Muscle Building Hacks In 10 Min A Day With Dr. John Jaquish

In this episode we cover:

• Science proving we’re 7x stronger at the stronger range of motion than the weaker range of motion
• X3 portable gym users group to see the before and after transformation
• Why there’s no such thing as cardio, it’s just ineffective strength training
• The difference between digestible and usable protein
• The process of creating the most effective muscle building amino acid product on the market: Fortagen
• How being lean and strong are the two greatest indicators

Full Transcript

Sean McCormick: On today’s episode we’re joined by Dr. John Jaquish. This is his second appearance since I’ve been in charge of the Optimal Performance Podcast way back at episode 182. John Jaquish is the creator of OsteoStrong, which is a Tony Robbins backed company that basically helps you regrow bone density. It’s a massively successful company and he’s also the creator, more importantly in my world, of the X3 Bar portable home gym. We talked all about endogenous natural growth hormone in ten minutes a day. It is still one of the more popular episodes that I’ve done so I wanted to have him back for a couple of reasons. Number one, I wanted to talk a little bit further about the application of the X3 Bar resistance band training system. The X3 Bar variable resistance training system users group on Facebook just has before and afters all day long of people who are totally transforming their body in just ten minutes. It actually sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. You see, I’ve been using the X3 Bar resistance band bar system for about a year and it has totally transformed my physique. It has literally been ten minutes a day, six days a week. It’s literally one hour of exercise a week and my body has totally transformed. I’m stronger, I look better than I ever have before and Dr. Jaquish has just recently released another product for basically for building lean muscle mass called Fortagen.

I’ve been taking that. I wanted to have him back because literally the results are so astounding that I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into it. Because I know that it’s been such a popular episode, I know that you guys would be interested in learning a little bit more. So, on this podcast we talk about some of the scientific evidence that supports this formulation, this protocol, the concept that we do our most work at the strongest range of our movement. Which means that as you, think of a bench press, as you’re pushing the bench or in this case the bar away from your body, that you’re way stronger at the longer range of motion. That concept is backed by science to show you that you will gain more muscle, that you will increase growth hormone. The proof is in the pudding. You know, I’ve been nursing a broken foot for a while. I’m still able to work out and look good so I wanted to bring him back and talk a little bit more. So we talk a little bit more about the science. We’re actually seven times stronger at the stronger range of motion than the weaker range of motion. We talk about some falsehoods of fitness. Dr. Jaquish is disruptive to say the least. He goes against the grain, but it’s backed by science. These myths about eating protein right after you work out, these myths about the usefulness of cardio. I mean, really, really incredible. We talked about digestible protein versus usable protein. This Fortagen product is an amino acid product that you take at night right before you go to sleep because you can gain more while you’re sleeping. We talk about that. He’s also doing one meal a day, OMAD carnivore and has been doing so for a couple of years. If you’ve been watching the Joe Rogan debate between Chris Kresser and James Wilks, or John Wilks? You’ll know that there is a debate going on. The Game Changers movie made some pretty amazing claims and Joe Rogan facilitated a conversation between these two guys to debate it that really let a lot of people down. So John weighs in on his thoughts about that. He’s a research scientist and he’s qualified to give us his opinion. We talk about the fact that you need a gram of protein per one pound of body weight per day if you want lean muscle mass if you want to grow. A really cool episode, talking about things that really matter to me. Longevity is really tightly associated with strength and lean muscle mass. So if you’re strong and lean, you’re going to live longer. I want to. I want to live a long time and I know that a lot of you guys do too. This gets to the core of optimal performance and when you can get the physique, when you can gain lean muscle in ten minutes a day, it’s not easy, but it is concise. It’s immediately relevant I think for everybody in their life. So you can go and check out my before and after photos on … under podcasts. Click on the podcast tab and my picture of before and after for 11 months on just X3 Bar exercise band bar system. I don’t do sit ups, I don’t run. I just do the X3 Bar resistance band bar system and hopefully my transformation photos will at least be interesting, maybe not wildly impressive but at least interesting. If this all sounds good to you and you want to check the product out, go to x3bar.com. Again, this is the last piece of exercise equipment you will ever need. There’s no doubt about it. If you follow the protocols, you’ll see pretty impressive results. Thank you for listening. Dr. John Jaquish, welcome to the Optimal Performance Podcast.

Dr. John Jaquish: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m honored to be on for a second time.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, there’s not that many people that I’ve done this with. But it’s been 58 episodes between the first time I had you on and I really wanted to have you back because I have seen first hand, not only in myself but in a group of about eight or ten friends of mine, that since that podcast aired, have bought the X3 variable resistance exercise system and had insane results.

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

Sean McCormick: I’m sure you get sick of hearing this but the

Dr. John Jaquish: Never, no. It’s like I invented fire. It’s awesome. It works so well.

Sean McCormick: It is the most incredible bio piece… And I think biohacking equipment in a very broad way. I think of float tanks as a biohacking, infrared saunas, but yours sort of transcends exercise equipment because the design, you really only have to do it for ten minutes a day, six days a week. I’ve had a fucking broken foot that I have been struggling with for about a year and a half. I went down and did platelet rich plasma treatment. I’m actually going to go back and do some exosomes. I can’t really run. I have been fairly limited in what I could exert physically to stay fit.

Dr. John Jaquish: Have you not had bone prp?

Sean McCormick: I had prp into the soft tissues around the break. He didn’t inject into the bone. crosstalk

Dr. John Jaquish: I didn’t even know that was legal in the United States. That must be a new thing.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s awesome but it’s only FDA approved for a couple things.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, it was too inflammatory for me. I found it blew my foot up. I didn’t baby it effectively enough. crosstalk Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’ve got to keep that foot elevated.

Sean McCormick: Dude, I kind of fucked it up to be honest. I got a little cocky, so I’ll be going back in actually a week to go do exosomes and then he’s going to send me home with some peptides that I’ll inject myself into the pad of my foot on the bottom. I have been limited. I have not been able to go play soccer. I have stayed out of the jujitsu gym because I’ve had this fucking broken foot, but I have still been able to do the X3 Bar variable resistance training system system. I been doing it as you suggest and my physique has shifted. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been in my life and I was a college scholarship athlete. My wife notices, my friends notice.

Dr. John Jaquish: It makes all the difference. It’s one thing when you notice but it’s totally another thing when your buddies are like, “Hey man, you’re looking really good.”

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: “You’re jacked.” Yeah, that feels awesome.

Sean McCormick: I was a fat kid growing up, sort of overweight and soft in high school. Even in college, I didn’t have a physique of a college athlete. Too much beer and whatever. Beer and pizza. To have people who I either don’t know very well or friends of mine say like, “Hey what do you do? Where do you work out?” It’s like, “I work out in my living room for ten minutes a day.” Then I just wait for the next question. The episode itself, episode 182 if you’re listening now and you’re curious and you want to hear Dr. Jaquish’s first appearance, go to episode 182. It’s one of the more popular episodes that I’ve done. It’s in like the top five episodes that I’ve done. The effectiveness of this piece of equipment is phenomenal. I really wanted to have you back because now, with the introduction of Fortagen, and me being keto-carnivore kind of toying around. I know that they’re two different things, but I’m sort of meat based and add vegetables sometimes. With the addition of Fortagen, in a week, my body changed again. Like it went through… Anyway. What is like to be this disruptive to the exercise universe? Do you love it? Or is it a pain in the ass sometimes?

Dr. John Jaquish: You know, I apparently like putting targets on my back. Yeah, when you’re that disruptive… When you take the entire protein industry and just come up with something that’s outrageously more effective and easier to digest, yeah, you get a lot of haters but they’re all from the protein industry. It’s sort of like internet hate is all jealousy based. I get angry personal trainers who sort of look at X3 Bar fitness band bar system and they think, “I should’ve thought of that.” Then they’re doing anything they can to tear me down, making up kinds of lies and stuff. Yeah, I mean ultimately I don’t really know another way because really the only thing I’ve done, like with the bone density medical device I created, that was totally disruptive. The directors of International Osteoporosis Foundation, when they first invited me, I don’t think they were behind me at all. I think they really wanted to have me at the conference, present my data, and really tear me down. After presenting the data, and there’s something very interesting I do, that I think is different than what everyone else does. Like nobody at a medical conference presents with hype. You’re not supposed to be excited. It’s here’s the data. Instead, what I do is I certainly don’t present with hype. I have the same boring monotone that all the other professors and scientists have, but what I’ll do is I’ll start with the limitations of the data. Here’s what we don’t know and here’s what we haven’t seen and here are the large sample sizes that we don’t have. In this medical congress, it was just hundreds of researchers sitting there and they’re like, “Well, the guy just totally took all our weapons away from us. Okay, what did you find.” Then I’ll show them the data that we’ve collected and what we’ve found and what we’ve seen with users. They’re like, “This is great. How fantastic.” It’s a great option for people who don’t want to take the drugs. Now, I mean they’re never going to be like anti-pharma because that’s where they get their funding.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: But they’re very pragmatic. I love that organization. If there’s a pharmaceutical that they don’t think is very safe, they will recommend against it, including entities that fund them. I’ve witnessed this. Pretty cool. So sometimes when you hear big conspiracies with pharma, yeah not really. They’re there, but they’re not as big as some of the internet commentators would have you believe. I’ve just always been disruptive. Then when it came to X3 workout bar system, I knew on paper it would be amazing because of the analysis I did. Just documenting that humans are seven times stronger in the stronger range of motion than they are in the weaker range of motion. I was the only guy that had that data. I had it before it was published because I wrote it. Well, I wrote the protocol of the paper, there’s actually a principal investigator who did that study, but I’m looking at the data as it’s coming in before it was published and I’m like, “This proves that weight lifting is really a lousy stimulus for strength and muscular development. There’s a better way. The way is variants.” I already knew that there was multiple studies. There’s 13 really good studies showing that variable resistance exercise is far superior to regular, conventional type weight lifting but they all picked a protocol where the level of variance is random. So maybe X at the bottom of a movement and one point two X at the top. So just kind of throwing a dart at a dart board and not really knowing what you’re going to hit. I actually had the information that would dictate the optimal level of variance. Here’s another thing I say to people all the time. When you look at a study that says variable resistance is more powerful than static resistance, you know send in some idiot and we’ll say, “Well, they had weights and banding.”

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m like, “Okay, so 13 studies so that variable resistance is more powerful than static resistance, so what’s more important? Static resistance or variance?” Only an absolute fool wouldn’t be able to answer that question. Let’s see what the maximum variance we can handle. That’s part of the reason why we go high repetitions with X3 Bar resistance band bar system because once you understand the strength curve and how it is very steep. It’s not linear at all. With the steepness of that curve, we can handle incredible forces at the top, kind of normal forces in the middle, and very low forces at the bottom. If we can fatigue with diminishing range of motion through the X3 Bar resistance band training system protocol, in accordance with these principles we trigger massive growth. I knew that would happen, then of course I built a prototype. I was over 40 years old at the time I built the prototype and I put on 30 pounds of muscle immediately in the first year of using it. I just left it in my suitcase as I was traveling all the time, presenting at these medical conferences. It was just phenomenal. I’d go on a trip. I remember I had these brutal trips where I’d go to London for a week, Moscow for a week, Osaka for a week, San Francisco for a week, and then back to Chicago. I was living in Chicago at the time. You’re gone for five weeks literally around the world and then I come back into the office and people would look at me and say, “You’re bigger.” Not fatter, bigger. I’d be like… You know you see yourself everyday so you don’t notice it as much, but I was like, “Well, you know, I’ve been using something else.” Of course those people were dying to know what I was doing. I didn’t show any of them. So yeah, very interesting.

Sean McCormick: The effectiveness of the X3 Bar variable resistance training system is undeniable. The X3 Bar exercise band bar system Users Group is a Facebook group that I’ve been watching now for a year. I’ve watched guys go from fairly lean, sort of skinny fat to beasts in this year. There’s a couple of guys specifically that I’m thinking of that post a lot and they post their workout. The users group is pretty incredible too because you can actually post. A lot of guys sort of post their workout and then say, “Hey, what am I doing wrong?” Which is really helpful, it’s a simple, simple protocol. You have do it right and you have to work your ass off. I want to bring up Shawn Baker in a second but I’m going to focus on the users group.

Dr. John Jaquish: One guy in particular, Todd Stratten?

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Was a very slim, he was a very lean guy. He wasn’t very big and then he put on 20 pounds of muscle in six months. He went from being like slim, athletic looking to looking like he could be cast in the next 300 movie.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: He walked into an OsteoStrong when I was giving a presentation one night and people assumed he was a body builder. The guy was wearing a shirt. He didn’t show up with his shirt off. Like, “Oh, so you’re a body builder. You friends with John Jaquish?” He was like, “I’m not a body builder, but yeah.”

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that is the level of change because the guy was so lean to start off with. Brandon was like that. Mikael wasn’t quite as lean as those other two, he’s that lean now and he’s quite a bit bigger.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s went up 20 pounds of muscle too.

Sean McCormick: The coolest part and I think the thing that really drives this home because people can speak anecdotally, you know, a flashy headline boost endogenous growth hormone in ten minutes a day, it’s like, “Fuck off. Nuh-uh.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right?

Sean McCormick: Right? It’s click bait-y. Even your shirt that says, “No weights, no cardio, just X3 Bar resistance band bar system.” When people digest the information, when they see it at face value it’s hard to believe, frankly it is. There’s even people who are sort of new to the users group that jump in and say, “How could this be? What are you guys on steroids? This is bullshit. There’s no way that just this band workout can increase muscle size, lean muscle mass this much.” But I’ve seen it over and over and over again. Friends of mine who are not particularly athletic are now have physiques of underwear models because they just get into it. I had to have you back because frankly I’m so encouraged by the results that I’ve gotten. I’m so encouraged I think that we know that lean muscle mass is a marker for longevity.

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

Sean McCormick: I’m interested in living a long healthy life.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Being lean and being strong are the two greatest drivers of long life.

Sean McCormick: Right. So if there is the shortest route to that, I’m going to be a proponent of it. I’m going to support it. Can you talk a little bit, because I know this can be redundant but I would love to hear a little bit more because you talk about the strongest range. Can you talk a little bit more about the science that supports why this works so well. How is it that what you’ve created with these bands is so much better than weights alone?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, glad you asked it like that because a lot of people get confused. They’re like, “Well, I can’t see how bands could do that.” Right, because bands alone can’t.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because when, I don’t know how many people listen to this podcast versus watch it, but this is what happens when you’re training with bands. You twist your wrists and you twist your ankles. If you’re going to use them heavy enough to actually get a strength effect, to actually get a muscle hypertrophy effect, which is why most band packages you buy that are just bands are just weak as hell. You know, 20 pound resistance. If you’re going to try and get stronger and build muscle, there is absolutely, positively no getting around heavy. You need to put massive forces through muscle and joints to, less so joints, moreso muscle, which is definitely how X3 Bar portable home gym works. It puts way more force through the muscle than it does through the joint. Weights do the opposite. Weights overload the joint, damage the joint and don’t even deliver muscle load to muscle, especially in optimized ranges of motion. It was a matter of making that initial observation based on my research then taking all of the variable resistance research and using my research to show that it’s superior but what’s been done thus far is actually much weaker than it could be. So those 13 studies that show that it’s superior to weightlifting, they didn’t barely scratch the surface of what could be done. What really needed to be done, it was like a band will screw up your small joints, your wrists and your ankles, but if we just build a custom Olympic bar to manage that weight, an Olympic bar that’s actually stronger than regular Olympic bars. Regular Olympic bars are hollow, X3 portable gym is solid. It has the bearing running right through the middle. A solid bar of steel and then the tube on the exterior that rolls with your joints that anodized aluminum, same material your iPhone is made out of. So really high, the other thing was just to make it really high quality, so it felt really good to hang onto. That’s more of a marketing thing ultimately. It could be a piece of shit and still work but you know, I wanted to make it amazing looking because it’s the most amazing fitness product that exists.

Sean McCormick: It is.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, so it’s got to feel like you’re holding the magic sword from the Legend of Zelda or something, you know? It was a combination of getting the research rammed into a product that would effectively deliver multiple things. This is really hard to put into scientific, white paper, or even pages on a website. In fact, the page is there on the website. We cut off the link to it, because people would just get confused when they read it. So there’s a couple of things going on. Because of the higher levels of force in the stronger range of motion you’re getting more of a myofibril growth effect, so like gymnast, power lifter type muscle. Very difficult to get. A lot of body builders talk about muscle protein synthesis, most of the muscle they build is really sarcoplasmic growth. They’re storing more ATP, glycogen, and creatine phosphate. The muscle protein synthesis levels are much stronger in explosive high impact athletes like gymnasts. They’re reading all of this research on muscle protein synthesis. They’re not training to get that. By the way, training to get that is absolutely dangerous. Nobody said gymnastics was safe. In fact, a gymnast on average retires at 19, for a good reason. That first phase is not only activating more of the neurological system, you’re firing more tissue than you ever normally would, in that stronger range of motion. The idea of trying to fire more tissue in the weaker range of motion, just guarantees joint damage. I see guys doing that all the time and I’m like, “How long are you planning on lifting? Because every time you do that…”

Sean McCormick: Can you describe what that means to overload the weaker range?

Dr. John Jaquish: The slow controlled reps… Like the stronger you get, the more weight you can handle obviously, but the more taxing it is on the joint. So anybody who’s lifted heavy for a couple of years, they’ll all say the same thing. “God, my knees hurt when I get out of a chair. I can’t get my arm over my head, I can’t do overhead presses anymore.” One of my good friends, Phil Hernon, he’s a former Mr. USA, guy can’t lift his arms over his head. He made it, I think he might’ve made this joke or maybe somebody else made the joke, in regards to this problem, but it’s like, this is him talking, “It’s a good thing I shaved my head, because I wouldn’t be able to comb my hair.” Because it hurts to get your hand up here on top of your head. I see these guys who just destroy joints from lifting heavy. I have the same level of pain in my joints that I did when I was ten years old. Nothing. I feel dynamite, nothing bothers me. I’ve now at this point, I’ve put on more than 45 pounds of muscle. It was 45 pounds of muscle in the first two years. I’m not even going to talk about how much better I’m doing now. I’ll do another photo shoot. By the way, most people don’t realize my photo shoots, who like say, “Oh this guy’s got to be on steroids,” or whatever. The two biggest secrets that are way more powerful than steroids are dehydration before a photo shoot and having a professional photographer with professional lighting.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Just so people know. When I see the pictures of myself, my iconic one where I’m just turning my head and you can see my traps, sternocleidomastoid, the lighting makes me look so incredible. But of course, you know, all physique type photo shoots are like that. That’s kind of why. Sometimes you’ll see a picture of Ryan Terry, he was runner up physique, Mr. Olympia, you see him in professional photo and then you see him out walking his dog and you can’t even believe it’s the same guy.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s a lot of it, so still no performance enhancing drugs other than my TRT which doesn’t really do jack shit because it gets you back to your normal level. I did a Falsehoods of Fitness on that, I’m sure you saw it.

Sean McCormick: Let’s talk about the Falsehoods of Fitness, because there are some key things that I really want to get to today in this conversation, one of which is Falsehoods of Fitness, the other is your carnivore approach, the third is Fortagen and the combination of OMAD carnivore and Fortagen. What’s one nice example of a falsehood of fitness that everybody just lives by that is bullshit?

Dr. John Jaquish: Cardio. There’s no such thing as cardio. Cardio is just really shitty ineffective strength training. You get the same amount of cardiovascular health. I’m actually going to give you two falsehoods of fitness that are very closely related. When you do cardiovascular exercise, you’re primarily working on your heart and your lungs. When you’re doing strength training, you’re secondarily working on your heart and your lungs. There’s more than a hundred studies that show that the cardiac health, not how far you can run, because that’s a stupid metric and I’ll explain why. If you want to run long distances, you want to get rid of muscle. This has to do with the same thing. So your cardiovascular health is one thing, it’s the stress test on the heart. It’s the VO2 max, it’s the capacity of the cardiovascular system. What happens is because observations have been made over the years where you take a 250 pound football player and you run up two flights of stairs and be out of breath and people would just assume, “Oh yeah, strength athletes, they have terrible cardiovascular performance, because their strength training doesn’t give them any cardiovascular stimulus.” Absolutely wrong. The reason they’re out of breath is because they’re quadriceps maybe five or ten times larger than the distance runner. Distance runners have tiny little legs, tiny little calves, tiny musculature, and they’re skinny fat. They carry a significant amount of body fat too. None of them have six packs. I’m sure there’s one of them out there, but whatever. Basically, these people are at a similar level of deconditioning as like the elderly. They’re very low muscle mass, higher levels of body fat. That’s what their exercise gives them, so when you do sustained cardio you increase cortisol levels, which diminishes muscle mass and increases fat storage, so a distance runner can run distances because he has tiny muscles.

Sean McCormick: Makes sense.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s why.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, strength athletes have incredible cardiovascular capacities. That doesn’t mean they can go run 20 miles easily. I mean, I’m sure I could run 20 miles if I had to. Some big animal would need to be chasing me though, because I never want to do that. That’s awful, what a waste of time. I see people all the time. I was talking to… I shouldn’t even say the name of the company, Fortune 500 executive was asking me about how he, like he’s been using X3 Bar resistance band bar system and he’s been doing cardio and I’m like, “Okay, so when you do X3 Bar variable resistance training system, you have a huge spike in growth hormone and you’re suppressing cortisol, so building muscle, losing body fat. When you do cardiovascular exercise, you’re doing the opposite, so at the end of every day, what are you really getting? Nothing.” You’re getting nothing. You’re telling your hormone system opposing… You’re asking it for opposing goals.

Sean McCormick: Huh.

Dr. John Jaquish: When you do cardio, the goal of the central nervous system is to eliminate muscle and store more fat because you have to go long distances, right? So you don’t want a bigger engine. If you’re going to try to do a cross country drive you wouldn’t want a formula one car.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’d want an efficient car, maybe a Honda Civic or something. I ask people, “What do you want to be? You want to be a formula one car or you want to be a Honda Civic?” Nothing against Honda Civics but it’s an economy car, it’s designed to go long distances on very little fuel. You don’t want to be efficient. You want to be big engine slash big musculature. You want a strong chassis slash high bone density. You want very little storage slash small gas tank.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, that is an incredible falsehood of fitness. I see women just wasting so much time on treadmills and ellipticals thinking they are going to get the body they want and it is the worst approach they could possibly take.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, just a little bit of strength training, maybe one tenth the time they invest. You know, of course they could have X3 Bar resistance band training system and have far better results. Like anybody on the X3 Bar website, they’re leaner, they’re stronger, they’re performing better, the performance athletes. Here’s another group of people that’s very interesting. I’ve been working with a lot of professional basketball players. I don’t pay any of these teams so I probably shouldn’t mention, but if you look at my Instagram account you can tell.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, so these pro teams, there’s actually a couple that I haven’t even…We got some guys in professional teams in New York, some guys in Detroit, but basketball players are awesome because they don’t give a shit about how much they lift. Some of these guys are seven feet tall, they’ve never had impressive lifts. So they’re not focused on that at all. They’re focused on getting as strong as possible, as lean as possible. Lighter but more powerful, getting more speed. So they’re goals are all performance oriented not a chalkboard on a wall on how I can have shitty form and claim I bench X or whatever. Which a lot of people in fitness are. So, they’re awesome because they don’t care about any of that stuff. If you’re that tall a joint injury is like you’re done. You could be done because the amount of lever action on a compromised joint for a seven foot tall guy or a six foot five guy is much more severe than a little guy.

Sean McCormick: I want to talk about the way that approach, because you’re an excellent example. Not only are you the creator but you’re also the model for the equipment and the instructor to follow the protocol which is super simple. Just in case you haven’t listened to episode 182 when Dr. Jaquish was on, it’s four exercises every other day. It takes ten minutes. There’s a push day crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: Exercises a day, there’s eight exercises altogether so you alternate half the body one day, half the body.

Sean McCormick: Right, they both include legs. There’s a push day and a pull day. They both have legs. The format calls on stabilizing muscles to train your core. I’m leaner in the midsection again than I’ve been even before college. Maybe since I was probably fucking 15 years old. I have not purposefully not done a sit up. I have not exercised my core. In fact, I’m taking it too literally and I have not done any sort of core exercises and I’m leaner. My clothes fit better.

Dr. John Jaquish: I can see my abs without contracting them.

Sean McCormick: It’s because of crosstalk

Dr. John Jaquish: …no contraction in my abs and I can see them all.

Sean McCormick: It’s because they’re doing what they’re meant to do which is to stabilize, correct?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you never use a stabilizing muscle as a primary actor, it’s like trying to get a tan with candles. It’s just not how the central nervous system responds.

Sean McCormick: Right, right. It’s been fun over the last year to watch people catch on to it. I sort of pride myself in being early, maybe I was the first podcast to have you or maybe the second, but I know that I was early because it really struck me. Since then, Ben Greenfield, Shawn Baker, you’ve known Dave Asprey for a long time and I know that he’s been doing it. He looks incredible. I’m sure that he’s taking his X3 Bar exercise band bar system when he travels. But it has been so effective. I would like to talk a little bit about your personal approach with carnivore and OMAD and use that as sort of a caveat to get into talk about Fortagen, because Fortagen is fricking amazing too. So, how does one meal a day and the carnivore approach compliment this protocol so well?

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Well, I’ll start with carnivore. What happened was I knew I needed to recommend the best nutrition program to go along with X3 Bar variable resistance training system because I want people to get the best results. In the beginning I recommended generic ketogenic nutrition but very quickly as I kept reading some of the research, I realized that there was a lot of inflammatories, almost every plant has oxalates, which are inflammatories, which keep you from performing. What doesn’t have oxalates is meat. At the same time I started looking at how much protein is actually required to trigger muscle growth and it’s a very high level of protein. You need a gram per pound of body weight. It’s been kind of shown over and over again. It’s not lean body weight, you don’t remove all of your body fat from your body fat calculation. It’s the studies are done on relatively normal body fat people so normal, probably 20 percent body fat. It’s still one gram per pound of body weight. When I realized it takes that much, I was like, “Wow.” I’ve been ketogenic for 13 years. I had been at the time. Then I thought, and this is about a year after I launched X3 Bar resistance band bar system, I kept reading this and reading this and reading this. I was like, “Wow, anything that’s not meat is really of very little value if your goal is to grow muscle.” Now if your goal is to live long, you better grow muscle because we already know the two greatest drivers of long life, being strong and being lean. Then I started doing some research on vitamins. Do we really need all of these vitamins? What’s the story here? I want you to take a guess, if you were to eat a diet of just whole foods, no supplements no powders, so just fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, whatever. How many calories would it take to get to the recommended daily intakes of vitamins, micronutrients ascribed by the American Medical Association.

Sean McCormick: Oh man. 2000, 2500.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it’s funny, the AMA tells you to eat 2000 calories, but to get your vitamins you need to eat 27000 calories. That’s more than an elephant eats. That’s just stupid.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, holy cow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Clearly the vitamin recommendations are nonsense. So fuck it.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Don’t pay attention to them.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, if you have a deficiency…

Sean McCormick: Right, if you’re treating something.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like a crosstalk deficiency or something like that, yeah. If you have a problem and it’s associated with a deficiency and you get blood work done, okay. Maybe you can look at reintroducing some things that might be associated with that but there’s a lot of vitamins in meat. I think a lot of vitamins we think we need, we don’t. I haven’t had anything other than meat since… No eggs and some dairy. I have a casein allergy so there’s a lot of dairy I can’t really take in. Like butter’s fine. Cheddar cheese is fine, but there’s other cheeses that have a lot of casein in them, so you know, it’s an allergy. But, November first of 2017 was the last time I ate anything other than just nominal amounts, just keeping it under 40 grams of carbohydrates. Sometimes you get a steak at a restaurant and they put chimichurri sauce all over it, which has probably got like five grams of carbohydrates. I’m not going to send that steak back. It’s like, “All right, I’ll eat it.”

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Even meat has muscled glycogen. So someone says they’re zero carbohydrate, it’s like “No, you’re not.”

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not a good way to describe it because you’re getting some carbohydrates, even in meat. So it was when I made that shift and that shift was incredible. I got leaner immediately, I performed better, my brain functioned better. Everything was just superior. My skin cleared up. I never really had great skin and it really, really cleared up. I seemed to be a little more impervious to sun because I used to be perpetually sunburned and it’s not really my problem anymore. I still am a more red kind of guy but that’s my family. Everybody’s red.

Sean McCormick: So when did you switch to one meal a day from basic carnivore to OMAD? Or are you doing OMAD?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I’m glad you brought that up again. The one meal a day thing came out of both knowing I needed a ton of protein and realizing if I’m going to get it all in one meal a day, because I want the benefits of time restricted eating, the autophagy is incredible, absolutely incredible. If you look into what autophagy is and the recycling of cells, your body can’t do that if you have any food in your system. You’ve got to be absent of food for like 20 hours. I believe that’s the minimum, it’s kind of hard to measure. So there’s the guy who won the Nobel Prize in medicine was the one who really, really discovered how to up-regulate autophagy. Now, it’s kind of one of these things that is almost like a super human ability, regenerating cells. You look younger, your skin regenerates, all kinds of great things happen. I’m actually in the middle of a 48 hour fast right now.

Sean McCormick: Hmm.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I’ll do sometimes only six meals in a week. One meal a day and then one day nothing. It’s fantastic. I want to get the benefits of the fasting, get even leaner and then looking at how much protein was required, so I’d eat like two and a half pounds of meat a day. If it was rib eyes it would have even three pounds because the protein content in a rib eye is a bit lower. The reason I came up with Fortagen was because people would try to do carnivore and one meal a day, that’s what OMAD stands for for your listeners that don’t know what OMAD stands for. A lot of people really didn’t like the way they felt after eating a gram per pound of body weight in steak in one meal. They feel like they have a bowling ball in their stomach. So now, a part of me was like just quit being a sissy, just do it. You’ll get used to it. I was already used to it, but I realize this is something people shouldn’t even be allowed to say, but I can’t. Okay. Yeah, you can. There’s people who try fasting and they’re like, “I can only go seven hours. I can’t go any further than that.” I’ve gone five days with zero food. What loser says that? Yeah, you can. The world’s full of quitters. A little bit of it, you see this in the forum, I give a lot of people some pretty tough love, but I’ll tell them what they’re doing wrong. And I’ll tell them when say they can’t, I’m like yeah of course you can. Anything else is you’re going to find a way or you’re going to find an excuse, either way you found something. That nutrition thing, getting the protein, people were just really upset with the way they were feeling, just stuffing themselves with animal protein in one meal and so they weren’t getting the protein and then they weren’t getting the results. If you don’t have the right amount of protein, nothing’s happening. So you’ve got to have the superior stimulus of X3 workout bar system and you’ve got to have the superior nutrition. So how do we get a more efficient protein and so there had been research from the mid-90’s on essential amino acids, now the problem with the essential amino acids as a supplement is there’s a lot of essential amino acids that don’t do anything because they don’t have the proper ratios or they’re not made with rotting material you need fermentation to create it correctly. You can get certain amino acids sourced in certain ways and as far as I can tell, they don’t absorb correctly. It was established how they can be absorbed correctly through this research but then I called a couple of companies that were making essential amino acids and I was like, “Let me talk to your scientists,” and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t have one of those.” Okay, well somebody who knows about this product and they didn’t know anything. It was just a bottle of stuff that might’ve had some amount of the eight amino acids that you really need but they didn’t know anything about how it was put together. Is there fermentation involved? I don’t know. Do you have vats of rotting material so you can get the bacterial byproduct and they’re like, “Dude, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” I thought, “Whoa.”

Sean McCormick: That’s both alarming and an opportunity for you, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It was amazing, there were really only like, no exaggeration, there were two guys in the world that I found and I searched. Two people who really understood how this worked. It was like, “All right, I want to make the most inaudible.” They were actually in a cancer treatment kind of field, keeping people from muscle wasting. Yeah, so these guys weren’t in sports supplements at all. Or really… One of them was sort of in endurance athletes, having a product that was more geared to that. I’m like, “I want to gear a product that’s muscle gain. That’s what I want to build.” For a non-nominal fee, they were willing to help and yeah, they did. We put together Fortagen and it is awesome.

Sean McCormick: It is. It is awesome. Can you give people sort of the… Well, I’ll talk about why I… I mean to get 50 grams of protein in two little scoopies.

Dr. John Jaquish: The equivalent of 50.

Sean McCormick: The equivalent, sorry. Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk sources, which by regular sources it’s mostly based on whey protein. It’s what most of the studies were done on. Whey protein is not very usable. It’s digestible. Digestible and usable are two different things.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when you have a bunch of amino acids that are in the wrong proportion or you just totally overfeed on protein, when you urinate, you see foam in your urine. It looks like beer. That’s nitrogen. It means you’re not able to utilize. Steak is only 38% utilized by the body, the rest goes through in waste. Fortagen is almost 100%.

Sean McCormick: Can you hit people with sort of the bullet points? Here’s the big idea, right? If you want to gain lean muscle mass, you have to eat a gram of protein, per pound of body weight a day. Sean is 190 pounds. Sean needs 190 grams of protein in a day if I want to increase muscle mass. How do I get that? What are the sources? Well, what are the things that are highest in protein that are the lowest in calorie so that I don’t get fat or so that I don’t get swollen or inflamed but rather it’s being used efficiently. crosstalk To get the equivalent of 50 pounds of protein in two scoops of Fortagen, taken as directed in the evening time before you go to sleep, it was a shift in my musculature in like four days. If you go to my Instagram, you can kind of notice when that happens, because I started taking more shirtless pictures in the sauna because my shoulders started to get a little bit bigger, my biceps were more pronounced, my vascularity throughout my entire body increased because I was leaning up and I was becoming more muscle-y. That’s what I want. I want to look good, I want to be strong. I’m not competing in Iron Man, I have my own specific goals. I think that most people want to look good naked and be strong, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Sean McCormick: So why do we take Fortagen at night and what was that process of formulating it in the way that you did? How did you come up with the most usable formulation?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I worked with those scientists to come up with the ultimate formula for Fortagen. Despite what trolls and idiots say, it’s not the same as anything else different. Now there are better essential amino acid products than others. Some of the companies I did talk to did know what they were talking about to a degree, but not like these two guys I worked with because I wanted to formulate something different. I wanted some different ratios and really focusing on mass.

Sean McCormick: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: We want to build muscular strength, explosive power, size, so not cancer treatment, not endurance athletes. So just a little bit different. Yeah. That was really the formulation. It’s best to just go to the experts and collaborate with them, even if you have to cut them a big check, then you know you’ve got the best.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, you know you did it right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It also, it wasn’t my background.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I talked a lot about nutrition, it’s not my primary area of study at all. Biomedical engineering is what I study. So my nutrition education through formal education is very cursory. So all of this just really came as a result of trying to learn as much as I could after launching X3 Bar resistance band training system, because I want people to just get the best result.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s also why, sometimes vegans come on the forums, if they’re polite and they ask good questions, I’ll help them out. But if they come and they start posting just fake news which is most vegan information, yeah. They’re not being helpful. They may not know it, they may just be misinformed but they’re damaging people by giving them terrible advice. Sometimes I have to tell them like, “What you’re posting is just fake. It’s just falsified information and here’s why.” Then I’ll post bio studies disproving what they just posted and by the way the study you posted was done by Seventh Day Adventists, who are vegans or something close and they’re trying to push their religious beliefs. What’s so amazing is if it was Christians trying to, well, I mean they are sort of Christian, like what are we doing by letting some sort of religious group produce biased research that is clearly biased and we said the funding for this study came from the Seventh Day Adventist church, and part of their religion is to make everybody eat vegetables. Why the hell do we allow that?

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s fine if they don’t want to eat animal products. Unlike vegans, typically meat eaters, carnivores, don’t tell them how they need to live.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right? So it’s just like all right, if you want to do that that’s fine, if you want to have an intelligent conversation, if you want to come and post a bunch of dishonesty, well, adios.

Sean McCormick: Yeah. Well, yeah because it’s woke. If it’s taking that kind of spiritual high ground that they’re not hurting animals or you know.

Dr. John Jaquish: Which they are, seven billion animals a year are destroyed in the United States for the sake of vegetable farming. Birds poisons, rodents poison destroyed, any deer that hops the fence into a farm is shot. They just forget about all of that stuff. It’s sort of like the people with their plug in electric cars don’t acknowledge the fact that that power comes from a coal burning power plant down the road.

Sean McCormick: Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Because if they see it and they’re not smart enough to put that together it’s like it doesn’t exist.

Sean McCormick: Right, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Willfully ignorant is what those people are.

Sean McCormick: Increasingly so, I think. I think that for me and I think for people who are watching X3 Bar resistance band bar system and watching the results and reading the research, I think it’s one thing that really is becoming of you in the way that you approach this is like, “It’s not bullshit, guys. Here’s the science behind this stuff. Here’s the research that I’ve done, that other people have done. Here are these meta analysis’. Here is the science. Here is all of it. You can read it for yourself. I just happened to have read it and made a plan.” It’s a testament to you because I imagine that a lot of people try to call bullshit or get mad at what seemed to be just crazy results that people couldn’t possibly be having the results that they are, but they are. My friend Kyle and Eric and Josh and my brother. All of these people that are really close to me and myself.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Sean McCormick: It’s just one after another. Are you following the Joe Rogan debate between Game Changers the movie and the whole back and forth and the sort of fall out from the debunking and the Chris Kresser interviews on Rogan?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Chris didn’t… He went for sort of pleasant conversation and he should’ve brought a bat with a nail through it. He didn’t mention so many things about that film. You know like, Roman gladiators were vegetarian or they ate a ton of greens. Yeah they were also slaves. They weren’t fed for health. They were like livestock and they only lived as gladiators for a matter of weeks before they were killed. The owners of these slaves weren’t like concerned with their longevity. Here’s another thing, Nick and Nate Diaz, the MMA fighters. They’re called vegans in the film. They’re not vegan. They eat fish.

Sean McCormick: Right, and eggs.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, they eat eggs. Right, right.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So just because they don’t eat red meat, the movie just lied about.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Chris didn’t go in hard enough. He didn’t make his points aggressive enough whereas I don’t even remember the guy he debated with who crosstalk

Sean McCormick: James Wilks.

Dr. John Jaquish: James Wilks. Oh he’s like the MMA fighter, right?

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or he’s an MMA fighter?

Sean McCormick: Trainer, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that guy showed up for combat.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: He just hit him with one thing after another after another. I wish the debate had been with Dr. Baker.

Sean McCormick: I agree.

Dr. John Jaquish: He would’ve crushed him.

Sean McCormick: I agree, I agree. crosstalk

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not like Baker’s necessarily more familiar with the literature than Chris, I just think he just shows up with kind of a pragmatic attitude like, “I’m not going to let you get away with telling people a bunch of just phony information.”

Sean McCormick: And there was so much left out of what was the most relevant pieces of information about the film. The claims of pollution, didn’t really go there in the podcast.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, yeah, didn’t even touch on environmental stuff.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: The environmental impact of vegetable farming is just as bad or worse than meat production. Now there’s some problems with some types of meat production like feed lots.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But for the most part, here I’ll blow your mind with something. You know McDonald’s cows don’t come from feed lots. They’re grass fed for most of their lives.

Sean McCormick: I’ve heard you talk about McDonald’s meat being high quality.

Dr. John Jaquish: In certain regards it is better than what you get at a nice steakhouse.

Sean McCormick: Oh, man. My own confirmation bias…

Dr. John Jaquish: They hold themselves to a higher standard. I believe it’s mostly for legal liability reasons, so when someone says, “Oh, that terrible quality meat made my child sick,” they’re just grifters that are just looking to screw over some company with deep pockets and they’re hoping to get paid so that the complainers go away. In reality, McDonalds doesn’t pay anybody. Ever since that coffee spill in the lap that created some burns, they’re like, “That’s not happening again.”

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because guess what happened like a week later, people would just dump their coffee in their lap and try and sue McDonald’s.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, you’ll never get a cup of coffee that’s too hot from McDonald’s.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’ve got all kinds of electronic systems fail safes. Their meats are held to a higher standard. If somebody thinks they get sick from a McDonald’s cow, McDonald’s can produce the health record of the cow.

Sean McCormick: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like Morton’s Steakhouse can’t do that.

Sean McCormick: Right. And they’re grass fed, grain finished or corn finished?

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk Grain finished, right.

Sean McCormick: Grain finished.

Dr. John Jaquish: So yeah, they might go to a feed lot towards the end.

Sean McCormick: Huh.

Dr. John Jaquish: Their life before they’re processed as food. But it’s great quality meat.

Sean McCormick: Huh, yeah interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: In fact, I’ve got an interview. I don’t see this guy very often because he lives in Reykjavik. He’s a Michelin star chef and he used to do all of the buying for McDonald’s for their meats in Spain, right after he finished his culinary training. He said it was one of the greatest jobs he’s ever had. He moved back to Reykjavik because that’s where he’s from. But very interesting, he said, I will always, like if I’m traveling, and I don’t know the restaurants like in the United States or something, I’ll always feed my children McDonald’s meats. Michelin star chef, this guy knows.

Sean McCormick: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Now, the rest of the stuff they serve in McDonald’s is not food.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Coca-cola, I wouldn’t feed to my enemy.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: The fries, just…

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m sure there’s a lot of Americans that think they get their vegetables from french fries. Yeah, I wouldn’t eat that crap ever.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, but if you’re crosstalk. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Ketchup is not food, but the meat and the cheese? Pretty good.

Sean McCormick: Huh, amazing.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, if I’m traveling and I’m not going to do a 48 hour fast, typically when I travel, especially because I travel overseas a lot, I’ll just go 48 hours with nothing.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I will, like if I need to get a meal and I’m pinched for time or something like that and I just look at my phone and where’s the nearest McDonald’s. Unfortunately Europe doesn’t have the double quarter pounders, which pisses me off. Australia doesn’t have that either. I was like, “Really, Australia? We expect them to have an even more badass burger, like a triple.” Anyway, they didn’t have it, so I had to get single quarter pounders. If I’m in the States, I’ll get four double quarter pounders so that’s two pounds of meat and just inhale it.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Throw the bun away, scrape everything off.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, my meal. I don’t even bother to order it without the bun because the employees are just confused.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, they don’t… Nobody.

Dr. John Jaquish: Just throw the bun away.

Sean McCormick: Right. Yeah, going back to the Game Changers debate and fall out on Rogan, I mean I think the cool part about it is that it has brought about more conversations, more formative conversations about propaganda films. It has brought about a broader conversation. I’ve seen Dr. Paul Saladino handling some Game Changers conversations and some debates and Robb Wolf as well, who’s going to be on the podcast here shortly. He’s got a film coming out that he’s working on called Sacred Cow, which I think it’s about time. It’s about time that some sanity comes into this conversation around veganism and the pea and soy protein industry. It’s just so slimy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Totally unusable by the body, by the way.

Sean McCormick: Soy or pea protein?

Dr. John Jaquish: Both. Oh, soy is just… It’s another thing I wouldn’t feed to my enemy.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Crap.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, not food.

Dr. John Jaquish: People should not be eating soy at all.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I mean you get gynecomastia from that which by the way, that weight lifter in Game Changers, he has gynecomastia, now we know he doesn’t take steroids so what’s up regulating his estrogen?

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Soy.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: The guy’s growing breasts, female breasts, because he’s eating soy. And he’s lifting less and less at every tournament he shows up to.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible. The guy’s inaudible himself.

Sean McCormick: And the list of vegan NFL players that are injured or underperforming, immense. There’s so many of them. Yeah. One question, because I’m curious about it, what is the benefit… So just to zoom out and paint a picture for people, the X3 Bar fitness band bar system is exactly what it says it is. It’s exactly as purported and you just peek for a minute into the X3 Bar exercise band bar system Users Group, read the testimonials, they’re real. Shit, send me an email and ask me questions about it. It’s real. The fact that you need a ton of protein, that you need as many grams of proteins as the pounds that you weigh everyday in order to grow is real. So how do we get it? Enter Fortagen to be able to supplement whatever diet that you have to get to that level. Sean needs 195 grams of protein a day in order to gain muscle mass which is my goal and it has been for a while and there are shortest routes from A to B in order to get there.

The simplicity and clarity of the way Dr. Jaquish that you talk about it, the solutions to increasing bone density with the OsteoStrong, the solutions to gaining lean muscle mass with X3 Bar resistance band training system, the solutions to getting to that level of protein consumption so that you can grow and put on muscle mass so you can be strong and live a long time is clear. I think that the way that you’re approaching that and your attitude toward it is really refreshing. That’s why I had to have you back so thank you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me, I’m excited.

Sean McCormick: The one question that I have that I wanted answered, why at night? Why take Fortagen at night right before you go to sleep?

Dr. John Jaquish: You grow at night.

Sean McCormick: Well, that’s easy.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a couple of studies on that, not a lot, but primarily when you stop contracting a muscle, that’s when the most muscle protein synthesis happens. You do that a lot less while you’re sleeping. That’s why sleep is so important to growth.

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You really do need eight hours of sleep. I’d love to come up with some hack that says you only need two but not going to happen. Your body needs to power down and recover.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I actually don’t really love the word recover, because that implies that there’s damage. Of course, that’s another falsehood to fitness. You don’t need to damage a muscle to make it grow. The more muscle damage you have, the less you grow.

Sean McCormick: You don’t need the little tears like my high school football coach said. You’re going to tear up the muscle, you need little tears and then fill it in and repair it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Wrong.

Sean McCormick: Shit.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s okay because when you use X3 Bar variable resistance training system you’re not damaging the muscle at all. Are you ever sore the next day after you do your X3 resistance bands system?

Sean McCormick: No, I’m not ever.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, yeah and people are like sore means you got a good workout. No, sore means you got a shitty workout.

Sean McCormick: Hmm.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s part of the reason muscle confusion theory and it’s not the only thing Arnold Schwarzenegger got wrong. I mean, he promoted Game Changers, turbo wrong. Yeah, he used to say, we’d always try and shock the muscle into growth by doing different workouts all of the time and hitting the muscle from different angles and we wanted to be as sore as possible. Yeah, that’s fake news. That might as well be on CNN. It’s just garbage. They’ve tested it. People who stick to one workout and try and go with progressive overload, which I actually hate that term, if we have time I’ll explain why, but the progressive overload type approach is better than mixing it up because mixing it up you just do more muscle damage because your body’s not accustomed to the movement and so you get damage and most of the muscle protein synthesis is to attenuate the damage and then none of it goes towards growth whereas if you don’t damage the muscle and stay with a consistent pattern of movement then you begin to have more muscular growth over time. It’s not the days you’re sore when you grow. Like I said, I haven’t been sore in years and I’ve put on well over 45 pounds of muscle after turning 40 years old.

Sean McCormick: So why don’t you like the term progressive… What did you say progress muscle what?

Dr. John Jaquish: Progress overload.

Sean McCormick: Overload.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s really dumb because progressive overload is a goal, not a method. That’s like saying my job is cashing checks. Somebody gives you a check because you did something.

Sean McCormick: Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s what your job is. The check’s got nothing to do with your job other than that you are compensated. So saying my method is progressive overload is nonsensical. Progressive overload is the result not the method at all. So a lot of people think to get progressive overload, you need to add a tiny bit of weight. Let’s see you do ten reps with whatever, 300 pounds and then you add like a two pounds and then you do ten reps and it’s like, “Oh, I’m stronger.” Yeah okay, because you got stronger. The method of adding tiny increments of weight has got nothing to do with it. If you took the same amount of weight and one day did ten repetitions and then another day you did 11 and another day your did 12 and then a couple months later you’re doing 20 repetitions with that same weight, that’s progressive overload also but it’s… I wouldn’t call it a falsehood of fitness because it is a goal but it’s not a method.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I just see people complaining about X3 Bar resistance band bar system, well you can’t do progressive overload with it. Yeah, you can. Like what the hell are you talking about?

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: They think they’re stuck in this idea that you need add little penny weights on the ends like…

Sean McCormick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Sean McCormick: You know, it occurs to me that this product is still so new and it’s been so disruptive in a good way and it’s based on good science, I imagine that five, ten, 15 years from now, the entire industry is going to change.

Dr. John Jaquish: Completely.

Sean McCormick: It has to because the results are clear. It’s going to be interesting to see what it’s like 15 years from now when we look back and say, “Oh, I remember when there were gyms all over the place and they had all these crazy weights and they had all these racks and all these things and none of that shit’s necessary anymore.” crosstalk Huh, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I get invited to world class gyms all the time and people are like you get to train at this amazing place and I’m like, “Who cares?” I show up to the gym and I bring my X3 Bar exercise band bar system and I use it in the gym and everyone’s just kind of looking at me like, “What the hell is that?” Then they’re like, “Oh, you want to try our whatever?” And I’m like, “No.”

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t want to try your whatever.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s like, “Who cares?” It’s not going to do what can be done. I know what can be done. That thing over there? Pretty stupid.

Sean McCormick: Pretty expensive, pretty dangerous.

Dr. John Jaquish: You might’ve paid $40000 for that whatever top of the line piece of equipment, but X3 Bar portable home gym is the cheapest home gym solution that’s actually effective. I mean, yeah you can buy a whatever, a shake weight or a perfect push up or something like that, but those don’t do anything.

Sean McCormick: Shake weight.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, anybody who’s willing to spend $35 on their health, they’re not interested in their health. They’re interested in telling people they work out at home.

Sean McCormick: Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Just fooling themselves. That’s fake fitness.

Sean McCormick: Well, said.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s so funny when people are like, “Yeah, I bought this such and such.” And I’m like, “Mm-hmm (affirmative).” You know a year from now, you’re going to look exactly the same or worse.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I have to say shit like that otherwise people won’t get it. I have to be kind of hard on them.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: If that’s your commitment, you’re not committed at all.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, well said. Let’s cut the bullshit. As a matter of habit, I like to end each episode with a fill in the blank. You’ve done this one before and I don’t remember what your answer was, but if you would, based on everything you know, elaborate as much as you’d like, please fill in the blank. Everyone would benefit from knowing…?

Dr. John Jaquish: Overarching theme, variable resistance. If you understand variable resistance, you’ll never lift a weight again. I mean, if you understand it. There’s some people that read the research and just shrug their shoulders and they have no idea what they’re looking at, so you’ve got to understand it, not just read it. There’s a big difference between the two. I have kind of a standard, it’s actually an automated response when certain clown people post some certain things on Instagram or Facebook, like automatically they get like, “Here are 13 studies.” Actually I think I picked ten out of the 13 because there were three of them that were really complicated. So just look up these ten studies and then get back to me. They never do because they’re not even able to read one of them, but it doesn’t matter because they can see that there are ten studies and then if you google variable resistance, you see there’s articles in some pretty big publications that talk about how variable resistance is much more powerful. I think because the general population hasn’t really had it broken down to them. See, X3 Bar variable resistance training system is like a magnifying glass onto this phenomenon, like because of the variable resistance, like I told you it was very arbitrary how they applied variance whereas mine was a very systematic approach based on my own research, which was published in a journal of osteoporosis and physical activity, I had the answer. They were like, kind of scratching the surface and implying there may be an answer. That’s better than what we’ve been using so far, which is why in really serious hard core gyms, you do see chains being used. Where they put chains at the end of the bar and they pick up more weight as they move the bar further away from the ground. That’s a pretty arbitrary or nominal amount of variance unless you’re using like battleship chains which nobody has. I think trying to wrap your head around that and then once you look at X3 Bar resistance band training system at that point, you’re like well, this is obvious. This is the only way to train. Here’s another thing, people will offer to have me try something and it’s just like, “Okay, if I’m going to get a real workout from that I’m going to risk joints and get very little muscular stimulus out of it, so no, I won’t try your thing.” That’s the other thing, I won’t do it because it’ll be damaging.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I just put the pin in at 100 pounds or something that’s light to me and just go through a couple of repetitions and shrug my shoulders and it’s like, “Okay, yeah so what?” Doesn’t matter. I don’t care how shiny it is, I don’t care how much you pay for it? Not anywhere near as effective as what I’ve got in my backpack.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, I’m way stronger than you with way less time and way less money and I don’t have to leave my house.

Dr. John Jaquish: I keep an extra X3 Bar resistance band bar system in my suitcase because I travel constantly still. I’d really like to change that but whatever. Last week, I feel like I just got back from Mexican Congress of Anti Aging Medicine. Awesome presentations.

Sean McCormick: Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Aesthetic physicians, plastic surgeons, absolutely love X3 variable resistance exercise system because they can’t do anything for people’s biomechanics. Someone who’s kyphotic in their shoulders, kind of slumped forward, there’s no amount of plastic surgery they can do to fix that, but you build your traps and your shoulders move back. They love it.

Sean McCormick: That’s cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it was a very successful presentation. I was probably the only guy that didn’t really present something that was some sort of plastic surgery or procedure or just general reconstruction or reintroducing adipose tissue in certain areas, like the Brazilian Butt Lift, they take fat out of somebody’s abdomen and they put in their… You know above their glutes.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sort of a more rounded ass look.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Which I’m not really sure if that’s attractive or not, but that’s what people are doing. I think most of these just people want what they can’t have.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve never really been into the huge ass thing. I don’t get it. Call me strange, I don’t know. They’re just not very interesting to me. Anyway, so I was like the only guy who was really talking about a physical medicine intervention and I knew it was a good speech when there’s a few hundred physicians in the room and everybody’s got their phone up recording it.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I was like, “Whoa. These guys are really liking this.” I already got invited for next year.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, they’re getting it, they’re getting it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re all about it. Then they hear how inexpensive it is. You know, of course, there’s trolls who will bitch about the price of anything. You could be selling a five dollar Velcro wallet and they’d post, “You son of a bitch. It probably only cost you a penny to make.” It’s about manufacturing costs out there by the way.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It only costs Apple five dollars to make an iPhone, no it actually costs them like over, I think it’s over $350 to make an iPhone.

Sean McCormick: Huh.

Dr. John Jaquish: They go like, I don’t know 50, 70%. No, less. They probably have like a 50% margin on the product because they have to pay an acquisition cost. They spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on advertising and branding. When you roll all of that into the cost of the iPhone, maybe they’re making maybe 50% maybe even less. Then they’ve got to pay to have all of these stores open. That shit ain’t free.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s just amazing some of these things. But you know ultimately when the plastic surgeons hear about the price of X3 Bar and then they compare that to the other stuff that they offer which costs tens of thousands of dollars, they’re like, “Oh, everyone in the world should have one of these things.” But there is nobody poor enough who shouldn’t have one.

Sean McCormick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because $550 is nothing.

Sean McCormick: It’s worth becoming stronger so that you can be more fit, more happy, live longer. I mean it’s…

Dr. John Jaquish: To be more attractive to your partner.

Sean McCormick: Yeah, yeah. I’m telling you it spiced up the.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s never been a girl that was like, “Wow, your big fat gut is even bigger, awesome.”

Sean McCormick: Right? Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Not what women are attracted to.

Sean McCormick: No. It’s really changed the way that I think about myself, it’s changed the way that I think about my physique. In the pre-read I’ll explain to people I’m ready for a before and after, I’m going to show a before and after picture to show people my progression and I’ve already told you that I haven’t done a sit up in a year and I haven’t run because I’ve got a broken fucking foot. I’m working out five days a week, maybe six, but for ten minutes a day doing the same thing and being decent at my diet, but yeah. Well, Dr. Jaquish, keep up the good work man, I’m glad that I could have you back for episode number two and I look forward to keeping in touch, man.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sean, thanks for having me. This was fun.