous hormones, because those are created when there’s a purpose for those hormones. So, instead of going to feed a cancer cell, they’re going, whatever you’re stimulating.

Siim Land: Yeah, exactly. If you have elevated growth signal in the muscle, then they the protein you eat and such, or the mTOR you stimulate will be directed towards the recovery of the muscle and muscle growth. Because if the body detects that, okay, we need it, it finds itself in this environment, where muscle growth is more important than cancer growth, so to say.

Dr. John Jaquish: Your body knows where to put it. In fact, cancer cells are not connected to the central nervous system. They can’t ask for anything. They pick up what’s there. So they’re almost like parasitic cells. A muscle can call for something to the central nervous system. And this was a theory, that a lot of people had for a long time. Can you be cancer proof if you’re ketogenic? Is it possible? Because cancer cells live on glucose. If you deprive the body of glucose, and the only glucose you have comes from gluconeogenesis, well, does that mean your cancer cells can never receive nutrients and will ultimately die off? So, that theory was around for a long time and now they’re starting to prove that theory. There have been a couple studies, that show that people who go carnivore, they can’t actually feed the cancer. A lot of the studies that look at meat versus not meat, the people who are eating those hot dogs in that study, was a rest of their nutrition just candy bars and Twinkies? It might have been. So it’s not like they found 1,000 people who only ate meat and nothing else. They didn’t control for that either. So, if both groups are saturating their body with glucose, usually oversaturating their body as we do with the typical Western diet, massively, then everybody is susceptible to cancer. But is it possible to cancer proof yourself by going carnivore or going ketogenic? My comment to vegans, because I know a lot of vegans that say like I love X3 Bar resistance band training system, but, man, like your nutrition, I can’t be ketogenic and vegan. And I go, okay, number one, I don’t know that’s true. I think you actually can. You just have to eat a lot of processed foods. But the problem is, if a vegan were to eat all vegetables, they wouldn’t be able to have enough calories in their body to survive, so they end up eating processed stuff. You’re going to have to eat processed stuff. Processed protein, like alfalfa, pea protein. Those things are certainly better than eating a bunch of candy bars. I think what happens with vegans is because they’re just hungry all the time, they have to go the other direction or they’re not going to have any animal protein. So the only other concentrated form of calories is basically candy or pizza or whatever, like something processed, it’s got a lot of calories rammed together, because this is the only way they can survive. And so I think that they’re putting themselves in a really challenging position unless those concentrated foods they have are much smarter. I think some of the vegan nutritionists are realizing what people are doing to live that lifestyle, and they’re trying to engineer some better food products that have more fat and protein. I think it can be done, ultimately, humans can thrive on all types of different nutrition. I think carnivore is the easiest. I know I feel great with it.

Siim Land: Yeah, it is true that a vegan keto diet is somewhat difficult and really restrictive.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s so hard, but it can be done.

Siim Land: I wanted to talk a little bit more about the muscles and such. What’s the difference between like strength and size in the muscles, in terms of hypertrophy?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, the biggest differentiator, you see a gymnast, and they have an incredible power weight ratio, whereas you see a 140 pound gymnast doing the same weight in a deadlift that the 250 pound, weightlifter does. And oftentimes, you’ll see gymnasts go into some of the lighter weight classes of weightlifting and dominate. Because of their incredible power weight ratio. So there’s two types of muscular growth. There’s sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and myofibril hypertrophy. And what we see is sarcoplasmic really has to do with fuel load deprivation. So, you exhaust, this is what most people do when they go to the gym, they’re going through sets, like volume training and many sets. They’re exhausting the ATP glycogen, creatine, phosphate, three fuels that are in the muscles. Exhausting that to such an extent where blood has to rush back in and they have to replace, the central nervous system blood supply replaces those fuels. So it’s really the lack of oxygen that calls for the blood flow. But that blood flow then brings in more glucose and insulin and more ATP glycogen, creatine, phosphate is made and that volumizes the cell. Some of the biggest guys are doing that type of training, that’s definitely like a bodybuilder style training. Myofibril hypertrophy, however, comes from a very different stimulus. So, this is more like gymnast muscle, this is when your body sees a lack, instead of a lack of fuel, it’s a lack of structure. So, this happens when you go to fatigue in the stronger range of motion through high impact, for example. So, when you’re doing jump training, and you’re slamming against the ground with five times your body weight. Guys that jump from these big blocks, by the way, it’s the down jump that’s actually making you more powerful. The up jump doesn’t really mean anything. It’s so funny. I see these guys jump up and then they step down. No, no, the impact is the important part. They’re skipping the important part. They’re doing all the other stuff. So, these high impact absorptions are getting this myofibril effect. Now, that’s why size and strength aren’t always related, but they are related, because ultimately, the person with more sarcoplasm, who holds more ATP glycogen, creatine, phosphate has a medium term muscular endurance that can be very powerful. They might not have an incredible explosiveness, like bodybuilders don’t become sprinters very easily. But their muscular endurance, how many contractions under a heavy load they can do, is incredible. Because they got a lot of fuel in their muscle, whereas the explosiveness of a gymnast, a gymnast can become a sprinter very easily. Because they’ve got that instantaneous power, because they’ve had so much myofibril growth, the density of the cell. And this also coincides with what’s been seen with periodization training. You’re asking great questions, man. You’re hitting a lot of the stuff I really love. So periodization training tries to go from more explosive type exercise over a couple of weeks, and then moves into more volume type training. And so for a few weeks, you work on the more gymnast type effect, the myofibril type effect and then you shift in to the more sarcoplasmic type of effect. But with X3 Bar resistance band bar system, you get the myofibril effect when you’re doing the full reps, and then as soon as you can’t do full reps, then the mid reps, you’re running out of fuel. So phase one, which I call what’s going on here, is you’re getting the myofibril effect, you’re showing the body a lack of structure, and therefore that protein synthesis can happen. And there’s always a little bit of myofibril effect with weightlifting. But we’re talking about in mass, how do we get a massive amount of stimulus, which shows the central nervous system there is a lack of structure within the cells, which creates more structure in the cells, myofibril growth. Greater density of each cell. And then you run out of fuel. So the two things are happening just seconds apart.

Siim Land: So you’re getting almost like both of the effects for the myofibril, which is strength as well as the sarcoplasmic, which will increase the actual hypertrophy and the aesthetics, so to say.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Siim Land: How would it translate over to the traditional weightlifting scenario? If you do get stronger with the X3 Bar portable home gym and you build more muscle with it, how correlative is that in traditional, let’s say, bench press and such and squatting?

Dr. John Jaquish: Anybody who goes back and checks what their old lift was, is capable of a far greater output. So, it makes you a lot stronger in all regards. So people who compete, they say, well, I don’t really want to fire my muscles in this pattern, because it’s not used to that. And this is not what my competition is like. I want to practice my weightlifting when it’s more my competition, and they’re saying something that’s very correct. Ultimately, if you swing a golf club for a living, you’re a professional golfer, going out and playing tennis, it’s like firing in the wrong pattern. Can you detrain yourself? Can you screw up your swing? I don’t know. We don’t have enough data on that. We have some anecdotal data, but that’s just somebody says, yeah, it screwed on my swing. Like, really? Or, did you hurt yourself while you were maybe doing that other thing? You don’t want to jump to conclusions based one piece of anecdotal data, or even multiple. But what the objective of X3 portable gym is, it’s not teaching you how to fire in a pattern. A bench press is two things. It’s raw output and it’s a skill. You need to be able to balance that bar and move it through space, keep it stable, hold it. So that’s a skill. That’s like swinging a golf club. So you fire in a certain pattern. So if somebody only does X3 Bar resistance band training system and never touches a weight, are they going to be great at the bench press? Not the first time they try it, they’re going to be all over the place. Because that’s not what they do. So the objective of X3 workout bar system is to make you as strong as possible. Way better than weights, but that doesn’t mean you get the skill.

Siim Land: Yeah, it is, there’s these neurological components to lifting weights as well. Like it is a skill that you have to teach yourself, how to position yourself and how to move and such. Even if a gymnast may have really high relative strength, then they may not still be able to lift as much weight, because they aren’t used to doing that same motion, so to say. There’s a there isn’t a similar functionality, but they will probably learn it quite fast after they do go over it, because the foundation is still there.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So ultimately, what I tell people, how much is going to translate, I say, look, if you want to be competitive at weightlifting, do your lifting first and then finish with your X3 Bar fitness band bar system set. That way, you’re firing in the right pattern. You’re keeping the body trained on that skill. And then you stimulate the muscle to the most powerful stimulus you can ever get. And then, so you’re growing as much muscular tissue and keeping that pattern. So, for the people who have done that, all of their lifts have just skyrocketed.

Siim Land: That’s exactly what I’ve been doing at home as well. I use a lot of these gymnastics rings and I do handstands and everything like and such. I do those things first and practice the skill, so to say, and then I finish off with the X3 Bar resistance band training system, which is actually much more fun, so to say. Because I get to spend more time on the skills without worrying of needing to hit muscle failure, so to say. I get to hit the muscle failure with the X3 Bar portable home gym, and I get to focus more on the skills themselves. It’s been actually a lot of fun with that. That’s great. So, we’ve talked about the X3 Bar exercise band bar system a bunch and what does the actual workout routine look like? It’s like very short and brief, but what exercises are you doing?

Dr. John Jaquish: So because of that 36 hour protein synthesis window, I split the body in two ways, and maybe ultimately everything I’m doing is a suggestion. If Somebody is training for a certain event or somebody really wants to work on their hamstrings and glutes, pretty much questions from females mostly have to do with hamstrings and glutes. Because the larger you make your hamstrings, the less cellulite shows. So they grow that muscle in the back of the leg and stretch out the skin. No more cellulite. Cellulite exists for one of two reasons, maybe both of two reasons actually. But there’s two reasons. Excess body fat, but then also you can underdevelop muscle under there. So, the deadlift with the X3 variable resistance exercise system is so effective. Whereas, a lot of these women would never want to do a heavy deadlift, because they’re afraid of getting injured. Or, they wouldn’t even, they might do a deadlift but they’ll grab like a 20 pound bar or something, it’s not going to do anything. So, it gives them the relevance and strength and the benefit of variable resistance. So, what I recommend and how it is applied is different. I’m also going to get different people, I’m going to get a CrossFit competitor to do like a CrossFit readiness program, which is more geared at making them better at CrossFit. Breaking their personal bests, because right now, there’s CrossFitters doing it. And they said, I got personal records broken all over the place since getting the X3 Bar resistance band training system. And it’s like I need the right person to do it. I need somebody who’s influential in that field, to develop a specific CrossFit program to help CrossFitters. Everything I say is a suggestion. Everything I say is also bodybuilder focused. Or I should say aesthetics focused, because I think that’s what people care the most about. Mostly the reason people exercise is to look good. So, yes, I have bicep curls in there, but is there are a good reason, is there a functional reason to have large biceps? Not really. You’re not going to be a better gymnast because you have bigger biceps, right? So, that’s the way I use it. Like when Ben Greenfield uses it, I think he only does overhead press, deadlift and squats. That’s all he does. He does bench press too, chest press. So he does four of the eight movements. So like the calf raises he doesn’t do, because you are activating your calves in a deadlift. His argument is that’s the functional way of using the calves. Great. I want my calves to look like somebody glued a steak on the back of my leg and that’s what my calves look like. They’re ridiculous. So, that’s what I wanted. So, I got what I wanted. I wanted that aesthetic effect, but I’m not competing in Spartan races and he is. So, that’s why he’s doing what he’s doing. So, like ultimately, the way I programmed it, it’s four movements per workout. So I’ll do one day his chest press, squats, overhead press and tricep pushdowns in any order you want. Then the next day is deadlift, bent over row, bicep curl and calf raises. So, that gets everything from an aesthetic perspective. As you advance in the program, you go from two leg squats to one leg squats. The reason I prefer the one leg squat is, unless you’re a kangaroo, you walk on one leg at a time, right? Functionally, we talk about functional training all the time, but then we don’t train functionally. So the only time you use two legs is when you stop, or an impact, with what we do at OsteoStrong. That’s two legs. If you’re moving, you’re using one leg at a time. Do you think sprinters go and squat? No, they don’t want to do that at all. It’s like totally the wrong firing pattern. So, we get one leg at a time. And also it allows you to put all of your body’s resources into one quadricep, in one glute combo firing pattern. So we do what’s like a split squat. And so when your front leg is getting load, you can put a lot more force through one leg at a time, you can crosstalk.

Siim Land: It is indeed, like a really good way to promote hypertrophy. Especially as well as burn some, a ton of body fat with it. I’ve been using it for maybe two weeks and I do notice that even though you’re not, compared to the amount of time that you’re exercising with it, the results are magnificent in terms of, you don’t really have to spend that much time at the gym, you don’t fatigue your nervous system that much either. You get to sleep better, you have more time to do other stuff and it is in terms of looking at bodies, like real biohacking, then, I think this X3 Bar resistance band bar system is really like something that ease can be considered like a biohack, in terms of you’re doing something that you wouldn’t get from a regular way of exercise. And it does show as well. So that’s cool. And then definitely, you yourself have seen amazing results in terms of muscle growth and fat loss and such. I’m looking forward to what’s going to happen in the next few weeks as well. Something to look out for. I really enjoyed talking with you, and we’re starting to wrap up the show as well. Before I ask my last question, where can people learn more about you and your work?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s x3bar.com. That’s where you’ll read the most about X3 Bar fitness band bar system. My website, if somebody wants to review some of my research is johnjaquish.com. J-A-Q-U-I-S-H. My work is there, you can download the PDFs of what I’ve published. A link to my book, Osteogenic Loading and also a couple videos, when I’ve been on different news reports and speaking at different events. And then my company is Jaquish Biomedical. So, you can learn about some of the other things that we’re working on. I got another couple products in the queue that are really cool.

Siim Land: Nice. Looking forward to them.

Dr. John Jaquish: Also, on social media if they want to follow me, my Facebook page is just Dr. John Jaquish and then @drjaquish for Instagram. Every day I put like a little tip, something that people just hadn’t been thinking of. I think some people really find those useful.

Siim Land: All right, yeah, all the links will be in the show notes for people to check out. And my last question is, what would be this one piece of advice or a habit that you wish you had adopted sooner that improved your body and your mind?

Dr. John Jaquish: I can only pick one? Sleep. I did a sleep analysis and the conclusions I came to were obvious but I got a couple of allergy issues, and I never liked taking medication. Sometimes I’ll just be coughing all night long, and I don’t get any sleep. I had to address those kinds of things. Also, I’m really active in the charity community in San Francisco. I live in San Francisco and we drink. Alcohol is not the friend of sleep. You do the sleep study, you download, you can get an app on your phone called like Sleep Cycle. There’s a couple of them. Yeah, I think the one I have is sleep cycle. You lay the phone with, it’s got an accelerometer in it and put it in bed next to. You got to be sleeping alone for this. So, if you got a wife or a girlfriend or a boyfriend, whatever, you want to make sure when you’re traveling you don’t have someone else in the bed. It’s tracking how often you move, because there’s very strong correlation to the quality of sleep and what phase of sleep you’re in, and how much movement there is in your body. If you’re in deep sleep, you don’t move. And so the nights we have alcohol, you’re never getting into deep sleep, you’re just thrashing around all night. And so it’s just a really crap quality of sleep. So, I didn’t realize that until probably six months into the development of X3 Bar, because I’m looking at everything because I need to make the greatest recommendations for all the users of X3 resistance bands system. I got to help them optimize everything. So, there’s just a lot of things I just didn’t look at for myself. And as soon as I realized that I thought, alcohol sucks. So those two things are tremendous.

Siim Land: It is true, sleep is one of the most important things and most of the growth hormone and anabolic growth also happens during sleep.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Siim Land: That’s true. Well, yeah, I really enjoyed talking with you, John Jaq and looking forward to your other inventions in the future as well. So, it’s exciting times.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.

Siim Land: Yeah. All right. I’ll see you around.

Dr. John Jaquish: All right. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Siim Land: All right. That’s it for this episode of the Body Mind Empowerment podcast. If you want to support us, then I would greatly appreciate it if you could leave us a review on iTunes and the other social media platforms. Also, if you want to get yourself one of those X3 Bar resistance band bar systems, then head over to the show notes and find the link to the X3 workout bar system store So, head over to the show notes and use the link there. But other than that, thanks for listening to this episode. Make sure you like it, share it around. Thanks for listening, my name is Siim. Stay optimized, stay empowered.