Podcast interview of Dr. John Jaquish by Dr. Shawn Baker of MeatRx.

John Jaquish, PhD is the inventor of the most effective bone density building medical device, which has reversed osteoporosis for thousands and created more powerful/fracture resistant athletes, John is now, partnered with Tony Robbins and OsteoStrong for rapid clinic deployment. In the process of his medical research, he also quantified the variance between power capacities from weak to strong ranges in weight lifting, which brought him to his second invention, X3 Bar resistance band bar system. The research indicates that this product builds muscle much faster than conventional lifting, and does so in less training time, all with the lowest risk of joint injury. Dr. Jaquish is a research professor at Rushmore University, speaks at scientific conferences all over the world, has been featured on many to the top health podcasts, is an editor of multiple medical journals, and is a nominee of the National Medal of Science.

Full Transcript

Shawn: All right, here we go. John, you hear me okay?

Dr. John Jaquish: I can hear you great.

Shawn: Perfect. All right. We’ll let people kind of fall in here. We should get quite a few in here any minute now, so… I like you, you’re in your studio, good for you.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Shawn: All right, guys. Well, first of all, let me thank Dr. John Jaquish for doing this today. He’s a wealth of information when it comes to all things muscle-centric and he’s done a lot of research in that area and has a unique perspective on that stuff, and he’s also pretty much on a carnivore diet, I think he’s fully carnivorous diet so that’ll probably go well with most of the folks in this crowd here, so…

Dr. John Jaquish: Like 99%.

Shawn: 99%, yeah. That’s pretty much what I am, too. I have some spices here and there and it’s just one of those things. You’ve got to figure out what-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, if somebody delivers the ribs and I got the sauce on it, I try to scrape most of it off but it’s like… I’m not going to be crazy about it.

Shawn: Well, I mean, like I said, not everybody needs to be. There’s some people that have to be really, really strict, not everybody’s in that category but the benefits seem to be pretty good. So anyway, just by way of introduction, I’m going to try to get through some inaudible. I know you’ve got a PhD in, I think, exercise physiology-

Dr. John Jaquish: Biomedical engineering.

Shawn: Biomechanical engineering rather, and you’ve developed and you’ve been spending the last several years developing products, and OsteoStrong, which is a product that’s designed to help with bone mineral density used in a clinical medical setting and then you ventured into some of the fitness stuff with the X3 portable gym Bar, which, based on research, is a good tool for muscle [building], something that I use pretty regularly now and I found it very beneficial, but it’s something that we can talk about.

So, John, if you don’t mind, maybe you can just flush out your background a little bit more, what I’ve left out, and then we can kind of get in some discussion crosstalk-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, about 13 years ago my mother was diagnosed with Osteoporosis and I had no medical background, I played rugby in undergrad, so I had kind of a fitness basic understanding and, funny thing, almost everything in fitness that people are taught is wrong, or just sort of oversimplified, which is another word for wrong. So when I looked at my mother’s Osteoporosis, I just took a very different approach, I said, ‘You know what, mom? I wonder if there’s a group of people out there who has responded very well to some sort of physical activity, and if they have superhuman bone, I’m going to figure out how they did it and I’m going to figure out how to help you with it.’

Well, once I looked at the clinical literature, it was pretty obvious. That group’s out there, it’s gymnasts and it’s because of the weight at which they hit the ground. They sometimes get 20 times their body weight when they hit the ground. Now, no one lifts weights with 20 times their body weight, which is why the gymnasts had outrageously high bone density, much higher than weightlifters. But also, they have a lot of fractures, so the abrupt nature of absorbing high impact also has a lot of high risk associated with it. Now, a gymnast will try and control by making it very repeated, so the same method of absorbing high impact every time they hit the ground. Problem is that’s not the way high impact always works, sometimes you hit the ground a little awkwardly and you cause a fracture, which is why they retire, on average, at 19 years of age.

So, after looking at all this literature, and they’re very easy to study because of the repetitive nature of the way they hit the ground, I thought, ‘Why don’t I create an impact emulation device?’ So giving the benefit of high impact forces without the risks, and so that’s what I did and there were four movements I put my mother through, and in 18 months she had the bone density of a three year old.

So then I filed for patents, launched a business and then licensed it to Tony Robbins and then the other guy named Kyle Zagrodzky, who created the brand OsteoStrong, which was all built around my technology. So, now there’s 130 clinics in eight different countries treating bone loss. So anyone with a bone density challenge, it is very helpful to put extreme loads through the body, which I know sounds dangerous but it is done in a controlled manner through robotics so that the loading is very safe, very controlled and people with low bone density very quickly, quicker than any drug that’s ever been trialed, and there’s no side effects… And absolutely anyone who’s following carnivore nutrition is going to do much better with this than somebody who’s not. Coincidentally, vegans don’t do well with it at all because they don’t have the building blocks. You know, you need to have the building blocks in the body before the body starts to use them and create the bone mass.

So once I did this, though, I made a pretty astonishing observation. The clinical trial data was done in a British government hospital in East London. So I did the study in East London and I was just there to author the protocol and make sure that they were using the device correctly, because I’m the inventor, obviously there’s a conflict of interest if I’m handling the data. So there was a principal investigator and the whole research team was going through what they were doing, so I was seeing 60, 70, 80 year old women putting six, seven or eight times their body weight through their lower extremities.

So I’m looking at this, and these are not strong people, and they’re using incredible forces so what I thought was, ‘Ha,’ like we have so much more capacity for creating force in these powerful impact-ready ranges of motion and when looking at the data like I was looking at the data, I really had a test case for kind of saying weight lifting is a really inefficient way of building musculature and if we could change the weight as we move, so if I’m doing a bench press I’m holding X weight here, maybe 3X here and maybe 5X here, now I’m changing the weight so that I can fatigue the muscle in accordance with its output capacity.

So, once doing that, I realized… I was supposed to do just band training and I had to have a bar to keep the wrist from bending one way or the other. You can’t step on a band, you’ll twist your ankles, maybe even break an ankle with these kind of forces that I was talking about, so I needed a second ground to stand on and an Olympic bar that could handle this very real resistance. Then if you custom make banding so that we were dealing with much higher forces than anything else, and then after doing that, that’s when I launched the fitness product, the X3 Bar resistance band bar system, and it worked incredibly well, I put on 30 pounds of muscle in the first year.

Then of course, that’s how Shawn and I met. Once I started the product, I realized I needed to have the best nutritional recommendations because if you don’t have the building blocks, nothing’s going to happen. I already was higher protein and ketogenic, I’ve been ketogenic for 13 years after I read about it in Body Opus. Shawn, I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book. The book should be titled 45 of the craziest things you’ll never do for your health, also not really healthy. It was a terrible book except this one chapter I liked in it, which was about ketogenic nutrition and it just made perfect sense because ketogenic nutrition is not really nutrition, you’re just really enacting a principle or few of physiology. There’s just a way to be more efficient in getting there and I thought, ‘Wow. There’s a whole system of the body that people don’t use that metabolizes body fat?’ Like in a way, we don’t really get efficient about metabolizing body fat unless we’re in the ketogenic state.

So I really liked that idea so I’ve been there for a while, but then after understanding how much protein you really need to put on muscle, it’s really like a gram per pound of body weight if you compile all the studies on the subject, and I thought, ‘Wow. That’s like…’ And I was also time restricted eating, I enjoyed eating one meal a day. If you eat one meal a day, you don’t have room in your intestines for anything other than meat, so I came to that conclusion and then, Shawn, I saw you on Joe Rogan and we connected and then we’ve been kind of corresponding ever since and sharing some exercise information, some epidemiology type information, just general habits of people. We’ve been talking a lot the Corona Virus lately and then the people with metabolic dysfunction and how at risk they are, and how the press seems to not want to talk about that, which we both find somewhere between sad and comical and then… I don’t know, I’m still rolling on my background. You want me to stop?

Shawn: No, that’s great stuff, John. No, I just want to… Like I said, I’m looking at some of the questions and they’re geared towards talking about the muscle building stuff, so I mean what are the things, and I used bands for years> I mean when I was power lifting, I built a platform where I could hook bands and I don’t know if you remember those old jump stretch bands that were out there? And they were pretty decent as far as resistance could go, but when I’ve used the bands you have, they have even more resistance so I think that’s something that… Because there’s a lot of people at home now and they’re training with these little bands, and I look at them and I’m wondering how much resistance they’re giving crosstalk compared to what I’m able to experience with the X3 Bar resistance band training system, which is… You talk about the top lock out of a deadlift for somebody my size; 6, 700 pounds, which is hard to get crosstalk-

Dr. John Jaquish: You can do a lot better than 700 pounds, you’re at about 740 pounds at the peak of your deadlift.

Shawn: Yeah, and that’s, like I said, it’s something that I can do comfortably, relative to what it would feel like to do with parcels of 700 pounds, and I still get that stimulation when I do it. I think this is a thing when people ask me about it because it looks a lot easier than it is, but when you’re actually doing it, particularly as you go to failure and as you go to these partial rep failures, I mean you really, really are taxing that system and you’re not really putting your body at risk as you would if you’re trying… If you’re trying to go to failure on a compound lift, that’s why many people would recommend machines for failure repetitions, is because when you’re going to failure on a squat or a deadlift, you got 6, 700 pounds on your back, or 400 pounds on your back, you can get hurt. When you fail with the bands, it’s like, ‘Eh, no big deal.’ You’re not going to get hurt, which I think is a big difference there. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy utilizing that.

Now, somebody’s asking a question about, how does this compare to the Doug McGuff Body by Science, One Set To Failure type of thing. I mean, you’ve got the variable with this resistance. Can you comment on that? I know there’s… Sorry, my dog’s barking. I know there’s thoughts on, we need to reach maximum muscle recruitment to stimulate at least periodically and then there’s a rest period. It has to be in there because there’s a period where you have to kind of back off from that a little bit. Can you talk about that difference a little bit?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure, yeah. Let me start with the Body by Science. The unfortunate part about that book is there is not a lot of science in Body by Science. It was a lot of anecdotes, which were interesting and one thing that Doug McGuff brilliantly boils down, is that we, when we want to stimulate an adaptation in the body, we don’t need to stimulate five times or 10 times. You stimulate once, like I ask people when they say, ‘Why do you only do one set of an exercise with X3 Bar resistance band bar system?’ And I say, ‘Well, how many sets do you need in the sun to get a suntan?’ Then they look at me like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Right, like such a comment is ridiculous because you only need to irritate a tissue one time before it will start to adapt and a lot of times when you stimulate and stimulate and stimulate, you’re actually doing more damage than good, but the reason that people do more than one set when they lift weights is because the stimulus is very poor.

When you lift weights, you pick the weight than you can handle in the weakest range in motion, which means when you’re in the strongest range in motion, it’s really not heavy at all for you. So think about a pushup, when your nose is close to the ground, it’s harder. When your arms are at full extension, it’s a lot easier and no one goes to fatigue in the stronger range in motion because you just have muscle firing, so when you go to fatigue with a static weight in the weak range, the mid range and then in the strong range, you’re really kind of leaving the growth trigger out. There’s not a lot of stimulus there, which is why people do more than one set. So when you are able to fatigue every part of the muscle in the diminishing range according to its capacity, it’s a much more powerful stimulus and you do not need more than one set.

Now, there’s some other things that McGuff mentioned in that book, like going really slowly when you lift… I think he did a follow-up book called Super Slow, or maybe that was the name of fitness chain that he started or something like that, don’t remember exactly. That had people lifting weights very slowly so that they would use less weight and be safer, and in his mind, go to a deeper level of fatigue. The problem with that is, if you want to grow muscle, you can’t get away from heavy, so you need to put heavy loads on the body and heavy is different for everybody, it’s relative. What’s heavy for my mother is not what’s heavy for me, it’s two very, very different engines pulling or pushing on the weight.

So, ultimately you want to create fatigue in a certain rep range with a certain cadence, but that really, that whole going really slow, like 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down thing, that didn’t work and it didn’t really grow any muscle in anybody. And then, what was the second part of the question? There was Body by Science and then…

Shawn: Well, I just commented on the fact that recruiting the maximum number of muscle fibers has been shown to… When it comes to hypertrophy and there’s a difference between strength and hypertrophy, which I think we’re starting to realize more. I think there’s some overlap but there’s some differentiation in there and I think that some of the recent data shows that you speed a lot of weights or some data out there shows that you can fatigue the muscle to get maximum recruitment with lighter weights, but it takes a lot longer, a lot more reps. I find that you tend to fatigue, maybe your grip gives out before your muscles do or something like that, whereas with the heavier loads, we know we almost immediately recruit… To be able to deadlift 500 pounds, you’re recruiting a lot of muscle fibers right off the get-go and so this is one of the things where, when you do a rep of the bands and use the appropriately weighted band, you’re recruiting a lot of fibers right away. So that was a fault that we need to recruit as many muscle fibers as possible to grow muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk and fatigue, like there’s a lot of different ways… I think that’s a huge distraction in sports performance research. I see studies all the time that scientists are really proud of, that, ‘Oh, look. 5000 People, we did Electron Myography on.’ Electron Myography has nothing to do with growth. Activating a muscle so that… This is part of the distraction, like you can grow a part of the muscle by activating it more, like doing incline bench press, which is really hard on your shoulders. From an Electron Myographic standpoint, you activate the upper pectorals more than the lower pectorals, but there is no growth carryover from that. So you’re contracting the entire pectoral and if somebody has bigger upper pectorals, it’s like their fingerprint, it’s because they were born with it, more tissue in that area.

Activation counts when you’re looking for performance and explosive movements, like what is sometimes seen as strength and when strength adaptations happen really quickly when someone starts to lift weights, so the beginner gains is what they call that, but a lot of that is motor learning. You’re just teaching the body how to fire a larger amount of muscle in a shorter period of time, and so like power lifters have to explode off the ground with the weight, they get very good at this. So a lot of what they’re doing just has to do with incredible fine tuned motor learning, which has nothing to do with hypertrophy at all, which is sort of the divergent conversation between the development of strength and the development of muscular size and then of course there are mechanical reasons that you can have a greater motor output, versus let’s say endurance and repetition so there’s the differences between myofiber growth of muscle and sarcoplasmic growth of muscle.

So when you fatigue the structure of the muscle as apposed to the fuel system of the muscle, which happens in more instantaneous way. It happens in the stronger range, so Shawn, when you do your dead lifts with the X3 Bar variable resistance training system, when you go to fatigue in the top range of motion, you’re getting more of a myofiber-type stimulus. So you’re going to grow the density of that cell, but in the diminishing repetitions, you’re making sure that your burning up all the ATP glycogen and creatine phosphate in those cells and when you do that, then you are stimulating the body to store more of those contractile fuels. So that swells the muscle and makes the muscle larger and reserves that fuel so you have repetition endurance, so we’re getting both an explosive power, maximum fatigue and an endurance maximum fatigue at the same time with those full versus diminishing repetitions and those are two different types of strength output.

So you’re going to have more ability to contract more times, more repetitions but also have the ability to create more absolute maximum force, from a mechanical standpoint with the myofiber work. As that proceeds, another growth stimulus is happening, especially if you don’t lock out or rest at the bottom, you’re creating a hypoxic effect by not letting a lot of blood flow into the musculature. You’re trapping it there and so while heart rate is going up trying to deliver blood, and the ATP glycogen, creatine phosphate, by depriving the musculature of that, you’re able to cause a very unique cardiac effect. Anybody see somebody putting a banding around the base of the muscle like a tourniquet, when people do that they’re creating a hypoxic effect also, but your body can do it on its own. You don’t need a blood-flow restriction banding for that as long as you don’t relax at the bottom or lack out at the top, you’re creating that hypoxic effect and that can actually modulate Myostatin, which is the mechanism by which the cardiovascular system limits how much muscle you can grow.

So for a period of time while you’re doing your set, your cardiovascular system doesn’t see that musculature, it becomes invisible because it can’t deliver blood there. So all of a sudden your ability to hold a maximum amount of musculature changes and you down regulate Myostatin, so Myostatin shows up to stop you from growing muscle. The less Myostatin you have, the more ability you have to gain muscle mass, which is a very powerful growth effect. There’s a lot going on in an X3 Bar portable home gym set. I kind of feel like I don’t hit people with that in the first videos because I just gave you guys a whole lot of muscle physiology, some of which is only like six or seven studies on them, like the hypoxic effect. Just because it’s kind of a new area of scientific research, also can really help people with chronic heart failure, can help people with cardiac problems and in way I knew this would happen but I didn’t know how much research would be coming out in the few years that preceded the development of the prototype of X3 Bar exercise band bar system, so that’s been helpful with cardiac patients.

Shawn: Hey, John. There’s a question because you mentioned some of the benefits, I think, I can’t remember, was in and that was asking about bone mineral density in the X3 Bar fitness band bar system is put on access to OsteoStrong. Do you think it helps with bone mineral density as well?

Dr. John Jaquish: It certainly can for somebody who’s challenged, but you really want to figure out how to get an OsteoStrong to open up in your area. For example, when I do a low extremity compression with OsteoStrong I typically, and I know this sounds like a big weight but in a way it’s not, my mother puts almost 1000 pounds through her legs and she’s 85, or 83, yeah. My father’s 85. So I put 3500 pounds through my lower extremities. I’m not going to do that with X3 Bar variable resistance training system, so X3 workout bar system’s really focused on muscle. There’s certainly an effect and I’m getting a university to do a clinical trial right now in X3 Bar resistance band training system to look at the blood bone markers, the P1NP and the CTX, which show anabolic effects within the bone and catabolic effects because there’s a bone metabolism, there’s always a rate of breakdown and a rate of building, so we are going to test that. But I don’t expect a huge effect, but hey, if you’re in Alaska and you’re not going to get an OsteoStrong location to show up soon, yes, it’s going to give you a benefit, but maybe talk to a physician in the area about opening up an OsteoStrong. A lot of them are physician-owned.

Shawn: Yeah, there’s a couple of these questions on nutrition, I guess in muscle building. So there’s one person asking about eating steak versus Fortigen, which is like an amino acid blend and carb back loading and then training fasted. Do you have any comments on any of those?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, those are three of my favorite subjects when it comes to nutrition. So I pretty much eat… I’m 240 pounds now, six feet tall. All I eat is meat and I don’t go to restaurants anymore, obviously, but sometimes I still do travel around a little bit. Don’t tell anyone, guys, so you know what I mean, meetings or whatever, so I’ve got my gift stack of burger patties, I have some cheese or something and maybe there’s a little ketchup, which I scrape off. That’s basically just like a melted Snickers bar, sorry for anybody who like ketchup, but yeah, that’s the nutrition. I do use Fortagen, which is an essential amino acid, which is made out of bacterial fermentation so vegans can actually eat that without compromising their principles if you want to call it that. Other people call it psychological disorder, but they can stick with their psychological disorder and still eat high levels of valuable, usable protein measured by how much nitrogen secretion there is.

So I do that. It makes it easier to hit my protein target over 250 grams of protein, just because of the usability ratio. So you don’t have to take very much of it and it kind of counts for… Like whey protein’s 18% usable by the body, whereas Fortagen is 100% usable by the body because it’s just straight essential amino acids. So that’s been really good, and what was the third thing? It was-

Shawn: The term of fasted, training in the fasted state.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes, so right now I’m trying to get a little bit leaner, basically I’ve been watching Shawn’s videos and I’m kind of jealous that he’s leaner than I am, so I want to catch up with him. So I’m getting to the point where I think I’m right around maybe 11% right now in the last DEXA scan. The [tick] said I was 11% and so I’m doing 72 hours a week fasted, but I don’t stop training. I do put my rest in though, so I train six days a week and so that way it’s consistent and I am hitting every mile because you split the body two ways with X3 Bar variable resistance training system so I hit every muscle three times, let at least 32 hours for muscle protein synthesis… Sorry, 36 hours, that’s how long it takes for muscle protein synthesis to stop.

There’s a lot of conflicting research but there’s only one biopsy study and that’s the good one. That’s the one where they actually cut a chunk out of muscle and look at it under a microscope to determine if the protein synthesis is complete, and so it looks like 36 hours is really what it takes, provided there’s no, or very little muscle damage, and muscle damage is not something you really want to go for when you exercise, despite what some trainers will tell you. So you get very little with X3 Bar resistance band bar system, muscle damage.

So six workouts a week and I do work out fasted and I just don’t feel like I need carbohydrates for that. Yes, I have muscle glycogen via gluconeogenesis, no gluconeogenesis doesn’t produce… It produces glucose on a demand basis, there’s plenty of research on that, but another point of fake news you’ll hear from trainers all the time, that if all you eat is protein then it will all convert to sugar and all be stored as fat, might as well be on CNN, it’s not true. So that’s pretty much how I do it, and even on the fasted days, I don’t lose performance at all, not even down a rep.

Now, if you’re not ketogenic at all and you’re still going through an adjustment period, and you’ll know because you’ll have headaches and stuff because your body hydration changes. Also, some people who start on carnivore and their hydration becomes different and they start to get headaches and they say, ‘Oh, this is clearly not good for me because I don’t feel good,’ well you make any major hydration or blood flow change, that’s big deal. So for example, people who are smokers who quit smoking get headaches all the time, too. That doesn’t mean cigarettes are good for your brain, they’re not good for anything, but your hydration changes because Nicotine is basal constrictor and blood delivery changes, blood flow changes when you quit smoking.

So it’s no different than making a major change in your nutrition. When you start, the first time you train fasted, yeah, it’s not going to be a great workout. You’re going to feel like shit but you got to adjust to the change and that also should be a reminder to everybody, just because you’re going to grandma’s house for Easter and she’s going to have four different types of pie there, that you should go, ‘Oh, well,’ and just go back to your old way of eating because you’re going to pay for that later. That’s going to suck, so you’ll retain all kinds of water, you’ll have headaches in the other direction because you’ll be overly hydrated.

I remember one time. So I’ve been carnivore since November first of 2017. It was an Easter Sunday, not this Easter Sunday, but it was last year, when my mom made a whole bunch of stuff and kind of got all emotional like, ‘Oh, you don’t want to eat my pudding anymore,’ and so I was like, ‘Yeah, fine. I’ll have a couple pieces of pie.’ My hands swelled up, it looked like I got stung by bees because that just was not how my body was hydrating anymore, like I was using electrolytes, putting some Himalayan salt on my steak and then because added in carbohydrates for that one day, it wasn’t an insane amount, maybe 300 grams of carbohydrates in a couple pieces of pie, I felt awful, like worse than a hangover.

The next morning I had just a pounding headache because my blood pressure was through the roof, my complexion’s kind of reddish anyway, but I looked like a tomato because my blood pressure was so high and I know exactly what the problem was. I ate like an unsupervised eight year old and I was going to pay for it. It took me about four days to get all that water out of my system and go back to a normal level of hydration. So I warn anybody, like you got to look at these sort of cheat foods or whatever, as not foods at all. We shouldn’t be eating them and as long as you stay under… It doesn’t mean you can’t have a bite or something ever, if you stay under 60 grams of carbohydrates, it really doesn’t have much of an impact, at least as far as I can tell but if you go off the rails and have what grandma wants you to have, you’re going to be hurting and just look at it like it’s not food.

Shawn: Yeah, I think that’s a good strategy. You kind of look at this as not nutrition, it’s something else, but let me just… A couple points that you brought up and I want to get a little more information still. One of the things we talked about is gluconeogenesis being demand-driven and you know that theoretically, I think, back from the 1920s I think Hans Krebs confirmed this. The theoretical joule of glucose from protein anywhere from 30 to 55 grams per 100 grams, but that doesn’t clinically appear and we see in healthy people when they actually do isotopically labeled protein feeding, they see that maybe only 5% of the protein ends up turning into glucose, which is a very tiny amount.

What happens often in a low carb state, we see a shift towards glycogen restoration and less hepatic gluconeogenesis and less glycogenolysis, so we don’t see it. In the diabetic, you see a little bit different physiology and in some of those people, as they eat more and more protein, they will see a little bit higher spike in their glucose. I’ve seen that occur, but again, as you get healthier, you’re able to use that protein, so I think the caveat there is in the normal person.

Then the other thing you talked about was 250 grams of protein, so at 240 you’re at that two grams per kilo or one gram per pound type of range and I’ve talked to Jose Antonio, and he says, ‘I don’t really care about people that don’t lift weights. They’re not even my interest,’ but I mean what are your thoughts on minimum protein requirements? And like you, I think everybody should be training, everybody should be getting stronger, maybe not in the beginning when some people are sick and they can’t do it, but I think long term though, we should all be maximizing, trying to have lean muscle mass. So what are your thoughts on protein requirements?

Dr. John Jaquish: So the gram per pound of body weight for who are trying to build muscle. If you’re not trying to build muscle, it’s hard because that really hasn’t been studied because protein is associated with musculature and the best studies out there are really looking at trained people. But I would say to keep from losing protein, like you want to keep from depriving the body of something it needs, like ultimately we need cellular repair. How much protein’s required to make sure that happens? To make sure that we have enough essential amino acids so that Autophagy happens correctly? There really isn’t that, I think… I mean, I’d just be guessing, so I can’t really put a number to it because there isn’t any literature for that. Damn.

I can understand why Jose Antonio said what he said because we just don’t know with people who are not strength training. I can say that of the people I know who are not, I mean this is like the worst kind of data, this is just of what I’ve observed, which isn’t data at all, but I would say like maybe half of that would be okay. Like half a gram per pound of body weight, when I look at my mother, who’s not really trying to make her biceps bigger at this point, she’s 85, but she wants to be healthy so she goes for half a gram per pound of body weight and she’s still really strong and has maintained the strength that she built earlier. I know she weighs 110 pounds and I know she can carry 100 pounds of soil in the garden, like she can pick up a 50 pound bag in each hand and she gets maybe 60 grams of protein per day.

She doesn’t love me more because I yell at her over it, but I do. I try and keep her on the path because she’s from Belgium and pretty much every meal revolves around pastries in Belgium, so I really have to break some cultural habits there. But she stays strong and she’s not really training right now. In the summer, she does lift. She uses extra weight, in the wintertime, she just doesn’t so this is the worst kind of data anybody could be talking about.

Shawn: Yeah, I think Don Laben, I saw recently came out with what he feels like 1.2 grams per kilo, which is higher than the RDA, but not quite as high as crosstalk-

Dr. John Jaquish: And that’s right about my one.

Shawn: Yeah, so I mean 1.2 grams per kilo, you’re at about two grams per kilo, but he’s saying that for that sedentary person, I think, and I think when we look at athletes; endurance athletes, strength training athletes, I mean you might need more. Then there’s some evidence that the more advanced you are, the requirements may go up even a little bit higher because you’re just… Same thing with the training requirements.

Somebody’s asking about training and building muscle after age 50, and I’m a guy over 50, but what are your thoughts on being able to build muscle after age 50 and then the utilization of the X3 Bar for that cohort? Can they use that crosstalk-

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve had the opportunity to observe the 40,000 X3 Bar portable home gym users and get a lot of reports from how they’re doing, and we do collect that data and compile that data. Because of the way X3 Bar resistance band bar system uses variable resistance, you can get to a level of fatigue that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get to in a fitness type environment. So I see people over 50, and there’s several of them on the website, just giving testimonials. We’re not paying anybody, they just volunteer, even though professional athletes that are on the website were paid nothing. They just are fans of the product.

Those guys over 50, they’re putting on muscle mass just as quick as the guys in their 20s and 30s. In fact, after I turned 40, in the first year I used the X3 Bar resistance band training system prototype, I put on 30 pounds of muscle, which is kind of unheard of. Like over 40, there’s not a lot of people who are really changing their body composition with standard weight training, so I think the variable resistance really resonates with the older population because ultimately I think what stops a lot of muscle growth the over 50 population is, whether it’s a conscious or subconscious fear of injury, it’s there.

You will see people and their behavior, everybody’s been hurt, maybe not severely injured but everybody’s been hurt picking something up. All of those times that’s happened, that sits in their subconscious and keeps us from potentially fully engaging, whereas that process just doesn’t happen with X3 Bar exercise band bar system and that neural inhibitory process becomes disconnected because the positions you would be in that are normally associated with injury, the weight drops off. It becomes lighter in those positions so you don’t have that neural inhibitory process. You don’t have muscles shut off for a subconscious fear of injury.

Shawn: Yeah, that’s one thing that I find and I’ve, in the 40 years I’ve been lifting weights, and I’ve lifted 1000 pounds on my back and did rack lockouts. I used to walk around the gym with 800 pounds, or back when I was doing Strongman, I’d move the heavy weights. One of the problems with that is it takes a long time to set that stuff up and to get to that level of resistance and I like that I can just grab the bar, throw the band in there and immediately I’ve got 700-plus pounds in the bar for a deadlift or something like that and yet not having to deal with all the awkwardness and the expense of being able to get that stuff.

Of course, I don’t do what the normal person does, obviously, and I’m still competing in sports so I think obviously there’s a difference between sports performance and muscle building. So I find this is supplement to the other things I do because, like I said, I’ve got this crazy idea that I’m going to do some CrossFit stuff as a stupid 55 year old when I turn 55, so you have to have skills and you have to practice those skills, but as far as a muscle building standpoint, I find that the X3 Bar fitness band bar system helps with that aspect over not me having to spend an enormous amount of time. Talk to me about some of the… Because I know you said, you’ve mentioned professional athletes and you’ve got some professional sports teams who are utilizing it. How are they incorporating it into their sports performance?

Dr. John Jaquish: It depends on the athlete. Like former Light Heavyweight Champion Forrest Griffin, so he was Light Heavyweight Champion in the UFC for a couple of years and he’s now one of the guys running the Sports Performance Institute for the UFC. So when a new fighter gets signed with the UFC, he goes over their training and makes sure they’re not doing anything counterproductive or that could potentially injure them or if they are doing something that has some high injury risk, you’re going to find some alternatives so they can get the benefits without the injury risks.

So he’s had seven Orthopedic surgeries, fighters get very beat up and I don’t mean like just getting punched. They get put into a lot of arm bars and arm locks and leg locks, which hyper extend joints tear a lot of tendons and ligaments. It’s not a sport for joint health at all, so his Orthopedic surgeon, just like tears come into his eyes every time he tries to lift weights and then is kind of where he was when we met and so we did some training with X3 Bar resistance band bar system and he said, ‘I can actually train heavy again and the pain is what happens when I’m the weaker range of motion, which is where the weight drops off and now I’ve been able to regain a lot of the mass that I had before because of this,’ so Forrest has done really well with it.

Now, the Miami Heat, Shawn knows this from firsthand experience, taller athletes have some advantages and some huge disadvantages. The longer a lever arm is the longer your humerus is, the more torque can be put on the shoulder joint so tall guys, especially NBA players, they really don’t like weight lifting because that puts even more force in the weaker range of motion and less force in the stronger range of motion. So they’re a huge mechanical disadvantage, so you’ll never hear an NBA player bragging about how much he bench presses or squats because it’s a huge distance with a lot of mechanical disadvantages. So none of these guys care about what their lifts are like and so when you give them something they can deliver more force in the range of motion where they have more muscle firing and less force where they have less muscle firing, it’s exactly what they’ve been looking for their whole lives.

So the Detroit Pistons, I think about half of them are just using X3 portable gym. I know Andre Drummond, he’s the best guy in the team, he’s 100% X3 Bar variable resistance training system, no more weights. The entire Miami Heat team is no weights at all, just X3 Bar resistance band training system, and so they’ve really leveraged that. In fact, one of the strength straining Hall of Fame strength coach, Bill Foran, is the one who runs the Miami Heat for strength conditioning and he ended up making that decision. It was only after experiencing X3 Bar resistance band bar system for about 30 seconds, he’s just like, ‘Yup. We’ve been looking for this forever.’ So for the really tall guys or the joint compromised, it’s a very easy decision to make.

Now, some of the NFL players, those still of course do the explosive drills, the sprint stuff. They need to do that and they keep their speed up. A lot of that is motor learning and keeping a firing pattern alive, so we never tell them to stop doing their drills but when an NFL player signs their contract, that’s pretty much the last day they ever got stronger, because now it’s all, ‘You get injured, you’re going to lose your contract,’ so they don’t ever really want to strength train after that because they don’t want to put up with the risk. So X3 Bar exercise band bar system is huge for them and a lot of them are X3 Bar portable home gym only or majority of their heavy movements are X3 Bar resistance band training system and then the rest of it is just drills and skill training.

Shawn: Yeah, somebody asking, ‘Do you still need to do cardio with X3 Bar resistance band bar system?’ And I know you probably have some interesting thoughts on cardio.

Dr. John Jaquish: How controversial do you want me to be? I mean, I can tell you what I really know or I can tell you what I’d probably say on Good Morning America.

Shawn: Just let it go and let’s get the information out there.

Dr. John Jaquish: So my general opinion, not my opinion, my read of the literature is there really is no such thing as cardio, it doesn’t exist. There is contracting a muscle and having your heart pump blood to that muscle, but ultimately cardiovascular exercise is not a lot different than strength exercise with the exception that you choose a resistance that will never grow any muscle. It will damage joints, so there’s some risk there. Now of course, somebody who’s been doing marathon running for a long time, they’ve figured out how to foot strike on the ground so that have the least amount of joint damage potential and they’re moving in a pattern where it’s a little more efficient, but ultimately, when you look at cardiovascular training, it is a set of goals that are pretty much inconsistent.

So neurologically, physiologically, there’s a set of things that your body is trying to do; it’s trying to become very efficient at moving great distances with a small amount of fuel, right? So let’s all imagine that we’re automobile engineers. If you look at a Prius; very small engine, very lightweight frame, let’s say a larger capacity, so what the body does when you start doing cardiovascular training is it up regulates Cortisol. Cortisol does two things; it gets rid of muscle, so you lose muscle when you have very high Cortisol moments on a regular basis. So somebody who’s doing cardio every day or every other day are losing muscle and the other thing Cortisol does is it helps you store as much body fat as possible. So you’re going to be fatter longer and you’re going to lose muscle. That seems like the opposite of what everyone wants.

So now, if you want to be a great distance runner, you have no choice and that’s just what you do, but that’s a goal and you have to meet that goal and you also don’t ever run into a distance runner that’s also doing body building competitions, because they know they’re losing muscle very quickly, they’re keeping as much body fat as they possibly can. You also don’t want to get weight loss confused with fat loss because a lot of the weight loss that happens is muscle loss. Also, there’s never been a study that showed that people who do extended cardio have any lower risk of all-cause mortality, so they don’t live any longer.

There’s quite a bit of orthopedic research that shows the chronic joint damage and you see some cardio or endurance-type athletes, they have to retire maybe when they’re in their 40s or in their 50s. They can’t do it anymore because of the joint damage, then of course they lose all the benefit within a few weeks of stopping training, the detraining from cardiovascular exercise is very rapid, much more rapid than muscular training or bone density. Coincidentally, when you build a high level of bone density… Oh, Cortisol also gets rid of bone density. It’ll lower your bone density faster because it’s trying to make you lighter.

A lot of heavy, powerful bone is extra weight, so it makes sense what the body is doing by storing more fat, getting rid of muscle and getting rid of bone density. You want to be as light as possible so you can move as far as possible with a lower fuel load. So I just feel like your hormones are fighting everything you really want, and coincidentally, the people who live the longest… There’s two things that drive long life and all-cause mortality and don’t really have any conflicting research, unlike a lot of nutritional research has a lot of conflicting stuff, usually because of bias and just fraudulent type research, but high levels of strength and low levels of body fat are the two greatest drivers of longer life. What’s the opposite of what you get from cardio? Which I think is part of the problem.

So I just don’t recommend it but of course when I run into athletes who do triathlons and they want to do some strength training as well, I’m not going to tell them to stop doing that because if you want to be good at endurance, you’ve got to train for endurance. But at the same time, endurance and health are two different things. Also, I think there’s a huge distracting physiological effect that strength training has, so let’s say Shawn and I are in an airport, like a German airport, which never have escalators, they have stairs. So we’ve got to sprint up two flights of stairs to make our flight, we’ll probably both be a little bit winded, whereas if there’s somebody who weighs 100 pounds less than us who sprints up that same flight of stairs won’t have a bead of sweat on their forehead.

The bigger a muscle becomes, the more blood demand it has. So literally, the more muscular someone is, the harder their heart has to work to just pump blood to maybe even nominal use of that muscle, which is where the myth comes from that strength athletes don’t have very good endurance or good cardiovascular health. We have great cardiovascular health but the heart is pumping blood to a much larger engine, which, if we go back to the car analogy, is gross inefficiency, but that’s fine because that’s what we train for. We train for power, we have power, but when we use the musculature for something nominal, a lot of blood still has to pump to it. So it doesn’t mean you have less cardiovascular endurance, it just means you have a bigger engine that is pulling resources from the cardiovascular system.

Shawn: Hey, John, just another interjection. Someone’s asking what’s your thoughts, as opposed to jogging long distance cardio, what are your thoughts on people including high intensity interval training? crosstalk… Do you feel like that has a different impact?

Dr. John Jaquish: Intervals are completely different than sustained cardio. In fact, the first and hopefully only meta-analysis I ever had to write, a meta-analysis of… Are they going to know what a meta-analysis is, Shawn? Yeah? Okay, so I did one on stabilization firing and growth hormone modulations in the body, so the faster you move, the more stabilization firing you have, [atharent] firing and that up regulates growth hormone. It can up regulate growth hormone if you add load to your body weight as you’re doing the stabilization firing, so X3 workout bar system is something that that would incorporate.

One of the 23 references that I used in this meta-analysis compared squatting, free-weight squatting, to machine leg press. Now, machine leg press, you’re typically using twice the amount of weight that you load on your back and balance with. That makes sense because you don’t have to balance it. So after one set, they did a post-blood draw to determine what the changes from baseline of growth hormone were in the squat athletes. So just one set, they had a 600% up regulation of growth hormone right away, so growth hormone pulsing happens very quickly. Now, the group that did the leg presses, they used twice the amount of weights so you’d imagine they’d have some kind of response, nobody really knew what it would be. They increased their growth hormone by 0%, no effect whatsoever. So stabilization firing and stabilization firing plus added load increases growth hormone.

When you do interval training, it’s much more like sprinting than distance running. There’s a reason sprinters look very different from distance runners and that’s because they have, if you look at the head of a distance runner it’s bobbing up and down. They have very little stabilization firing because stabilization firing is inefficient. Their whole biochemistry is trying to make them move greater distances with a very low fuel demand. So they’re going through a cadence, a motion where they’re almost leaning forward, moving their feet as they’re practically falling forward just for each step. So very efficient movement for a low fuel demand.

But a sprinter does not care about fuel demand at all. If they have to burn an extra 500 calories per sprint, it doesn’t matter because how many sprints they can do is not the context. It’s being as fast as possible, so when they do this you’ll notice the skull, the head of the sprinter almost looks like it was lined up by a laser, doesn’t move at all, and that’s because of the massive amount of stabilization firing in the neck, in the back, in the hips, in the ankles. All those stabilizer muscles, which by the way primary actors typically don’t up regulate growth hormone…

There’s a NASA AIM study on this, which took a percussor to gastroc versus soleus versus tibialis muscle and the tibialis muscle up regulated growth hormone and the gastroc and soleus didn’t through athletic activation, so why? Because the tibialis is the stabilizer. The other two are drivers so they function very differently and because we can stimulate them differently in that test environment, really showed that stabilization firing is going to up regulate growth hormone, it’s going to make people leaner, it’s going to make people faster. Growth hormone is not anabolic to muscle, but it is anabolic to tendons and ligaments, so it forces tendons and ligaments to grow, now albeit very slowly, because these aren’t fast growing tissues, but that’s what’s going to keep somebody from being injured and high intensity interval training has all kinds of stabilization firing involved so it’s very different than sustained cardio.

Shawn: Hey, John. It’s right at 11:00, unfortunately I have to go do another meeting. This has been wonderful and fascinating and we’ll have to do a round two because I think just scratching the surface. I think that people really appreciated this.

John, appreciate what you’re doing and I think it’s a great product. I use it most days now, and thanks for all the information. We’ll talk to you, I’m sure soon, John, and you guys have a great day. I’ve got to go the public meeting, so if some of you guys want to head over to MeatRx public meeting, we can do that now and then after that, I’m going to go eat and train.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.

Shawn: All right, take care, everybody-

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks, Shawn.

Shawn: … and bye-bye, guys.

Dr. John Jaquish: All right. Thanks, bye. (silence)