Interview with Dr. John Jaquish - OsteoStrong

Our interview with Dr. John Jaquish from OsteoStrong regarding the science behind osteogenic loading, and the phenomenal growth of the OsteoStrong company in the past three years.

Eric Durak: Hi, this is Eric Durak, and welcome to this edition of MedHealth Fit, the TV show that integrates wellness and health care. This is our first TV show since we want our TV Santa Barbara Award. And I just want to give a shout out to all of the people at TV Santa Barbara. It’s a fantastic, and to start off our episode tonight, I am honored to have Dr. John Jaquish who is the inventor of the OsteoStrong equipment. He is a leading researcher. He is an international presenter. He is… I’m going to say one of the great minds of the industry. Welcome to the show dr Jaquish.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks Eric. Good to be here.

Eric Durak: So I appreciate you, you came down from San Francisco today and, and you’re going to, we’re going to spend some time tonight and, I met you about three years ago here in towns when Yvonne Parsons opened her center. And I was a little smitten by the concept because I am a fan of anything that can improve a person’s health and longevity without resorting to just the whole medical issue.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Eric Durak: So you started OsteoStrong a few years ago. You didn’t start the company, the company was invented by someone else. Go ahead.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right. So a Kyle Zagrodzky, he’s the CEO and founder of OsteoStrong. And he found what I was doing and basically I had an earlier version of my devices and I was selling them one doctor’s office at a time. And I knew my pain point was this, “I’m not going to change the world by getting one doctor to do it.” And then the worst part was you would sell this to the physician’s office and they’d say, “Great, I can’t wait to treat my patients.” They treat 10 patients with tens of thousands of dollars of this equipment and it works great. I’m so happy. And I would think, I’m not going to change the world 10 people at a time. Like there’s got to be a better way. So Kyle Zagrodzky, CEO of OsteoStrong, it was like the guy was reading my mind when he met me. He says, “I know exactly what your problem is. I’m going to fix it.” And so he designed a concept that had these osteogenic loading devices. They’re bone loading devices that trigger very rapid bone growth and so he just saw that it was so special that it needed its own venue.

Eric Durak: So…

Dr. John Jaquish: You need to be able to walk into a space and that’s, there it is. That.. Wow. I get it.

Eric Durak: That’s where the franchise came in.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s where OsteoStrong came from.

Eric Durak: And we had a little conversation before the show about what I’m seeing in the industry. So I’ve been in health and safety at the University for a number of years, but over the last three years I’ve been getting back into the medical fitness. I’m on a couple of boards. I just came back from the a show in… A conference in Orange County and I’ll be down in San Diego for the big health club conference in a couple of weeks and I’m starting to see this medical fitness concept. But I’m looking at the aspect of the franchise, the small studios, the independent-type practitioners as opposed to “Let’s build another 90,000 square foot health club.” You guys are actually in the kind of the forefront of how the industry is actually expanding itself.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You can call it wellness or biohacking, but it’s very targeted at particular individuals. Now, everybody has bones, right? But they want to influence their bone mass for different reasons.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So somebody who has osteoporosis wants to improve their bone health and their bone density for that reason. Somebody who has a risk factor, let’s say… This is the biggest group of people I call them the Worried Well, there nothing wrong with them, but they’re going to get out in front of any healthcare problem that could be in their future. That’s what healthcare really should be, shouldn’t be disease care, should be…

Eric Durak: Right it’s not, but… It.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, and approach towards health. So these individuals, they’re the ones buying organic food. They’re the ones reading labels, are the ones that might go to a yoga class and also have a personal trainer. So, these individuals, they see that they might have a risk factor. Let’s say one of their parents had low bone density. Let’s say they’ve taken heartburn medication, like a proton pump inhibitor. That’s very damaging to bone. Let’s say for a period of time they were on a corticosteroid. That’s another thing that damages bone. Maybe they smoked when they were teenagers. Maybe they had a period of time where they had some excessive alcohol consumption. So these are all risk factors of osteoporosis. So, they say, “Okay, I’m going to do something and I’m going to preemptively address this. I’m going to build super high bone density.” And once you build bone density as we’ve seen with some of the clinical literature out there, you can keep that bone for 30 years. Not like building a muscle.

Eric Durak: Well, muscle has it. Yeah, exactly. You’ve got to keep up. But the interesting thing is that, I had the opportunity to see the program three or four years ago when I first met you and then I walked into Yvonne’s center three weeks ago and you have a completely new line of equipment and you also have the vibration device and all this other things. So, the CDC basically says that for people over 65 years of age, there’s over 9,000 deaths a year that may be attributable to bone fractures and 50% of the people over 75 years of age, it’s about one in 2000 falls and most of that is from hips. But as you get older, it can get like to one in 10 are due to damage of crosstalk

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It’s a mortality rate that’s similar to breast cancer.

Eric Durak: Right, right. So, and again…

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk the complications. They have a fracture and then sometimes that fracture isn’t a clean break. It’s a sort of a splintering of the inside of the bone.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: They can’t go in there and operate on it, sometimes the person can’t recover.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re not in good enough health or they’re immobilized and then they get pneumonia.

Eric Durak: Yep. Well my grandmother was 99 years old and she was in a nursing home and they forgot to put the rail up at night. So the next morning she went to lean over the bed and she fell out, broke her hip. She was dead in six weeks. I mean, because… And they did go in. I mean they did what they could, but… Anyway,

Dr. John Jaquish: The problem is doing what you can when the bone mass is low, think about, you’re building a birdhouse with rotten wood.

Eric Durak: Right? Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: You can’t put a screw in a rotten wood. So orthopedic surgeons really enjoy their patients using OsteoStrong because if they have to go in there and intervene with a fracture or attach some hardware into bone, now they’ve got strong bone and not just the outer bone, not just cortical bone, but trabecular bone as well. So the inside, they get to screw right into that and crosstalk right the strong attachment.

Eric Durak: So and that’s in terms of people who have… So I’ve got… it’s a two part question. So people who have, let’s say they’re in the first standard deviation of negative bone loss and you get them into an OsteoStrong program, at what period of time would they be at normal bone? Normal enough if they needed to have surgery, it would… That that screw would hold. Is it two months? Is it…

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s probably different depending on the individual.

Eric Durak: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: The level of aggression that somebody can approach the therapy intervention has a lot to do with their starting biomechanics.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Their general joint comfort, their experience with exercise in the past might have something to do with it. Just a confidence of movement.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Was it… There’s some people who they might not be weak and they might not have any joint problems, but they’ve never really done anything that requires them to exert any force before. So they’re very unfamiliar with it.

Eric Durak: And when I was in the OsteoStrong Center, and Yvonne asked me to push, I pushed hard. I mean I heard a little snap and… I was putting some force on that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. Yeah inaudible readjust

Eric Durak: Because I understand what a one-repetition max is and I was trying to put it in there and you’re right. A senior, my mother would never know what a 1RM max is. I mean her thing is getting out of bed in the morning, that’s the difference. She would have no idea.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I would call it to scientists, I see a kinesthetic awareness.

Eric Durak: Right, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Eric Durak: So, I want to stay, from a preventive standpoint, you are developing a series of exercises and also you’re now starting to combine it with other exercise formats, which we’ll talk about in our second part of the interview. But, there’s a secret sauce that you’re developing here and… And it is, I mean, I understand the concept of 1RM, but I don’t necessarily think what you’re doing is a 1RM based on what I was classically trained.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, it’s not a 1RM.

Eric Durak: That’s a muscular, you know… And how much you can lift the weight, you’re not lifting per se you’re…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s a very specific thing.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then I also don’t like confusing… This is a new modality in when you bring in existing words, it allows people to mistakenly assume it’s something else.

Eric Durak: Right. Well I bring… I wouldn’t bring a bias in because well, it’s not… “Is it a 1RM?” “Well, you’re not lifting.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. I don’t say the 1RM. It’s not isometric. It’s not a lot of things. It’s osteogenic loading.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so what is osteogenic loading? I wrote a book called Osteogenic Loading, which is what this is about. It’s about a therapy intervention where we’re emulating high impact.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So that that’s the takeaway. So what does OsteoStrong? It emulates high impact? It gives you the benefit of the greatest forces that are going to go through your musculoskeletal system through your entire life.

Eric Durak: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: High impact, far higher than what you’d ever do in weights. Even like compare athlete to athlete, gymnast to weightlifter, gymnast has far higher forces albeit brief and in optimized positions. So that’s what we’re trying to emulate. And when we emulate these high impact forces in these very specific positions. So for example, in the upper extremities, I get in the optimum position back in the hand in line with the clavicle, upper arm, lower arm of 120 degree angle between them. This is how my body would choose to absorb impact if I were to trip and fall.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: If I had the time to react, that’d be the perfect position. And that’s seen in the landing biomechanics of gymnasts.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so that’s where I got the positions that people get into in these devices, in the robotics, get the individual exactly in the right position. So then they self-load and then they have a computer screen in front of them so they can see what’s… What they’re doing.

Eric Durak: Were you a gymnast when you were in school?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, I was not.

Eric Durak: Okay. Because a lot of what you’re talking about sounds a little bit like Greg Glassman who’s the CEO of CrossFit. And he’s not really per se chastised in the industry, people just don’t really understand this guy. But he was a gymnast and he starts talking about the loads that gymnasts do and how they have to absorb more force than almost any other sports.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Eric Durak: And I don’t… I’ve never been a gymnast. So, I don’t really…

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve heard him say that. No. So what it… I’m glad you asked that question. The way I came up with this, the reason I did was because my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. And I saw her… I saw her suffering. She was very worried and she knew about all the statistics that you just read. She also didn’t want to take the pharmaceuticals. She read some of the side effects and said, “That’s not for me, I don’t want to do that.” So her plan was just to live an unhappy immobile life. And I said, “Yeah, you’re not doing that.” So I said to her, “Look, what if I can find a way where we can just grow your bone density via some sort of physical medicine intervention, some type of device or protocol?” And she’s… “Yeah, sure. Sounds… Go knock yourself out.” Like she didn’t think I was really going to go do that. So, but…

Eric Durak: Kind of a mother is she?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, a lot of kids say a lot of things. So here’s what I did. I said, “I’m going to find a group of people that has super human bone density. I’m sure there’s some group inaudible , find out how they did it.”

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And it was really easy to figure it out. It was gymnasts. They have incredible bone mass because they go through incredible high impact-type activity. So the question, the research, the engineering question was, how do I get the benefit of the high impact without the risks?

Eric Durak: I mean gymnasts have to… I mean, they also injure themselves.

Dr. John Jaquish: They retire at 19 crosstalk.

Eric Durak: Right, exactly. Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And there’s a reason for that.

Eric Durak: There’s a reason.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s because those high impacts, they’re not… They’re… What’s greatest for bone density also causes the most fractures…

Eric Durak: High risk, high reward, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So the objective was to get the human in the position to absorb high impact and then self load and then use computerized biofeedback. So you’re looking at your first session, first time you ever done it, last time you ever done it, and then what you’re currently doing in comparison. So you get to see the performances, your performance in real time by comparison. And then of course, it’s all mediated by the robotics in your own comfort too.

Eric Durak: Right. And a person buys a package cause it is a business. So they buy either a monthly package or a 20 session crosstalk or whatever they’re doing. So, but you’re following them all along. So if someone says, “Well, I’m going to do a three month package” at each end of three months, you would say, “Well, this is what you’ve done.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Eric Durak: And you’re loading through a leg press, a squat…

Dr. John Jaquish: Lower extremities.

Eric Durak: Lower extremities.

Dr. John Jaquish: Lower extremities. And then we have like kind of a core crosstalk loading of the rib cage and then like a spine and neck, we call it the Postural… Postural Growth Trigger.

Eric Durak: Right. Which is akin to like a dead lift. But it’s not really…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you know elderly people don’t like the word dead. They don’t like saying… I say “Dead lift” and they look at me like “Why do you call it that?” So yeah.

Eric Durak: And that’s funny, I never even thought about that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Postural growth trigger. Yeah.

Eric Durak: Well, there’s a lot of stuff about… And again, when you’re young and you do the squatting and everyone is “Well, the squat, the squat.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Exercises were clearly named by young people.

Eric Durak: Right, exactly. And I inaudible. All right, so now when I came back to the studio, a month or so ago, I noticed that you had the addition of the right vibration plate.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Eric Durak: And what I’ve learned and I’ve sort of been late into looking at certain types of things like the vibration plates and other types of exercise things that have been out there. Because I say I don’t actively work in a health club right now, but… And I had to sort of think about the vibration plate until I actually did one. I was at a conference and the lady said, “Come here, you’re going to do sitting into this thing,” the other thing. And then when I go into your studio here in town and you have a person actually go through this as part of what they’re doing, I understand the whole proprioception in the kines… The movement, these micro things that are having an effect on the body. So go ahead and explain.

Dr. John Jaquish: Eric, I’m happy you brought it up. Whole-body vibration is one of the most confused topics in physical medicine and in exercise. And it’s because a lot of the early days talking points were really… There was a lot of huckster-ish activity. They’re way oversold.

Eric Durak: Well. But they also looked at it from the standpoint of either performance or beauty or you know, the young people can get on this.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, they just lied.

Eric Durak: Okay, whatever.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Eric Durak: I just say I wasn’t…

Dr. John Jaquish: And I’m only beating up on it because I want to point out that there’s some real stuff there. But the real stuff, they didn’t know how to sell that cause that’s science. So instead they say it’ll cause you to lose weight. Not true. It’ll cause you to grow bone density. Not true. It’ll reverse your neurological dysfunctions. And that’s not true either. So, like the… And I said on the Dave Asprey podcast. I did the Bulletproof podcast and he sells a vibration product. It was really funny because it was great that he says, “Tell me about… You know more about vibration than I do.” And I unloaded all this on him and I said, “Here’s what they did with the bone density thing. They sort of lied with math. It’s the speed at which the plate travels. They reference that speed as manifest into your musculoskeletal system as gravity.” So, they call it Gs or six Gs. In fact, now there’s probably the leading vibration manufacturer. You go and it’s… You tap it to six Gs.

Eric Durak: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’d be like saying you have a treadmill with a blinking light on. So you’re peddling at the speed of light. You’re not. It just BS. Totally.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But what they do enact is reflexive firing. And that reflexive firing is incredible from movement preparation, which is why 87% of professional teams in the United States use vibration products.

Eric Durak: Because everything in professional sports is neurologic. I mean… And I look at it like a guy who has to cut very quickly as a receiver or crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you also want to warm them up without wearing them out.

Eric Durak: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Eric Durak: And one of the things I see about vibration plates is from a really old senior person, let’s say we get someone who’s 85 or 90 with no history of exercise and they get on there. And that’s a way that you can actually stimulate certain types of processes in the body, neurologic, proprioceptive, whatever, without having them fall over. They’re not on a bicycle, they’re not… And I actually see it as one of the sort of the up-and-coming things that should be a part of rehab programs, physical therapy-type programs, and then what I’ll call these medical fitness programs, which is a growing part. So, take us through, you have a client that comes… Go ahead.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I just want to say, we use the vibration product, like these professional teams. We use it for movement preparation.

Eric Durak: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: And there’s a growth hormone effect also, but of course that only matters when somebody’s like nutritionally correct. And then it has a lipolysis effect and things like that. So there’s some… I wrote a meta-analysis on that. But so we get them prepare for the movement, which is great for the unathletic people or the people who are just not ready to do a movement where they’re going to recruit a maximum amount of muscular tissue for this bone compression, this impact emulation.

Eric Durak: Okay. So that leads me into the question. So I’m glad you finished off that statement. So it leads me… So you take a client through a program, do they start with a vibration plate? I mean, I started right in on the actual pressure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay.

Eric Durak: And then I did the vibration plate afterwards. Or maybe I did one before. Yvonne will tell me.

Dr. John Jaquish: You do a little before and a little after.

Eric Durak: Little after.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Eric Durak: And that makes perfect sense to me.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Eric Durak: So, but what… So you put a person on and so what are you actually looking for, and again, I’m going to stay with the seniors maybe in the next episode, we’ll talk a little bit about the sports performance. You’re looking for certain things with them. Like I say this, this maximal effort that we’re trying to get them to perform and you’re doing that by having the look on the dial and the dial will actually, “Hey I did…”

Dr. John Jaquish: Scale. Yeah.

Eric Durak: The scale, I di 650 the last time I wanted to do 660 or 670 this time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Eric Durak: So they’ve got a number.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s just computerized biofeedback.

Eric Durak: And Yvonne told me to give good force and of course I tried to give as much as I could and she’s got some other things that she does but I do this once a week. Correct.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah crosstalk.

Eric Durak: Four… Not four exercises, four loadings, all right, a week and then the vibration plate. Can I come in twice a week?

Dr. John Jaquish: Great research study in 2009 I think it’s inaudible and Richardson that shows that primary mineralization is between five and 10 days after an event that would trigger osteogenesis. One loading cycle, by the way. There’s a lot of great research on that.

Eric Durak: One loading cycle per week, one loading cycle…

Dr. John Jaquish: One loading cycle. Just one event will trigger osteogenic loading at the appropriate forces. So you have to be past the minimum dose response.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Once you do that, the primary mineralization happens between five and 10 days. So you… So I mean seven fits on the calendar and it’s right in the middle of that five and 10 days. Also, if you don’t allow for the adaptation to happen and you stimulate again, well that’s like training your biceps every day. It doesn’t work. You can’t adapt. You got to have protein synthesis completed cycle.

Eric Durak: Right. And I’m going to… In the last six minutes we have here in this episode, I’m going to sort of… I’m going to fall back a little bit to classic physiology, the Astrand the… Whatever. And so when they looked at loading an…, One of the things that they did back in the day when Astrand and inaudible and some of these guys who I consider the better physiology researchers would talk about the first thing… The first study I ever read, the classic study on interval training was not from the Nautilus guys or whatever it was from Per-Olof Astrand, it was called Intermittent Muscular Work, 1961 and he did bicycles certain amount of time, rest, exercise, rest and that’s where interval training came from. And of course it’s been sort of bastardized and used in all kinds of different ways.

Dr. John Jaquish: Misread.

Eric Durak: Misread, misinterpreted, misused, whatever we want to say. So, but one of the things that they talked about was, people who do like quadricep exercises every day or every other day that the… Your classic three or four times a week, your bodybuilder, upper body, day one, lower body… So they would switch on and off so they’d get this day of rest. Whereas marathon runners would run 10 miles a day on the same legs.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s because the metabolic rate of the lungs and heart is different than the metabolic rate of muscular protein synthesis.

Eric Durak: Right and there’re… But then also, if they’re running 10 miles a day, it’s a little difficult on the… But the load is not as high as squatting.

Dr. John Jaquish: And they’re not doing muscular protein synthesis. Marathon runner is definitely not doing that. So it’s a different system they’re taking to fatigue.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And therefore, so the metabolic rate of the heart and lungs can be eight hours. The metabolic rate of protein synthesis and musculature, 36 hours by muscle biopsy study, and then the metabolic rate of bone between five and 10 days, we know that from radiation studies. The 2009 Richardson and inaudible study.

Eric Durak: Okay. So, and I don’t necessarily want to try to interpret something, but then again, what I see your philosophy here is you’re sort of moving away from this classic exercise, the periodization model or the 10, 8, 6 model of the…

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Eric Durak: This is this classic way that people are trained and you’re saying, well, we can do it this way. And then when I was at this conference a couple of weeks ago, I actually met a guy who knows a little bit about your program, and he’s like, “I just don’t believe that.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Eric Durak: But again, I think he’s coming…

Dr. John Jaquish: I get that a lot. It’s different.

Eric Durak: He’s coming.

Dr. John Jaquish: And anybody that’s coming out with something new.

Eric Durak: Well, but I also think too that research, you know how it is when you come out with something new, everybody poo-poos it and then they ridicule and then there’s acceptance. So there’s three stages.

Dr. John Jaquish: Acceptance like it was never questioned.

Eric Durak: Right. And like I say… But the other thing about it, is that as you grow the company from a business model, and of course we’re not here to talk about your business model as much. Yvonne did a great job with that, a few weeks ago, but, I want to understand and I’m always felt I’m a pretty open guy in terms of how I look at things, but I want to understand the difference when there is the concept of the 1RM max versus what you call osteogenic loading. You’re not training the muscle to perform a one-maximal contraction as much as you’re putting the load on the bone.

Dr. John Jaquish: The movement is only a few millimeters.

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s just in that perfect range of impact, absorptive movement.

Eric Durak: Right. You say it’s the strongest

Dr. John Jaquish: You can call it the strongest range or the impact-ready range. I focused on impact readiness, for a couple of reasons. One is, I don’t want to get it confused with a weightlifting-type movement, because it’s not like that. It doesn’t have that type of benefit. It’s really focused on bone tissue, tendons and ligaments get thicker and more powerful as well. So it’s addressing parts of physiology that exercise… Current exercise technologies do not address. So that’s really where I want to focus. And that’s also why I don’t want anybody use those traditional exercise words cause they’re just not… They’re not a good fit.

Eric Durak: They’re not applicable to what you’re doing. Well and that’s good. That’s why I have wanted to have you on the show because I’m seeing… And we’ve got about a minute and a half to go. So I’m going to ask… I have one more question for this episode, but I’m seeing the shift in the industry that I’ve been involved with for over 35 years and I’m seeing it shift very rapidly with the new CrossFits coming out with CrossFit Health, your program, all these other things. So my last question is how safe is this technology in the last few years? Any injuries?

Dr. John Jaquish: So the great part about osteogenic loading, the great part about OsteoStrong is the force that’s there is force that is created by the user. So think about it this way. If you squeeze a fist, no matter how hard you squeeze, can you break your own finger?

Eric Durak: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You can’t. It’s because of a process called neural inhibition. Basically, you get to a point where you’re going to create an injury and your body shuts off.

Eric Durak: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right? And so it’s completely self-regulatory. There’ve been more than hundreds of thousands of uses, no issues.

Eric Durak: Okay. And we’ll transition this into our next segment. But for this segment, I appreciate this wealth of information.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.

Eric Durak: John Jaquish. Number one, first part is over already, and this is Eric Durak from MedHealth Fit. Thanks for watching this episode. Tune into the next one coming up shortly.