Why Lifting Weights Sucks and The Best Exercises for Muscles, Bones and Growth Hormone

Today I talked to Dr John Jaquish, PhD in Biomedical Engineering research c/o Rushmore University - an inventor, author and scientist. After successfully reversing his mother’s Osteoporosis as part of his Doctoral Dissertation, he conducted four years of testing with human subjects focused Reversing Osteoporosis and Building Muscle with Exercise.

In this episode we talked about:

Reversing Osteoporosis with OSTEOSTRONG
Banded Exercises with the X3 Bar fitness band bar system
4.2 x Bodyweight needed to Grow Bone
Multiple Sets VS Single Dose Exercise
Engineers vs Doctors/Scientists for Challenging Convention
Osteoporosis has the same mortality rate as breast cancer
Physical Medicine vs Chemical Medicine reversed Osteoporosis to the bone density of a 30 yr old - female from a 70 yr old female
Vegan Nutrition is Damaging to Bones
Muscle Optimization Nutrition
Professor Jose Antonio and Protein Intake for Growing Muscle
How to Read a Scientific Study
Protein Intake 2.3 grams a day minimum
Being Ketogenic is Using Fat as Fuel
Is High Protein safe for Kidneys?
Growth Hormone Accelerator
How to stimulate the CNS with the correct stimulus to grow muscle and bone and growth hormone - without damaging the body

Full Transcription

Damian: One. And we’re on. All right. Well, good morning Australia. Good evening America, and wherever you are joining in from the world. Always great to have you join in. With me today I’ve got doctor or professor Dr. John Jaquish. And I should’ve actually asked how to pronounce your name hopefully I haven’t butchered it too much my friend.

Dr. John Jaquish: No. You got it. You’ve heard it in enough videos. Yeah. It’s Jaquish.

Damian: Awesome. So look, a bit of background for everybody. I’ve been watching John for quite some time. He’s the inventor of what we call the most effective bone density building medical device. He’s now a partner with Tony Robbins at OsteoStrong and deploying it into clinics. Dr. Jaquish is a research professor at Rushmore University. He talks at scientific conferences all over the world. And as I know, he’s featured on many of the top health podcasts. I’m very honored to have him on our small one. My pleasure. Let me see a couple other really interesting ones here. You are currently on the board of directors of American Bone Health and editorial boards of the journal…

Dr. John Jaquish: Formerly. That’s a little out of date. Yeah. I spent three years on the board of American Bone Health and helped them raise some money for… It’s a great organization, patient awareness as opposed to physician awareness. Most of the other national and international organizations focus on the physicians, but they have to be aware of a lot of things and not everything can be top of mind. So that organization really focuses on the lay person. And what does low bone density mean? A lot of people they get a T-score and they’re told is good or bad, and they don’t know how to read it. They don’t know really what’s it’s about. And of course, the internet is where to go for misinformation as a patient.

Damian: What a great place to start, because that’s why I love having some of these top people like yourself on the podcast. So thank you for giving me some direction there, John, that’s really cool. So in that vein, you’re getting information out there to the people and that’s how we connected, it’s brilliant and information is great. So can you please tell me what your study was in for your PhD and then the direction that you’ve gone down with osteoporosis and with banded exercises. And we’ll talk about some other things later on. But how did you get started, what was your education background, and your current research?

Dr. John Jaquish: Got you. This whole adventure started when my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. And so she felt like she was diagnosed with that at a young age and it was going to be very limiting for her health. And she was afraid, she played tennis and was into gardening, always very active and all of a sudden she didn’t want to do anything. She was afraid of breaking a bone. So I told her I would look into this and I did. The path of research I took, this was before I did my PhD, so I probably took a very unorthodox approach. And also it was very apparent when I started doing my PhD, my PhD advisor told me you would have talked yourself out of this if you had done your education first.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve always had an opinion that traditional education teaches people how to be employees, but traditional education doesn’t teach you anything about inventing things, about being creative, about something new, about challenging convention. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s about conforming to convention. Now, even from a social standpoint, you listen to university students now talk about how the world should be and you know that isn’t their ideas. They’re just repeating what they heard. They don’t have the life experience to talk about a lot of the things that they’re posting about online, just copying and pasting from whoever they were told to follow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I had an interesting path of research and I said to my mother, “I’m going to find if there is one, a group of people who have super human bone density. If I find them, I’m going to figure out how they did it, and then I’m going to figure out how that can apply to you.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, I know it seems like a basic research kind of engineering premise to me, but apparently nobody had ever asked themselves that question. So what I did was identified the population. It was just crystal clear obvious as soon as I started doing searches of different peer reviewed, published papers, and it’s gymnasts. Gymnasts have superhuman bone density. And it’s because of the rate at which they hit the ground. There’s nothing to do with body weight exercise. In fact, body weight exercise won’t build any bone. The contact with the ground was the determining factor and that had been observed in, depending on how you look at it and how you count them, hundreds or 10,000 plus, 20,000 plus studies have shown that the impact or impact level forces can greatly influence bone. And that dates all the way back to 1895. So all this information was out there on high-impact in the growth of bone. Which is where the recommendation of exercise and osteoporosis came from.

Dr. John Jaquish: The problem is exercise and not saying exercise or just saying the term exercise for a disease state is like, okay, in any other medical recommendation you’d have a dosage associated with it, like aspirin’s good for headaches. Well, how much? Five milligrams or 5,000? Well, five milligrams won’t do anything, 5,000 will kill you, but maybe 350. That’s good for reducing headache pain and thin blood to the point where you can reduce some of the inflammation. So there’s a dosage, but there wasn’t any dosage associated. So some studies would … You’d read the studies and it would say, “High impact is the best.” But then of course the associations, they don’t want to tell de-conditioned people to go out and do high-impact cause that’s going to cause fractures. So they went the other direction and they said, “You want to do low impact exercise.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, in 2012, a group of researchers out of Bristol, United Kingdom, did a study where they used accelerometers taped to people’s hip joint, right above the hip joint, or on the hip joint but on the skin of course. And they took the accelerometer data and then they crossed it with regular blood tests to check for bone turnover markers. So bone has a metabolism, you’re always losing some bone density and gaining some bone density. But when you’re under 30, you’re gaining more than you’re losing. When you’re over 30, it’s the opposite. So what does it take to influence that ratio? Was the question that they asked. So how much force is required to start building bone in the hip joint, which is the most important place to start building it. Biggest, most powerful joint in the body. Do you know what it is? Did you read that on my site? Okay. I’m going to blow your mind here. 4.2 multiples of your own body weight are required to influence bone at all. As in under 4.2, you’re doing nothing.

Damian: So I did actually remember that one from the original time I listened to you, I think it was up in Greenfield. If we tangent off there and come back, is this why long distance runners get stress fractures?

Dr. John Jaquish: Correct.

Damian: Wow. So body weight loaded, as you said that, the gravity nine meters per second, they’re literally about an inch off the ground doesn’t build bone. We’ve got problems, haven’t we?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. And they’re using excessive amounts of calcium with repetitive muscle contractions. So they’re actually leaching out of their body. So let’s go back to that. That’s that’s an awesome lead into the next thing I want to say about inaudible to wrap up what we did for bone density. So what I did was I designed an unpacked emulation system. And it’s out there it’s called OsteoStrong. Now, in fact, there’s an open clinic in Melbourne.

Damian: Yeah. Awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Have you, have you hung out there? Have you seen those guys yet?

Damian: No. Perth is the most isolated city in the world. I’ve gone from New Zealand. The next time you’re being to Antarctica to Perth, the most isolated city in the world, but I will be popping over Easter soon.

Dr. John Jaquish: All right. It’s a great clinic. They’re going to open the one in Sydney in, geez, I don’t know. Real soon. If it’s open in Sydney, you can go to the one in Sydney that might be a little bit easier to fly to. But ultimately this series of devices is designed to emulate high-impact without the risks. So you’re in an impact ready position, you contract, you can put tremendous forces through your body. In the study that we did at a hospital in London, the individuals in that study were seven, eight, and nine times their body weight through their hip joint. Keep in mind, these are post-menopausal females.

Damian: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. These were not footballers.

Damian: Safe and injuries from there. Let’s talk about that.

Dr. John Jaquish: None.

Damian: Great.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because it’s self-loaded. So it’s like squeezing a fist, you can’t squeeze your own fist hard enough to break your own finger. You have a process called neural inhibition, which is going to keep you from doing that. Also neural inhibition, that’s kind of another lead in. I’ll just say that a lot of people who, ‘Train through their joint pain.’ They’re really not training anything because the muscles starts shutting off as soon as they start sensing pain. And what they think is a great workout is just accumulating more injury. Just destroying the joint more and they’re really not doing much, which is why they don’t grow.

Damian: You’re really talking about a paradigm shift in mindset for exercise. And not only, we just touched on long distance running, now you’ve just nailed pretty much every… I mean, I was one of the first personal trainers in the world back in 1991. And I’ve seen them all. You’re talking about every Lakers and they come to the gym and try and to exercise at a… inaudible gets injured and it keeps them going.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And then they go, “My shoulders hurt, but I’m not going to quit benching.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you will. Because all you’re doing is just destroying the joint, that’s it.” Some people are lucky and they get more stimulus than joint damage based on genetics or style or control, something like that. I know if you look at Mark and Chris Bell, you know who those guys are? The bigger, stronger, faster documentary. Damian: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So yeah, Chris is the director of that documentary. And so he had some hip joint problems which were just hereditary, his father had the same issue. He had double hip replacement. But his brother is smashing weightlifting records all over the place. The guy moves like a cricket. crosstalk what happened? So, yeah, I mean, there’s some genetic stuff in there too.

Damian: We talked about your mum though, John, and you’ve just reverse engineered the issue.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I created impact emulation, it’s a series of medical devices. Allows for compression of bone and your guide is your comfort. Basically, if you become uncomfortable, the muscles are shutting off. So you just go right to the maximum level of comfort. You expose the load to four different places in the body. And then once that happens, the stimulus is set and you wait a week. And when you come back, you perform at a higher level, which is really a measure of functional bone performance. Cause that’s the failure point. And so you can actually see the bone performing in these impact ready positions at a greater and greater force every week.

Damian: Now again, if I think back to when I originally… I’ve watched a lot of your stuff and I remember… People will listen to podcasts in their cars while they’re moving. So we’ve got to paint them a picture and I’ve found it a bit difficult and… You’ve been on so many interviews I’m sure you’ve got it down to a T now. Could you explain and paint a picture of someone listening, what would your mum be doing in this clinic as an exercise to get her bones stronger and then coming back for the next session.

Dr. John Jaquish: So the protocol takes about 10 minutes. Now, I know that seems really brief. How could 10 minutes once a week doing anything? Well, remember impact… And by the way, one loading cycle is all that’s required, one. So you don’t do sets. You do the appropriate load one time and the body is triggered for growth. Which is by the way true of everything. It’s true of suntans, it’s true of calluses, it’s true of muscle growth too. The reason we do multiple sets is because the stimulus sucks. So we’ll get to that. I see you’re writing that down. So she would go in to an OsteoStrong. She would do four movements, lower extremities, upper extremities, core, and spine and neck, goes all the way up to the skull, the loading. And then she’s done in 10 minutes and she’s out. And the next week she comes back and performs at a higher level.

Damian: Wow. That’s awesome. So I really love hearing that. I originally got into all this stuff with bio hacking seven years ago and it’s sounding a lot like the dose response. And Bein Kalkowski, Olympia bodybuilder, he talks about a minimum effective dose, and doing more would probably be deleterious if not just playing dumb.

Dr. John Jaquish: I did his podcast too and that’s why I immediately was excited about what I was saying. Because he’s like, “Yeah, these guys they do set, after set, after set and they’re not really sure why.” And ultimately every time you lift conventional weights and they’re at an appropriate level to create strength and you’re already strong, the bottleneck is the joints. But of course, I have something else to remove that bottleneck.

Damian: It’s interesting we’re opening up a nice little network here. I want to go back on something you touched on and ask you the question. Why do you think it is that engineers are solving problems in 2019 with nutrition, with exercise, with health. So some examples being health, Heiver Tummings with heart disease, the guy’s a computer engineer. Another computer engineer from optimizing nutrition here in Australia inaudible and talking about nutrient density. Why do you think engineers are surpassing doctors? I mean, we used to go to a doctor cause they were the font of all knowledge about health and exercise. I remember specifically me asking at 13 years old, my GP, how do you get strong for rugby? Why do you think engineers are now…

Dr. John Jaquish: The majority of… Well, I shouldn’t say the majority. I don’t really want to say this, but..

Damian: It’s strange crosstalk podcast.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. Yeah. Hey, I’ll say it straight. The majority of medical school is pharmacology and learning how to treat… Keep in mind healthcare is not really healthcare, it’s disease care. And what most people really want is to avoid, especially chronic disease, diseases of aging. The genetic factors for diseases of aging will never be weeded out of our genetics because people have kids before they have diseases of aging. Think about it, survival of the fittest doesn’t apply to those things. So that has only to do with how we take care of ourselves.

Dr. John Jaquish: And when you consider that an engineer’s job is to solve a problem. They don’t have any horse in the race, they don’t have a bias. How do I solve this problem? So the bone density is going down. I mean, this is my path. How do we build bone density in the first place? Impact. Okay. So if it’s built with impact, then why are we trying to avoid impact? It seems like the worst advice ever.

Dr. John Jaquish: We know impact is dangerous, so how do we make impact safe? Very simple question and that’s what my device accomplished. And now the device is fully robotic and it’s very accurate. It gets people in exactly the right position to expose load. And it’s a perfect, elegant and simple solution for a dysfunction that kills as many people as breast cancer does. Yeah. I wasn’t even aware of that until I’ve really developed a prototype. And then, so I went and found a PhD program that would let me go real deep on impact biomechanics and design exactly what I wanted to study. That was what my PhD thesis was on. And anybody who wants to read my PhD thesis, I adapted it in a book called Osteogenic Loading, it’s on Amazon.

Damian: Just touching on it, you’re saying the mortality rate for osteoporosis is the same as mortality for breast cancer. Is that due to the…

Dr. John Jaquish: Modification for fractures.

Damian: Thank you. Wow, that’s phenomenal.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And like I said, it’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s clean, there’s no side effects. And I win every physician over because even though we’ll never have the 20,000 subject study like a pharmaceutical company would…

Dr. John Jaquish: In fact, I think recently the former editor of The New England Journal said, “Peer reviewed research is set up so that pharma wins and nothing else is considered relevant.” Because you have these massive studies that are like… No one’s going to test if broccoli or steak or eating a diet of only deep water fish is going to have whatever effect. No one’s going to spend billions of dollars on that study because that money is not there. There’s no money being paid by the industry. So the way randomized controlled trials in top journals work, if only pharma can play. Pharma is the only one who can get all the prerequisites accomplished to be considered worthy of publication in such a prestigious journal. Well, that’s how I feel about the ‘Prestige’ of a lot of academic institutions or whatever. Okay. It’s got nothing to do with what’s right. It has to do with whose right. And that’s not what anybody ought to be looking for.

Damian: Is it the same guy, John, that also stated, I think even published either his opinion or post a study on. 90% or so of the studies in the BMJ are not replicable. I did actually listen to a guy on that.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s the same editor.

Damian: Same editor, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. If you want to replicate the study, they’re so complex, convoluted. Many of the things that they do don’t make it into the method section just because there’s so much detail there.

Damian: He was amazing to listen to. They’re just kicking out all the stuff that doesn’t make the point, don’t they?

Dr. John Jaquish: Also consider this, if a pharmaceutical company pays a university to do a study and it doesn’t come out the way the company likes, what happens to the study?

Damian: Gone. Gone.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re right. It’s trash, thrown in the trash. Yeah. So they can have lots of failed experiments and you’ll never know. So yeah. I just didn’t follow convention because I wasn’t going to be part of convention. And fortunately when people read my thesis, my dissertation, while unorthodox, there’s a level of obviousness there. And how I win over every physician to tell their patients they need to go to an OsteoStrong is if anybody says, “There’s not enough research,” or, “You don’t have a publication in The New England Journal of Medicine.” I say, " Look, there’s a physical medicine alternative that has no side effect whatsoever, why would you not try that first? You wouldn’t try an exercise intervention?" We don’t call it exercise because it doesn’t look or feel like exercise. But just from a pure argument perspective, you wouldn’t… A physical medicine, so like physiotherapy exercise all falls into physical medicine category, something physical you do that can be applied to what would normally be seen as a medicinal purpose. So we have this and you would go…

Dr. John Jaquish: We have this and you would go to a pharmacologic approach first? Are you sure about that? Even if there is a physical medicine alternative? And what I say is, “Let me make sure I get the spelling of your name right because I’ll contact the local press and say you’re against exercise. That’s really interesting.” Immediately they’re like, “Well, I didn’t say that.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you did.” And so they usually kind of shake their head and smile a little bit and think, “Okay. Tell you what, I’ll send five of my patients and I’ll see what happens. And they’ll call you.” “Great, great. That’s all I wanted.” And as soon as that happens, they call me, maybe, six months later after they do another set of DEXA scans and they say, “These people have higher bone density. This is awesome.” And I go, “Great. Now make every one of your patients happy. Just tell them what happened to the first five. That’s all you need to do. Just stay fact.” That’s why OsteoStrong is taking over the world when it comes to bone density.

Damian: I’m glad we went there cause I saw the real John coming at the real reason that you started this. And I’m writing those furiously here. I thought you’d almost coined the term physical medicine, which I haven’t heard before. But I was going to have a question. I’ll start the statement and then I’ll integrate the question.

Damian: You were unconventional in your approach. I asked the question, why do you think engineers are now winning versus doctors? You’ve shown why, but you got into this because of passion, because of your mom. So let’s tie this in a bow. If you hadn’t done that, if mum had come to you then… And I’m very real, I do apologize for being blunt, but mum came to you and she was also osteoporotic at a young age and not doing what she did. And it’s mum so we’re heavily invested. What would have happened, what would she look like? And what was the treatment protocol if you had not gone and done what you do did? Look, you’ve made money from it. Awesome. But you didn’t get into it for making money like the pharmaceutical companies, you did it help to mum. What would she look like? And what was the treatment protocol if you hadn’t invented OsteoStrong?

Dr. John Jaquish: Damian nobody has ever asked me that question and I’m really glad that you did. Okay. So a few years after I reversed my mother’s osteoporosis, she went back to the bone density of a 30 year old and she was in her seventies. She fell down a flight of concrete stairs. Yeah, yeah. And it was bad. And she was bruised up. There were four steps, just didn’t see them. There was four steps down into a patio and there was a view and she was looking at the view and not where she was walking and she just completely mi… And apparently this happens a lot of people who go over to that particular person’s house. The guy says, “I really need to just change the way my house is designed because people fall down the stairs all the time.” I mean, usually they miss a step and are able to rebalance. She went down and landed on her knee.

Dr. John Jaquish: And what probably would have happened if she had had her previous bone density before OsteoStrong is she would have shattered her knee and her hip joint. She’d be in a wheelchair unable to move. Probably would be wheelchair bound or died of pneumonia from not being able to move, which is the complications we talked about. So she probably wouldn’t be with us if it didn’t happen. But what happened, they took her to the emergency room. They saw her age, they saw how bruised up she was, already swelling. And they were like, “All right, like she’s just a disaster.” So they x-rayed her, nothing. Nothing.

Dr. John Jaquish: She had a bruise on her knee and she had soreness in her hip, but a bruise on her knee that took a year to go away. That’s how much trauma happened. That’s how much internal bleeding there was. And she was kind of fascinated by that. Also very upset cause she likes to wear dresses and stuff. It was terrible. But hey, I told her, “This is a very small problem compared with death, so stop complaining.” Of course the doctors thought it made no sense. “How could you have a bruise like this and no fracture?” And all she had to say to them was, “Yeah, my son, his research, you need to talk to that guy.” So they did. Yeah. It’s just taken off since then. But yeah, that’s the difference.

Damian: Wow. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. This ties up in a bow between research, between theory, between the world population and then something real and tangible and hugely inaudible to you, John. So thank you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thank you. Well, this is a lead in to what you’re talking about, with runners and how they have low bone density. My approach if I were to boil it down to a generic formula, I’m going to give you the formula. You have to think of the central nervous system as an engineering team. Think of it like a team of people, like they’re working in the pits at a race. And they’re going to try and adjust things to optimize. So you watch a Formula One race or let’s say they’re inventing cars. Developing what’s going to be next road car. Well, if you look at a Formula One car and you look at an economy car, they’re very different.

Dr. John Jaquish: The central nervous system, this team of engineers, we have only one way to communicate with them. You can’t look in the mirror and tell your central nervous system, “If only I can really lose five pounds.” You can’t do that. But you can create an environment where you would be much better off if you lost that five pounds of body fat. And by creating that environment, that engineering team goes to work and starts making changes, adaptations to the body and you become that optimized machine. But talking to the central nervous system is poorly understood by most. You have to give it crystal clear stimulus before that extreme environment is created. So for example, when I see people, they do a couple hours of cardio a week, and then they do a couple hours of weightlifting a week. The weightlifting is increasing growth hormone and decreasing cortisol. And the cardiovascular training is doing exactly the opposite. So how much progress are they going to make?

Damian: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Not much.

Dr. John Jaquish: Not much at all. So ultimately when I talk to people about what they want, what do you want to feel like? How do you want to perform? Every once in a while, “I want to be well-rounded.” Okay. So you want to suck. Is that what you’re trying to say? Cause ultimately if you do a little bit of everything, not a lot’s going to happen. So you might look at a particular athlete and say, “Yeah, that guy is just a champion in everything.” Probably not. That’s probably not how that guy trains. So I know guys who are strength competitors that might do a marathon in the off season, but they’ll tell you, “This is destroying everything I work towards, I just want to challenge myself. And I got plenty of time to get back in shape for the season.” People don’t read that part. They just see the fact that this rugby player or whatever did a marathon. So they go, “I need to run marathons.” Nah, no, you don’t. Not if you want to be a strength athlete, you don’t. Or even look strong. That’s definitely the opposite of what you want to do.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I like looking at what really the mechanisms are. And so when I was doing the research in London for OsteoStrong, I was looking at the data when I said seven, eight, nine times body weight that these post-menopausal females were putting through their hip joint. I compared that to what the American College of Sports Medicine keeps as what’s considered normative weightlifting data for the lower extremities. Well, most people between deconditioned to conditioned 1.3 to 1.5, three times their body weight. So what does that mean? That means we’re basically seven times stronger in our impact ready range of motion than we are in our weaker range of motion. But it means we can then extrapolate something further, which is when you lift weights, you pick whatever weight you can handle in the weaker range of motion, which is where you have the least amount of muscle tissue engaged and the maximum exposure to cumulative joint damage.

Dr. John Jaquish: So Peter Rutter has said this, he said this on a podcast. I actually was saying it before I heard him say it. But he’s cooler than me so I’m going to reference him. He said, “The problem with the way we exercise is we overload joints and under load muscle.” And so that was the next conclusion I came to, the central nervous system isn’t seeing the right thing.

Damian: Can I translate that? Cause there’s a bit pack there and people are listening and they literally visualizing a bunch of words you said. I’ve got a bit of a cheat there cause I understand where you’re at. So are you saying that someone’s at the bottom of a squat with a weight on their back, they are lifting the amount they can get out of the bottom of the squat with, that’s the maximum, because the rest of its easy, isn’t it? The bottom of the squat is what you said an unsafe position.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re barely engaged at the top.

Damian: Exactly. So unsafe position at the bottom and that’s the maximum weight. The rest is just a waste of exercise and modality.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, waste. I hate to call it a waste. I mean, yes. The short answer is yes, it’s a waste. But also you don’t want to just train in it. So somebody could say, “Well, let’s only train in the weak range then.” Well, then you’re just damaging joints. And the weak range is awful. Why do sprinters only use seven degrees of flection when they sprint behind their knee when they have 180 degrees available?

Damian: Well, can I ask you a question? And I do want you to carry on where you we’re going there. Why do people squat to jump? How low does someone, basket baller, flex their neck and knees to jump or a high jumper? It’s not ass to grass is it?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. I’ll give you just from memory there’s a great study, Mukhejee and Radimus, 1999. I’ve met both those researchers. They’re both a part of the American College of Sports Medicine. These guys did a fixed bench press study and tested the translation of strong range only exercise. And how that translates into any strength changes in the weaker range, 100% translation. Because you’re just engaging more of the tissue. It’s not like there’s some secret part of the muscle that gets used… That’s the key to growth in your least optimized position. Not at all.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so what I did determined when I was in London was, okay, based on what I now understand, weightlifting it sucks. We’re doing it all wrong. What we really need is a lightweight in the weaker range, a normal weight in the middle, and then a super heavyweight when we get into the impact ready range of motion because we can handle it. And we need that weight to be high enough where as we move through the range of motion and these weight changes, we get to fatigue in descending order. Super important. I hope you put a header on this podcast so everybody in the beginning knows they got to wait till 30 minutes in before we get into some serious, actionable stuff. So in descending order, because once you fatigue in the weaker range of motion, most of your muscle hasn’t been touched. It’s just not exhausted at all. Once I figured this out, I developed the world’s most powerful variable resistance training device called x3bar.com.

Dr. John Jaquish: The way it works is you first go into the impact ready range of motion, the stronger range of motion. And this is true of all the movements with the exception of the rowing movement, which is a very special force curve. You’re not powerful in the end, you’re powerful in the middle there. But it’s okay, we got a way to address that. So basically like in a chest press, you’re strong when your arms are almost locked out. When they’re straight ahead of you. In the middle, you got a middle amount of strength. It’s actually less than half of what your max capability is at in that more powerful range. And at the bottom, you don’t have much working for you, it drops real quick. So when I chest press it with X3 variable resistance exercise system, I’m holding 500 pounds, 237 kilos at the top and then 300 pounds in middle and about 100 pounds at the bottom.

Dr. John Jaquish: So let’s say I do 18 to 20 repetitions full range with that 500 pounds and then I can’t get there anymore. And then because of the protocol, because of the density of the latex in the banding, and the mechanism of which we’re harnessing the band, you have to have that bar. If you try and use a band by itself, you’re going to twist your joints and it’s going to cause neural inhibition for a completely different reason, you’ll have a different set of injuries. And I mean, if you’re really weak, you can use bands alone. But I mean, we’re talking about athletic people, not rehab.

Dr. John Jaquish: So we go to fatigue in diminishing range. So first strong range then I can’t get there anymore. Then I do the halfway 300 pound repetitions and I might do five of those and then get there any more. And then my last two repetitions are just an inch, just a couple of centimeters off my chest. And then I’m completely exhausted. And I only do one set because you only need to show the central nervous system one time that you have a lack of muscular tissue and then it will adapt. But it has to be at the appropriate levels. So when you stop short because you have a chronic joint injury, you’re not simulating anything. Cause it’s the joints that shut you down, it’s the neural inhibitory process of the joint. And yeah, you might get a pump in the muscle and think, yeah, I’m really going to grow from this. No, you’re not. So when you can change that force is when that growth really happens.

Damian: So couple of things there, weightlifting sucks. People are going to like hearing that. I’ve lifted weights…

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s okay, I got plenty of haters they can throw a party. Look, anybody who really wants to get as strong as possible, they want to have the optimized strategy. If somebody’s life revolves around or their social life revolves around the activity of lifting weights, they can still go lift weights. I mean, I hate to ruin the party, but there’s a separate… Being social and lifting weights you can do that. There are people who bring their X3 Bar variable resistance system, it fits in a backpack. So they can bring it to the gym. They can use it at the gym and be social. But ultimately moving the same weight like in a chest press from your chest to full extension is really just hard on the joints and it just doesn’t do much for the muscle by comparison.

Dr. John Jaquish: And just my results have been outstanding but on the website you can see plenty of people who have had similar results to mine. The first year I put on 30 pounds of lean mass using only X3 Bar resistance band bar system. So no weights at all, no cardio either. Also dropped body fat. And then the second year I put on an additional 15 pounds of muscle. So I weigh a hundred kilos now, 220 pounds. And I was in a lean and I was a not so lean 180 pounds before. And it’s just been completely transformative. And typically guys over 40 years old, don’t put on 45 pounds of muscle even if they were taking performance enhancing drugs. That works for younger people, that doesn’t work for older people. So the gains I’ve seen are incredible and the same thing has happened with users. And you can it in the before and after pictures on the website.

Damian: So people are listening, minds are starting to blow, egos are starting to break. I’ve been lifting weights since I was 13 years old so showing my age is a long, long time. You do one set using banded exercises with the X3 Bar exercise band bar system, which is brilliant. I’ve had one for quite some time. And what happens if you did two sets?

Dr. John Jaquish: It wouldn’t create too much inroad in recover because it’s really easy on joints. One of the problems with multiple sets is it’s so hard on joints, but with X3 Bar resistance band training system, X3 Bar variable resistance system is always easy on joints.

With X3, you train with Greater Force to trigger Greater Gains

Damian: Yeah. So going back we talked about crosstalk .

Dr. John Jaquish: If you’re doing two sets, the people who have done two sets or three or four, cause some people will try to do more. And it’s that they don’t need to do it, they don’t grow any faster.

Damian: That’s what I’m looking for, and I didn’t know the answer. They don’t grow faster. I mean, look, let’s be real. People go to the gym and we all think work harder, I’m a bit older now so I tried to work smarter. work harder, better result. So you’re saying one set, which literally was, you’re talking 40, 50, maybe 70 seconds of exercise, bang that’s it. Movement/ body part done.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s correct.

Damian: Sounds pretty smart. Then going back to look at your engineering mentality towards OsteoStrong, dose-response. Dean Kolkowski, top bodybuilder in the world, dose-response. It doesn’t make sense, it’s illogical for doing this extra work for no or little outcome.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re just accumulating damage, yeah.

Damian: So devil’s advocate, you know I’m pretty real here. Why can’t I just attach bands to some bars at the gym and to some machines?

Dr. John Jaquish: They won’t handle it properly. So the way X3 workout bar system works is there’s a center shaft that runs through the middle and then the hooks rotate. So your wrists are always protected. So it works like an Olympic bar, but one very specially made for extraordinarily heavy loading in optimized positions. And for example, if you take one of the heavier bands and just wrap it around you and do a chest press kind of thing with it, it will make your wrists so uncomfortable you can’t accomplish the exercise. And like saying neural inhibitory process is the same thing. And so the only people who really accomplish anything with banded exercise with bands alone are either really weak people or they’re just going extraordinarily high repetitions. They’re not going to put on any significant amount of size or have a lot of adaptation, maybe they can maintain. They’re not going to hurt themselves, but they’re not going to do much.

Damian: And again from personal experience, you’d have to attach those bands to 15 different machines in the gym. You’re talking men portable, literately it fits in my bag back here, and I can just go outside in the beautiful sun and do my exercise out there with X3 Bar resistance band bar system.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Everyday I do it I’m outside. My photos on Instagram are hilarious because I just work out in all kinds of crazy, public places. I’ll be like in the middle of the strip in Vegas and I’ll be doing calve raises. And people are like, “Did you just really just stop on the sidewalk and do that?” “Yeah. Cause I can.” It paints the picture very well, you can do this anywhere. It takes 10 minutes a day and you can have physique changes and strength like a professional athlete. It really does take you all the way.

Dr. John Jaquish: Another thing, a lot of previous… This was hard to overcome before the product got a good reputation. But when it first came out, it was compared to a lot of other really kind of low price banded things. Well, they have 20 pounds of force. And you can double up on bands with the X3 Bar fitness band bar system. I know a guy who uses the Elite band and the heavy band together to do his deadlift, so he’s doing a 700 pound deadlift. How does compare to the $20 product? Well, the $20 product is not going to get you anything other than, I guess, the mental satisfaction of pretending you’re exercising. And remember what I said about the central nervous system, it has to be an environment that is extreme so the central nervous systems says, “Okay. We got to make some changes here.” And that engineering team goes to work and makes you more like that Formula One car and less like that economy car. So you need to expose the muscle to the appropriate forces and when you understand…

Dr. John Jaquish: …the muscle, the appropriate forces. And when you understand the differences between strong versus weak range, those forces, there’s no way around this. Now, heavy is relative., Women clearly use some lighter. And there’s different levels of banding, not all over 500 pounds. But you pick the appropriate band and heavy equals results, and it’s heavier than anybody’s… So it’s really a way to get your body to lift heavier than it’s ever lifted, with more repetitions than you would ever normally use. And driving you to a much deeper level of fatigue and that’s why it triggers the growth.

Damian: You’ve really narrowed it there and explained it quite well because it’s…

Dr. John Jaquish: Thank you.

Damian: As you listen to podcasts, you’re trying to paint a picture of what the guy’s saying, the guy or girl is saying. So we talked about strength curves and so on. My particular story is I actually tore some tricep musculature and I rehabbed it using the bands really well, actually. I had to try a cable exercise every now and then and literally couldn’t do it. So I’m assuming that because it’s working through the whole strength curve, i.e. from full elbow flection to extension, that’s why I’m getting the more complete rehabilitation of strength from injury with that?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right, yeah. Physical therapists, physiotherapists as you call them, they have understood for years that variable resistance is far superior to static resistance. The only problem is they never apply that to strength training, only to rehab, because there’s never been a good way to grab a hold of a heavy band without creating a different injury. So you see these little, very lightweight products, they’re great for rehab. They’re great for outward rotation. If you had some shoulder surgery or something like that, getting that range of motion back. But they’re not really good for much else.

Damian: So you’ve reverse engineered two problems. One, osteoporosis. Two, correct loading for muscles for strength and also for hypertrophy. And you’ve centered that around central nervous system stimulation. You’ve given the appropriate dose to get a response. The response was for your mom to have the bone density of a 30-year-old woman, versus a 70 year old woman. Dose response was you put on 30 pounds of muscle in a year. At our advanced ages, not supposed to happen. How about, and I know I’m cognizant of your time here, what’s the correct central nervous stimulus … sorry that’s not the term. It’s the wrong word. What’s the correct stimulus, nutritionally, for A, strong bones. And B, for growing muscle, be that strength or size or whatever? What’s the correct stimulus nutrition?

Dr. John Jaquish: For bone density, it’s very highly contested. We know vegan nutrition is damaging to bone. That’s been shown in multiple studies. So is that from a lack of protein? That might be part of it. Is it because there’s a lot of anti-nutrients in plant-based nutrition? Yeah, that has a lot to do with it. It encourages inflammation and can damage bone mass. Other than that, there’s a lot of conflicting research. When people ask me what I recommend, I have to be very responsible in the way I answer that because I’m still a consultant to Osteostrong. I’m the owner of the intellectual property, and so I tell them, “Well, it’s not that simple. There’s a lot of recommendations that have shown positive outcomes and they conflict with each other.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, I would tell people, if possible, they should get their nutrients from whole foods as opposed to products or supplements. Though there are some great supplements out there for bone density. Vitamin D and magnesium are two things that are not quite discussed as much as calcium is. And they’re almost more important because they’re the reason calcium stays. So, vitamin D and magnesium are incredibly important. But there really isn’t a prescription for nutrition or at least one that I’m willing to publicly endorse just yet. I have some ideas and I have some things that I think will be proven in the future, but I’m just keeping that to myself for now, because I’m trying to get some other nutrition researchers to show what I think might be the optimized nutrition.

Dr. John Jaquish: Ultimately, think about it this way. For bone density… Well, for anything in the body, but bone density. Every once in a while, you’ll see somebody who says, “Well, I take calcium, so I never have to worry about my bone density.” It’s like, okay, think about a weightlifter. They take extra protein and they lift weights and they build muscle. What happens if they quit lifting weights and just took the protein? What would happen? I don’t know. Nothing, that’s what would happen. Absolutely nothing.

Dr. John Jaquish: You need to give that central nervous system, that engineering team, a reason to grab a hold of that building block and do something. If they don’t know they need to do something with it… In fact, for a distance runner, they want to be as light as possible. They want to carry themselves with the least amount of movement as possible to conserve energy. So what does the central nervous system do? It sacrifices their bone density. It gets rid of it to help them in the environment that they’ve chosen to be in. Of course, if they miss a curb or something, they’ll shatter a bone. But there’s no way that they were communicating to the central nervous system that they wanted to avoid that.

Damian: So they’re doing something that makes them sweat out calcium. They’re not replacing their calcium through their electrolytes while they’re exercising. Of course, they have to leach it from their bones to continue the muscle contraction?

Dr. John Jaquish: It probably can’t, because they’re not giving the body a reason to retain it. They’re giving the body a reason to sacrifice it. The central nervous system is getting rid of bone mass when they do that.

Damian: Thank you for that answer. You’ve pretty much told us what not to do, which is great because we can extrapolate there. My experience, I actually snapped my toe in half, unfortunately, about eight months ago. Dropped a weight bench on it. What did you say? You said weights, weightlifting, sucks.

Dr. John Jaquish: It sucks.

Damian: I literally snapped my big toe in half, clean snapped it. Four weeks to the day, so on day 28, I ran a 9.6 beep test. Personally, I was taking Vitamin D, calcium. I was using a lot of PEMF machine on it and…

Dr. John Jaquish: Ah, great research behind that.

Damian: Yeah. I mean …

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, the pulse electromagnetic fields are fantastic.

Damian: Yeah. That’s exactly why I slammed it on. And massage for the soft tissues. So at week four, on a small bone, it was good enough to handle the load. I managed to pass my firefighter beep test there. But vegan nutrition, again, from one of my guests, pretty much doing almost vegan nutrition inaudible Mira Calton managed to give herself the early-onset osteoporosis from a poor dietary choice. Am I correct, and I’ve heard this from another podcast, am I correct that we do store protein as humans in muscles and bone, that’s our storage of protein?

Dr. John Jaquish: Correct.

Damian: So…

Dr. John Jaquish: But we are made of protein. Skin’s made of protein, everything.

Damian: Yeah. So can we now go to something you may be able to discuss, what’s the correct nutrition stimulus to grow muscle and get strong, combined with the correct dose responsive exercise?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s conflicting information on that as well. I defer, for the most part, to some very accomplished scientists in that area. Now, the area of proper stimulus on muscle, the way I see it, I think I’m really the only one who is thinking the way I’m thinking. And the users of what I invented have had outstanding results, some of the best results I’ve ever seen. However, when it comes to nutrition, I really like to lean on some of the people who’ve spent their lives studying it. And some guys have a really great understanding of how that works. Of course, Dr. Sean Baker, Dr. Paul Saladino, fantastic guys. Also, just from an experience in the podcast standpoint, Chris and Mark Bell, they’ve collected information from so many of these top people in what muscle optimization nutrition looks like.

Dr. John Jaquish: I was sending some text messages back and forth with Ben Pakulski. He interviewed Dr. Saladino and we were talking about… So I said like, “What do you think of carnivore nutrition now?” Because when I went carnivore, which was November 2017… I haven’t had a vegetable or anything other than meat since November 2017. I had already put on 45 pounds of muscle using ketogenic nutrition but I was like, “Okay, that experiments done. I don’t really want to weigh more. I’d like to be a little bit leaner. But I want to perform better, I want to be stronger, and if I put on some more muscle, that’s cool too.”

Dr. John Jaquish: So I thought, “All right, I’m going to give this a shot because ultimately, having the most incredible and effective muscle stimulus device in the world is only going to be as good as what building blocks we feed the body. So I really got to start understanding this. I’m going to talk to all the world’s experts.” And I can’t get away from coming to the conclusion with everything I read that carnivore nutrition is really optimal for performance.

Damian: Can we just pause that for one second? I’ve actually made a note so we come back to that point of carnivore nutrition. I want to pause it because you said building blocks. Now look, back at university, again, a long, long time ago, amino acids are the building blocks of the body. It’s a throwaway tune, just like mitochondria is the powerhouse, it’s…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s just a thing people say to sound smart. And it’s like, okay, that’s a way over simplified statement. Yeah, right.

Damian: I love to say I’m not a smart guy, but I know smart people and I’ve got a great memory, so I’ll start on the memory here. Perfect analogy for the human body breaking down and breaking in and building up is if you’ve got a wall in front of you, every minute of the day, bricks are falling out of that wall. The blocks are falling out of that wall, and every minute of the day, you’re putting them back. You’re trying to rebuild that wall every day. Now that’s without trying to grow bigger, as you just said, or grow stronger. It’s a great analogy for the person, I can’t remember who it was. But that’s the amino acids building that up. As you see, we’re made of amino acids, our skin, our hair and muscles and so on, our bones.

Dr. John Jaquish: Everything.

Damian: The reason I’ve thrown in there is because we’re talking about building the wall higher. Well, we need to not only replace those blocks into the wall, but we’re trying to build it bigger. So I just want to touch and maybe explain for everybody that’s listening, the building blocks of the body with protein there. Now…

Dr. John Jaquish: Your go-to metaphor is really building the wall? Really?

Damian: I love it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Go on, all right, sorry. I couldn’t help myself.

Damian: What is the rules? You never talk about politics or religion? Well, food’s not a religion, and Trump’s made your economy pretty strong. It’s really screwed my dollar over here, the Australian dollar.

Dr. John Jaquish: Of course it has.

Damian: So let’s go back to… Well, almost inaudible carnivore. Food is not a religion, people that are listening.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Damian: You’ve come to carnivore, we’re a caveman in a 2019 internet world with its bag of meat, or meat avatar, as one of the scientists said last week. You’ve talked about carnivore possibly being one of the best muscle building nutrition protocols.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So the top researcher in the world on protein and performance, as well as health metrics, is Professor Jose Antonio. And I’ve never had the pleasure of speaking with him, but I think I’ve read most, if not all, of his papers in great detail. When I look at some of his studies that have been referenced 500 times or something like that, when I read a study and I think it’s really profound, I go read every study that referred to it. All 500 of them. Because I want to see how others are interpreting what he came up with. Do they get it? Do they read it the way I read it?

Dr. John Jaquish: So the data is presented, the way a study works for the listeners that don’t know, it’s here was the experiment. We describe the experiment in detail. We ran the experiment, here was the result of the experiment. And then in the discussion section or conclusion of paper, and usually referenced in one or two sentences in the abstract, it says what this could mean. And usually the word could is there because there may be some other variables that we’re not looking at, that we should be, that would be factored in later when we have greater understanding. There may be another way to run this experiment, which would tell us more. But based on the data above, this could mean this and this and this.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when you look at protein recommendations and muscle growth, we need a lot more protein than we get. A lot more. So I tell people the minimum is 2.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. And that’s well established. If people exceed 2.4, they can be at a caloric deficit, like my friends that are fans of fasting or ketogenic nutrition, they hate when I talk about caloric deficit. We’ve laughed about this online. There are many different approaches to caloric deficit. I think some are better than others because of compliance. When I’m ketogenic, I just don’t want to eat a pizza or a chocolate cake. I don’t want it. It doesn’t look good to me, I’m not going to eat it. Whereas other strategies of just depriving yourself for periods of time or eating tiny meals, you’re just angry all the time. And all you want is that thing that you know you’re not supposed to have. That’s a crappy way to go through life.

Damian: It sounds like you’re speaking from experience.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. Yeah, I tried it all. I tried being a vegan. I just said, “Okay, I’d be a hypocrite. If I said this was wrong.” So a couple of years ago, before I came up with X3 portable gym, what does it feel like? What does it feel like to eat only vegetables? My conclusion was after 60 days, it feels terrible. Now some told me, “Well, you didn’t try it for long enough.” Okay. Well it long enough for me.

Damian: It wasn’t raw enough, it wasn’t vegan enough.

Dr. John Jaquish: Also, I base my decisions on clinical research.

Damian: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: And a lot of the things that vegan nutrition leans on is like the book, The China Study, which was not a study. It was a book that the author named, open quote, story, close quote. Or sorry, study, The China Study. It was not a study, it was basically synthesized data. It was his best guess. Now did the guy actually believe that that was the right answer? I don’t know. But I know he didn’t perform any sort of actual research. So I call it a fraud. And I think some other people did because I’m pretty sure that guy went to jail for a period of time.

Damian: Wow. I have seen some very well researched paper. I think Denise Minger or Linger did that. Protein recommendations though, cause I’m cognizant of your time and I do want to touch on one more thing that you’ve created. You talk about 2.4 grams per kilo body weight, you talked about overall, the smartest person on protein intake is as Professor Antonio. And I’ve listened to him, he’s great. International society of sports nutrition, I believe, has just stated in the last six months, bikini model… No, how would you put it? Female figure athletes recommended intake is 3.1 grams per kilo of body weight. And that’s their position. Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Damian: So there we go, you obviously-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. And that’s why I say 2.4 is a minimum. I try and go for three. Now, if you go for three grams per kilogram of body weight, is there much room in your digestive tract for much else other than? Right. If that is true, then you can pretty much throw everything else away. And you hear the argument for fiber, you need fiber. You need fiber to digest fiber. If you don’t have it in your diet, your bowel movements are like, “Really? That’s all that’s coming out of me? Where did the rest of it go?” Your body used the rest of it. It was utilized by your biochemistry. That’s why not much comes through you.

Damian: Smart.

Dr. John Jaquish: My waist went down by inches because I, based on observations of my waist and what I can surmise from the research, my intestines were inflamed. Because when I was just ketogenic… Now I’ve been ketogenic for now 13 years. So I read Body Opus years ago. And there was, I don’t know if you ever remember? Crazy book written by a crazy man, but Body Opus was like 25 insane things you can do to increase performance. And it went all the way from just having a bunch of ephedrine, this is before the ephedrine was illegal. Just taking ephedrine pills before your sprint, you’ll run faster. Okay. I mean, totally hard on the heart, but yeah. I mean, that’s been seen. So ultimately, I don’t even remember the author’s name.

Damian: Dan Duchaine, I believe.

Dr. John Jaquish: Dan Duchaine. That’s it, Dan Duchaine. But the one thing that went over, because it was like 25 things in all. All of them were like, “Only a dummy would do this.” Or are you talking about different performance enhancing drugs, which are totally illegal. And you’re like, “You wrote this in a book? Why?” But, ketogenic nutrition. And he just describes you’re putting your body in a situation where it’s really hard to store body fat and a lot easier to utilize the body fat you have. Now I think that has been distorted by, “Fat is not bad.” Well, that doesn’t mean cover everything in butter and eat as much fat as you possibly can choke down. Because first of all, you don’t need to ingest fat at all to be ketogenic.

Damian: Exactly, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’d be an unhappy person if you didn’t have any fat in your diet. You’d never feel full. And you need fats to create oils in your skin, have your hair grow. Your body does have a certain amount of oils in it. But being ketogenic means utilizing fatty acids as fuel. But you don’t want it to use the stick of butter you just swallowed, you want it to use the fat you stored from the Krispy Kreme donut you ate 10 years ago.

Damian: That’s really a soundbite. And that’s where everybody screws up the ketogenic diet. If you were a eight year old epileptic child, you’d probably want to use that butter to turn into ketones. But you don’t want to, as a 40 year old man who’s eaten Krispy Kremes, you don’t want to use the stick butter, you want to use your belly fat.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yeah, lean as possible. So I think that’s where the ketogenic and even fasting type nutrition programs… It’s a strategy of caloric deficit, forcing your body to use its own materials. Also, for extended fasting periods and autophagy, and there is some autophagy with caloric restriction, not as much. I mean just traditional caloric restriction. But ultimately, when autophagy happens, the-

Dr. John Jaquish: When autophagy happens, the obese people who lose a lot of weight, they start to metabolize their loose skin.

Damian: Yes. Yes. Wow. That’s the first time someone stated that. And we’ve seen some amazing pictures. I’ll throw one up maybe in the show notes. But you’ve seen these people that are like 50 kilos overweight and they don’t have the loose skin hanging down.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Whereas like people with gastric bypass or something like that, they need plastic surgery to get rid of all that loose skin.

Damian: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: But you metabolize your loose skin when you do these extended fasting periods. So I think there’s so much to be learned there. Sorry. There’s just so much more to be learned and understood. And I think a lot of, now that we understand these two things, we really need to focus on how do we get more out of that? Or how do we really understand it better so that we’re really making sure we’re doing the right thing? There’s ultimately, and I tell everybody this, if somebody could prove to me every piece of research I’ve ever read on protein recommendations is wrong, and if I ate nothing but a handful of sprouts a day, I could grow more muscle, be leaner, have more energy, I’d be all about it. But right now, not even close. It really has to do with protein far more than we’ve been taking in in the past.

Damian: One question with that protein, and then I’d like to move on to one last subject is, is high protein safe for the kidneys?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes, it is. There’s never been a single study that showed a negative impact on kidneys with a high protein diet. Never, not one. There are some individuals who have kidney dysfunction, as in a diseased kidney or a dysfunctional kidney damage, and they have trouble ingesting certain amounts of protein, but these are people with a disease. So that is just, that’s like a complete myth of nutrition. And I do falsehoods of fitness video every once in a while. And I’m going to do one on that. That is just, you hear that all the time. “Oh, you’re going to destroy your kidneys.” Never been seen in a single study anywhere. There’s no conflicting evidence on that. It just never existed. Just total BS.

Damian: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, we’re research-based guys. I’ll tie that in a bow. Dr. Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist and anthropological … I can’t remember his other title. Smart guy, smarter than me. I’m not the smart guy. He just tweeted-

Dr. John Jaquish: Anthropology and psychology professor.

Damian: Thank you. He just tweeted yesterday. He’s had his blood tests done by three independent, separate insurance companies, all come back within range and no sign of scurvy. He’s on the carnivore diet, he did it for health reasons. And obviously looking amazing. I want to move on to one last thing, because we’re pushing on. You have one more invention you’ve made, or utilized. And that’s a vibration plate.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah.

Damian: Again, going to break people’s minds and damage a few little soft egos, but I’ve seen the research out of my country on those. I’ve got one behind me. You’ve termed it the growth hormone accelerator. But, the reason I’m asking this question, inaudible, watched your video literally last night in preparation for this podcast. And it was brilliant. It was brilliant because-

Dr. John Jaquish: Thank you.

Damian: … you showed the difference between a sprinter and a long distance runner. And I teach health with the body, a good looking body, as a side effect of health. Now, health, people could turn to different things, but I want the person absent of disease and absent of injury. You said a long distance runner’s head bobbles around all over the place. My background clinically as an exercise inaudible physiologist, instability, function, core training, all those things, for prevention of injury. A sprinter’s head stays absolutely still. To me, a sprinter being muscular, looking healthy. Who looks healthier? The Olympic gold medalist in marathoning, which I did ultra endurance running, being a special forces crosstalk. Or who looks healthier, Usain Bolt?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Damian: You brought that up really well. And now you’ve got the growth hormone accelerator with the vibration plate. Have at it. John, tell me about that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, you kind of stole my thunder. That was it. That’s what I normally say. So yeah, a sprinter is leaner than a distance runner. No, maybe more muscular. Let’s just talk about percentage body fat. A sprinter’s got a lower percentage body fat. Does a sprinter spend a lot of time at a caloric deficit? Probably not. They need to have all the energy available to them. Now, even some of them who do carnivore nutrition, I know sprinters who can sprint and eat a bunch of fruit right afterward, and then take an acetone test and test their ketone bodies. They’re still in ketosis, because they’ve used so much muscle glycogen that all of that fruit goes right into replenishing muscle glycogen. So sprinters are … if I were to pick a sport to where an individual is like the healthiest, I had to pick one, it wouldn’t be weightlifting. It would be sprinting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, I don’t know that’s very useful information for most people because when you’re past like 25 you probably shouldn’t be sprinting. Or at least if you decide to go and take a sprint protocol, you better take six months to learn how to do it exactly right. Hire a coach who’s videotaping you, monitoring your toe strike, looking at your toe strike effectiveness. Like there’s 100 things you got to look at. I’m not a sprinting coach.

Damian: Can I pause you there? You’re not a sprinting coach. You probably don’t know this about me, I was at a police officer before I was a firefighter, about 10 years ago. And quick story. My sergeant and I had pulled this guy over, he had actually assaulted four different people in the mall. And we were talking to him. We hadn’t heard about how bad it was, we just heard it was a disturbance. My sarge turns away, and he literally, this guy takes off. He just had a prior, he just injected methamphetamine. Or sorry, snorted methamphetamine. So he’s pretty fast. I took off after him, we watched the video and we measured the distance. I think I did 90 meters in a roundabout 10 and a half seconds from a standing start. And then had to run him down about another 300. Got him. But the reason I’m saying this, I was sore for two days and my lungs burned for six hours afterwards. I specifically remember it. So, when you’re saying we probably shouldn’t be all trying to be Usain Bolt level, I can say from experience probably not.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You can’t just traipse into that.

Damian: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re going to do that … Like at my age, at our age. I mean, I’m guessing you’re close to mine. I’m 42. How old are you?

Damian: Wow. You’re wise one, but I’m the old one. I’m 45.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Right. We would be considered master sprinters if we were to enter into a sprinting event. I thought just for fun, before developing X3 resistance bands system, knowing what I know about stabilization firing in an upregulation growth hormone. That’s really the summation of what the GHAccelerator is. It’s great, but there’s a lot of risks involved. And everything I’ve done is giving the central nervous system the right information to make a change in the body without the risks. So I decided early on, like I understood the sprinting research and how to do a stabilization firing. And all you have to do is look at the skull of the sprinter and the skull of the distance runner. Skull of sprinters is absolutely stable, because all the stabilization firing is going on all over the body. Almost every muscle in the body is activated when somebody is sprinting.

Dr. John Jaquish: So the question to me was, “Okay, how do I create that effect?” Now, vibration platforms have been around a long time, but people don’t load the body or do anything really extreme on these vibration platforms. So just being on a platform that shakes a little bit. And the University of Sydney, there was a professor, Maria Fiatarone Singh. Brilliant, great researcher, big physical medicine researcher. And she’s at the American College of Sports Medicine Annual Congress every year always presenting something like really, really smart in what she’s done with her research. And so she said to me, “So people do these little exercises on vibration platforms and they get a benefit. But if they were doing the same exercise …” We’re talking like air squats and pushups, basically, maybe a plank. Even though everybody does that wrong. So I mean, let’s be honest. So of all the people doing plank, okay, like 90% of you are not doing anything.

Dr. John Jaquish: But so I listened to her talk about it, and she had nothing nice to say about vibration. She said it doesn’t do anything. And the reason anybody gets an effect is because they’re just doing regular exercise on this vibrating platform. And I said, “Well, it may be that you’re not looking at this through the right microscope. What if we were able to add 5x the load on some of these movements and add vibration? Would that lack of stability provide a greater effect?” Now I didn’t yet know about the growth hormone stabilization axis, because I only wrote my meta analysis was … I published that in summer of 2016. So this was five years earlier than that. So she said, “Well, if somebody ever does that, that will be very interesting.” Well, when I did the growth hormone study, the meta analysis, I found 23 different studies that made the body unstable, in different ways. Percussors, things like that. Made a muscle contract in rapid succession involuntarily.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when you are doing a bicep curl and you’re contracting the bicep, you’re thinking about doing that. It’s an intentional action. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about when you’re doing a bicep curl and your core lights up, that’s a stabilization firing movement. And so like with X3 Bar variable resistance system, I knew we would have the opportunity to be able to lift with more load than normal, which means in stabilization type exercises, like bicep curls, like overhead presses, like deadlifts, like squats, we’re going to have even more stabilization firing and having a greater growth hormone effect. Which is why a lot of times you see these before and after pictures, and people say, “I didn’t really make any changes to my diet and I lost five kilos or 10 kilos.” And yeah, I know why, because you’re having an incredible growth hormone effect, and that is key in lipolysis. By the way, there’s some people out there saying that growth hormone has nothing to do with lipolysis. And this is like a new thing I’ve seen in the last like three weeks. And it’s really concerning, because it does.

Damian: Can I ask a question, and hopefully give an answer on that in a different way? Is it true that injection sites of human growth hormone that people actually have a small divot, a small hole of where that is at their injection sites?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve heard that. I don’t think that’s been studied. But yeah. I mean, ultimately, yeah, it has a lot to do with lipolysis.

Damian: With lipolysis.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think one of the best things a growth hormone does is it preserves muscle. It really is not anabolic.

Damian: No, I have heard that, yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s not anabolic, but it preserves muscle, and then you’re at a caloric deficit. And you have growth hormone in you, you’re dynamite. You’re not losing any mass and you’re losing a lot of body fat. And by optimizing the musculature of these high growth hormone levels, and fasting does that to a degree. And so you’re optimizing your situation for keeping as much muscle mass, and losing body fat at the same time. So with the stabilization firing, back to that, I knew that X3 Bar resistance band bar system by itself was going to have an effect, but if we want to have the absolute maximum effect, we should combine vibration with inaudible. So that’s what the growth hormone accelerator is. And so it is a base for the X3 Bar exercise band bar system. So the band flexes and moves underneath through a channel that’s inside the device. And so you can do overhead presses, where at the bottom you’re holding 100 pounds, at the top of you’re holding 150, where you are stronger. So it’s delivering more force to where you’re more capable.

Dr. John Jaquish: So that greatly influences the strength of the growth hormone effect. And that’s what the meta analysis showed. So we saw some studies where people would have a 300% increase. Other studies where people had an over 2000% increase. And the difference was loading. Loading and stabilization. Now a sprinter, they’re doing impact with a toe strike. So there’s a lot of load there. And when they push off, they’re pushing as hard as they can to propel themselves forward. So that’s incredible forces that they’re dealing with, which is why they’re getting that effect. So I loosely refer to this as the sprint effect.

Damian: Nice. I love it. Paul Chek, who I studied under ‘98, used to term it, “You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe. Imagine where the canoe would go.” And you crosstalk that the fastest guy in the world is putting all his force through his toe, to his skull. He has to be stable. And that’s obviously going to produce those results.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Damian: John, I’d like to sum up, I know we’ve been going for some time. It’s been phenomenal speaking with you. You develop from a place of passion and a problem solving position of creating OsteoStrong, amazing. Create an X3 Bar resistance band training system. I’ve got one of the original ones here. Feel free to upgrade me anytime you like.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay.

Damian: And also, I was using a vibration plate a year ago with the X3 Bar variable resistance system before you developed the growth hormone accelerator.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.

Damian: Yeah. It’s been-

Dr. John Jaquish: You get that from Trevor?

Damian: I’m sorry?

Dr. John Jaquish: You get it from Trevor [Burn 00:01:32:38]?

Damian: No, no. This was the Hypervibe. Again, crosstalk smart scientists here in Australia put me onto it. Where do we find you? Where can listeners go to learn more about you and your products, or at least your research, and just learn a bit more?

Dr. John Jaquish: So my website, which is incredibly boring, intentionally, is johnjaquish.com. But the more exciting website is x3bar.com.

Damian: I mean, you and I, we talk a lot of facts, but we do have the same sense of humor. It’s called X3 Bar resistance band bar system. Why didn’t you call it XXX?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, funny. The reason I looked at X3 Bar exercise band bar system is, they’re probably one of the best studies done on variable resistance, which uses far weaker variable resistance than I was doing. They were looking at like X amount of weight on the chest and 1.2x at extension. So what I’m looking at is like X on the chest and 5x at extension. So a much more dramatic increase in variance. Variance is what we need. Weight is not what we need. Variance is what we need. So even this very basic study where they … it was a power rack with all kinds of hooks welded to it. And it was a special made apparatus for banded training, and they had weights and bands. So that’s why it was like X weight here, and 1.2x at the top. So just with that tiny band so I had a little bit of variance. These individuals got three times stronger than the control group. And it was a base study. It was probably an inexpensive one to run. Anderson 2008, that study. I’m sure you’ve read it. It’s a great study.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so that’s why I called it X3 Bar variable resistance system. You’re tripling your opportunity grow muscle. And now the truth is, now that I’ve seen how X3 Bar fitness band bar system behaves, because this was like early days when it was just a prototype. It’s a lot more than three times what weights can do. For most people, it’s infinitely more because they’re not getting anything out of weights anymore. Because they have some chronic injuries, they’re not getting bigger or stronger. I see some of the most dramatic transformations are from guys who are over 50 years old. And they’re like, “I’ve been lifting for years and I haven’t seen anything change. And I’m lifting as hard as I can. And now I get this X3 Bar resistance band bar system and,” they kind of have a halfway smirk on their face. Like, “Ugh.” Like, “I’m going to see if this does anything. And see if this Dr. Jaquish guy is full of it or if he’s the real deal.” And sure enough, they put on 20 pounds of muscle. And they’re like, “I didn’t gain muscle this fast when I was in my 20s. And now I’m in my 50s.”

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s just a better approach. So I’m clearly keeping the name X3 Bar exercise band bar system. And the reason I didn’t call it XXX was because I did some web searching on … Like I was thinking of calling it like the word Triple X, right? The problem is any type of Google search like that brings up porn. And so I was like, “This is a terrible name.” I mean, I thought it was clever and memorable, but …

Damian: Maybe for the wrong reasons.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh well.

Damian: X3 Bar it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: Man, doc, it’s been phenomenal having you on. I’ve got more show notes than I’ve done with just about any guest. I really appreciate your time. If you’re listening, x3bar.com, and johnjaquish.com. Great guy. Thank you so much for your time. It’s has been phenomenal. And just learning and hearing all the information from you.