Dr. John Jaquish: Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time

Full Transcript

Nick Hardwick: You’re raised as an athlete to fight back. So why all of a sudden when you retire do you stop the good fight?

Dr. John Jaquish: You only need one stimulus. Bone density is the same thing. You only need one of the appropriate level of loading.

Nick Hardwick: Got you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it can be sunny on Christmas day, we can go outside and we are not getting inaudible because the light is not intense. Which is why when you pick up the 10 pound dumbbell and you’re doing curls with it, I don’t care who you are, you’re doing enough.

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So-

Nick Hardwick: All right, guys, you know this, I hope as we get older, we all get a little wiser. It’s kind of a goal, right? For me, that means we can work a little smarter, not harder. We can have the same positive effect we were looking for initially, but it takes a long time, lots of experience and failures to get to the point where we can eliminate all of those wasted efforts and really pair ourselves down to just the essentials for the maximum results, with minimal effort free and our time up to do more of what we love.

Nick Hardwick: What if I told you that it doesn’t take that much effort to attain the physique you want? What if you were actually working too hard in the gym for your best body? And what if all of that weightlifting that may feel good now, in the long run was destroying your body and joints? Our guest today, John Jaquish PhD is the best-selling author of the book titled Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time and So is Cardio. By the way, it’s available now, special new release for $1. It’s a super easy read. It’s a dollar. I highly recommended it. Some great information in there. All science-backed. All research backed. Really well done. The book will certainly have you reconsidering your fitness regimen.

Nick Hardwick: Some have described John as the Tony Stark at the fitness industry. Pretty cool. Dr. Jaquish will tell us how 10 minutes a day is not only all it takes to attain the body you’re looking for, but will argue that that time is actually optimal. He has partnered with Tony Robbins to bring multiple revolutionary products to the marketplace. His first is a suite of equipment developed with his mother mind who had osteoporosis called OsteoStrong. It’s the most effective bone density building medical technology available. The facilities located all across the country are designed to build bone density and under 10 minutes per week. That sounds pretty awesome. And I think a lot about it especially for my own parents or aging generation. Find out what is required to trigger bone growth. And then what led Dr. Jaquish to develop the X3 Bar system? It’s a variable resistance system.

Nick Hardwick: So in the first place, what’s variable resistance? Why is it better than traditional weight training? And what does this business about cardio being a waste of time? I got to learn more about that. Really, I mean, come on who likes cardio? Just kidding. I know some of you do. Check out the OsteoStrong website @osteostrong.me and look into the X3 Bar portable home gym products @doctorj.com. That’s D-O-C-T-O-R J dot com. Also follow him on Instagram @drjaquish, D-R J-A-Q-U-I-S-H. Come on and learn with me. Here’s Dr. John Jaquish. Doc, welcome on how are you?

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

Nick Hardwick: Yeah, it’s quite the pleasure. I look forward to talking about the book, the products, the business, OsteoStrong, X3 Bar exercise band bar system, all of that. You’re really on the forefront of where we should be looking from a fitness standpoint and a health standpoint.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, I was confused, I thought fitness was about results. inaudible you and me, but it’s not. It’s about bench pressing, so you can talk about it on Facebook.

Nick Hardwick: Is that what you’re getting out of a lot of people? Like you put out a new product and-

Dr. John Jaquish: 10% of people are like, yeah, it’s like you want to talk about results and it’s like, well, but you’re not lifting iron. Was that the point? Thought the point was the results.

Nick Hardwick: Right? Yeah. So, in your mind, what should we be shooting for from a health and a fitness standpoint? And I should put the caveat like 99% of the world, other than like the elite competitors who are making money trading in really the future health of their body, like I once did and damaging for the high-performance in the short term, but in a long-term standpoint… There are trade offs for performing at a really high level and banging heavy weights and running into gigantic men and dead lifting a thousand pounds. There are huge trade-offs for that. So in your head, give me health and fitness.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, two things I’ll start with the pro athletes and then we’ll go into the rest of us. A lot has changed in the training of professional athletes. Yes, they’re at risk when they’re on the field, but the idea now is that they’re at as close to zero risk as possible when they’re off the field. And you’re like, if you’re in the NFL and you do a one rep maximum you’re in trouble.

Nick Hardwick: That’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible like you’re… Can I use profanity on the show?

Nick Hardwick: Oh yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh okay. You’re a fucking idiot by doing it. inaudible end your career by doing it.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And it happens in a second and then, Oh well, career’s over. I guess I’ll just go sell pencils at the fucking doc.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah and there’s a big myth that sort of the sideways have “powerlifters”, which are really just obese people who call themselves powerlifters. 99.9% of people who call themselves powerlifters are just fat guys who lift.

Nick Hardwick: Yes. When you take the overall health of that individual, it’s catastrophic. I bet if you looked at their blood panels, it’s a nightmare for a doctor.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Right. I’m carb bloating. Really? Every day for like 3000 days? So, this idea that these guys are throwing around heavy weight is just false. That is not what they’re doing. They’re already strong when they get in the league, I’m speaking… I only do one-on-one work with professional athletes. So it’s about 25 guys outside of the Miami heat and then the Miami heat. Yeah. And they even endorsed my book and they let me use their name, which is kind of a big deal.

Nick Hardwick: Oh, that’s awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nick Hardwick: It says a lot. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It says right on the back of the book.

Nick Hardwick: It’s a great book, by the way. It’s a great book. It’s an easy read.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You know, there was some guy the other day that’s like, “I’m so sick of reading about the studies in your book”. And I’m like, “I distill down the studies so that you can understand them.” And that was a pain in the ass. The book is supposed to be written at a third… Well, first they told us to write a third grade level, the USA today rule.

Nick Hardwick: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Your article is supposed to be written in a third grade level. And then they changed it to high school because there’s no way we can get this level of science and this level of reading-

Nick Hardwick: They don’t match up.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So we had to bob up but yeah. I mean, it’s not the most simple read, you got to be smart and you got to care.

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: But it’s still high school reading level. Most of our customers would get to that because we don’t target bodybuilders. We target busy professionals.

Nick Hardwick: Right. Yeah. People who are looking for efficiency.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Spending all day in the gym is not something that is enticing to them.

Nick Hardwick: Right. If you want to spend time at the gym… I like hanging out in gyms, I like listening to music, I like just being in the environment, but most people don’t. They just want to go get the work in and get out and get the results.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Especially if you have something going on in life or _inaudible_or like a job.

Nick Hardwick: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible hang out on gyms all day long. They don’t have those things.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. That’s true. Hey doc, if you don’t mind, I want to go back a little bit. Will you give me a bit of a bio on you? How’d you become and I read this now and this is kind of cool that people are calling you the Tony Stark at the fitness industry. How did you get to this point? I don’t know if you’ve heard that, but that’s quite the compliment.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It was in a Chicago Tribune article and it sucks they deleted the whole section of the paper that I was in. It was called… Yeah. I used to live in Chicago. So it was called community something. And they got rid of it. And I was like, damn it that’s like the coolest things that’s ever been said about me. But I think it was also said in the Boston Sun. I’m definitely a disruptor, not intentionally, I just looked at some problems and frequently the problems I look to solve are different then what’s out there. Then the standard of care.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, it’s sort of like, if you want to get stronger lift weights? My answer is no, that’s a very inefficient way to get stronger. So I came from the medical device industry. So a lot of people are like, this jerk came out of nowhere, they’re all mad. I told you, I get death threats.

Nick Hardwick: What are people so mad at?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, they think I came out of nowhere and the truth is I’ve been for 13 years in the medical device industry. And I developed a bone density treatment device really to treat my mother’s osteoporosis. That was the inspiration. And I fixed her osteoporosis and reversed it for a few hundred thousand other people.

Nick Hardwick: So this is really cool. Don’t don’t skip over this because I think this is super cool. I looked into this it’s OsteoStrong and people can find it @osteostrong.me. Tell people, give me a little bit on this first, because I think this is super rad. I got a 75 year old mom, most likely osteopenia. She weighs like 85 pounds. I’m assuming she’s heading down that path. As most people kind of in the back end of-

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible

Nick Hardwick: Yes. Like most people in the back end of their life. Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Graduated inaudible

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. It’s huge concern. So, tell me about it. Like how would you… And the machines look… I mean, I’ve gone through the videos and everything and they look they’re quite impressive.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You see him actually working with a robotic arm?

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, there’s nothing like it.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. And they’re dialed into the computer and they’re measuring all units It’s like 10 minutes a week.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, primary mineralization of a bone after an osteogenic loading moment is five to 10 days. So that’s what I would tell people to do it one time per week. You don’t want to… It’s sort of like, you wouldn’t do a bicep workout every two hours.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Got to let the muscle recover. You got to let it build again. So, that’s why it’s just the metabolic rate of bone is slower than the metabolic rate of muscle tissue. But then look at the metabolic rate of cardiac tissue. Your heart starts to heal itself if it’s damaged in moments.

Nick Hardwick: Really?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Because you can’t just have a… Yeah.

Nick Hardwick: It needs to.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you could die. Cardiac metabolism is just the metabolism of the cells, it’s very fast. So every type of tissue has different metabolic rate. Tendons and ligaments have a very slow metabolic rate. Brain tissue has a very high metabolic rate. So what I did was, my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis and she looked at the medications and was like, I’m not doing this, these are terrible. And a lot of side effects. And so I said, all right, well, let me see what I can figure out for you. And so I looked for a group of people who are what would be called super responders or they have in some way got their bone to just be more powerful than everybody else’s. We’re not looking to get back to normal. We’re looking at like superhuman level, bone density. And I found this population and they’re very easy to find through your literature searches. It was gymnast because they absorb sometimes 10 times their body weight when they hit the ground.

Nick Hardwick: Oh yeah. crosstalk When I watch it, I’m like, Oh my goodness, how did their legs not snap?

Dr. John Jaquish: They hit the ground because they conditioned for it.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And the condition for it is you’re building bone density. That’s it. And so the conclusion I came to was I’m going to build a series of medical devices that emulate impact. So it gives you the benefit of impact without the risks of the actual impact. Because there’s a reason gymnast also retire at 19 years of age.

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: They beat up. Yeah. And they beat up to the point where they have trouble walking. If you can see some really crushed people. They’re like 40 years old and they have trouble getting out of a chair and they’re like, yeah, I was a gymnast from 15. You’ve been miserable since 15, that’s terrible life. So I identified this population, I prototyped a series of devices, put my mother through it within 18 months. She had the bones of a 30 year old.

Nick Hardwick: No kidding.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And she was in her seventies.

Nick Hardwick: Wow. So even that late it’s fairly easy to reverse crosstalk

Dr. John Jaquish: And which gets in the muscle a little bit. That was what, my first like moment of clarity when it came to training, it’s like, huh, generally people over 35 or 40, have a much more difficult time putting on muscle mass. Nobody puts on inaudible Like me, I put on 60 pounds of mass having my body fat go down at the same time after turning 40 years old.

Nick Hardwick: Goodness gracious. 60 pounds? How quickly? How long did that take?

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible

Nick Hardwick: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Right.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. And you’ve probably been training for a long time too. So when people talk about-

Dr. John Jaquish: I did it for years and it just didn’t really do much for me. And every time I like thought I was getting bigger, I was really just getting fatter and then I died down and then-

Nick Hardwick: You lose muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And then I’d get a little bit leaner and then I’m like, Oh, like I really thought I was more muscular than this. And then it just felt like skinny.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that’s kind of what I go through is like, Hey, I’m bulking up. And then there’s this spillover effect. And I started getting, putting it on in the first place that comes on, always my love handles and my thighs. And then I get skinny and then my shoulders shrink down and my arms shrink down and my chest goes away and it’s like, Oh man. It’s like, I can’t have both at the same time. That’s a problem.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yes it is.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, yeah. And then OsteoStrong flourished from there. I filed for patents and I licensed actual property to… Sorry. That was bugging me.

Nick Hardwick: That’s all right.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s like, what is that thing in frame?

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. That’s a chair there.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, in case I need to talk to somebody, like I can have another person sitting right here.

Nick Hardwick: Exactly. Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I-

Nick Hardwick: You filed the patents?

Dr. John Jaquish: Filed the patents and then licensed the IP and that thing was off and running. And now there’s 140 clinics.

Nick Hardwick: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: In eight different countries. crosstalk

Nick Hardwick: It’s still growing?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah.

Nick Hardwick: And what’s the population that’s coming in? Male, female, age. What are we looking at?

Dr. John Jaquish: About 65% female and almost everybody 40 and up.

Nick Hardwick: Okay. I’m sure you know, the numbers on osteoporosis, is it more of a female issue or male issue? What are we looking at from a population standpoint there?

Dr. John Jaquish: Three in five females and one in five males.

Nick Hardwick: Got you. That’s a lot.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. It actually ends as many lives as breast cancer.

Nick Hardwick: Does it really?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s not as scary. For some reason something growing inside your body and killing you is a lot worse than breaking a hip and not being able to recover it and dying of pneumonia in the hospital.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. And that’s the stats. I pulled the stats up this morning on it. It’s one in three adults over 50 dies within a year of suffering a hip fracture. And then older adults have a five to eight times higher risk of dying within the first three months of a hip fracture compared to those who don’t.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nick Hardwick: Pretty crazy stats.

Dr. John Jaquish: The reason that osteoporosis fractures aren’t reported on… I believe, this is not science it’s just my opinion. Everything I tell people is usually science but I just think, but this isn’t, that’s why I just wanted to preface that.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think that people just don’t see it as frightening. It’s like, you know what happened to your grandmother? She broke her hip, got stuck in the hospital, died inaudible

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But then it’s just like, people just go to pieces and cry like babies if somebody dies of cancer, it’s like, well, you’re dead. What’s the difference?

Nick Hardwick: And it’s the same result, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Dismiss like, Oh, it’s just life. And the other one is like, you know so-and-so got eaten by rats.

Nick Hardwick: Right. crosstalk

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re dead.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. It’s like oh grandma-

Dr. John Jaquish: We should treat it the same.

Nick Hardwick: That’s true. Yeah. It’s the exact same end. It’s like, Oh, grandma got old and fell down and broke her hip and she just passed away.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible Osteoporosis too. So I mean, if somebody could retort and say, well, yeah, but people who have a hip fracture, they’re all elderly, not true. There’s people who just are inactive. I had a meeting at West point, not too long ago and they were talking to me about the best of the best physically, mentally and they go to West point. West point take weak people. And they said, we have incoming cadets that have osteopenia and osteoporosis.

Nick Hardwick: No kidding. How?

Dr. John Jaquish: They just don’t use their body. It’s a dysfunction of disuse.

Nick Hardwick: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, you don’t use your body, you spend all your time playing video games then.

Nick Hardwick: Right. So one thing that our strength coaches would always stress is not only are you getting stronger, like lifting weights and loading the bar up on your back and everything, but you’re also increasing the density of your tendons and ligaments and making them thicker so when you get out on the field, that you’re safer.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Good study on that. Benjamin and Ralphs 1996. Yeah. If you put impact level forces, it has to be higher than squat really.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Higher than a squat, really. crosstalk to have very high loads put on the body and that’s what the body adapts to the most, it’s sort of like testosterone receptors, they respond to heavy. There’s no getting around heavy. Our bodies really work well around heavy loads, but the problem is that recommendations just force people to get under loads they have no business being under and then lifting very stupidly. So, I designed two different approaches to loading the body to these extreme degrees, one to cause bone density adaptation, and the other to cause muscular adaptation, where the risk is almost gone. And the benefit is outrageously higher than what we see with conventional exercise, and that was my objective.

Nick Hardwick: With the OsteoStrong, do you get the tendon and ligament thickening as well as the bone density? Okay. So there you go. It just so efficient. So you’re getting the same thing in a short amount of time and you’re saving yourself from… And that’s where I’ve come to in my life. It’s like I’ve done some dumb things in the past. They were fun at the time, like bench a lot of weight, deadlift a lot of weight, squat a lot, but I’m 39 now. I put myself through the ringer. It’s like I have made a commitment to myself to never put a bar on my back again. I am never going to, because every time I do, something happens and my back’s thrown out for three weeks. It’s like, “Well, stop doing it.” There’s no need to do that.

Dr. John Jaquish: In nature, would you ever stack something on your back and walk around with it?

Nick Hardwick: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. If we were in a native tribe and I was like, “Nicholas, let’s build a building today out of big rocks.” And you’re like, Okay." And I’m like, “Now, put this big rock on your back.” You’d be like, “How about I just carry it in front of me?”

Nick Hardwick: Right. How am I going to get it there, first off? Like, “Hey, throw it off the cliff, onto my back.”

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ll just catch it on my neck. Yeah. Standard squat is not a good approach.

Nick Hardwick: Not a good move. So what led to the X3 system?

Dr. John Jaquish: Seeing the research from OsteoStrong, it was very apparent that I… We have X capacity here and seven X capacity here. So once I figured that out, I document this in great detail in the book.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. And it’s really easy to understand the concept too. It’s like you’re trying to lift the same heavyweight through a range of motion where you’ve basically got three different strengths, where you’re at the bottom and you’re doing a bench press, or for people who aren’t watching it on YouTube, it’s like you’re at an incredibly vulnerable position with a heavy amount of weight that you’re trying to stress yourself, which is really only good for the top portion. But you got to get it through that bottom range. And that’s where you’re susceptible to injuries and joint degradation and all that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Drastically variable capacity. So we need a variable weight. We need a weight that the changes as we move, to deliver very high forces. So when I do a chest press, I’m holding 540 pounds at the top, 300 pounds in the middle, and a hundred pounds at the bar. And then I hit that 540 pounds for 20 repetitions. Then I can’t get there anymore. And then I do as many reps as I can that are just half way in the 300 pound range. And then my last couple reps are in the hundred pound range, but the entire muscle is devastated in every range of motion to its biomechanical capability. This is what my inaudible, just the process of exhaustion and the system of exhaustion, to completely fatigue the muscle. And the fact that people think you need more than one set. I’m like, “Oh no, you only need one set because weightlifting sucks.” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?” I go, “Answer this question for me. How many sets do you do in the sunlight to get a tan?”

Dr. John Jaquish: How many times you got to run outside, irritate your skin in the sun, and run back inside, recover for however long it is, and then run outside, and do it again and then run back in. And then you need to do that 10 times, run back and forth. Or is it just a good half hour on the 4th of July, and you put some sunblock on, and you’re going to have a good tan? And then they’re like, “Well, it’s the last thing you said.” And I’m like, “Right. So what did we learn?” You know? And they usually are clueless. You only need one stimulus, bone density is the same thing. You only need one of the appropriate level of loading. It can be sunny on Christmas day, and we can go outside and we’re not getting tanned inaudible cause the light’s just not intense, which is why when you pick up the 10 pound dumbbell and you’re doing curls with it, I don’t care who you are, you doing nothing, right.

Nick Hardwick: You have to do that for half the day to get what you need out of it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Nah.

Nick Hardwick: Even then?

Dr. John Jaquish: Even then.

Nick Hardwick: Cause you’re not getting the hormonal response that you’re looking for.

Dr. John Jaquish: You won’t get any hormonal response from that through your ATP, glycogen and creatine phosphate, but you won’t burn through it fast enough to show a deficit. You know, as your long distance runners have really big quadriceps?

Nick Hardwick: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: Run on twigs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that would be like the equivalent of that. Yeah. Well, I had to really be strategic in loading the body in the right way so that we can exhaust, cause it’s a level of exhaustion under incredible amounts of force. Now people keep wanting like weight lifting for some reason, fitness in general, is very dogmatic.

Nick Hardwick: Oh my gosh. So is nutrition.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That whole world is just, people don’t know what that word means. It’s it’s like, you’re almost religiously devoted to an idea about how something works and if it gets challenged, you’re like upset. And I’m also, by the way, anybody who gets upset about a scientific issue is they need counseling. That’s you know, like

Nick Hardwick: Deep seated issues there.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It was like a year or two ago, like a Alexandra Ocasio Cortez said that we should make it illegal to continue research on global warming because it’s settled. No, you just liked the fact that people believe in it. But if you want to stop science, right. You guys have your feelings, like you should be thrown in a bottomless pit. Like what an . Yeah.

Nick Hardwick: You can no longer claim to be a scientist if you want to stop science.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Right. Well, I mean, she’s, she’s a bartender has a bartender’s license. That’s what was her job? She got into Congress, which is like another, we can talk for an hour. That’s a whole nother debacle, but it just like, it it’s so mind blowing when someone says, you know, we can’t do science anymore because you know, it’s hurting people’s feelings. Yeah. And back to the fitness issues, like, you know, challenging a lot of things that people have been doing a long time and yeah, they get upset, but it’s

Nick Hardwick: Challenging. It’s like it’s challenging their way of life and their belief system. It’s like, no, it has to be this way because I’ve done it so long. And this is, this is the way it is. When in reality science may say something completely different with variable resistance that the studies have come out. You can. Yes. And what in your mind is the, is the Cornell study the most profound one?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, no. Later on they approved that the higher, the ratio of variants from bottom to top, the more effective, no kidding. Yeah. So in the Cornell study it was like, you know, X at the bottom and you know, 1.2 X at the top, whereas we’re going like X at the bottom and about five X at the top.

Nick Hardwick: Gotcha. And that was because in the Cornell study they were doing two groups with one athletes. And what was it? Wrestlers. And I forget what the other

Dr. John Jaquish: Random assignment.

Nick Hardwick: Okay. So there were two groups, one was doing traditional bars and dumbbells and the other one was doing variable resistance along with the weights. So right. So they lowered the bar weight,

Dr. John Jaquish: But they, they lower the weight by like 10, 10, 20, 30% Dade, a strap, really lightweight vans on, I mean, that was all that was available at the time.

Nick Hardwick: And that was kind of Louie Simmons does that a lot. He was kind of one of the big guys at Westside barbell, the conjugate method to put bands on bars and

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And yeah, Simmons definitely advanced that. Like I think there’s somebody who could probably correct me on this. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I believe what sidebar about, well, it’s one gene in Ohio and that was wrong. So I won’t say that I’m incorrect on that, but they would, I think it broken like 200 strength of world records. Oh yeah. A ridiculous amount. Right. And they use variable resistance. I’m like, yeah, well I can show you 16 studies that show you, you grow more muscle, you gain more strength, which by the way is the same thing with variable resistance. So yeah. Obviously

Nick Hardwick: Would they do better? Do you think, could you argue, they would do better with only band loading rather than having the bar? I mean, obviously they’re going into competitions. They have to have the bar. They have to train that way. Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. For, for, I mean, if people, people who are training for powerlifting and weightlifting, you know, it’s like, how does a pitcher train? He throws a ball, throws a ball. Yeah. Does he bench press also, usually not now because it’s edited motion that you got to be good at. Even even the strength for any program of like tiger woods. Like he said, one of them, one of his secrets to success was he really got into strength training, but they had to be really careful not to screw up his swing. So in keep in mind, like weightlifting is a percent of your, your strength, maybe a percentage of your preference has to do with the strength, but a lot has to do with your technique.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like it’s not output. So like you can, you know, take somebody who has incredible power in their chest and shoulders and triceps and, and, and put them in a bench press competition. But if they’ve been training on some, you know, hammer, strength machine where they don’t have to actually control a bar or yeah, yeah. The drop bar on their face, it’s totally different. Yeah. Right. This is a skill they need to keep that skill wired. Like here’s another one, a sprinter will never go out for a jog. Right. Because it screws up their stride. They want to fire their lower extremities in the same way. They’re running to keep their movement. Perfect.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. Even to the point when they are, when their pace has been reduced, they step off the track and they go, come back, come back in a couple of days because we don’t want it. We don’t want to train you to be slower. We’re training you to be faster. Right. Yeah. That’s it. We had that in football all the time. It’s guys who looked incredibly good that look, we call it, it look like Tarzan played like Jane it’s like guys who would step out on the field who were wait room savages. And then they would come out onto the field and you go, where’s all that strength at it. And it was because they didn’t have the right technique. So to your point, strength is one facet of athletic performance. It’s not the only factor

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. In, in a lot of football through any used to be weights in sort of, they thought, you know, the drills were just not as important as just being strong. And it’s the opposite now. Yeah. In fact, they don’t spend much time strength training at all. It’s skill work all the time. Yeah. A lot of the NFL guys that I’m working with now working with a eight of them that they’re just like, They’re like, I’m so happy. I can do some strength training again, because my strength coach is like, no, we don’t really do that.

Nick Hardwick: Wow. And this and the strength coaches from what you said earlier, and it’s true. And it’s been true forever. They’re scared to get guys hurt because if they get guys hurt, they get fired or done.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s like, yeah, like you work at a warehouse. He crashed a forklift in new, you know, something more than a million dollars. Like they’re like, it’s not for you to go.

Nick Hardwick: That’s enough. Now I look, I love having muscles. Obviously you love having muscles. I feel better. I love working out. It gets the oxygen to that fresh blood to the brain, which is my primary concern at this point is like, stay moving, stay active, stay at a good, healthy weight. That way I can keep going. And my brains firing. So I don’t get dementia. Alzheimer’s because obviously as a football player, that’s being concussed. If he yeah. Six times and 30,000 head hits. So you think about all those and you hear the stories and it’s like, I want to avoid that at all costs. What do I have to do? I got to be at a good weight. I got to take care of my joints. And I have to work out regularly to keep providing a fresh what’d you ask what’d you say

Dr. John Jaquish: Not inflammatory nutrition is good too.

Nick Hardwick: That’s exactly right. We’ll get to that. I want to get your thoughts on nutrition because obviously you don’t one without the others, nothing. So, I mean, I would argue nutrition’s more important than even strength training, but you know, I

Dr. John Jaquish: Stupid means that are like nutrition is 80% of your results or 70% of your results. It’s like, no, nutrition is a hundred percent and training is a hundred percent. They’re two different subjects and you need to have them both. If not, you know, you’re not going to get the results.

Nick Hardwick: Tell people, tell people who are thinking about getting back into a fitness routine. Like, why do they need muscles? Why do they want muscles? Why is getting strong in your mind? Why is it important?

Dr. John Jaquish: Being lean are the two greatest drivers of long life. And they also have a tremendous impact on quality of life. You know, obviously if you’re 80 years old and you can open the pickle jar and move the lawn furniture around and you know, still pick up the grandkids, like you’re really enjoying yourself, but there’s a lot of people who get to retirement age and it brings tears to their eyes to get out of a chair because they were never conditioned. Right. And he screwed up their body doing yard work. And you know, they’re, they’re just, it’s never going to come back. So, you know, maybe the last 20 years of their lives will be miserable.

Nick Hardwick: And that’s, that’s a way that I live my life as like in reverse. It’s when I’m 85, when I’m 95, I don’t want to look back and go, man. I wish I would have done more. I wish I would have eaten better. I wish I would have trained. I wish I would’ve been stronger so I could still be useful and I didn’t have to be hobbling around. And my kids didn’t have to come take care of me. It’s like, if you do all the things today that you’re supposed to, you’re going to have a really long, healthy, fruitful life. And that, that for me is why we eat well, why we train the way we do,

Dr. John Jaquish: Like keeping, you know, your, your partner excited about you. Right. I see guys letting themselves go. And just like, again, I tell them about I’m, I’m brutally honest with everyone. So, you know, I see a guy kind of letting himself go and I’m like, I noticed your wife’s not let herself go. You see a lot of mismatched couples. You see a lot of big fat guys with like wives with six packs. Yeah. She’ll leave. Yeah. You can look at you and you see a disgusting slob. So,

Nick Hardwick: And you’d like to be around people who have the same views that it’s. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I like being around people who, when they look at their day or whatever, it’s like, today’s going to be a great day. Look at all the great stuff I have. And you know, there’s other people that are like, I don’t go to the office. This sucks. Oh yeah, yeah. I can. Can’t be around people.

Nick Hardwick: Those it’s the, it’s the haves too. It’s the have tos versus the get twos. Like the people who take care of themselves, get to do everything that people who don’t take care of themselves. I have to do this. I have to do that. And I have to spend time with my kids or I have to, it’s like, no, dude, you get to, you’re lucky. You’re one of the fortunate ones. You and that’s I think people, people who go ahead.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, I, I just, I, I, every time somebody whines about something like that, I, I can’t take you to the extreme, like, would you rather be in a wheelchair or you don’t want to walk over there? You know, at least you have legs, go talk about legs and tell them your problems. That’s true. Yeah.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. Complete complained to that person. See if they have any empathy towards,

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Well, it’ll change your perspective if you give it a try.

Nick Hardwick: A lot of us think about the positive hormonal effects that exercise insights within the body. How, how can we promote those benefits? How can we maximize the benefits of hormones through exercise?

Dr. John Jaquish: So we know growth hormone is not an anabolic hormone, but it is an anti-cannabis from losing muscle. Yes, it does. It does increase the metabolization of fans of adipose tissue. So stabilization official, yeah. Stabilization firing plus loading can upregulate that to 2000% in moments. In, in fact, me and my co-author Henry ALK higher in 2016, published a meta analysis on the subject, but a stabilization firing and growth hormone regulation. And we were mostly looking at whole body vibration, but there’s a lot of different ways you can get stabilization firing, like lifting heavy with variable resistance. You know, when I’m, when I’m up here in an overhead press, I’m like, you know, my, my core is jacking to keep my body stable. That’s the same thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like the vibratory stimulus doesn’t need to come from something to vibe like your vibration. And as long as those muscles are contracting, not consciously, but subconsciously there’s a growth hormone release. And it’s huge. And so this is part of the reason why I hate saying this, but CrossFit is like, everything’s self stabilized and we’ll see guys get lean. I mean, I don’t see any muscle gain, but, or much, but you do see them dropping body fat really quick. Yes. That stabilization.

Nick Hardwick: Oh, no kidding. Yeah. The only, the only thing that I ha I feel almost compelled to say about CrossFit is like, it’s still one of those things where you’re trading in your longterm joint health for, for a lean body. I mean, it’s just the, the greatest friend to an orthopedic surgeon has been CrossFit in the last decade.

Dr. John Jaquish: We’ll sponsor CrossFit events.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s like, there’s like, you know, like an LA orthopedics, like sponsors it. And I mean, it would be like, you know, a lung cancer, a fun run that was sponsored by like camel cigarettes, like, huh.

Nick Hardwick: It’s just top of mind awareness in case you need your labor and repaired in your hip or your shoulder, we’re here for you. So you would need that rotator cuff fixed.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Because if you’re in the stands and you miss a step that could happen certainly as the athletes. Oh

Nick Hardwick: Goodness. So I love the whole body vibration thing. Now, does that factor into like one of the body plates or one of the, the shakers, like, does that help with growth hormone or is what’s the science say on that?

Dr. John Jaquish: You need to add load it’s worthless, but yeah. Worst investment I ever made was investing in one of those companies. Yeah. It was an owner of, because scientifically I knew they could do provided the right protocol, but people were far more interested in sort of exaggerating the product from other perspectives. And nobody cares about growth hormone. One of the guys I was working with and I’m like, what the ingest? So this is before they regulated injectable growth hormone, that could be prescribed it. Right. And I’m like, that’s a $4 billion industry. You don’t think anyone cares. Huh? You sure? Because like, you clearly haven’t looked into this, your moron. He was. Yeah. So, but yeah. It’s like people didn’t, the companies didn’t see it. And so then.

Dr. John Jaquish: The companies didn’t see it. All the companies in this category didn’t have a scientific understanding. The problem was the original builder of vibration platforms, who understood it very well, is an Italian guy. He’s a researcher and professor at an Italian university, I can’t recall what one. His name was Carmelo Bosco. Then he had kind of an understudy, Marco Cardinale. They were great. They totally understood the product, but it didn’t exist. It was like they built one for testing and then they came out with their own and it was really poorly named. It was an acronym. It was like … I can’t remember, but it was so bad. Like a seven letter acronym, the A-M-H-R-S-I-4. Yeah. You just couldn’t remember it. Obviously, I can’t. It was terrible. They failed and then a bunch of people copied their product, but they weren’t scientists, so they would just say all kinds of totally outrageous medical claims, like alkaline water. People in the alkaline water business for a long time were like, “Oh, it cures cancer.” That kind of, “I can’t tell you what it does for cancer.” Oh dude. No.

Nick Hardwick: Right. There was inaudible.

Dr. John Jaquish: Nothing. In fact, the more alkaline your diet is, the more acid your body makes to get it to neutral.

Nick Hardwick: To try to find balance.

Dr. John Jaquish: Find homeostasis, yeah.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: What? So, so illogical. The body wants a certain pH. Your blood’s going to be a certain pH and your body’s fighting you to get it there if you’re trying to mess with it. Eat your steak, drink your red wine, drink your coffee. It’s all acidic and it doesn’t matter, because your body’s going to fix it all anyway. That was never an axis of disease or dysfunction. Never will be either.

Nick Hardwick: Give me your nutrition. What do you advocate for? Or how do you eat throughout the day, I guess, is what, how I should ask that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Here’s something interesting. I try to get on a lot of mainstream media shows and the problem is they think my approach to nutrition is super extreme. I don’t see it as extreme at all. Not one bit. Because once I learned how much protein the body needs to grow muscle, which everybody should be trying to do, everybody.

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Little ladies should be trying to grow as much muscle as they can and I’ve proven that, much later in life, there’s 50, 60 year old users of X3 Bar resistance band bar system who put on more muscle than they did in their twenties and thirties in a couple of months.

Nick Hardwick: That’s cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s because of the efficiency to stimulus. It’s not magic. I can prove all this. I wrote a book about it. People are like, “Just explain, one or two sentences, how X3 Bar resistance band training system works.” I’m like, “I wrote a 266 page book.”

Nick Hardwick: Boil that down to one sentence.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I actually did. Weight lifting is a waste of time. That’s my thesis.

Nick Hardwick: That’s it?

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t know how helpful that is, but you can read the book. Where was I?

Nick Hardwick: Oh, nutrition, about getting the correct amount of protein, when you know how much protein it takes.

Dr. John Jaquish: You need a gram per pound of body weight. There’s plenty of research on this. That’s a middle of the road recommendation. There are some recommendations that are higher, but they use really crappy protein sources like whey. Whey is only 18% usable by the body because it has all the wrong ratios of essential amino acids, so whey is not very valuable to the body at all.

Nick Hardwick: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. When I reconcile everything, a gram per pound of body weight, a higher quality protein, that makes sense. I would say that-

Nick Hardwick: Is that where you start with protein? When you’re building out a plan you say, “Start with protein and then go from there?” Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s the most important macronutrient. There’s only two macronutrients, because carbohydrates no longer fit the definition. They’re not needed by the body at all for any reason.

Nick Hardwick: No, not for building muscle? No?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. You can hydrate a muscle and you can accelerate growth under certain circumstances. I have a protocol in the book that first you vasodilate before your workout, then you do your workout and then you have a small amount of carbohydrates that’s based on your body weight. Then you stretch. There’s a lot more detail and understanding, but it’s 20 pages it took me to write that in the book.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now that’s a level of permanent muscle growth. That’s to get hyperplasia. There’s plenty of research on this, but it’s never really … you’ve got to stack a couple of things together and use the carbohydrates to basically force in a fluid into the muscle where the muscle, as that fluid is dispersing, has some space to actually divide the muscle cells.

Nick Hardwick: Gotcha. Wow, that’s cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s the only nice thing I can say about carbohydrates. Let me tell you, carbohydrates in nature appear right before it gets cold.

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: They appear at the end of the warm season, before the cold season. Bears give themselves type two diabetes every year before they go into hibernation so that they can get as fat as possible. They gorge themselves so that, when they come out of hibernation, they’re ripping deer apart and eating fish. Then they go to carbohydrates.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah, berries. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Berries, honey. I had a little squirrel trap in my parent’s yard. The idea was, this is a problem with squirrels. As soon as the squirrel’s out you trap them and drive 20 miles away and drop them off, they’ll figure it out. There’s nuts everywhere.

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: We put some peanut butter. Peanut butter is just a sugar shit storm. It’s not ground peanuts for those of you that don’t know. There’s a reason it tastes like a candy bar, because it’s basically a candy bar.

Nick Hardwick: It does taste like candy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Peanuts don’t taste like that. They’re like honey roasted peanuts. They’re just covered in a sugar syrup, glazed in a sugar syrup. That’s why they taste like a candy bar. Anyway, we put some honey, peanut butter to get these squirrels. Before the squirrels could even get to it, we don’t even know … my parent’s yard has this seven, eight foot fence surrounding it. This brown bear somehow gets over this fence, leaps over the fence to eat this peanut butter.

Nick Hardwick: Figured it out.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. We’re backing away like, “Oh my God, there’s a bear the size of a car.” He just hit all the peanut butter and we went inside, because we didn’t want him to think we were food.

Nick Hardwick: To eat you too, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Nick Hardwick: That makes sense. Go ahead.

Dr. John Jaquish: Carbohydrates exist to get you fat when getting fat would be an advantage. Going into the winter, the more adipose tissue you have, the better survival you have, for two reasons. One, you can live off of it if you can’t find food. You can go for a year without food if you have the fat-

Nick Hardwick: It’s been done before. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Done before. Second thing is that the more layers you have in the subcutaneous, it protects you from cold.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. That makes sense. I would argue that type two diabetes is not a dysfunction, it’s a function designed to protect you. We just stay … humans, well, a large percentage of humans stay in a diabetic state for 20 straight years and that’s why they’re dying. It doesn’t weaken your immune system as quickly as the bears are doing it, but when you’ve been in that state for 20 years, well, you’re in trouble. No inaudible is looking at that.

Nick Hardwick: Right. Yeah. Your system is-

Dr. John Jaquish: The COVID people, 94% of the deaths associated with COVID, there was comorbidities, meaning they had type two diabetes and heart failure. Really you can look at the death rate and cross off 94% as they really died because they were dysfunctional.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. I read even, it was 2.6 comorbidities on average for the 94% of deaths. 2.6 on average. It’s not just one, we’re talking four.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. They all kind of go hand-in-hand. Heart disease and diabetes are … it’s a two for one.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You eat like you’re an unsupervised child and then you get both. Lucky you.

Nick Hardwick: Yes. Unhealthy is unhealthy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah, it turns out. Protein, you’re out on carbs, what about fiber? What’s your source of fiber?

Dr. John Jaquish: I think two Instagram posts ago I posted the research and I put a quote of the conclusion. There is no reason the body needs fiber in any amount whatsoever, ever. The logic of fiber is it gets things moving in the digestive system, but if your toilet’s plugged up and then you throw a towel, a hand towel in your toilet and flush the toilet 20 times, look at the logic of that. Let’s put particulate matter in something that’s plugged up because that’ll get it broken loose. Really? That doesn’t make sense.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. What about gut microbiome and all of that? Feeding the prebiotic, probiotic, feeding the good gut microbiome?

Dr. John Jaquish: Basically the micro … well, we know very little about the microbiome and I hear a lot of people who are kind of … what will I call them? Science evangelists, but not really scientists.

Nick Hardwick: Got you. Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean Dave Asprey would fit in that category and he’s a very smart guy, so I’m not putting these people down at all, but I hear a lot of those type of people talking a lot about microbiomes and I’m sitting there going, “We know next to nothing about the human microbiome. Before we start making health decisions based on some metric that we pulled out of that, let’s not.” It just doesn’t make sense. We don’t know. We know the fungus in our gut is bad, candida. What does candida eat? Carbohydrates. That has a lot to do with appetite, so when you’re eating sugar all the time.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You need to eat more.

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: The candida effects ghrelin and leptin, which are the two hormones that tell you you’re full. If you’re never full and you’re always hungry, well there you go. That’s the one thing that we know about the microbiome. All this other stuff is just total guesswork.

Dr. John Jaquish: I met one guy, top of the field in microbiome research. He was explaining how he did an analysis on a celebrity athlete, who I also won’t name. “His microbiome was just awful. He was so unhealthy and everything was wrong.” I know a little bit about his business, it’s not my field, but I know that we know almost nothing about it. I was like, “Well specifically what?” He stops and he says, “Well we don’t really know the very specifics.” I’m like, “You don’t know anything.” The field, not you. Everybody in your field is barely scratching the surface of what different … I think there’s something like a million times more DNA. Again, it’s not my field, I could be getting this wrong, it could be 10 million, I don’t know. I think a million times more DNA in the various bacteria in our guts than there is in the actual human cells. We’ll be mapping this stuff out, we may be dead, old men.

Nick Hardwick: 10 lifetimes. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, a lifetime.

Nick Hardwick: It’s like outer space.

Dr. John Jaquish: Not tomorrow. I love how everybody thinks we can come up with a good vaccine tomorrow. It’s like, okay, AIDS is a virus, we’ve been waiting on that vaccine for 40 years.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Any day now.

Nick Hardwick: Still waiting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. The cold, we’ve been waiting for that one for a hundred.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. It’s not coming.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible. We’re going to get a vaccine. Okay.

Nick Hardwick: Back to the nutrition, give me your day, a day in the life.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve got to give you a week, because my day-

Nick Hardwick: Okay, cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: On a day that I’m eating, I will do two, three pounds of meat in one meal.

Nick Hardwick: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right now, and I detail this in the book, how and why, but it’s really the … the one meals I do get a fasted benefit. Satiation is great at that one meal and then I get to really satiate and feel super before I go to bed. You grow at night anyway.

Nick Hardwick: When you’re resting. Rest and repair.

Dr. John Jaquish: Three of the references in the book, three of the studies that I talk about … yeah, when you’re sleeping, which is why you should never compromise on sleep. I know guys who lift and they get four hours of sleep and they’re like, “Well, I’m tougher than everybody else. This is what I do.” Yeah, no, no.

Nick Hardwick: Bad idea. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You cannot out-frame a need to sleep. You really want to get a decent night’s sleep, which is why I’m not a big fan of alcohol.

Nick Hardwick: I’m not either. I don’t drink. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I do, just to be social.

Nick Hardwick: Social, yeah. Somebody offered me a drink the other day. I had family over for a birthday and somebody was like, “Hey, you want one of these?” “Yeah, sure. I’ll take it.” Then I have a couple of sips and I carry it around and it’s like, yeah, it’s fine. Just not to be awkward or whatever. Normally I find a place to put it down once I’m out of sight. It’s like, got to move on.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Hardwick: It just doesn’t seem to be moving in the right direction for me.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Putting it down is a great idea. On the days I don’t eat, which is … right now, first I was doing one meal every 48 hours. I did that for a little bit, which emulated a study that I thought was incredible. That actually showed an anabolic spike when you go 48 hours and then eat a meal. Your body’s just been dying to grow and you grow even more.

Nick Hardwick: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. I show how that works in the book. One of the things I get accused of with the book, and you can read all the negative reviews, “This is just a commercial for X3 portable gym.” It’s 266 pages and 32 pages talk about X3 resistance bands system. The rest is about the stuff we’re talking about now.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Stupid comment.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah, yeah. People are crazy. People are crazy and people are mad and it’s just a wild … we’re in this, yeah, just tear people down. That’s what we’re really into.

Dr. John Jaquish: The people who spend a lot of time online, that’s true. Normal people aren’t like that. Successful people aren’t like that. If everyone was like that, we’d still be living in caves.

Nick Hardwick: That’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Those are the losers. I was doing 48s because of that anabolic acceleration and now I’m doing a 72 hour block where I get more autophagy, more cellular recycling, so old cells getting-

Nick Hardwick: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: … cannibalized. I’m doing that once a week to see if I can get better results and I have been thus far.

Nick Hardwick: How is cell autophagy measured? I hear it all the time, but how’s it measured? How do you know?

Dr. John Jaquish: You can’t.

Nick Hardwick: You can’t measure it? Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Unfortunately.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well I mean I have my fraternity letters branded on my arm.

Nick Hardwick: A little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ll get the light. Just right there. That brand, if you look back in my Instagram a year-and-a-half, that thing was raised, stuck out. It was embossed lettering on my arm.

Nick Hardwick: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: My fraternity was very serious. Then, as soon as I started fasting like this, all the scars on my body started disappearing. That’s autophagy. There’s no other explanation. It’s getting protein from unused cells, protein cells in the body. I had a scar here from a motorcycle crash, riding a motorcycle without a helmet. I was 14, a dirt bike, just doing dumb little tricks as some kids do. It came out from underneath me and bang, I just hit my head on the asphalt. It was down to the bone, it was bad. It always felt like it was like a little wire stitched in here. I’d have girlfriends touch my face and be like, “What the hell is under your skin?” I’m like … it’s underneath so you don’t generally see it, but they’d be like, “Oh, that’s the worst scar I’ve ever felt.” Yeah. I can feel it, but no one else can.

Nick Hardwick: It’s remarkable.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nick Hardwick: You’re able to maintain your size?

Dr. John Jaquish: You do not lose mass when you fast. You lose mass when you calorically restrict. When you calorically restrict, your body thinks that’s the new normal, you won’t be able to get more food. It’s going to make adjustments based on the environment so that you can thrive off of far less calories.

Nick Hardwick: It’s going to make you smaller.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It up-regulates cortisol long-term. An up-regulation of cortisol short-term, any exercise up-regulates cortisol and also there’s no such thing as a bad hormone. I read articles all the time written by fitness people that are like, “Growth hormone is the good hormone. Cortisol is the bad one.” Your body doesn’t make hormones that are trying to screw you up. It’s like your body just decided to poison you one day, really? You think that’s a thing? It’s terrible. Totally made up. Or it’s a misread of the science. We know a lot of the fitness industry doesn’t absorb science at all, so it never really happens. Some of these things are established for 40 years. Cortisol, when your calorically restricting, goes up and stays there. Cortisol does two things. It gets rid of muscle and protects body fat, so you keep body fat longer. It’s keeping you fatter longer. Cortisol, here’s another thing I’ve heard. People who try and reconcile what I’m saying, they say, “Cortisol makes you fat.” That’s an oversimplification. Oversimplification is another word for wrong.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And an over simplification is another word for wrong.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, you have a lot of trouble losing body fat. In fact, it may be impossible at certain levels to metabolize body fat and in use as fuel when you have high levels of cortisol and also growth hormone, cortisol seem very inversely related. So when you clinically restrict your cortisol goes up, your growth hormone goes down, so you’re losing muscle. You may be losing some body fat too depending on the deficit and was this got to get the fuel from somewhere.

Dr. John Jaquish: But when you have no calories or not enough to trigger the fasted state to be stopped, something very different happens, your body does not look for a new homeostasis because obviously getting zero calories is not something the body can adjust to because that’d be death. So the body it keeps you stronger, growth hormone and suppresses cortisol. So you go from just fat becomes the fuel.

Nick Hardwick: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you preserve all your muscle presumably, because you’ve got to work harder to get your meal. You got to chase down that water buffalo or whatever. You can’t make you weak when you get hungry otherwise, it’s a death sentence if you got to chase your dinner now.

Nick Hardwick: So when you’re eating every 72 hours, you’re not eating three days worth of calories or are you? Are you eating three days worth of calories? Are you eating at one meal?

Dr. John Jaquish: Then I eat after?

Nick Hardwick: Yes, yeah when you break the fast?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, just one day’s worth.

Nick Hardwick: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. crosstalk I mean, I also don’t count calories. So…

Nick Hardwick: Well you don’t have to.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or like sometimes I’ll go to a restaurant the only thing they’ll say, “what are we known for the rib eye?” And I’m like, “I love rib eye, but it’s loaded with fat.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s hard for me to get my protein from a ribeye without going into core surplus. So on a day like that, it’s all right, but a caloric deficit while overfeeding protein keeps you very anabolic.

Nick Hardwick: Okay, yup.

Dr. John Jaquish: And about studies on that, Jose Antonio was involved in two of them and he’s out of Florida state, he’s a very smart guy. And he can distill things probably even better than me.

Nick Hardwick: And that’s where the science has leaned towards. If you have enough protein in your body, while in a caloric deficit, you can maintain, or even some people would say, I guess science may say you can even build muscle while on a caloric deficit.

Dr. John Jaquish: It is true but yeah, so we don’t know. There hasn’t been one of those studies done looking specifically at cortisol, which I’d like to see somebody do. I wouldn’t be inaudible Like nutrition is not my field.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s just very careful. Everything we say about nutrition, like any of the statements that are conclusionary at all I’m referencing another study. So you have no background in nutrition you shouldn’t be talking about it. I’m like, all I’m telling you about is existing research. And being a biomedical engineer, my job is really to analyze data and research, having to do with biology so, that is my background. But….

Nick Hardwick: Give me the subtitle of the book because it’s Weightlifting is a Waste of Time and so as cardio. What about I think a lot of people would be interested in this tell me about the cardio part being a waste.

Dr. John Jaquish: So cardio is a little like caloric deficit. Your central nervous system is an engineering team. You ever see the pits at a formula one race?

Nick Hardwick: Oh yeah we’re watching it every Sunday.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, you’re an F1 fan, I am too.

Nick Hardwick: Oh yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Hardly any Americans. It’s the best motor sport.

Nick Hardwick: Oh, it’s so awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m so happy for stopping this year. And I’m happy for Honda he’s got the Honda…

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: And Honda’s got the least reason to produce a great engine in that sport.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And whereas like Ferrari and Mercedes…

Nick Hardwick: Ferrari’s getting killed.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re doing terrible killed.

Nick Hardwick: They’re getting killed.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, so why is cardio a problem? So cardio is a problem because again, cortisol secretion like that engineering team, the guys in the pits, your central nervous system, they’re in the pits and they’re rebuilding your car and making adjustments you are your car. They’re making adjustments all the time to make you better for the environment. You know so sometimes guys pull into the pits and they change the type of tire they’re using.

Dr. John Jaquish: You know, they go from hard to soft or whatever the track or it’s too hot. And the tires are blistering, things like that. So what your body does is given an environment, it’s going to change based on the stresses of that environment. So if you put the body in a situation where you need to go on distances, you basically need to become an economy car. What does your central nervous system do?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it makes the frame lighter and the frame is bone so you lose bone density. So your chassis is weaker now can a weaker chassis support a more powerful muscle? No, it cannot. You don’t want the muscle breaking the bone so cortisol again is secreted so that you lose muscle mass and you also preserve more body fat because you want more fuel to take you further. So you basically you lose muscle, you lose bone, but you keep all the body fat.

Nick Hardwick: All right, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and this has been known for 40 years, yet the fitness industry has never picked up on it.

Nick Hardwick: That’s amazing, yeah. crosstalk Well, that’s good news for a lot of people.

Dr. John Jaquish: The conclusion of the book, it really looks at like people are going to be upset by a lot of this information because it’s very different and you know..

Nick Hardwick: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Emotionally tied to issues that…

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: …Logical about, so they shouldn’t do that, but they’re going to anyway. And like, you need to look at the fitness industry. The fitness industry is probably the most failed human endeavor. Like who really looks like I can give you an anecdotal sort of way of looking at it. Like, who looks like a professional athlete, pretty much professional athletes and that’s about it.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re at the beach and somebody walks by and you’re like, “wow.”

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, is that one in a hundred people? No, it’s probably more like one in 10,000. So one in 10,000 really creates something impressive, maybe one in a thousand look pretty good, but the one in a hundred, top one percentile of leanness or percentage body fat, which is a great number because that considers muscularity, the more muscular you are your body fat is going to go down.

Nick Hardwick: Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s your total body weight. The leanest males in the United States are 10.9% body fat.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not impressive.

Nick Hardwick: That’s not that impressive, no.

Dr. John Jaquish: No that’s like, maybe you can see your top abs.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. That’s pretty normal.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. That’s inaudible I would think like a regular guy, but that’s the top one inaudible . Like the gym not working, inaudible not working. It’s like, I would say given that, that statistic right there so that means that the gym industry has a 99% failure rate.

Nick Hardwick: That’s crazy.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think, yeah. crosstalk industry. What if you know, the mutual fund industry lost 99% of everybody’s money.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah they’d be out of business.

Dr. John Jaquish: Would anybody want to go buy mutual funds? Nick Hardwick: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, it would be a profound failure.

Nick Hardwick: Yup.

Dr. John Jaquish: 99% of people based on the model I presented fail at fitness, even one in six males over the age of 18 have used anabolic steroids, but 17%.

Nick Hardwick: Wow. It’s still failure.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible You currently use or have used anabolic steroids yet only the top 1% achieves a kind of pathetic level of fitness. So even the steer users are failing.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not like the people on the internet thing like, they think everybody who’s bigger than them take steroids.

Nick Hardwick: That’s true Doc. Hey,

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible Allows them to think that they’re like they are the peak performance.

Nick Hardwick: If I knocked you down, I feel good. So the fitness industry is failing because the constructs are outdated or not working.

Dr. John Jaquish: Fitness industry is failing, because there’s two reasons the nutrition industry is really like the anti nutrition industry. Nabisco, wants everybody to be a vegan. Now why they don’t sell vegetables? Well, Nabisco knows vegans, don’t eat vegetables, they eat cookies and cake and vegan ice cream and all kinds of little delicious nut bars that have nuts shipped from every continent on earth burning billions of gallons of fuel doing so. These morons think they’re saving the world because they’re not eating animals. But you know, I mean, they’re creating inaudible

Nick Hardwick: Was that you who just was that you who just had a recent post on that, there was somebody that I saw on Instagram that was talking about the amount of carbon emissions and fuel taken by the meat industry and the amount taken by it.

Dr. John Jaquish: It wasn’t me.

Nick Hardwick: But it was there’s more

Dr. John Jaquish: Or inaudible I guess,

Nick Hardwick: Yes yeah. I think it was.

Dr. John Jaquish: They love pointing that out it’s like yeah, your cute little nut bar that saves all the animals by the way, like billions of animals are destroyed every year for the sake of farming, knots, fruits, and vegetables nobody was talking about that. There’s just as many lives destroyed farming vegetables as there are farming animals, which brings you back to sort of like the basic intelligence of an expanding species is going to take resources from all other species. If for no other reason, just habitat, like more habitat make up the lesser is for animals.

Nick Hardwick: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now we can have our own animals like cows. And you know, when they get to the end of a life cycle or they reach maturity, like let’s turn them into burgers, yeah.

Nick Hardwick: Make them useful.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like so that’s the symbiotic relationship we can have with animals. Like we’re just the apex predator that’s the way it works. And sorry, but like everything inaudible.

Nick Hardwick: And you don’t feel bad about that.

Dr. John Jaquish: You want to plant a garden what do you need in it? Bone meal, ground up bones does that come from not death? You know like these people just they see one tenth of the story. Now living in California and we got a lot of coal burning…

Nick Hardwick: Power.

Dr. John Jaquish: And people plugged their electric car in and they’re like “look at me, I’m saving the world.” And I’m like|” yeah!" Except not at all because coal provided that or the wind mills that have a couple of truckloads of dead birds every day like Eagles fly into those windmills, right.

Nick Hardwick: And the amount of power currently where we’re at with the way they build these cars, the amount of power and emissions, it takes simply to build a factory to build these batteries. It’s not to the point yet where…..

Dr. John Jaquish: Google……

Nick Hardwick: …it’s efficient.

Dr. John Jaquish: ….oil rig and then google, lithium mine, a lithium mine is just like a crater in the earth that nothing will ever grow in ever.

Nick Hardwick: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, it’s destruction. Yeah just like I hear the term from some of these environmental extremists raping the planet. If you want to see rape in the planet, check out where batteries come from.

Nick Hardwick: Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, I’ll check it out.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, there’s no way around it like I said, like he’s grows, there’s competing resources. We’re going to take the resources we need and that’s going to hurt something else and there’s no way around it. So but it also, the same is true` like if there’s a population explosion of deer, it’s screwing up the ecosystem for all kinds of other animals.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But then there’s, there’s a balancing cycle though, because then the wolves and coyote and bears will eat a lot of the deer and then they’ll have a population explosion. So like there’s checks and balances in nature. That’s imbalances. Again, I consider myself somebody who is very environmentally aware, like we do need sustainable farming. It’s called cows with grass that they graze on that’s got a rootstock that goes eight feet deep. You know inaudible

Nick Hardwick: Yes, I learned about that we had an awesome episode with Anya Fernandel that’s her name, she runs Belcampo meat company, which is up in northern California. They got a 26,000 acre farm, right at the base of Mt. Shasta and it’s all regenerative farming. And you talked about the grass going down and how much carbon that sequesters out of the year and how much net positive is happening. Because of that.

Dr. John Jaquish: People don’t realize that at all.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: As you drive the healthier plants get, but you know, they don’t get that.

Nick Hardwick: Right yeah that’s a correlation that I actually haven’t heard either.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah that’s great.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah and that crazy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah I mean, it’s just not worth dwelling on.

Nick Hardwick: Last, how how’s the business going? How’s X3 going and yeah where can people learn more?

Dr. John Jaquish: So the business is going amazing.

Nick Hardwick: Great.

Dr. John Jaquish: Waste of time is a number one best seller…

Nick Hardwick: Congrats.

Dr. John Jaquish: …in bigger categories so like, somebody can like get a number one best seller in like the category of gardening tool buyer’s guides.

Nick Hardwick: You can go down into the, like the tiny minucius category.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like, we did win a couple of those. Like we’re in like we won like quick workouts and we were number one in like ab workouts and, and fitness for the elderly, I don’t know how we got that.

Nick Hardwick: Okay, cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: We’re number one in weight training, we’re number one in fitness and exercise.

Nick Hardwick: Nice.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah that’s the overarching one over all the fitness.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So like, yeah.

Nick Hardwick: Which does it does tell you what you were saying earlier. It’s like, what people have been doing is not working for them. crosstalk They’re searching,

Dr. John Jaquish: Not like just internet dogmatic, angry people who think that wearing their hats sideways means they’re muscular. Just as much as an NFL player means that they’re the same.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah, pretty much.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think of waste, you’re not the same. So yeah the fitness kind of like typical fitness commenters And by that, I mean like the people that have like all day long to post online, they’re really lousy people, inaudible comments and on the misspelled words. When I probably saw a hundred different comments about in regards to just the title of the book cause I mean, I got troll comments before the book was even out. So they couldn’t have, so your Y-O-U-R.

Nick Hardwick: Oh no.

Dr. John Jaquish: H-I, your high juice.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible V-R-E-H-I-G-H. So two word posts, both words were spelled wrong. I mean.

Nick Hardwick: A hundred percent error rate.

Dr. John Jaquish: All the right, nobody. Also like, look at where the fitness information is. Like, where are the two biggest places for fitness information, Instagram pictures, YouTube video these people are lit.

Nick Hardwick: Oh yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, they can just look at pictures of videos. They’d probably have to sound out the words. Like I don’t understand that’s why that’s not even our market. So these clowns can come in and complain and throw tantrums. They just adult babies, I guess but it’s just like, I’m not even targeting the CEO like you weren’t invited to this party it’s cool you came not so cool that you like didn’t read a word of anything and you act like you’ve got it all figured out.

Nick Hardwick: Right, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. So we just get rid of these clowns crosstalk idiots.

Nick Hardwick: Yeah. crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: We get endorsements. There’s more and more endorsements on like YouTube or on the website like somebody’s a doctor from NASA, Sean Baker got the Miami heat, Ben Greenfield, like some really, really highly intelligent, knowledgeable sports performance figures. But you know, the guy with the sideways hat, he knows more.

Nick Hardwick: Oh yeah, bro science, crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: No science. And you know, like also like my favorite study, like ever is the Dunning Kruger study from 1999 Dunning Kruger in what did determined was that the least, and it wasn’t just based on IQ it was based on some different tests having to do with just capability. So it was cross-referencing capability versus your ability to judge your work. So the least competent people, the people who like fuck everything up were most confident in their work.

Dr. John Jaquish: They thought they were the best. Like when they score themselves, they’re like," Oh yeah, I’m a genius. I totally know this." This is even funnier. The most intelligent people had the most doubt in their work.

Nick Hardwick: That’s unbelievable.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like do you know what you know, sometimes you know what you don’t know, but if you know what you don’t know, then you’re really stupid. And this is no, the it’s on the far end or the unintelligent. They don’t know what they don’t know so they think they know everything.

Nick Hardwick: That’s dangerous.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right in the Dunning Kruger study explains the angry internet commoners. And you know, you can really paint a clear picture when you look at like political comments.

Nick Hardwick: Oh goodness gracious.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like some of the most extreme people you’re like, you don’t understand how economics works. Actually, you don’t understand how math works.

Nick Hardwick: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Just tracking these people are so dumb and crosstalk.

Nick Hardwick: That’s painful.

Dr. John Jaquish: Evangelizing how this country ought to be run. And it’s like these are people who would earn $5 spend 15 and then blame somebody else for that situation. They’re like, well, I didn’t overspend. Like they don’t understand.

Nick Hardwick: It doesn’t compute.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, and so that’s Dunning Kruger. And I think that’s a lot of what you see in internet commenters, in fitness and nutrition they don’t understand the words they’re using, but they are sure that they’re experts.

Nick Hardwick: Doc this was awesome. I really enjoyed spending some time with you and picking your brain and like you said you’re a market disruptor. I think it’s fun for some conventional wisdom to be dumped on its head and to think critically and I think the book does a great job of that and I think inaudible yeah, and you do a great job of it so thank you for the time. And thank you for sharing your knowledge with us.

Dr. John Jaquish: Nicholas thanks. This was fun.

Nick Hardwick: All right. Thank you. All right, brother. Bye-bye.