Working Out with John Jaquish and Luke Storey using OsteoStrong and X3 Bar

Full Transcript

Luke Storey: John Jaquish, welcome to the show, dude.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me.

Luke Storey: I’m having a great time already. The people listening to the podcast don’t get the added benefit of the fun banter that goes on before.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Yeah.

Luke Storey: I sometimes wish I just click record and we just ease into the conversation.

Dr. John Jaquish: You could’ve done that.

Luke Storey: So the people watching on Instagram and Facebook live, they see all the fucking around that happens before the actual quote, end quotes interview.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Luke Storey: But we were just talking about the differences in our drinking habits and why I don’t drink and you limit yours. So yeah, man. So here we are. We’re here at OsteoStrong in West LA. We’re definitely going to be talking about that. This is one of my favorite places in this city.

Dr. John Jaquish: Mine too.

Luke Storey: There are places like this that keep me anchored to Los Angeles. Every time I want to move, I’m like, ah, but what about OsteoStrong? Ah, what about Just Float in Pasadena? What about my Kundalini yoga studio? There’s so many resources here that have become part of my lifestyle. So it’s fun to be here doing something other than working out, but we’re going to do that afterward. So before we get started and get your background and really dive in, what’s new and exciting in your life right now?

Dr. John Jaquish: All kinds of things. X3 Bar portable home gym is really taking off. I think when you come out with a product, and we’ll get into what that is, but it’s just a very different way of looking at strength. And this is very common, we’re going to talk about this too, when you talk to exercise scientists, they go, “Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s kind of obvious but why haven’t we done that?” And it’s with variable resistance. But most people who believe lifting weights is the best thing you can do to gain strength, this is just like an alien idea or it’s crazy. And so I got a lot of negative feedback from the potential customer. A lot of people just thought I was just a crazy person for launching such a product. But then they started to see the results, not just out of me, but out of some of the users, and I’ve got a group of a 2,500 raving fan… Actually, I don’t have a group. They started their own Facebook. Are you part of that?

Luke Storey: No, that’s cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: The Facebook users group.

Luke Storey: For X3 variable resistance exercise system?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. X3 Bar resistance band bar system Facebook users group. Yeah. These guys, they’re totally all about X3 Bar resistance band training system in their strength training. And because they’re basically all pure converts, there’s a couple of guys, you still do a few other little things mostly to keep sports-specific, but they switched over and they’ve seen gains. A guy sent me some pictures yesterday. He said, “I’ve got more out of 12 weeks of using X3 Bar fitness band bar system from a muscular gain and fat loss perspective than I have in 20 years of lifting weights.”

Luke Storey: Holy shit.

Dr. John Jaquish: Obviously this guy’s not a kid.

Luke Storey: Right, right, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, yeah. And so it now that those things are starting to come out and people are starting see it, they’re like, “Oh, well I guess it’s a bizarre approach.” But I mean, hey, remember when Steve jobs said we’re going to take all the buttons off the phone, it’s just going to be a piece of glass. There’s only one guy, and I remember this guy, I met this guy, he’s a writer for the Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg, he’s the only guy that said this is going to be a smashing success. Everyone else is like, “Apple’s going out of business as soon as they launch that phone with no buttons.”

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But it clearly worked, as did mine.

Luke Storey: So that’s the big news is that’s just starting to mushroom out-

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s really starting to take off, yeah.

Luke Storey: … And it’s just going crazy. At what point do you start making real money at something like that? Once you’ve gone through the different prototypes and the development and running your patents through and all of that stuff, when do you start to go, “Wow, Holy shit, I’m rich. Or is has that not happened yet?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m a pretty low maintenance dude. So I could live in a tent and I wouldn’t care. So, rich is relative. But what I will say is at first I always thought that reversing osteoporosis, creating the OsteoStrong medical devices, was where the sort of real money was. And then I ended up, based on the OsteoStrong research, that’s where I developed X3 workout bar system because I made some observations with human capabilities in optimized sort of impact-ready ranges of motion. And then when I saw these impact ready ranges of motion, just how powerful people were, I thought, “Wait a minute, if people are seven times stronger in a stronger range than they are in a weaker range, then when we lift weights, we’re really leaving a lot of untapped resources untapped. They’re just not being accessed. What if we can fatigue the muscle in a way where we could change the weight through the movement.” And people had thrown bands on bars before, but that was like X-amount of weight on your chest and 1.1X at extension. Whereas I’m looking for X-amount of weight on your chest and 5X at extension. So a much more profound a force going through that muscle. But that is in accordance or very close to the actual curve of strength that you have in your natural motion. So that’s why it’s just really started to take off, and it’s been the coolest ride. And I guess to answer your question, it made money right out of the gate. It was a great product. But now it’s really growing the company and building tremendous international distribution. There’s a lot of different countries we’re going to get into. And some of the partnerships that we have with some athletes, there’s the Miami Heat is using it, all the players in the Heat.

Luke Storey: Oh cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And the coaches are just brilliant guys.

Luke Storey: Awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well of course, naturally, I would say they’re brilliant because they brought my product in. But they are brilliant guys. They’re not afraid of not just trying something new, because they really look at the efficacy, what’s the logic here, why would this be great? And that strength coaching group, they just get it. It was fantastic. And then other people have followed on. A lot of people, when it comes to their sports performance, they want to be first to be second. Nobody wants to be the first guy to try something because what if it doesn’t work, what if it hurts me, what if it ruins my whatever, neurological firing pattern or something like that. So a lot of people were hesitant in the beginning, but it’s taken off now.

Luke Storey: Awesome, dude. Well, let’s jump back into how…

Dr. John Jaquish: You notice how I really totally avoided that when I’m getting rich question.

Luke Storey: Well, no. I’m always curious because not so much about people that start a business, but specifically when there’s an inventor of a product, and I know there’s the research and development, there’s the prototyping, there’s a lot that goes into bringing something to market, a physical product. And I’ve never done business in that way. I’ve always been in like info marketing and education and working as a freelance artist. And so the idea to me it’s just interesting, I think because I’ve not done it, of having an idea, seeing it come to fruition and then building a business around a physical product. It’s something that I don’t have experience with.

Dr. John Jaquish: So what’s the weirdest thing about when I tell the story about where X3 Bar resistance band bar system came from, I developed it because I made the observation, this the seven-fold difference observation. So I made a drawing, showed it to the engineers that I was working with, with bone density, and a consulting company in Northern California. And so we built a prototype, actually we built a like three prototypes. And I started using it, and I just started gaining muscles so fast. The prototype cost me $2,000 to build just the bar, just this thing, because it was supposed to withstand a tremendous amount of force. And so it immediately started working. Then I gave one to Dave Asprey, and said, “You got to try this thing.” And he immediately started seeing results. And I thought, “You know what, if I don’t launch…” Because I already was very busy with medical devices with bone density. So with doing that, that was my job. I’d never felt like I was going to start another thing. I thought that this bone density invention was really just doing fantastic and I wouldn’t really need to do anything else. But then I thought, “I created the world’s greatest strength training device and I plan on just using it myself.” And I’m like, “If I don’t come out with it, it’ll be just like a missed opportunity because it’s huge.” And now it’s a tremendous company.

Luke Storey: Awesome, dude. So let’s get into the bone density research. So I understand that you got into researching that and developing what eventually became OsteoStrong as a result of your mom coming down with this osteoporosis diagnosis. So I find that story really interesting because obviously it’s close to anyone’s heart when someone in their immediate family is suffering from something that could be fixable. What’s the story…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, most people don’t know it’s fixable.

Luke Storey: Yeah. Right. What’s the story behind that, A, and B, if she hadn’t had the intervention of what you came up with as a solution, what are the typical pharmaceutical or Western medical solutions to that, and what are the side effects? What’s the worst case scenario if you hadn’t come along and went, “You know what, I think I can fix this.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So she was diagnosed in her 70s, and she was a very active person, she did gardening and played tennis. And she had me a little bit older in life. One day she comes home and she says, “I’m going to die.” And she’s very dramatic, so it’s like I’ve heard that before. But then I said, “Why?” “Well, I got diagnosed with osteoporosis.” And I said, “Okay. Well, that’s a real thing. I’m well aware of what that is.” So I said, “Let me look at the options.” And then I looked at what the pharmaceutical options were. I told her about the side effects and what the effects were. And what really bothered me was that the only classification of drug there was, was what you’d call an anti-catabolic, meaning a drug that keeps older bone from breaking down but doesn’t encourage the growth of newer bone. So it’s just kind of like a hard shell on the outside of your bone that’s there temporarily until you cycle off the drug. And I thought, just from a mechanism standpoint, that doesn’t sound so great. And so I told her about it and what my opinions were. And so she did not want to touch any of that. And I said, “Look, let me look into this because I have an idea.” And I really saw the disease, and I didn’t have my PhD yet. So what I did… And my professors told me if I had developed or wanting to develop this after, I would’ve talked myself out of it. Because what you learn in school so often is this is the way things are. And what I had done to the ultimate solution was emulating high impact, creating a device that gives you the benefits of the highest slamming against the ground that we do, absorption of impact, without the risks of injury. So what I did was I looked at all the research and I said, “Gymnasts of superhuman bone.” So I’m not going to tell my mother to be a gymnast, but what I can do is maybe we could create a set of devices that deliver the force but in a very slow and controlled manner, in exactly the same positions that humans absorb these impact forces. So, for the upper extremities it’s like right here, 120 degree angle of inclusion of the arm, back of the hand in line with the clavicle. And I can either produce or absorb the greatest amount of force right here in this position. Not here, not here, not with my hands on my head, right in that position that I described. So let’s get all these positions and build specific devices and then use robotic arms to get everybody in the right position, and then have computerized biofeedback so they can see where they’re going. And that’s what I ended up developing. The way I describe it sounds like a throw it together in an afternoon, but it took some time. And then once I had the prototype put together… I built it at my parents’ house. And I was living in San Francisco like I am now at the time and they lived in the Napa Valley. And so every time I was there, once a week, because the protocol is once a week, I had her go through it. And there were some arguments, you’re trying to get your mom to do something, especially when no one else has tried it, right? So I tried to first and then my dad, who’s… He understands what I’m doing, he’s a scientist. He designed and built the lunar rover for NASA, smart guy.

Luke Storey: Oh, wow. Damn.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s a smart guy. So he understood the literature that I was referencing and he said, “Yeah, on paper this should work, but we got to try it.” So within 18 months she went from the diagnosis of osteoporosis, she was a T-Score of negative 2.5, all the way to zero, which is a normal bone for a 30 year old. And she was a 72 at the time.

Luke Storey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So, she went from having compromised bone to having-

Luke Storey: Better than it should.

Dr. John Jaquish: Better than it should be at her age, way better than it should be.

Luke Storey: In simple terms for those that don’t know, and I’m not even sure exactly that I know, what is osteoporosis?

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s deconditioning of bone. When a muscle gets weak, when a muscle shrinks, that’s deconditioning of the muscle. When a bone has disuse or isn’t loaded properly, we see this with astronauts, we see this with people who are stuck in a bed, they’re just sick and they can’t load their body and start losing bone density rather quickly. And when that happens, the bone… If you look at the inside of a bone, it looks like a honeycomb. So there’s little walls, it’s not in hexagonal format like honeycombs are. But there’s walls that hold this bone mass together, it’s called the bone matrix. Well, with disuse the walls become thinner and some of them disappear so it becomes more porous, osteoporosis. The Latin osteo is bone, porosis means porous. So you get porous bone.

Luke Storey: Is it anything akin to when you make bone broth, and I don’t know if you’ve ever done this but, you make bone broth in a crock pot and you cook the bones for 24, 48 hours, those bones become very brittle to the point where if you cook them long enough, they just become mush, they just turn into kind of mineral dust.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Luke Storey: Would that be a sped up, exaggerated version of that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Nah.

Luke Storey: Different crosstalk

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s pretty different, because you’re breaking down everything. It’s not really becoming more porous, it’s just dissolving.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: But there’s great micro photography. When you do a search on osteoporosis and you go to Google images, you can see what a porous bone looks like and then what a strong bone looks like. So given the situation that she had, I ran her through it, it worked with her. I said, “Okay. Now, if it works with my mother it can work with everyone.” Because she didn’t want to do any type of exercise. She likes playing tennis and hiking and gardening, but she doesn’t exercise for the sake of exercise. And the fact that I got her to do it and got her excited about it, too. I thought, okay, people are going to like doing this. So I opened up a clinic in the Napa Valley and had 400 members pretty quickly. I hustled. I mean, I had to get a lot of people’s attention because I didn’t even have a name for the machine, it wasn’t called OsteoStrong, the name of the machine’s actually Spectrum. But I just called it the machine. So I was networking with physicians and then one of the physicians who I attracted as a user, as a member, she immediately began building bone density and then referred more than 100 of her patients.

Luke Storey: Wow, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was a coauthor on my book. We have the book somewhere around here.

Luke Storey: And how many machines are there now? And we have them here in the room, aren’t there like…

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s 70 locations of OsteoStrong now.

Luke Storey: But I mean the actual… I guess you call it a circuit of machines, in the location we are here in West LA. What are there, like five?

Dr. John Jaquish: Four.

Luke Storey: Four machines?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: That do different parts the body, different bones?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s four positions that you… We could look at this in a couple of different ways, but four big positions that we absorb high impact force. There’s the way we absorb upper extremities, lower extremities is 120 degree angle behind the knees, same as the 120 degree angle right here. The spine throughout. So the positioning of the shoulders and getting the spinal curvature as you would absorb high-impact forces, it’s different than being relaxed, and then the core. And so those are the four positions. It only takes about 10 minutes to run through the protocol and you only have to do it one time per week.

Luke Storey: As you might’ve guessed from looking at me, I’m a guy that forces myself to work out but it’s not something I’ve ever enjoyed. Kind of like your mom, I like to be active and do stuff, but exercise for the sake of exercise has never been my favorite. It’s kind of like I make myself do it because I want to be healthy. But I think that was one of the first things, when I first tried the OsteoStrong training and going through the sequence, I’m like, ‘We’re done?” It’s so fast. I mean, each machine is, I wouldn’t say it’s hard but, I mean you’re exerting a lot of effort and force for a few seconds and then-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, I got criticized about this.

Luke Storey: … And then you’re done. I’m like, “Can this actually work?”

Dr. John Jaquish: When I was writing my dissertation, other than my professors, I was only working with medical doctors and I never met one that told me something other than this is never going to do anything because you’re exposing… It takes 10 minutes to go through the whole protocol, but you only exposing each kinetic chain for a few seconds to these high-level forces. And of course if impact is the greatest stimulus to bone, how long are you under tension for impact?

Luke Storey: Good point.

Dr. John Jaquish: Tenth of a second, hundredth of a second?

Luke Storey: Good point.

Dr. John Jaquish: So by comparison, what we’re doing is a marathon. And this whole time under tension thing, which is sort of like… I’ll do a false hoods of fitness video on that. I mean, yes it’s an oversimplification of what the body needs, and it’s missing out on a couple of key elements of stimulating a change of showing the central nervous system that something needs to change. Because that’s what we do. And I think that’s also something that exercise science understands but applied exercise and fitness, or in physical medicine facilities like this, the idea of what you’re trying to do, and just about everything you’re trying to do with biohacking, it’s you’re showing the central nervous system that there’s a deficit of something in your body. You don’t have enough tendon or you don’t have enough bone or you don’t have enough muscle. And the body works to fix that problem. So we can only talk to our central nervous systems via creating environments. If you put your body in an environment where you seem like you want to be a broken down car, your central nervous system will say, great you’re going to be a broken down car, you can barely move. If you put your body in an environment where you want to be in economy car, like let’s say an endurance athlete, hormones drastically change, up regulate cortisol to protect as much body fat, as in staying as fat as you can, as long as you can, which is what long-sustained cardio does. Sorry, cardio fans. There’s only 40 years of research on this. So that’s sustained cardio. But your central nervous system is saying, okay, we got to be an economy car. So it up-regulates cortisol to protect body fat, down-regulates growth hormone to get rid of as much muscle mass as possible. So you lose muscle, gain body fat, or protect body fat so you can be an efficiency type device going long distances, right? Now, from a fitness perspective, that seems to be like nothing what people are after, unless they want to be great endurance athletes. I think most people want to be a Formula One car. So what do we know about a Formula One car? Engine, big engine, powerful engine, that’s muscle, right? Everybody, women and men, they want the same thing. Everybody wants to be strong, have a beautifully shaped body, very aesthetic. So we have the engine, muscle. The chassis, bone. That’s specifically what we’re focused on with OsteoStrong. So with putting these… Creating the environment. So we’re creating the environment that the human body’s just got to become a Formula One car. So, huge forces through the bone. When I push like this, when I’m in this position, there’s over 2,000 pounds that go through my upper extremities. Now I’m only pushing… I’m actually not pushing it all. There is movement though, and the movement comes from the compression of the actual bone. And so that compression of bone and then the release shows a deficit of bone matrix, therefore minerals get pulled into the bone to re-calcify, making the bone more powerful. So that’s part of that Formula One car, you’ll get the chassis, you have a Formula One car. It doesn’t look anything like a road car. It looks crazy how powerful it is, and it needs to be because there’s incredible forces going through that chassis. And a Formula One car doesn’t have a gigantic gas tank either, they got to stop for gas because they’ve got to say light. And so that’s the type of thing that I was after, is what do we need to do to create those environments. And that environmental model just articulated the way that I was talking about it. I don’t think a lot of applied exercise professionals, they don’t quite see adaptation that way. I don’t know how they see it, but I know they don’t see it that way. Because they see some of the recommendations and I want to ask, what do you think you’re doing because I know you’re not doing anything that’s going to create an adaptation, because it’s not the environment. So that premise is the way I approach everything. And that’s how X3 Bar resistance band bar system came to be, and that’s how how OsteoStrong came to be.

Luke Storey: Well I got to say something in terms of a testimonial, as I said, not someone that’s been super into working out, just doing it as needed. I would like to have an aesthetically great looking body and be in shape and have some muscles and stuff like that. And it also does feel better to be stronger. You’re lifting a suitcase or got to climb some stairs, no one likes to feel weak sauce. But when I first started coming here and OsteoStrong and using the bone density machines, I was not in a period where I was lifting weights. Sometimes I do that, I get off on a JAG and I do high intensity training, body weight, pull-ups, pushups, whatever. My brother has a gym, he’s a great trainer, into kind of a functional fitness kind of stuff. So I go through phases. And I go, shit, I’m feeling stronger. I can do more pushups, more this, more that, whatever, pull more weight, push more weight rather, or pull in some cases if it’s a pull up. But anyway, long story short, I start coming in here, doing the bone density just because I’m like, well, it’s good for you. And after the first couple of times I did it, and I want to ask about this too, this is still the case, I felt so high afterward. I was in such a fucking good mood. I’m just super happy. I don’t know what’s going on with hormones and neurotransmitters, but something was happening.

Dr. John Jaquish: You got it. That’s what’s happening.

Luke Storey: So, I mean, I’m just like, if I’m depressed I need to get to OsteoStrong and push these goddamn machines for 10 minutes and do the vibe plate before and after, and I feel like a new man. But what was really trippy, dude, is after I’d done, I don’t know, maybe three or four weeks of once a week and then went back into the gym and started doing pushups and pull-ups, I’m a goddamn beast.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah.

Luke Storey: But I didn’t build any muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Right, yeah.

Luke Storey: It’s so weird. So I…

Dr. John Jaquish: So the OsteoStrong, it’s good to make the distinction.

Luke Storey: Yeah, go to do some pushups or pull ups or just simple stuff, or even just curl some heavy weight and think, oh, I’m only going to be able to do two or three of these and I’m doing 10. I’m like, what? I was not working out, how did I build muscle? And I started to make the correlation that I’m getting stronger from this even though I’m not doing any weight training or do anything that would classically build muscle. It’s so weird.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well there’s limits.

Luke Storey: But it’s the chassis you’re talking about it, it’s the frame, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right, right. So unlike an automobile, a Formula One car, we have a central nervous system, and that central nervous system has feedback loops all over the place. And when I speak about how much force, like we have elderly deconditioned females putting seven, eight, nine times their body weight through their hip joint. And so I say this to a group of elderly people and they’re looking at me like, “Yeah, I’m not doing that. That sounds dangerous.” And I said, “I’m going to ask you a question. Everybody hold up a fist like this, like you’re angry, hold up a fist. Can you squeeze that fist hard enough? Look at your fist. Can you squeeze it hard enough to break your own finger? And they all do this and they’ll go, “No, I can’t. I don’t think that’s possible.” Right. The reason is, this is very important for people who exercise or who want to ever exercise keep in mind, neural inhibition. So we have a process in our body that says if something’s going to hurt or cause damage, if this something is under control, as in not explosiveness, like you can hit the ground and fracture and that happens, there’s no neural inhibitory process. But when you squeeze a fist, your body’s going to stop you before a fracture will happen. You will actually shut the muscles off, you just can’t do it. And so I knew that when we engaged here, we would go right to the neural inhibitory limit, which would be that environmental stress to show the bone matrix, to show all those cells in the bone matrix, ah, we need to pull in minerals and build more small walls inside this bone, make the bone more powerful. And the same thing with X3 Bar exercise band bar system, it’s just a much deeper level of fatigue. Oh, you’re absolutely running out of myofibrils to fire, therefore we’ve got to build more. And it’s the speed at which you run out of the contractile tissue and with the X3 portable gym. So when you experienced that, what happened was you build bone mass therefore normally when your body would shut you off, when you’re going through a movement, it didn’t shut you off.

Luke Storey: Oh, interesting. Interesting. So it sort of unlocked a hidden potential, in a way.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, It’s a very another way. Now, younger people don’t have that same experience. How old are you?

Luke Storey: 48.

Dr. John Jaquish: 48.

Luke Storey: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I mean, definitely people past 30 start noticing that. Sometimes with some 25 year old guy and he’s a professional athlete, and they don’t have that same experience because they’re able to fire enough muscle to be at that limit whether or not, or they’re high impact athletes. You work with gymnasts. Gymnasts, it’s funny, they come to OsteoStrong and they put tremendous forces through their body and they have slivers of progress, just 1%, 1%, 1%, 2%. And they’re like, “Well, why is everybody making more progress than me?” Because they see an NFL player making 10% progress every time they come in. And I tell them, “Because you’re already at such a high level of bone mass, you’re already able to fire because the way you protect yourself and you hit the ground.” Now, ultimately you want to do it because you’re becoming fracture proof, because gymnasts still fracture. Impact is the greatest stimulus for bone, it’s also the greatest cause for fracture. So you’re going in right into the most dangerous thing, which is also the most powerful thing, but you’re walking a fine line. And not every impact is under control, in fact most of them aren’t because they don’t land the same every time. They practice landing all day long and they train because they want all those landing events to be identical, because it’s always loading the body in the right way so that they don’t injure. But they don’t always.

Luke Storey: So with someone who’s younger and more fit then, it’s like their threshold for the neural inhibition is higher?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: Okay. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well they have higher bone mass.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’ve been losing bone mass since you were 30.

Luke Storey: Right. Oh, shit. Don’t tell me. How depressing.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, sorry. That’s another thing…

Luke Storey: I think the first thing I noticed… I’m trying to think when was the first thing where I was like, wait, something changed my body dramatically. You know what, it was is one of the things I do on a fairly regular basis. I have my Bulletproof vibe plate like you guys have here and I’ll just do some kind of hollow body pushups on that, like elbows tucked in. And it’s just a way that I like doing push ups, it doesn’t fuck with my shoulders. And I’ll do that and I’ll just do some planks, and I’ll kind of swap arms and just plank around a little bit. And I was swinging around from plank to plank, like a freaking…

Luke Storey: And I was swinging around from plank to plank, like a freaking karate expert or something.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: I’m just throwing my body weight around and not getting strained at all.

Dr. John Jaquish: How am I doing this?

Luke Storey: Yeah, I think that was the first thing and doing those pushups, I was like, this is so easy. Normally when I’m vibrating I fatigue a lot faster and that’s kind of the point. That’s why I like doing that. It also just feels better on my joints when they’re getting shaken while I’m doing that strength. So that was the first thing I noticed. It was just fascinating. Then I think what’s cool about it was that it started this cascade where then I actually felt like because I had quantifiable, subjective progress, it made me want to actually work out more because I’m getting somewhere now.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a psychological effect when you can see a metric of your health that you can absolutely control. Look, how many people do you talk to that aren’t the people that you interview? Because people you interview probably have something figured out. You don’t generally find a confused person about their health and say, let me talk to you and let the world listen. Most people find the subject of their health very frustrating because they think it’s out of control. They think there’s nothing they can do about it. I have a fraternity brother who said when I think we were both like 35, he was a type two diabetic and he had all kinds of joint problems. He could barely get out of a chair and he goes, “Well, I’m just getting old.” I was like, “What? No you’re not. I mean, yes, you are, that’s a fact. But that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to fall apart. There are plenty of people who are older who are in great shape, like address your joint dysfunction. Go to a physical therapist or show me what’s wrong with it. I might be able to help. Google it. My knee pops when I-”… Whatever. I don’t remember what it was. He was living in the East coast at the time. People have this attitude where just it’s defeatist. I plan on being in incredible shape. Now I’m 220 and 9% body fat. I’m going to stay here forever because I basically go under no risk while I use X3 Bar fitness band bar system to build muscle or I use OsteoStrong to build bone. The protocol is just mostly risk-free, nothing’s risk-free, but-

Luke Storey: Breathing’s not risk-free.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Luke Storey: In terms of going back to the degradation of bones, how much does environmental and dietary influences have to do with that? I’ve been hearing a lot about EMS in the way that they affect calcium channels and lead to all of these seemingly unrelated diseases. Do you know anything about deficiencies in diet, exposure to EMS, other things that would be making this problem worse?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Magnetic fields, EMF, electromagnetic field. Our friend Dave Asprey, he noticed he had lower bone density in the hip where he keeps his phone than he had on the other side. And I don’t remember… Yeah, I do. I think it was 7% lower on one side versus the other, which seems kind of extreme to me, but he went specifically to look at that. So yeah, electromagnetic fields are not doing us any favors and we are surrounded by them. But the bigger challenge is nutritional. Inflammation is not the friend of building bone density. So most of what we eat is sugar and refined grain, which is all inflammatory. So I mean most of the Western diet, what people are consuming and they even see health foods as just a chemical shitstorm which is just like stow a lot of sugar. I see all these keto bars with like 10 grams of sugar.

Luke Storey: I know.

Dr. John Jaquish: Why?

Luke Storey: It’s funny.

Dr. John Jaquish: Do you understand what the word keto means? I don’t think you do.

Luke Storey: Specifically with bars, I swear every time I see a new bar and it says Paleo or keto or something, I look at it, it’s got 22 grams of sugar and the second ingredient is dates. I’m like, dude, seriously can know and make a good tasting bar?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Luke Storey: I mean you have to eat the meat bars, like the grass fed meat.

Dr. John Jaquish: Which have like five grams of protein. It’s barely worth the trouble.

Luke Storey: Yeah, so…

Dr. John Jaquish: When I get those Epic bars, I can eat a box of them.

Luke Storey: I bet you can have.

Dr. John Jaquish: And I do. I thought, I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s all I’m doing is eating bars.” I don’t remember where I was, long trip or something.

Luke Storey: When you travel, I mean you want to have a quick fatty protein snack. So if anyone’s listening and you’re of the entrepreneurial spirit, please make some God damn good tasting bars that don’t have a bunch of-

Dr. John Jaquish: Basically, it’s like a rib-eye steak that you can just keep in your bag.

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: In a sealed container.

Luke Storey: I remember when I was a kid, there was this big campaign by the dairy industry, milk, it does a body good. It was all about bones and calcium.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Luke Storey: Where does the calcium play into to this and why is osteoporosis becoming more common?

Dr. John Jaquish: You ask the best questions.

Luke Storey: I don’t remember everyone’s bones falling apart. It wasn’t something that I heard about and I’ve been pretty conscious of health issues and disease for a long time.

Dr. John Jaquish: One of the biggest issues with dairy and calcium intake is calcium is the only mineral that your body self regulates. So everything else, magnesium, like if you take in magnesium, you have magnesium. If you don’t take any in, you don’t have any. Calcium is basically stored like in a battery and that battery is your bone mass. You need that calcium every time there’s an axon and a dendrite that that fire and kind of communicate with each other. Every time that kind of lightening bolt goes through there, that’s calcium that’s being used. The problem that we have is that battery that we hold through our whole lives is after we get to about 30 years old, that’s peak bone mass, the battery gets lower. We don’t store as much in that battery. When the more you take in, the more the calcium metabolic rate speeds up because oh, you’re taking it in and so you actually end up losing bone density faster if you change what homeostasis is. So people who don’t have good amount of calcium in their nutrition and then they get past peak bone mass or they get to like menopause, which is when you know like estrogen levels change and that’s when they start losing bone density about twice as fast as normal, sometimes three times as fast as normal.

Luke Storey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then they go, well I need a calcium supplement, but they’re still not loading the bone. They sped up the metabolic rate, which means they start losing bone faster. Now there’s conflicting research on that particular function right there or exactly what happens. But from a mechanism standpoint, those are understood to a degree and calcium is something that should be at a decent level throughout life, not just when somebody says, “Well, I need it now.” Not to say that it’s too late. Now they can come into OsteoStrong and now the body’s got a reason to keep all that calcium. So that’s when people ask me about the calcium and vitamin D recommendations, when they pass a certain age, I say put force through bone, then look at supplementation. It’s not the other way around. All of these things also, here’s another thing to think about. For any view that that tuned in because they want to hear about X3 Bar portable home gym, this is something you’re going to tell your mom. When you look at a weightlifter, they’re strong because they lift weights and they take extra protein, which is used as a building block for muscle. Right? What if they just quit lifting weights and just took in the protein? What would happen? Would they still build big muscle? No. If it’s excess calories, you’d probably get fat. So why would we expect to take in calcium and vitamin D and have them magically turned into bone if we’re not using the bone? Not going to happen.

Luke Storey: You just reminded me of something that, I don’t know if I read this or I just intuited this, but I’m a guy that’s really into sun. To me, the sun is the ultimate vitamin and it seems to me, I mean especially if you look at when as we’ve become more domesticated and the advent of the incandescent light bulb that so many diseases have become more prevalent as we move indoors, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: We’ve got air conditioning and heat and we’ve got fake lighting that isn’t-

Dr. John Jaquish: And the inflammatories that we take in actually, it contributes to sun burns.

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like if you get your inflammatories really low, you don’t burn, you tan.

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Even red-haired people.

Luke Storey: So if we’re sun deprived, I think I’m really hot on this too, because I just did a really long interview with Dr. Jack Kruse and he just blew my freaking mind about lighting and sun and stuff, so I’m just totally even more obsessed with this concept now. What about the deficiency in vitamin D? Because we’re cutting ourselves off from the sun because most of us have been brainwashed to think the sun gives you cancer and is bad for you when in fact it’s the biggest anticancer practice you can do if you do it safely. Where does vitamin D play into the loss of bone or ability if we add force and these things that are positive for bone growth, how does vitamin D and sun play into that?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a much bigger conversation about what vitamin D we should have. A lot of the base levels, a lot of the normative data that we have on minerals, vitamin was created based on survey data of averages in like the 1950s and 1960s back when we had the food pyramid and everybody was eating cereals and grains. They actually use that fucking word, cereals.

Luke Storey: That’s funny.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah.

Luke Storey: That’s what I grew up on.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. The guys from General Mills paid for that food pyramid to be built and it was like that’s what we eat. It’s just so criminal what ended up happening back then.

Luke Storey: Yeah, and then-

Dr. John Jaquish: It was all inflammatories and then it’s like here’s the normative data based on everybody who’s eating everything wrong.

Luke Storey: Then later on, the sugar industry pushing the low fat thing too. It was two big crushing blows to our dietary traditions and habits, at least in Western culture.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: Okay. So carry on, vitamin D, sun.

Dr. John Jaquish: What’s a good level of vitamin D is we can argue that because the normative data was taken by, I would call a tainted sample, a tainted population. Also, you’re not just meant to absorb sun through your face and your arms. We’ve got a lot more skin that we cover with clothes. Now pointing out another example, females in the Middle East have a tremendous problem, much bigger bone density problem than we do in the United States because they got this much showing.

Luke Storey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So having your face and your exposed does make a good positive difference.

Luke Storey: Yeah, and-

Dr. John Jaquish: Not as good as somebody who’s got the shirt off at the beach, more often than not.

Luke Storey: I always recommend breasts and genitals out too.

Dr. John Jaquish: At the beach?

Luke Storey: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, depends what beach you go.

Luke Storey: Anywhere you won’t get arrested.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a short list there, but we’ll include that in the show notes.

Luke Storey: I think people feel like, oh sun, yeah, I get some sun. I go out and get some sun on my face.

Dr. John Jaquish: For five minutes.

Luke Storey: There’s photo receptors all over your body.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re right.

Luke Storey: Your skin is basically a solar panel.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I’d agree with that. There’s also some things that we don’t really measure and talk about like serotonin levels.

Luke Storey: Oh.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, like an antidepressant, right up there in the sky. Just take your shirt off and stand outside.

Luke Storey: Right. That’s why I this has always been my concept is why we feel good. Say you go on vacation somewhere tropical, right? Why you feel good? I think most of us think, oh it’s because I put my phone away and I quit work and I’m not stressed out with my family. Dude, it’s because you’re just in the sun.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re doing what you should be doing.

Luke Storey: And you’re grounded and you’re in bodies of water being even more grounded. I think that the sun is what makes you feel like you’re on vacation and that-

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Luke Storey: I mean I do it every day. I just go on mini-vacations, 20 minutes out in the sun.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s funny. It doesn’t matter what your weather is, you still have sun everywhere.

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean I’m sure there’s some guy that lives in a cave, but yeah, for just about everybody. You don’t need to be by the beach. You’ve got the sun.

Luke Storey: I’ve been having this thing I’m doing lately, I practice, I’m very committed to and that’s watching the sunrise every day and doing my sun gazing. This morning, I got up to do it and it was cloudy. It was overcast, which is rare in LA and I was like so bummed. I’m like, “God dammit. I woke up at 6:50 for this?”

Dr. John Jaquish: You know you’re still getting it, right?

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s there.

Luke Storey: That’s what I had to tell myself.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re getting that light.

Luke Storey: Because it felt like it wasn’t. So with the vitamin D thing, I’m super curious about the way all of these things work, when we’re low on vitamin D because of the lack of sun, etc. does that make us not be able to utilize the calcium in our body properly? Is that how it-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: Is that the mechanism by which the bone starts to degrade?

Dr. John Jaquish: The vitamin D is kind of the glue that pulls the calcium in.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: So the other thing is with the calcium, I wanted to ask you, I stopped taking calcium supplements ages ago because I started to read a lot of negative, I don’t want to say press, but just doing some research that indicated that most calcium supplements are kind of chalk or dust and they’re not bioavailable. They’re organic minerals like calcium and water that you can’t uptake.

Dr. John Jaquish: Most vegetables are not bioavailable either. That’s the response when you say that to some of the bone density experts. There’s a lot that we take in that is not bioavailable.

Luke Storey: What form of calcium could we actually supplement or what foods are really high in calcium if we want it in addition to doing physical things like this that would give us that impact and help build new bone? How is ways that we can get more calcium into us?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s meets with great levels of calcium. Also don’t cut the tendons and ligaments so far off the meats you eat. I power through a lot of bone material when I eat, especially chicken. I don’t eat all the bones but I kind of grind them up.

Luke Storey: Oh you do?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: I wonder if bone broth then would have a higher level of calcium?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Yeah.

Luke Storey: Because you’re leaching all those minerals out of the bones.

Dr. John Jaquish: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Luke Storey: Okay, cool. Cool. Next question, going back to something that I referred to earlier, why do I feel so goddamn high like I just took MDMA after I do an OsteoStrong circuit?

Dr. John Jaquish: Is that MDMA feels like? I feel great, but it seems like that would be a little weirder.

Luke Storey: I’m exaggerating.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you feel great when we’re done with-

Luke Storey: I’m not trying to make out with everyone after OsteoStrong, but I do have a marked increase in, I mean it’s so obvious to me subjectively that my hormones and neurotransmitters just explode. I always feel really happy for the rest of the day after I do it.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s definitely a serotonin effect. Other than that, it’s hard to quantify. We haven’t done a study on it.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like, I’m so busy doing bone density studies-

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: That it like-

Luke Storey: Is this something that’s common or am I just like the feel good guy?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, everybody says they just feel good. You say to somebody, like when I do the lower extremity, I put between 3,000 and 4,000 pounds through my hip joint. Everyone goes, wow, that sounds terribly painful. It feels fantastic. Just wow. You just feel like you just drank lightning. Like, I feel great.

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you’re not worn out or anything like that. As a scientist, I’ve never written about that because that’s not really quantifiable.

Luke Storey: Right. So it’s just more of an anecdotal thing. We don’t really know exactly why. I mean-

Dr. John Jaquish: At some point-

Luke Storey: Frankly it doesn’t really matter. It’s like, does it do that? Great, then I’m in.

Dr. John Jaquish: It certainly does make people want to come in and do it again.

Luke Storey: Right. So compliance is higher because the net effect of just being in a better mood.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right. So we’re more assured that the people who come in, they like it. It feels good. And then, oh look, my functional bone performance is going up every week. So you get a chart that shows you what you’re doing at OsteoStrong and it pretty much shows success happening every single time you come in. And so it’s a combination between you feel great and you have a metric of your health that you can control and you’re like, whoa, okay. I’m like happy for two reasons here. Yeah, that definitely keeps people coming back and excited.

Luke Storey: Next thing I want to know is about joint health. Something I’ve experienced as I’ve gone through different phases where I’m like, you know what, I want to put on some muscle and I start working out and I’ve found, I mean I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve injured myself on numerous occasions because I just don’t have the range of motion and the joint mobility and the joint health to push weight on those joints. You know what I mean? So say doing a bench press and I lack the shoulder mobility or a better example would be like doing a pull up-

Dr. John Jaquish: Do you mean lack mobility or just some like the joint just does not feel good?

Luke Storey: I mean, putting pressure on a joint and loading it and making it move in a way that afterward I’m like, ouch, why did I do that? And that doesn’t happen to me. I’ve only used the X3 Bar resistance band bar system a couple times. So I can’t speak to that, but I do know that numerous times, and a lot of people I know too, it just kind of the meathead gym rat generation are all about gains but often injure themselves because they don’t have the range of motion to work on whether it’s free weights or machines and they end up getting hurt.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So the range of motion really has to do with that neural inhibitory process combined with a lot of either damage from a traumatic event or just sort of micro-trauma happening over time. Typically, the most powerful weight workouts should never make you sore in any way. The reason it does, like when people say, “Oh yeah, I can barely move my arms. I had a great bench press workout.” I’m sitting there like going, “Do I really want to tell this guy all he really did was just hurt himself?” That’s not stimulus that you’re feeling. What you’re feeling is damage. So the way we move, the way people functionally move, and I almost don’t like the word functional because it’s really overused. A muscle shortens, that’s its function. So you could define anything as functional. But when you see somebody sprint and we didn’t need to train people to do this. Everybody from all over the world sprints pretty much the same way. You use seven degrees of flexion from a straight knee to… Not even like that. Like here to here. That’s what you use when you’re under force to propel yourself forward. We have 180 degrees available yet, we only use seven. Why? I mean like trainers, great trainers will look at me and be like, yeah, yeah. I mean, you have to only otherwise you wouldn’t go fast if you tried to bend your knee more like at the bottom. You’d be doing like lunges. You wouldn’t go anywhere. Right. It’s just totally efficient. So we choose to isolate the strong range of motion when we actually have to get some shit done, right? When the objective is getting somewhere really quickly, we choose efficiency. Then why is it with weight training, we just absolutely bury ourselves in inefficiency? So let’s say you’re not using an X3 Bar exercise band bar system and you’re using a regular weightlifting bar-

Luke Storey: For those of you who are listening, you can watch this on YouTube if you want to see where it’s going.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah, that’s true. Thank you for explaining that. Some people will listen. So, I’m holding a bar, it’s an Olympic bar. This one is an X3 resistance bands system, but most Olympic bars are not nearly as cool as this one because they hold weight instead of variable resistance. The problem with a weight is that it’s the same when you got it laying right across your chest as it is when you’re at full extension. But you’re seven times stronger at full extension than you are when the bar is at your chest. So you’re going to choose a weight that you can handle in the weaker range of motion when the bar’s on your chest. So that really means… And what do we know about that range of motion? You have very little muscular activity and the joints at the greatest point of stress. So, when people-

Luke Storey: So say you’re doing what you’re describing, say you’re doing a bench press and you’re in the down position and now you’re kind of at that rest point before you push back up.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, most people don’t rest at the bottom. I mean, especially-

Luke Storey: You’re not supposed to.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, you get guys who are bench pressing 400 pounds or something like that. They don’t rest it on the chest.

Luke Storey: Right, right. I’m just saying at the end of the press.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, the bottom and then they go to push back up.

Luke Storey: So at that point-

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s incredible stress on the joint and you’re hardly stimulating anything in the muscle.

Luke Storey: So at that point, is the highest stress point of that particular move on the joint and the muscles are very unengaged?

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re the least at least engaged.

Luke Storey: The least engaged through the cycle of that move.

Dr. John Jaquish: So every single time people lift in the standard weightlifting format, they’re overloading the joint and underloading the muscle, every single time.

Luke Storey: Interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: At first, I kind of held back because I got a lot of people who were angry.

Luke Storey: I love how-

Dr. John Jaquish: Now I just kind of come out and say like, yeah, weight lifting is actually really terrible.

Luke Storey: What’s funny, dude, I listened to a couple of your podcasts and I’m like, holy shit, this guy makes sense. I have my Joovv red light thing at home and it’s kind of boring to stand there so I do a couple of different things. A, I obsess on my phone addictively or if I happen to have a little more energy, I’ll reach down and I’ll do some curls. I just have like a 25 pound little barbells.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Luke Storey: But since hearing you talk about this concept, I realize it’s only hard at about 10 inches of lifting them and then once it’s up here, I’m like, ah, I can feel my muscle resting.

Dr. John Jaquish: As soon as the bicep really gets short-

Luke Storey: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: You got a lot of power there.

Luke Storey: And there’s a lot of resting involved. Even if you try and not pull it up all the way and let it down all the way and you kind of limit the range of motion to get the most sort of squeeze out of it, it still feels pretty weak.

Dr. John Jaquish: The objective behind X3 Bar resistance band bar system was after making the bone density observations and how heavy a load we can get in the body to trigger bone growth, which also grows tendons and ligaments, by the way. So people with joint damage-

Luke Storey: I have that. I’ve got a bad right hip.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s going to be less bad over time as you keep using the OsteoStrong device.

Luke Storey: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Even if you’re bone on bone, you can still build the joint capsule. There’s a study, let’s see, it was Benjamin and Ralph’s 1996, which shows the compression of a joint at impact levels begins to thicken the tendons and ligaments that surround that joint. So the joint’s just better supported. So being bone on bone, yes, that that can hurt. But I’ve seen people with debilitating knee pain saying I need a joint replacement. They push off that joint replacement for six years or maybe longer than that because all of a sudden in six months, they’re pain gets cut in half. In six more months they’re pain gets cut in half again. Now they’re like, I mean my knee still doesn’t feel good but I can do everything, get in and out of a car. I can run around at the beach with my family, whatever. So now from a muscle perspective, so X3 variable resistance exercise system is about building muscle and dropping body fat. It’s the same logic but applied in a different way so we fatigue the muscle to the absolute most profound in comparison to what we see in weight training. So instead of limiting yourself by your weak range, you have a light weight in the week range and you have a medium weight in the mid range and then you have a hyper load at the strong range. So something you’ve probably never even handled in one repetition in a gym. So like when I do a chest press with X3 Bar fitness band bar system, I’m holding 500 pounds at the top of the movement, 300 pounds in the middle of movement and 100 pounds at the bottom. So I’ll do 15 to 20 repetitions and then that brings me to fatigue in that stronger range of motion. I cannot get to the strong range of motion anymore, but now I’m doing half reps in that 300 pound range. So now I’m fatiguing that range of motion. Then by the time I do go to fatigue and completely fatigue, the muscle, which you cannot do with a weight, I’m in the weaker range of motion. But guess what? I’m not overloading my joints. My joints never hurt whatsoever. The first two years, which I just kind of crossed that threshold a couple months ago, I put on 45 pounds of muscle and lost 16 pounds of body fat in the first two years of using X3 Bar resistance band bar system. I have no joint pain whatsoever. My body feels like it did when I was 10.

Luke Storey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Nothing hurts. Not my neck, not my knees, not my toes, nothing. Then I see in weightlifting forums, which I had followed for years and I was one of those guys who had little tweaks, never had a big injury but just little like, oh, I was dead lifting heavy and something definitely didn’t… Had to put the bar down because just one side started tightening up, one side of my spinal erector started tightening up. I get nothing now. It’s just growing muscle and it’s to the point where if I don’t see somebody for three or four weeks, because I travel a lot, so I see friends in different parts of the country and gosh, where was I recently? I was in Miami and I had my shirt off and I was taking some pictures. I saw some people I hadn’t seen in like six months and they’re like, “Did you put on another 10 pounds of muscle?” I’m growing quickly and I’m in my forties. This is unheard of. Generally it doesn’t happen, ever. That’s why. It has to do with the appropriate level of force and the appropriate range of motion. It’s so simple.

Luke Storey: For people that are listening. speaking of the simplicity, I just want to explain for those that don’t know what the X3 Bar portable home gym is, we’re looking at it right now and those of you that are on YouTube, we’re going to work out after the interview and show the OsteoStrong machines and also show the X3 Bar resistance band training system. I’m going to do a little workout cause I just want to try it out with the man who invented it himself because that’s the privileges you get as a podcast host. But essentially we’ve got a bar, right? What’d you call it? An Olympic bar?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s a spec of an Olympic bar. It’s a knurled, steel bar, and then it has bearings that allow these hooks on the end that hold the world’s heaviest latex in place so that you can change your joint angle.

Luke Storey: Oh, cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: It always stays level.

Luke Storey: See, you don’t get that when you lift weights or work with machines.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, you don’t.

Luke Storey: Oh, that’s interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Luke Storey: So that’s why your joints don’t get-

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, Olympic bars do have bearings?

Luke Storey: They do? Oh, okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Olympic bars do, but standard machines don’t.

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So there’s a lot of awkward wrist positioning in standard machines because people don’t understand it. The manufacturers have no interest in adding complexity and cost to their equipment. So sometimes somebody will use some kind of chest press or something like that and they’ll notice their wrists are a little sore afterward-

Luke Storey: Yeah. Well if you don’t have-

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s because there is a little torsion in there, but-

Luke Storey: If you haven’t worked with a trainer who has some sort of concept of biomechanics to, it’s very easy to injure yourself, especially in machines, I mean free weights I think a little less so, but in the gym machines, I’m always like, “Ah, I don’t think I’m doing this right.” You can feel your joints hurting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Neural inhibition.

Luke Storey: Okay, so we’ve got the bar and then there’s these thick bands. The one I’m looking at right now is like what, three inches wide? Two-and-a-half inches wide?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep. It’s two-and-a-half inches wide-

Luke Storey: And like three feet long, three-and-a-half feet long?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a 41 inch loop band, but it’s not made of a petroleum rubber. This is tree rubber. This is latex.

Luke Storey: So actual latex.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. When you do the chest press, it’s doubled over around your back and you push the bar away from you. But that’s as thick as my pinky finger-

Luke Storey: Yeah, it’s intense.

Dr. John Jaquish: Block of latex, that is like two-and-a-half inches wide.

Luke Storey: It’s like a rubber band to King Kong.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, something like that.

Luke Storey: Yeah, and then there’s a plate depending on the move you’re doing.

Dr. John Jaquish: This band is 300 pounds at extension for doing a chest press.

Luke Storey: Jesus.

Dr. John Jaquish: But if you’re seven times stronger in you’re stronger range, don’t you really need that?

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because the people who are listening, you think about, oh, I’ll never need a 300 pound band. Well, yeah, you actually will because you have no idea what you’re capable of in the stronger range of motion.

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s what people get and they go, “Wow, I can actually use like the heaviest.” Some of the stronger people can use the heaviest band. We sell one called the X3 Elite Band, which is separate, and that’s 500 pounds.

Luke Storey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And then people can even combine them. I know a guy who dead lifts with the heavy band and the X3 Elite Band, so that’s 800 pounds.

Luke Storey: Jesus.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s 800 pounds.

Luke Storey: Jesus, dude.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, he needs to get that force. He’s a former football player. He’s crazy strong.

Luke Storey: So he’s got the bar and then the rubber band, and then there’s a big plate. When you’re doing curls, for example, that goes on the ground, and you stand on that, and then the bar or the band wraps around that, and then your hand wraps around the bar.

Dr. John Jaquish: The reason for the plate is, a lot of band protocols. People just step on the band. But most fitness bands are between five and 20 pounds. Sometimes they’ll say it’s 300 pounds. There’s one on Amazon, it’s a 300-pound band. It’s a band bundle actually. I played with it, and yes, it’s 500 pounds if you stretch it 15 feet. That’s the failure point of the band. So they’re pretty much screwing with the math and the engineering. So you won’t get 300 pounds, but it will take 300 pounds. It’s an irrelevant number. I’m talking about what’s actually being put into the muscle. That’s the only thing that counts. Actually, all of the bands for X3 Bar resistance band bar system, ironically, are tested up to a 1,000 pounds, even the tiny one. So they could all be called a thousand. So that’s just some goofy thing that crosstalk.

Luke Storey: Why do you use latex instead of rubber?

Dr. John Jaquish: Because molded rubber stretches out.

Luke Storey: So it wears out?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It wears out real quick, especially with very high forces that people are capable of creating with this type of strength training. Molded rubber is junk, and most of these rubberized band fitness products, they’re $20 piece of junk. They might be okay for rehabilitation. Which is why you walk into a Physical Therapist office and you see a lot of band products. But a lot of those are for outward rotation thing. They’re not for strength training. If you took these latex bands and you tried to do a dead lift without this ground plate, you might injure or break your ankles.

Luke Storey: Right. Because of the force that’s turning your ankles in?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. What I needed to do was create a second ground. That’s what this is. This is what the plate is. So the plate, the bar, and then the band set are all critical. And when I travel, I don’t leave part of it at home. You’ve got to have the whole thing.

Luke Storey: Well, I think one thing that’s cool about this, and now of course I need to get one of these and make myself work out. One thing that’s cool and I think one of the biggest barriers to entry for me is the idea of going into a gym under really bad artificial light and EMF. It’s not an environment and really bad music usually, or at least what I consider bad music, that’s really loud. And the smell of all the plastics and rubbers and off-gassing. To me, most gyms, fluorescent lights that are buzzing. crosstalk. Most commercial gyms are the most unhealthy environment and I’m going there to get healthy. So I think what’s cool about this, I’m like, oh dude, I could go out in the woods and do this. I could do it on the beach, I could do it on the line.

Dr. John Jaquish: I always film it outside.

Luke Storey: That’s freaking cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Lifting outside is great.

Luke Storey: If somebody buys one of these setups, how many different parts are there to the X3 Bar resistance band bar system? And how much does it cost? Or are there different crosstalk?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s the bar, the plate. And then there’s four bands that it comes with.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Of varying degrees of power. Most of the lower strength individuals can use the lightest band. Most very strong people are doing great with the stronger band. And then the X3 Elite Band is, as the name would suggest, for really strong people. Now what’s very interesting is the customer base has typically been very high level strength gaps. crosstalk.

Luke Storey: This looks like it’s part of a tank or something. This is crazy.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s like a tank.

Luke Storey: Holy crap.

Dr. John Jaquish: There are some people who get it and they’re like, I got it, I actually can’t move it, even a millimeter. What I tell them is I just keep using the one, a level lower, and you’ll get there.

Dr. John Jaquish: Listen carefully.

Luke Storey: Love that. My listeners love that too. So many people get that. When I’ve used it, it’s been here at the OsteoStrong in West LA.

Dr. John Jaquish: Let me make one distinction, just make sure, and I got some confusion after I did the Dave Asprey podcast. What’s your dog eating? Nothing. Okay.

Luke Storey: She’s just having fun.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. X3 Bar resistance band training system does not do bone.

Luke Storey: Right. Got that.

Dr. John Jaquish: This is for building large muscle. Women love it because it grows hamstrings, which women have very underdeveloped hamstrings. Typically, because it’s deadlifts that build hamstrings and that’s dangerous for the back. And women don’t want to hurt their back or their neck. So when you do an X3 Bar exercise band bar system deadlift instead of a standard deadlift, you offload the position where you’d normally injure. And you hyperload the position where you’re powerful. And you just grow. And the hamstrings get bigger and it stretches the skin. So the reason a lot of leaner women, and I hear this from women all the time, in fact, if we ever want to get the attention of a lot of women, we could just go to a restaurant, start talking about hamstrings, growing and stretching of the skin, so cellulite goes away. Every woman in earshot will stop talking and lean in, and say, “what did you just say?” So this is a huge issue. And now they can deliver that force into their hamstrings. You just grow that muscle a little bit, stretches the skin out. Now what you thought was body fat, was just really loose skin. And it’s not loose anymore. It’s nice and tight. It looks feminine. It looks great.

Luke Storey: So basically for 500 bucks, you have your own home gym that’s totally portable. You could throw it in the trunk of your car.

Dr. John Jaquish: And totally superior to anything else. I’ll never lift a weight again. It’s just a waste of time.

Luke Storey: That’s what I’m getting. In terms of going back to the OsteoStrong machines, as I think about living somewhere other than Los Angeles where I’ve been for 30 years, now I’m so hooked and habituated into so many great things I have here. How well heeled would someone have to be to buy there four OsteoStrong machines and have them in their house? Are we talking like a couple of $100 000 or something?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: It’s pretty out there, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s pretty out there. And actually we don’t even sell them to individuals other than investors like Tony Robbins. So Tony Robbins has them in his house.

Luke Storey: I bet. He has everything in his house. Everything I’ve ever heard of that’s awesome, he has five of them. Seriously. Every time I hear about a biotech that he does, I…

Dr. John Jaquish: He has rooms at each one of his homes that are just full of all of this biohacking stuff.

Luke Storey: Well he’s a discerning user and customer. So when he gets behind something, it gets my attention. And actually, come to think of it, that’s how I first heard of OsteoStrong. Was at his Unleash The Power Within in San Jose. He did quite a big presentation about it. And then I was working in an event here in LA and met Sarah there. Because I was annoying her with my joovv light that was shining in her face. She’s like, do you think you could turn that the other way or turn it off? And then I became friends with these two and coming in here. But when Tony gets behind something, it definitely signals that there some legitimacy there. He seems to be on the cutting edge when it comes to this kind of stuff. So with the business model with OsteoStrong does it work as a franchise model or-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s franchise.

Luke Storey: Where they license the machine and stuff like that?

Dr. John Jaquish: And it’s probably the coolest business that you could ever get involved with because the machines are robotic and automated. You still want the session coach to be with someone to answer any questions and make sure they’re just using it properly. But the machines are pretty automated and they track data automatically when people log in and there’s not a lot of permitting, not a lot of costs to set up one of these things. They’re just dynamite businesses. And you end up with a lot of happy people that you’re helping live longer and happier. If you and I owned a bar, at the end of some of the days when we wheelbarrow people out of the bar, because I just think you and I would own that kind of bar.

Luke Storey: Of course. If you’re going to have a bar crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: If you going to have a bar, it’s got to have a wheelbarrow to throw dude’s in there. So you know at some point we looked at each other and go, you know what? I don’t really know if we’re doing the right thing for people. And this place is just magic, because people walk out of here with these… And especially people who have no other options for their health, some of them are compromised or some of them are high performance athletes. There’s a former NFL player that comes in this location who he’s got a lot of joint pain. Now when you look at him you think, oh, that guy, everything’s perfect in his body. No, that’s me. Him, he’s all beat up because he’s been lifting standard weights for a long time. And this guy’s just gritting his teeth when he gets out of a chair, because so many things hurt. The look on that guy’s face after his first experience here, I was lucky enough to be here. I can put heavy load on my body with both the X3 Bar and with the OsteoStrong. And he has an X3 Bar resistance band bar system now. He has an X3 workout bar system at home. So he’s now able to put tremendous force on the body, stimulate even more muscular growth, stimulate bone. And now tendons and ligaments with the OsteoStrong devices, making them thicker, making his joints more powerful, and he’s cutting his pain. So the guy walks out of here with the same smile that a 75 year old mother walks out with. What’s so cool from a bone tendon, ligament perspective, we’re all the same. The NFL guy and the little old lady, they’re the same. They get the same issues. Now for different reasons, one’s disuse, the other one is abusive use, but dysfunction in both cases. And we’re rehabbing those dysfunctions and making them more powerful than they ever were.

Luke Storey: I think that’s one of the things that’s interesting from an observational standpoint is when I come in here, I do see a lot of people that are super fit and athletic that look like people that do sports or are in the gym a lot. And then there are a lot of elderly people too. That are in here just rocking it. It’s just really cool to be able to hit that wide of a demographic.

Dr. John Jaquish: And we call them needs people and performance people. But it’s really the same thing.

Luke Storey: Right. And the other thing that you mentioned too is the software interface that tracks what you do. I think that’s a really important component because I’m incentivized by gamifying things. When I track my sleep with my Oura Ring, and I’m always tracking my performance.

Dr. John Jaquish: Is that the new Oura Ring?

Luke Storey: It is. I sanded mine down so it was a little less shiny. But it’s great. But for example, just with that I know sleep’s important, and I try to go to bed early, and get a good night’s sleep and I care about it. But, I care about a hell of a lot more when I wake up in the morning, I check my score and I’m like, fuck, 92. When I wake up and I’m 64, oh man, what did I do? And then I look back and go, oh yeah, I ate a steak at midnight. Bad move or whatever it is. So when I started coming in here and doing the OsteoStrong machines, I put in my phone number and then it shows me my best score, shows my last score, and shows me the current one. And it incentivizes me because I see the gains are massive and I’m getting so much stronger. I think last time I was in here I was on the heels of a gnarly flu or some bug I had for two weeks, and I hadn’t been in for maybe, I want to say a month or month and a half or something. It was a pretty long break traveling and then I got sick and stuff. But even though I was totally weak, my score was still higher than when I first came here, which is interesting. So I didn’t digress and go back, or regress back before I started.

Dr. John Jaquish: If you have more bone…

Luke Storey: It’s crazy. That was really interesting. I was disappointed, but it still encouraged me because I’m still better off than my baseline when I started. And I could see my highest score and I was like, what, I pressed 1200 pounds before or whatever it was, whatever number. So I’ve been able to gamify it and quantify it and get those results and then they get emailed to me too. I think that’s a big influence on the compliance factor too, and getting someone to habituate to it. Whereas you come in and like, I don’t know, is it working? I guess I’m getting better. Who wants to do that? If I see my results every single time, then I want to beat my own score. It’s like a video game. Why would you ever play a video game if there was no scoring?

Dr. John Jaquish: And then also when you have friends that do it, then you’re comparing scores and holding each other accountable. That feels pretty good too.

Luke Storey: How many different cities in the world do these facilities exist in?

Dr. John Jaquish: 70.

Luke Storey: What?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. 70 locations areas.

Luke Storey: You serious?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: I had no idea. I thought it was just rolling out and there was just a few here and there.

Dr. John Jaquish: It is just rolling out.

Luke Storey: That’s a lot though. What countries is it in? Just for starters, for people listening if they’re like, I want to try this.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Greece, Australia, United States.

Luke Storey: Wow. No wonder you travel a lot.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Luke Storey: And the one we’re in right now-

Dr. John Jaquish: Iceland is coming online very soon too.

Luke Storey: Cool. That’s on my bucket list. I want to go there and go to Hot Springs. So this is the one in LA then. We’re in West LA, for people that are listening. A lot of my listeners live in LA and New York. Do you have one in New York city?

Dr. John Jaquish: Interestingly enough, no.

Luke Storey: Because real estate, who can afford space there?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s the question. You test the business model somewhere and then New Yorkers like, well you don’t have one in New York. Because, it’s just different. But we have a couple in Connecticut.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: You could get there-

Luke Storey: In a hop, skip and a jump.

Dr. John Jaquish: Take a train.

Luke Storey: All right. So dude, when I’m looking at you and I’ve never been highly incentivized by getting ripped and being a big buff guy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Me neither, actually.

Luke Storey: Maybe I was born with a decent enough mug. I think that I could get by without having to be super in shape. But I look at you and you’re a freaking monster, dude, you are ripped. So my question is if I fully committed to my bone density using the X3 Bar resistance band bar system, doing my 10 minutes a day, which I also want to ask you about too, because that’s appealing to me that you’re not an hour and a half in the goddamn gym every day. If I committed to that say for a year and I went hardcore and was very disciplined about it, could I actually become a guy that had big muscles where you’re like, holy shit, that guy’s fit?

Dr. John Jaquish: You could put on a lot of muscle mass.

Luke Storey: Even though I’m an ectomorph, tall, skinny guy?

Dr. John Jaquish: So one thing, my video series I do on YouTube is called Falsehoods to Fitness.

Luke Storey: Oh cool. I got to watch those.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re not watching them?

Luke Storey: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because, you said… Okay. I thought you had been watching them.

Luke Storey: That’s from a couple podcasts, I got that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. So I started doing this recently. I just did my fifth one.

Luke Storey: Cool. Okay good.

Dr. John Jaquish: And just talk about some of these things that just won’t go away. Like cardio is good for losing weight. That’s false. You need to use a full range of motion. That’s another falsehood of set of fitness. I take these things, training parts of a muscle. There’s people who have entire programs based on how to train your upper versus lower pecs. Yep. Fake news. You can’t do that.

Luke Storey: Really?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep.

Luke Storey: You just reminded me, that was one of my questions. Because one of the body dysmorphic issues I have when I look in the mirror, is I have these huge caves in my upper chest. And so it gives me moobs. Even when I work out my chest a bit and bench press and stuff, it doesn’t build up here.

Dr. John Jaquish: The whole thing will eventually fill up.

Luke Storey: I don’t get uniformly built pecs.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. And I do think there’s somewhat of a latency. You’ll see young guys when they start developing their biceps, the bicep just gets wider instead of taller. And then that seems to come on later in development.

Luke Storey: Interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: So some individuals it’s a noticeable, different shape coming into a muscle as the muscle develops. But the shape of your muscle, whether it be big or small, ultimately it’s like your fingerprint, you’re not changing it. That’s the way it is. People with uneven abdominals, it’s not they trained wrong, that’s like their fingerprint. They’re just not even. And very few people have exact even abdominal muscles. So I try and dispel these myths. Where was I going with that?

Luke Storey: I was talking about whether or not I could get ripped, I think is where I was going.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes.

Luke Storey: Let’s get back to the most important question.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, yes, absolutely. And the reason I brought up Falsehood to Fitness is one of the things that it’s not a falsehood of fitness, is the protein recommendations. So there’s some very solid research on 2.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, which is awful close, because 2.4 versus 2.2, the conversion factor. So it’s almost like a gram per pound of body weight for the American listeners.

Luke Storey: Thank you. I’m an American listener. I was already trying to do the math.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re right.

Luke Storey: Mentally fatigued.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I weigh 220. Being 220, I’m a hundred kilograms, so it’s really easy for me to do the math. So I try and get 240 grams of protein a day.

Luke Storey: Holy crap. There’s those guys out there, there’s bodybuilders that say you need to have more than that.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m going to put you on the spot with your math skills. So if I’m 180, how many grams protein I want to take per day? That would be one 190.

Luke Storey: Okay. Noted. All right. I’m going to pay attention

Dr. John Jaquish: So if you just eat a couple pounds of steak. A pound of medium marbled red meat will have a hundred grams of protein. A pound of chicken will have 125 grams of protein.

Luke Storey: Shit. So I need to step up my protein game.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s one of the biggest problems.

Luke Storey: Seriously?

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re not getting the right amount of protein.

Luke Storey: I think that’s my co-host Kookie. I don’t eat red meat every day. Some days I do fish. Fish, bacon, and grass fed beef is probably my thing. I’ll make maybe a half pound burger and I’m full as hell. That’s my one big meal of the day.

Dr. John Jaquish: But do you have anything else with it?

Luke Storey: Gee, maybe a little sauerkraut, some avocado. I’m trying to think what else. That’s pretty much it. Because I really suck at cooking.

Dr. John Jaquish: When you start using X3 Bar fitness band bar system, which you’re going to start doing. Your appetite’s going to go up because your body’s going to… Remember that environment I talked about? Environments can be, all right, we need to grow more muscle.

Luke Storey: If I’m not doing any high intensity workout or really working with weight training at all, then it makes sense that my body doesn’t have the demand for it. So I’m like, eat a burger every night, I’m good.

Dr. John Jaquish: Do you know who Dr. Shawn Baker is?

Luke Storey: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So the carnivore.

Luke Storey: Sure. I heard him on Rogan.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think he’s up to five pounds of meat a day. But he’s huge. He’s tall and he holds world records in indoor rowing. So he’s rowing every day. And he also holds, I think, a couple of world records in the deadlift. So he’s using a lot of energy, more than I’m using even with X3 Bar resistance band training system. And he’s big, he’s got a lot of mass. So he’s doing a lot of that strength training. So he’s got an appetite for it. He needs it. He’s growing. Is he late fifties? I don’t want him to get mad at me. I don’t actually know him very well other than a few

Luke Storey: We have 51.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s 51 years old. And the guy’s growing muscle right now because he just really upped his protein when he went carnivore. And I think he’s in the best shape of his life.

Luke Storey: One of my brothers went carnivore, I want to say maybe four or five months ago. Hasn’t been sick, there’s no inflammation. He’s the healthiest he’s ever been. It defies all logic.

Dr. John Jaquish: We’ve been told for so long that meat was bad.

Luke Storey: I feel great when I eat grass fed meat and a lot of fat. I’m home free. I feel great. But my brother, I’m like, don’t you want to take some Spirulina or some superfoods? And he’s like, nope. He only does meat. That’s all he eats.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s only one super food, it’s steak.

Luke Storey: He’s like, dude, I’ve never felt better in my life and I’m mr health nut, and I’m taking all these herbs and supplements and just next level. And I’ve been sick twice in the past year. And he’s like, dude, stop eating sugar. I don’t eat a lot of sugar but I’ll eat wild blueberries or something like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: When you get to the level of ketogenesis that a carnivore diet puts you in, the taste of sugar is just gross.

Luke Storey: Wow. Do you eat any carbs or grains?

Dr. John Jaquish: Very little. Ultimately nobody’s zero carbohydrate because even meat has carbohydrates in it because there’s glycogen in the cells in the meat. So there’s no such thing. And when I can’t get enough steaks, which happens in Europe because they’re serving little four ounce. I was in Amsterdam with a friend of mine the other day, god I do travel a lot, and I actually ate a platter of steaks. I said, I want four orders of steaks. And they’re like, no you don’t. I really do. And I ate them all. But sometimes I just can’t even get the right amount of meat. So there’s, it’s called Meat Snax. Spelled S-N-A-X. Which I hate when they do that because you can never find it, you know, online. Made by two retired athletes, Dave Hawk and Kurt Angle. Was he a weightlifter? And then he went to WWF.

Luke Storey: Okay. Don’t know him.

Dr. John Jaquish: Really? You’re not a fan of WWF? inaudible.

Luke Storey: You’d never guess looking at me.

Dr. John Jaquish: So these guys came up with this chicken protein product, which I’ve recommended. And it’s not the best because they do cook it in vegetable oil, which is just…

Luke Storey: That’s a fail.

Dr. John Jaquish: Dammit. It’s a fail. But I’ll do it every once in a while when it’s just I have no other options. And it’s just dehydrated chicken.

Luke Storey: Wow. Cool. Well, I feed my dog dehydrated raw meat and she seems to be doing well. One thing I wanted to ask you before I forget actually. And then I want to blast through a couple of the big health myths because I’m a huge myth buster and I just love shattering misinformation.

Dr. John Jaquish: You got to tune in to my Falsehoods of Fitness.

Luke Storey: I’m definitely going to. I want to get a couple.

Dr. John Jaquish: The trolls are awesome, because they come out of the woodwork and I always say at the end, if you disagree with me, I don’t care. Because I’m referencing published research. It’s not my opinion. So I explain what the myth is and why it’s inaccurate and I usually give one or two studies, try and go from meta- analysis if there is one, because that’s the strongest medical research. More physiology research, whatever. But ultimately there are people who are emotionally tied to a training program. And when you show them evidence that that is wrong, they’re angry. Why? You think you’re doing them a favor? I don’t know. They’re nuts.

Luke Storey: Well, they probably feel they’ve been wasting their time and they don’t want to address that. But before I get into a couple of those and then we’ll start to wrap it up so we can go through a little training circuit here, which I’m excited about. I’m a huge fan of ice baths and cryo and also infrared saunas. Well I’d been doing ice baths for a long time, but when I started incorporating them into a workout, I would work out, get super sore and sweaty. Then I’d go on the ice bath and it was amazing because I recovered so fast. I had no lactic acid, no inflammation, no soreness. Everyone else who I’m working out with is the next day like, oh, I’ve got to take a rest day. I’m too sore. I’m like, what? I’m ready to go again. Then I started listening to Rhonda Patrick and she says, no, because it depends on your goals, but if you’re trying to build muscle you don’t want to do an ice bath after you work out cause you’re killing the inflammation that’s going to build muscle. So I started doing ice bath before I work out and I’m a zillion times stronger. I don’t get fatigue. I’m not all hot and sweaty. I feel amazing. So now I’ve switched my preference to doing an ice bath before I work out and afterward I just let it roll, or I might go do a sauna. Do you have any…?

Dr. John Jaquish: She’s totally correct?

Luke Storey: What are your thoughts on ice baths, saunas? When do you do them if your goal is to gain strength and muscle?

Dr. John Jaquish: you just said it.

Luke Storey: That’s it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: Okay. Do you ever do an ice bath before you train with the X3 Bar portable home gym? Or is that not part of your protocol? You do?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sometimes. If I can legit find an ice plunge or cryo, I would definitely do it before.

Luke Storey: Do you find you’re stronger?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, of course.

Luke Storey: After cold exposure? It’s not just in my head?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. You’re firing more tissue. A lot of what’s happening, and the reason why ice baths and cryo up-regulate growth hormone is the same reason that stabilization firing, which you get a lot of in X3 Bar resistance band training system, up-regulates growth hormone. When you fire a muscle via reflex. I wrote a meta analysis on this and I’m actually now on the editorial board of the Journal of Steroids and Hormonal Science. Which is not steroids isn’t cheating in sports, it’s anabolic chemicals either created endogenously, inside the body, or exogenously via medication protocol, to look at different dysfunctions in the body. And so what I theorized or what seemed like a possibility, and I put to the test, was there’s so many instances where growth hormone was upregulated via stability protocols. So whole body vibration or other things, precursors. And so the theory I had was, what if reflexive firing is a huge driver of upregulation of growth hormone. And then when you look at sprinters. Sprinters have very high growth hormone, distance runners suppress growth hormone, very low. So the difference in what’s going on in the body is the distance runner is trying to fire as little muscle as possible. So they got a little bit of leg activity and their heads bobbing up and down. But you look at the skull of a sprinter, it looks like it was lined up with a laser, head doesn’t move. And the stride is much bigger, much more explosive movements. The toe strike, the contact, far higher force. They’re blasting off of each leg as quickly as they can, with as much force as the momentum plus their body weight. Yet their head doesn’t move. They have incredible amounts of stabilization firing. So what we saw in this research, we found 23 different datasets that showed massive upregulation of growth hormone based on stabilization firing. The only thing that attenuated a difference, either a low response, and by low I still mean high, 400% was on the low side, 2600% was on the high side, was adding force to the stabilization firing. And so that’s the product that I came out with an accessory to X3 Bar resistance band bar system. So you do your X3 portable gym on a vibration platform. There’s a vibration platform, it’s called the growth hormone accelerator, the GHAccelerator.

Luke Storey: Really?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And the top of the X3 Bar exercise band bar system plugs right into it. So you’ve got the band, you got the second ground in there, so you can do your X3 Bar resistance band bar system on the vibration. So it’s making you slightly unstable. Now you’re already getting a growth hormone effect with the regular X3 Bar resistance band bar system, because as you have to stabilize with weights, you could never handle or get there in the stronger ranges of motion, that’s happening. But you can amplify that with the GHAccelerator.

Luke Storey: Damn that’s cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: But that’s the same thing you’re getting, bringing this back to cryo, when you shiver.

Luke Storey: Interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because, that’s an afferent activation. Afferent activations in rapid succession yield a greater level of growth hormone.

Luke Storey: Hot. Damn. That’s cool as shit.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t like being cold. I’ll do an ice pond. I think they do feel exhilarating. But-

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s fun so I think they do feel exhilarating. But I prefer the protocol where I’m using either just an X3 Bar resistance band training system because I travel so much I don’t have my GHAccelerator readily available.

Luke Storey: If they do fit in, where would infrared saunas play into your protocol?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s a great question. I don’t know where I’d put that. I know the benefits. There’s great benefits in infrared saunas, especially for older people. I don’t know where I’d put that though.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: That could be first thing in the morning. I like it first thing in the morning if I can because I definitely feel like it woke me up. You’re never tired coming out of an infrared sauna.

Luke Storey: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But that’s the way I do it because I just drag my feet in the morning. I do not leap out of bed singing.

Luke Storey: Yeah. That makes two of us, especially with my new sunrise protocol. Jesus.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I just… I’ve have never been a guy who… I have friends. There are two guys in my fraternity house who would just be like launch out of bed at 7:00 in the morning and they’re yelling at each other, talking about their day, and just like, “Hey, fuck you guys.”

Luke Storey: Those people are freaks. Let’s face it. Sorry, morning people but you guys are freaking Martians.

Dr. John Jaquish: I need to drink coffee for two hours, and you can come into my office and talk to me and I’ll just probably agree to anything. Yeah. Okay, sure.

Luke Storey: Yeah, totally.

Dr. John Jaquish: We’re going to burn down the building. Okay. Well, try not to make a mess. I’m not even really engaged.

Luke Storey: Yeah. I’m with you right there. Okay. As we start to come to a close here, I got to ask and I’ll refer people to your YouTube videos. What are maybe your top two or three health myths that pissed people off the most?

Dr. John Jaquish: Ah, yeah. I get the sideways hat idiots. I’ll fire it up.

Luke Storey: I’ve never heard that. I like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah. I know like the guys who kick and scream online. It’s like high school kid or adult with a sideways hat. Yeah, a lot of that, a lot of that. A lot of…

Luke Storey: That is an actual archetype now that you mention it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Their job is they work at Batman. That’s not a thing. That’s not a company. Batman is a cartoon character. It’s just like, like they’re almost there, or if they have a fake name, that’s another one. If their name is like [Mikety Mike 01:38:30] like hmm. I know exactly what you’re going to say.

Dr. John Jaquish: So the things that get these unintelligent people really upset explaining how… Basically, weightlifting is not the best way to get as strong as possible. That really upsets them. Now, there’s two reasons. One is just dogma, which is the that’s just stupid. You just believe that it’s a religion. Well, Arnold did it, so it’s got to be right. Arnold did a lot of things wrong. Arnold has a whole section in one of his books about stretching out your rib cage, which will make your upper body bigger.

Dr. John Jaquish: Swear to God in the encyclopedia of modern bodybuilding today, it’s still being printed. That is the stupidest thing. I don’t know if he actually wrote it or somebody else wrote that and he just put his name on it, but it’s like there’s a lot of things that were said back in the ’60s and ’70s that are still myths in weightlifting, and I think part of the problem was a social media is the people who probably most likely have the lowest level of intelligence also have the greatest amount of free time.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s like a sea of bad information when you go into fitness or nutrition or politics. No matter what side you’re on in politics, you definitely are going to see the stupidest news shared the most. I see these guys when I say like, “This is better.” It’s like, “Well, what about this guy? And what about this guy?” And they’re just mentioning genetically gifted people who hold records in strength or bodybuilding and it’s like, “Yeah. And?” So nothing can ever be better. What’s your point?

Dr. John Jaquish: And then the other one… So that’s the dogma guys. And then the other ones are more like, it’s their identity. This is the sad people. Their identity in life is I lift heavy weights. You can tell by… They’re like you click on their profile and every single thing is about how they lift dangerous weights, therefore they’re really great people, and that’s who they are. And then when you say there’s another way, they’re really hurt by that because it’s insulting their identity. The best thing you have to say for yourself as you lift heavy weights, it’s like, okay, no family, career, friends. You’ve got to really look hard in the mirror, bro.

Dr. John Jaquish: But that’s kind of depressing because I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. First of all, if you don’t like the product, don’t buy it. Just don’t go to the gym, I guess. You’re going to hurt yourself maybe, maybe not. There’s some people that don’t, plenty of people that don’t, but a lot do. So, hey, go do whatever you need to do but don’t light me on fire for it. So those are the strange ones.

Dr. John Jaquish: Training parts of a muscle. That’s another one where I think emotionally people want to believe in that. They want to imagine they could build their upper pecs, and then sometimes you look at their profile, it’s like you got a lot more problems in your upper packs. Do you work out like at all? It just seem like those kinds of individuals. I’m not sure why they’re so upset. There’s a lot of endurance athletes that don’t like the whole, it’s not really good for weight loss. But I mentioned to them, when’s the leanest you’ve ever been? Was it when you were doing a lot of cardio, and they all say the same thing. You know what’s funny it’s funny, it’s usually in the off season.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now all of a sudden their cortisol down-regulates and because they eat very controlled diets, then they start shedding body fat. Those are the little things, but it’s being drowned out by the success because you have a couple thousand raving fans now.

Luke Storey: Yeah. That’s cool. I want to get in that Facebook group and get some inspiration.

Dr. John Jaquish: We see the before and after pictures in there. They’re awesome.

Luke Storey: I want to ask you one more thing before I do my regular last question, which is will hopefully be a surprise for you. If one of us was to use the X3 Bar and you start building muscle, how does that correlate to losing fat? I’m always just super real and personal on the show. When I look in the mirror naked, I think, ah, I let go all. I’m not someone that cares that much about it. Otherwise, I’d be in much better shape. I have resources to do that. But one thing I really don’t like is my belly fat.

Luke Storey: Since maybe 26, 27 never been able to have a flat stomach again. Are there any exercises with this thing that I could do that would assist with that or if I’m just building giant large muscle groups, am I just going to start burning more fat? Because you can’t do… A lot of people I think, Oh, I want to have abs so I’ll do sit ups. I even that’s not going to work. No. You know what I mean? That’s probably what another myth.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s definitely like focus on your abs to get abs. Nope. Well, fortunately even the sideways hat idiots know that there’s a saying they use abs are made in the kitchen. So they understand it’s just about cutting your body fat and then then everything shows. So fortunately even those guys have it figured out. But the way to drop body fat for me in the protocol that I’m recommending with X3 Bar resistance band bar system is by using the exterior upregulating growth hormone, and provided you stick to the nutritional principles.

Dr. John Jaquish: The way I recommend a ketogenic diet is similar to the way Dave recommends it which is pretty easy to follow. Really just getting rid of sugar and eating very darker green vegetables and animal protein. Now, what I recommend and what I do are a little different. What I’m doing is a little more hardcore than that cause I’m carnivore and pure carnivore.

Luke Storey: Oh, damn.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And it’s oh crosstalk.

Luke Storey: How long have you been doing that?

Dr. John Jaquish: November of ‘17.

Luke Storey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So 13 months.

Luke Storey: Wow. That’s a long stretch.

Dr. John Jaquish: Leaner, faster, stronger. Robert’s doing the same thing.

Luke Storey: Yeah. Oh, I’m sorry. I said that was my last question, but it’s not. Another one just came to mind. Now, I get in trouble sometimes on my show because people feel like I’m picking on vegetarians or vegans because I was a vegetarian for 10 years and I was very unhealthy, so my personal story is like, ah, that shit almost killed me. So I’m not a huge fan. However, I always say, dude, whatever works for you. I don’t care if you want to go eat a box of rocks, I don’t give a shit. I have no business in getting people to eat one way or another, but…

Dr. John Jaquish: Just don’t tell me how to eat.

Luke Storey: Yeah. But I don’t go tell people you need to eat salmon for day just because I do. I really don’t care. But out of just education and curiosity, let’s say someone is plant based or vegan and they want to get ripped, I know there are some body builders and some men and women out there that are super fit and have big muscles and look ripped that don’t eat any animal products.

Dr. John Jaquish: Vegans can do it.

Luke Storey: How do you get that much protein? What are you eating, P-protein by the fucking gallon a day?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s it. It’s a lot of refined protein.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: P alfalfa, rice, but the right types of proteins. Sun Warrior makes a good product. Vega makes a good product. The Regular Vega is not that great. It’s got sugar and shit. Vega, I think it’s either called sport or performance.

Luke Storey: So you can build muscle as long as you put in enough protein in the body. It doesn’t matter if it’s animal or plant based.

Dr. John Jaquish: It does matter. There’s a bioavailability and quality of protein crosstalk.

Luke Storey: When I have vegan, people send me shit for free. They go, “Oh, try our box at this.”

Dr. John Jaquish: They give you heartburn.

Luke Storey: Yeah. I tried the vegan powders. I don’t care if it’s P’s or what they make it out of, it gives me heartburn so bad. I can’t digest that stuff. I’m open to it. I’m like, “Cool, yes. Send me your protein.” And I try it and it’s like every time I get sick.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I don’t., I don’t know what to tell you there.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, maybe vegans who are really committed and don’t have that reflux issue.

Luke Storey: Right. Have you heard of that from other people not being able to digest that or is it-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes.

Luke Storey: Oh, okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve heard of it, but I can do vegan protein and it doesn’t hurt me. I know that the quality in bioavailability is poor.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: And that also doesn’t mean have more. That just means that your body is not going to be able to utilize it as well. One of the myths that vegans like throwing around is there’s just as much protein in broccoli as there is in steak. Well, an eight ounce steak, which is like an appetizer for me, you’d need 15 pounds of broccoli to equal that same amount. But it’s low quality protein, which isn’t complete chain, which really won’t facilitate in the building of much muscle. So it’s kind of like a non-

Luke Storey: What about the amino acid factor? Do you-

Dr. John Jaquish: Unfortunately, no.

Luke Storey: Many of the vegan versions of protein then would lack the proper amino acids?

Dr. John Jaquish: Some of them, yes. Some of them, no. The really expensive ones do tend to have something a little more complete, but it’s incredible amounts of refined food. The vegan friends that I have, I tell them, “You can’t get your nutrition by just eating vegetables because you’re way under in your caloric intake.” If it’s literally just whole vegetables that you’re eating, you can’t get to your basal metabolic rate.

Dr. John Jaquish: So your body’s suffering, so you have to have refined foods. Now, most of them find those refined foods in Twinkies, or whatever, just cakes and just garbage. And I think they think because they don’t eat meat, they’re healthy and they’re just poisoning themselves. The other side is a fitness guys who work really hard to find more dense sources of vegan protein, like we’re talking about like these protein products and powders, and it’s just the quality issue, and they’re just not getting it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Also, Dave Asprey mentions this. Vegan athletes, their secret is they’re 20. His words, not mine. You don’t see a 45-year-old vegan athlete. You see really, really young ones. Well, when you’re young there are guys… I remember I played rugby in undergrad. There were guys on my team who had a six pack, top performers, best guys on the team and pizza and beer. That was all I consumed.

Luke Storey: That was me dude, college.

Dr. John Jaquish: You probably had a six pack.

Luke Storey: I lived off crack, heroin and Guinness and cigarettes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Seriously?

Luke Storey: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a joke about an addiction problem.

Luke Storey: No. I was hardcore.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, wow. Okay. That’s a real thing.

Luke Storey: But all I ate was sugar and like I used to drink really fattening beer too, like Guinness. I love stout beer on tap. I’d drink 48-

Dr. John Jaquish: The joke is, is Guinness is a meal.

Luke Storey: 48 of those a night, and I had a fucking six pack.

Dr. John Jaquish: Of course you did.

Luke Storey: And I would eat tons of like pints of ice cream every day.

Dr. John Jaquish: Kids can get away with that stuff.

Luke Storey: It was incredible. Until like I said, I was 27, 8, 9, 30 and I was like, wait, I look down and be like, “What the hell is this thing? I look pregnant.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: Yeah, I just want to reiterate, eat whatever makes you happy folks listening to this, but I’m asking the questions specifically for people that want to get big and want to put on muscle, not just is it good for you?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m actually writing a book on this subject.

Luke Storey: Oh, cool. For me the hard thing about being a vegetarian was that in order to get full, I had to eat a lot of foods that were inflammatory and really hard to digest. So I ended up eating a lot of beans and legumes and grains and things like that. Now, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was totally inflamed. I had back pain all the time. I still have a bit of that, but it was much worse. Just my whole body just hurt all the time.

Luke Storey: And then when I started getting off of those foods and started eating, once I found out that you could actually grass fed meat, I’d never knew about that. I thought all meat was bad because it was all factory, farm, GMO, corn fed, soy fed meat. So I was like therefore all meat is horrific, and I stopped at all. But I really could never feel full unless I ate the foods that are inflammatory. I couldn’t eat a salad and feel full, and I’m the same way now.

Dr. John Jaquish: You just can’t get the calories.

Luke Storey: Dude, I don’t feel full. I mean, I’m sorry.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s just not-

Luke Storey: I eat five avocados even now if I’m like, “Oh, maybe I’ve been eating a bit much meat,” and I say I want to eat avocados and some other foods that aren’t legumes or grains or nuts and seeds and stuff like that. I literally at 30 minutes later I’m starving. The only thing that gets me full is seafood and meat That’s it. With a lot of fat in it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Luke Storey: And if there’s not enough fat in it, I add fat, ghee, coconut oil, whatever. So it’s weird. So that’s why I’m always just curious about this because I don’t see how a guy who’s my size. I’m six two, 181-85. I see guys that are much bigger and much more ripped that are vegan, and I’m like, “Dude, how do you get full? Aren’t you starving all the time if you’re living on glucose and not much of it?”

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Luke Storey: It’s weird. So anyway the mystery is not solved. People do whatever you want. But in the context of this conversation, I have your perspective and I look forward to your book on it because I think it will clear it up for people.

Dr. John Jaquish: And I’m definitely going to have like a preface specifically for vegans. Here’s how to do it if you’re vegan.

Luke Storey: Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because it’s like I don’t want anybody to be left out.

Luke Storey: I don’t either. I’ve interviewed a lot of… I’ve interviewed Rich Roll and a lot of prominent vegans on the show and they seem very healthy and happy and they’re doing great. I’m always just there like it’s a mysterious phenomenon to me that they’re able to stay alive.

Dr. John Jaquish: How old is rich?

Luke Storey: I think he’s around my age. Maybe 50, a couple of years older. 50. When you said only young guys look fit, I go, “He’s figured something out.” I mean he…

Dr. John Jaquish: Does he eat fish or is he true vegan?

Luke Storey: No. He doesn’t do any animal products at all. Not even ghee or anything.

Dr. John Jaquish: Interesting.

Luke Storey: And his wife Julie, who’s lovely, she’s been on the show as well. I mean he’s probably doing better, because I don’t know if he cooks, but his wife Julie is an amazing, amazing vegan chef. She makes some of the only food I could actually eat without getting gas and feeling really bad afterward that it was vegan. So she’s cracked the code. It might make it easier, I think if you can get nutrient dense, calorie dense vegan food that it tastes like fine cuisine, it’s a little more doable. Just when I was doing it, I’m eating like gluten-free spaghetti or whatever, I couldn’t do it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, potato spaghetti.

Luke Storey: Maybe it works for some people. All right. So my closing question for you, my friend, and thank you for spending so much time.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s my favorite subject. Both these products, I’m so happy about it.

Luke Storey: Well, good. You have the passion and like when we started, I said it could be an hour, hour and a half. We’re about two hours in.

Dr. John Jaquish: Are we really?

Luke Storey: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh wow. I didn’t even know.

Luke Storey: When the time flies, at least for the two of us, we know we’re on track, but I do have one closing question that I’ve asked every single guest.

Dr. John Jaquish: All right.

Luke Storey: So I’ve learned a lot about health, physicality in general, muscle building, bone health, all this stuff from you. So you’ve been my teacher. You’ve been the teacher of our audience who have been three teachers or teachings in your life that you might recommend that our listeners go check out. And they could range anything from how to live a good life, how to be healthy, anything that’s influenced you or you’re like, you know what? People need to go read this or listen to this speaker or whatever it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Well, I’ve worked with Tony Robins for years and…

Luke Storey: Love that dude.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: I just got back from Date with Destiny. Amazing, amazing man, that guy.

Dr. John Jaquish: He asked me the first time I met him, he says, “What do you think I do for a living?” First, I said, motivational speaker. He goes, “Never called me that.” I said, “Well, I even refer to you as a coach before.” He said, “Okay, I can accept coach, but really what I do is I travel the world and find the best shit for people to do, the best shit for people to think. The processes, the protocols, whatever, that people need to do to live the best life.” And I thought that was a really great job description. It’s totally not what you see him necessarily applying on stage because he’s instructing, but he says the real work is going out and finding what’s best, and then delivering that message. So it’s the finding, that’s the hard part.

Luke Storey: That’s the premise of this whole show. I never heard him relay his crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: He said it to me at his kitchen table. He didn’t say that on stage. But isn’t that cool?

Luke Storey: Yeah, it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s definitely a guy who, a lot of his material was stuff like I had been applying and I just didn’t know it had a name. And I learned a lot of great stuff through his material, but that was a really interesting perspective just hearing that.

Luke Storey: For sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s definitely one of the guys. I really liked Dr. Jason Fung.

Luke Storey: Oh, I don’t know this one.

Dr. John Jaquish: So he’s a Canadian nephrologist.

Luke Storey: I don’t even know what that is.

Dr. John Jaquish: Let’s call him a kidney doctor.

Luke Storey: Oh, okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: But he looks at a lot of type two diabetes and a lot of major kind of chronic dysfunctions. And he’s the guy who’s really been pushing longer fasting. I mean, I’m talking two weeks of nothing.

Luke Storey: Just water?

Dr. John Jaquish: Water and coffee.

Luke Storey: Okay. I could get behind the coffee part. I think I can live off coffee as long as there’s some fat in it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. He’s trolled endlessly, but it’s usually by people who just don’t understand. Another thing, yet when you’re making references to academic literature is a lot of people don’t understand how to read academic literature or they don’t understand that when a sentence has two references in it, or a paragraph has two references in it and they try and pick apart one of the references, it’s like, “No, dickhead. There’s two references.” So it’s this and an observation made here and this, and those two observations over laid together comes to a conclusion. But people don’t understand that because they just don’t know how to read like scientific documentation. If it was just a study comes out and then nobody’s allowed to talk about that study in conjunction with anything else, how would we move science forward? We wouldn’t. So in fact, every study references sometimes hundreds of other studies. Why do they do that? So how did we get on this?

Luke Storey: Well, he was your second recommendation.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So I remember Jason Fung. And so that was like I almost went on a rant there, man.

Luke Storey: It’s okay. I almost did too because he brought up this other thread that I almost chased and I’m like, “No, we got to end it.”

Dr. John Jaquish: What happens to him is he gets picked apart for referencing a certain study that was done with maybe a population that’s morbidly obese or whatever. And that doesn’t apply to everybody. And so he wrote The Obesity Code. You’ve probably heard of his book, The Obesity Code.

Luke Storey: I don’t think I have.

Dr. John Jaquish: Really? Oh, you got to check it out.

Luke Storey: It’s not something I’ve…

Dr. John Jaquish: You need to have him on your podcast?

Luke Storey: Really?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah. He’s cool. And really showing… So growth hormone upregulation is really how I got connected with him and in his work. And so it was the stabilization firing. I know there’s multiple axes of growth hormone, and there’s nutritional triggers, and I was looking at the nutritional triggers when I started researching what’s really the optimal nutrition I can really connect with X3 Bar fitness band bar system, so everybody gets absolutely the best results. And so that’s why… And I have a slightly different approach to fasting. I call it insulin restriction instead of just fasting because there’s Bulletproof Coffee and there’s things like that. There’s other ways to soften the flow of not having any calories in your system.

Luke Storey: One quick question on that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Luke Storey: Because someone who had a different perspective the other day said something intriguing and they were talking about fasting, and for someone that’s done a lot of fasting, “Oh, dude. I did new research and I decided it’s bad for you.” He said that, “When you fast that your body is going to want to get energy and so it’s going to rob glycogen from your muscles and so if you’re trying to build muscles, it’s really bad.” I did a fast.

Dr. John Jaquish: Totally true. In fact, when you’re fasting your fat stores are already used. Even if you don’t have a ketogenic diet, you automatically go into ketosis and when you’re in ketosis, you’re using your body fat for fuel.

Luke Storey: So you’re getting ketones out of your own indigenous fat stores?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Glycogen doesn’t leave the muscle.

Luke Storey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: The longest fast, I’ve done it six days and that was nothing other than coffee and water.

Luke Storey: I lost nothing.

Dr. John Jaquish: No muscle whatsoever.

Luke Storey: No gain, loss?

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Luke Storey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: In fact, I was using X3 Bar portable home gym. I lost no strength either. I was firing on all cylinders. I was just living off my body fat. If it were true that every time we didn’t have calories that were ingested to be used for activity, and we lost muscle every time we were void of that, and we would all, and this is Dr. Fung’s expression, we would all just be balls of fat because you store fat from eating, eating too much or the wrong things or whatever. And then if every time you’re void of food, you lose muscle. Just think of that, played over a longterm scale. Everyone would just be a big sack of fat. It’s like a stupid idea. Like, yeah, obviously that’s not what’s happening. Now scientists don’t like analogies because frequently it’s just an oversimplification. Actually, that’s not really an analogy. He’s just playing it out like, “Okay, let’s broaden our model over another lifetime of an individual.” It doesn’t work. That’s obviously not what happens. So I really like his work, and I think that even though his protocols are meant for obese people, I think there’s something really powerful to be learned from the rest of us. I want to pull some of the best stuff that I learned from his work and apply it to a nutrition program that is just so fucking easy to follow. The most compromised individual from a time perspective and a travel perspective will look at this and go, “I can do that. I can do that every day.” That the goal of what I’m putting together. So that’s the second guy and I encourage everybody to read The Obesity Code.

Luke Storey: Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And third, it’s tempting to say Dave Asprey, but it be too easy for either of us to say Dave and everybody who’s listening is probably already familiar with Dave. So if I were to pick someone else, it would be… “Well, there’s a couple of guys rolling around in my head.” To tell you the truth, I don’t even know if she’s ever written a book, but it would be the material Rhonda Patrick puts out. She’s got a great, great ability to dive into research and get it to a point where people can understand it. And she can also…. See, like a lot of reporters will find a piece of research and it’ll be like, whatever, kale is good for you or kale is bad for you. And they didn’t really read the study, they just read the title. And the title sometimes in an effort to be descriptive, isn’t? Or it’s totally misleading. So reporters do that, and Rhonda Patrick is like a totally awesome filter to go. Everyone is saying this stuff except here’s what it actually means. I watch her videos and listen to her in every good podcast, especially when she’s interviewed by somebody who’s going to ask her some hard questions. Joe Rogan is actually really good at asking. Not trying to be a scientist, but he actually asked her some great questions.

Luke Storey: I agree. They’re a great pair. Anytime she’s on-

Dr. John Jaquish: It really pushes her to go, well, there’s this and this and what we do, what we do know and what we don’t know. I always like a scientist that says, “We just don’t know that yet.” Because it’s very easy for somebody who has a personality, who basically is in the practice of sharing information and she doesn’t sell supplements or anything. She’s an information source. It’s very easy for an information source to just say this is the way it is or this is like to sound more authoritative. A true scientific mind will say, this is what we… Maybe not even, this is what we discovered, and I say this frequently, this is what this study found. These individuals had this effect and this was the outcome of that study. Now, are there 10 other questions to ask if in a real world example or what if these individuals lacked sleep or what if these individuals drank too much alcohol or what? This study didn’t look at those variables. So we don’t know. And I really like the fact… Dave does the same thing, but Rhonda really does it. Just absolutely crystal clear says, “This is the small amount of information that we know and all these other questions we just don’t know.”

Luke Storey: Right. That’s a sign of humility to say, “I know this much, and beyond that, I don’t know.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. She’s super smart.

Luke Storey: Cool, great recommendations. Last thing is where can we find you, what websites, social media, any of that kind of stuff?

Dr. John Jaquish: Find me, my Facebook page is Dr. John Jaquish and my last name is spelled J-A-Q-U-I-S-H or D-R-J-A-Q-U-I-S-H on Instagram @drjaquish.

Luke Storey: Awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then of course to find X3 Bar exercise band bar system, it’s x3bar.com

Luke Storey: Sweet, dude.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.

Luke Storey: That’s awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.

Luke Storey: Thanks so much for joining me.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me.

Luke Storey: Now, what’s going to happen, ladies and gentlemen is I’m going to go try out the OsteoStrong machines and the X3 resistance bands system, and we’re going to film it and include it in this YouTube video. So if you want to see the shit we’ve been talking about, tune into YouTube and check it out. Thanks so much for joining me on this show.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me. Okay.