Serious Growth Podcast #78 - John Jaquish

John Jaquish, PhD. has spent years researching and developing improved approaches to health. He is the inventor of the most effective bone density building medical technology which is now partnered with Tony Robbins and OsteoStrong for rapid clinic deployment. Inventor of X3 Bar exercise band bar system, a technology that is proven to develop muscle much faster than conventional weight lifting, all with the lowest risk of joint injury, Dr. Jaquish methods are used in training the world’s most elite athletes and associations such as the entire Miami Heat organization, various NFL and NBA players, as well as Olympians.

Full Transcript

Leo Costa Jr: You are now listening to the Serious Growth Podcast with your host Leo Costa Jr.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, your assistant’s calling me.

Leo Costa Jr.: Oh okay. Tell her to stop bugging you.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m gonna shut my phone off. It was a great reminder, she actually assisted me.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, I reached out to Phil because I’d like to do a, after this podcast, I’d like to do a three-way with you, Phil and myself.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Leo Costa Jr.: I think that’d be great.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’d be great..

Leo Costa Jr.: Where do you live?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well I live, unfortunately at the moment in the People’s Republic of San Francisco.

Leo Costa Jr.: Oh my goodness.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m getting out of there real fast.

Leo Costa Jr.: Are you? You going to move to Texas or one of those states?

Dr. John Jaquish: I haven’t quite made of my mind yet. My business is a California business, so I can’t… We make most of the parts, of at least X3 Bar resistance band training system… Now the OsteoStrong medical devices are a little more complicated, they’re all over the place. But it’s better for me to stay in California. So I got some options, but it’s amazing how San Francisco is so much worse when it comes to just sort of tyranny type behavior and neighbors telling on each other for not wearing masks in their backyard.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, LA’s not much better.

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Leo Costa Jr.: I don’t know if you know where I’m… I’m looking in the Central Valley, and compared to LA and San Francisco, we’re conservative. But yeah, you go down in the LA, I spent a lot of time down there obviously when I was training with Gold and at Gold’s Gym and it’s a different animal, it’s kind of sad actually.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s terribly sad what has happened.

Leo Costa Jr.: It really is and then all the stuff that’s going on, I don’t know. I hope this thing straightens out pretty soon but I keep telling people if the election was yesterday this would all be gone or most of it would be gone.

Dr. John Jaquish: I tell people coronavirus hands on November 4th.

Leo Costa Jr.: It ends on November 4th, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, unfortunately with San Francisco a lot of the policies are long-term. I mean like giving alcohol and marijuana to homeless…

Leo Costa Jr.: Holy shit.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, is that going to make things better? It’s substance abuse problems.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah I know.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s their biggest issue.

Leo Costa Jr.: You’ve heard of that that expression, ruth is stranger than fiction.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Leo Costa Jr.: We’re there.

Dr. John Jaquish: We are there.

Leo Costa Jr.: This is so weird. Like you can’t even… And now it’s so damn blatant and transparent it’s like oh shit, and so many of them buying it.

Dr. John Jaquish: And the elected officials in San Francisco, it’s like their policy fails and then they double down on it.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah. I guess this is what you’re supposed to do, I don’t know.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Leo Costa Jr.: Brutal.

Dr. John Jaquish: It doesn’t make sense to me.

Leo Costa Jr.: Did you tell me, when we talked earlier on the phone before the podcast a while back, that you bought serious growth when you were in seventh grade?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Leo Costa Jr.: Holy crap.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, white cover, picture of Tom Platz, black and white, on the front.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah. It’s amazing. I’ve been in all these years and sometimes. I don’t know, maybe you feel this way too now because you’ve invented a bunch of stuff and people are using your products, but it’s really humbling when, for me anyway, when I run into somebody that, like yourself, who purchased this thing when you’re in the seventh grade. I mean, I knew the products that we wrote back then were a big hit, but I didn’t really understand how it impacted so many people. I think that you’re probably going to see the same thing with your products.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I already have.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, no question about it.

Dr. John Jaquish: People have been using X3 workout bar system for three years and they send me transformation pictures that are life-changing, totally life-changing. And I think that fitness is such a strange industry like we’ve known for 40 years that cardiovascular exercise increases cortisol, which promotes the sacrifice of muscular tissue and the storage of body fat. So it gives people exactly the opposite that they want, and that they think they’re getting. This research has been out for 40 years. So why doesn’t the fitness industry understand this? Why don’t they talk about it? So my point is, there’s a couple of things out there I think Arthur Jones wrote some things, I think Mike Mentzer wrote some things, I think there was one book he wrote that was just so hard to follow.

Leo Costa Jr.: Mike was a… Did you ever meet Mike?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, I never did.

Leo Costa Jr.: Well, I tell you I did, and I got to know him kind of well. He’s kind of hard to get the know anyway.

Dr. John Jaquish: I bet.

Leo Costa Jr.: I think he was a genius.

Dr. John Jaquish: No doubt about it.

Leo Costa Jr.: And I think that all the craziness went along with that. But I met him, and he’s a boy he was a tough one.

Dr. John Jaquish: But I mean, other than what I just mentioned, what have been like the important things that we’ve discovered? Nothing.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, not much.

Dr. John Jaquish: And I refer to the fitness as the most failed human endeavor. If you think about like who actually looks like they exercise? It really looks impressive. Male or female, is it 1% of the population? Maybe one tenth of 1% of the population?

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, not very many.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, and the attitude… I think the people that are a little more thoughtful in their comments when you say, Well, why don’t you exercise?’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t know.’ I know a lot of people that exercise and they look terrible. They don’t look like anything. So I can look like I don’t exercise by not exercising. That’s what I’m doing.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, save the energy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, and so there’s so little understanding. And also, we do this with so many subjects like nobody wants to know how their iPhone works, they just want it to work, right? And so it’s like, there’s no instructions that come with an iPhone. You just get it, you turn it on, you go. That’s not how fitness really is, because it’s the human body. And if you don’t understand what’s happening in the human body, you’re going to screw something up. You’re going to get something wrong, you’re going to end up, and I’m not even exaggerating here, I read somewhere somebody saying, ‘I’m doing a hybrid between the South Beach Diet which says carbohydrates are good, and the Keto Diet which says fats are good, and so all I eat is cheese pizza.’ This is not even a joke, it’s just like wow. You don’t even know what to say, and people tend to not want to understand, they just want bullet points. And then on top of that, they want what they want to hear. Sort of like people who watch the news, they don’t like they don’t want to watch the news that tells them the truth, they want to watch the news that tells them their truth, which is really bullshit. Yeah, there is no such thing as your truth, there is the truth and then the shit you want to believe.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re rarely the same.

Leo Costa Jr.: Unfortunately this, what you’re saying, applies to a lot of the trainers that are out there, most of them are fake as far as I’m concerned. Because they’re exactly what you’re talking about, they don’t know the why of why the fuck that you should be doing certain things.

Dr. John Jaquish: No idea.

Leo Costa Jr.: It blows my mind and I guess at some point, I had a podcast with somebody that said, ‘Well eventually this pendulum will swing,’ but I don’t know about, where it’ll correct itself.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think there needs to be a catalyst. I think Dr. Baker, Shawn Baker, he’s been on your podcast.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, great guy.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s one of the guys that, and he and I are good friends, like me, is sort of like no, fuck you, you need to understand this. Don’t just say meat is good and then…

Leo Costa Jr.: Not tell me why.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. And then have a key lime pie after you’re done with your small steak and then think, ‘I’m carnivore, I’m all set, I don’t even need to learn anything>‘ Information about the human body that’s worth learning doesn’t fit in a little internet meme, it doesn’t fit a tiny little quote, it’s more complicated than that.

Leo Costa Jr.: Definitely.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you’ve got to learn why. And anybody that reads his book or Dr. Paul Saladino’s book, by the way, you need to have him on your show too. It’s just, you got to understand why these nutrition decisions are the right decisions to make. If you read the text, it’s like, oh, well this is obvious. But you need to understand it. There’s nothing wrong with understanding something, it’s a few hours of your time.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, do you remember a guy named Don Ross, The Ripper Ross.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Leo Costa Jr.: Don Ross, he was a wrestler.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah.

Leo Costa Jr.: He wrote a lot of mags back in the late ’80s, early ’90s. He passed on, but I got to know Don pretty well and he said something that people say stuff along the way that makes sense. And he said, ‘Everything works to a degree but it’s to the degree that it works.’ I thought that was kind of interesting information. And then I believe now, from being in the sport as long as I was in bodybuilding, that if you really want to know how nutrition and training works, and if you’re dealing with somebody who’s a student of the game, which I think that I’ve become, then that’s the person that you want to ask as to what’s really going on. Because we try everything, our bodies are our lab experiment. And we really start finding… There’s guys out there, John, the bodybuilders, they just want somebody else to tell them what to do and what to take, and they never learn it from that perspective, so they don’t know. Even though they become…

Dr. John Jaquish: As soon as they hit a stumbling block, they don’t know what to do.

Leo Costa Jr.: They don’t know what to do.

Dr. John Jaquish: They don’t understand anything.

Leo Costa Jr.: Right. And then of course, like Einstein said, he said, ‘Real knowledge is through experience,’ and my dad used to say in a different way. It’s hard to replace first-hand experience and when you go through that, you really learn it at that level. And that’s what’s missing in the industry and it has been for a long time, as far as I’m concerned, the whole time I’ve been in it. I think it’s a little bit worse now with social media, personally but…

Dr. John Jaquish: I completely agree. Social media is training people to have ADD.

Leo Costa Jr.: That’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: We need to be better at focusing on one thing, not jumping between 100 things and not understanding anything of what we see. I see people that’ll make comments on social media posts, and it’s clear by their comment that they didn’t even read the post, like read the caption. They don’t even know what they’re looking at. They’re so impatient, they want to shoot their mouth off so bad, they don’t even understand the subject that they’re discussing before they claim to be an expert on it.

Leo Costa Jr.: Of course. John, what is your PhD in?

Dr. John Jaquish: Biomedical engineering.

Leo Costa Jr.: Biomedical engineering. Okay, now on your bio here, you said you spent years researching and developing improved approaches to health. Can you describe that a little bit for us?

Dr. John Jaquish: So the first thing I did was really based on my mother’s osteoporosis. My mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis and she didn’t want to take the medications and I understood why when I read some of the side effects. And I’m not anti-pharma but I’m in favor of people learning what they’re putting in their body and after she learned that and I in turn learned it, I thought okay, let’s see if you can avoid this. And so what I said is, there doesn’t seem to be like they say things, and this was when she was diagnosed it’s like 14 years ago now, physical activity is great for bone health. Well yeah, my mom played tennis, my mom was super athletic, she would go on 20 mile hikes. Clearly hat recommendation is either lacking in specificity or it’s just wrong. Which is it? So I’m gonna go find out. So I told her, I said, ‘Look, there’s probably a group of people out there somewhere that have super high bone density and I’m gonna find them, and I’m going to find out why, what they did, and then we’ll we’ll apply that to you.’

Because I looked at porosity of the bone, well, this only happens because of disuse. And okay disuse, well how do we use the bone to such a high degree, we trigger the growth of it? And so within days of starting a literature review, I found that group, I found the outliers. And the outliers were gymnasts. Gymnasts because of the high impact they go through, the rate at which they hit the ground, they get 10 times their body weight through their hip joint.

Leo Costa Jr.: Holy crap.

Dr. John Jaquish: Nobody squats 10 times their body weight. So it was a very unique loading experience, very brief but very powerful, and they have the highest bone density in the world by far because of the impact. Now, they also get injured all the time from impact. There’s a reason gymnasts retire, on average, at 19 years old. So telling my mother to go out for gymnastics was not the right thing to do. But what I told her was, I’m going to develop a physical therapy, physical medicine type device, or series of devices, that are going to be able to give you the benefit of high impact without risks of injury, of fracture. And so that’s what I did and that’s now called OsteoStrong.

I mean these aren’t home devices they’re over $100,000, and they go in a clinic. But they’re robotic and they have a computer screen in front of you that shows your previous bone density performance and then today’s bone density performance and it’s really a functional bone test where you’re putting pressure on an axis, so from end to end on a bone, how much force can I pinch the bone with. And it’s voluntary, so it’s your own comfort that’s your guide. So you drink too many vasoconstrictors and you have some joint irritation, too much coffee kind of thing, you’re not gonna do as well as a day that you’re a little more balanced. So it’s very simple straightforward, the franchise clinic is called OsteoStrong. There’s one near Venice Beach. So if you want to check that out.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, so this machine that you’re talking about, is this something that… Okay, if you could paint maybe a clear picture for me. Is it somewhere that you put on each end of your body and then do you have a switch that you’re creating pressure?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. What you do is, see if you can still get the audio. If I’m going to trip and fall, I mean, and you rarely plan to trip and fall, but if you have to trip and fall, you’re going to get your arms out in front of you like this. So 120 degree angle from upper to lower arm, and the back of the hand in line with the clavicle. So everybody when they trip and fall, if they have the time to react, they do exactly that. Bang, right there. Little kids know to do this as soon as they start walking. So it’s just instinctive. And so you get in that position, and in this position, I can either produce or absorb the greatest amount of force. So this is what I got from gymnastics, I looked at the way the human body absorb these impacts. And so I thought, okay, so impact position and then we self-load, and so these devices are, like the upper extremity device looks a little bit like a chest press, you hold some really fat handles, because that distributes more load over your whole hand right?

Leo Costa Jr.: Make sense.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you push away, and you might see just a couple millimeters of movement, but the movement is from the compression of bone. The device actually doesn’t move at all, but there is movement so it’s not isometric. And people can put out like over 1,000 pounds to their upper extremities. I’ve seen athletic people, 1,200, 1,500 hundred pounds, and that acts as the catalyst so the bone, I mean imagine a long bone here being pressed on from end to end, and it distorts. And then when it springs back into position, all those little areas, like the inside of a bone looks like a honeycomb. When all those little walls get bent, they don’t care for that, sort of like a muscle. You take a muscle to exhaustion, the muscles like, okay we got to remodel some stuff. So the bone remodels, pulls in minerals and re-calcifies, builds more little walls and becomes more powerful.

Leo Costa Jr.: So it’s adapting to its environment, basically.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s right. You put it in an extreme environment and it adapts.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, now…

Dr. John Jaquish: It has to be the right extreme environment.

Leo Costa Jr.: Right. So my question then is, when you’re doing this range of motion, is it a partial? Is it a full range of motion? Is it both?

Dr. John Jaquish: The range of motion for the upper extremities might be one or two millimeters.

Leo Costa Jr.: So really not very much at all.

Dr. John Jaquish: Not very much at all. The range of motion in the lower extremities, because there’s a lot more bone mass there. And there’s also joint compression, which increases the thickness of tendons and ligaments when you compress it like that, that can be three inches of movement, for me it’s like four. A orthopedic surgeon do stop motion photography on me and it looks like four inches from my hip joint to my feet disappear.

Leo Costa Jr.: Really.

Dr. John Jaquish: And it’s because the long bones are being compressed and then they spring back into position, it’s cool.

Leo Costa Jr.: That’s fascinating. And are there a certain amount of reps that you do or is it just, how do you determine when enough is enough?

Dr. John Jaquish: One experience, one exposure. One exposure to load it. And there’s a great study, it was in one of the American college of sports medicine journals, I don’t recall which one at the moment, I might think of it in a second. But a great article showing that one load exposure to an osteogenic load starts the process. And that’s another point I like making in both of my devices. The body only needs one stimulus. When I go out to get a tan, somebody says, ‘If you want to get a tan, how many sets do you do in the sun?’ Crazy question. Just go out there one time. And if you really want to stimulate the most, you have a very intense stimulus. I’m speaking from a weight training perspective in a very abstract perspective, but you really only need one experience of the highest level of intensity that can be handled by the target tissue in that extreme environment that we’re creating to get that adaptation.

So you only do it one time and then we have clinical data, I did the first published trial in London. Now, I wasn’t the principal investigator, I was just kind of observing, basically making sure they used the equipment right. And so we saw elderly de-conditioned females put six times their body weight, seven times their body weight, through their hip joint. And these are non-exercising people, lifetime non-exercise, and so we have a lot of capability we don’t use. And so, as I was watching this, some of the doctors that are participating in this, some of the physicians at the hospital were test subjects. And principal investigator was from University of East London, and they kept asking us these questions like, ‘Well, what do people lift in the gym compared to this because that seems crazy that these people are lifting this much.’

Now, because it was developed in the United States, I had it in pounds and I didn’t have it in in metric, and a lot of the people in East London aren’t even from England, because people in England do understand the imperial measurement system but they come from a country that has a metric system. So that particular neighborhood that we pulled our test subjects from, there were people from India, there were people from Africa, other people Cambodia, Sri Lanka, a couple places like that. So everyone was used to the metric system so they didn’t really understand what the pounds meant right, nor did they care because they noticed that the number was going up every time and they were told that was good. So like, okay I’m getting better and we’re sitting there thinking like, wow these people are really loading their bodies and they all had incredible results with building bone density.

But when you look at what they did and then compare that to the NA’s Database, that is typically, a good portion of the ACSM publications come out of analysis of the NA’s database, and for your listeners don’t know, that’s like the biggest health and medical survey that includes dexa scans for body composition, dexa scans for bone density and they generally pull in about 1,000 people per year, and then catalog that data so you can always look back and re-analyze it. When I looked at the NA’s database on what people normally load the lower extremities with, and this is going to be so disappointing for a bodybuilder, and probably some of the listeners, the average person starts off with 1.3 multiples body weight when they start exercising. What is considered the average advanced athlete is 1.53 multiples of body weight.

Leo Costa Jr.: Really?

Dr. John Jaquish: It was like, wow, so nobody’s trying. Okay, got it. That’s not what you ever did but anyway, the point is, that’s where that’s where the majority of people stop. But here, these same type of people, these average population people, I mean it was a random sample that was collected for this project. And these were all, I think the average age was 66. Yeah, average age of study subjects were 66 years old, lifetime non-exercisers. So obviously it wasn’t like they had to fight themselves from going to CrossFit so they could do this study, they don’t even know CrossFit is, never heard of it. So they were perfect examples of the regular population and it shows what the regular population normally does, given conventional weights, and then what they are actually capable of, there’s a seven-fold difference.

Leo Costa Jr.: Unbelievable.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you can apply this to an elite athlete too, because they’re starting off at a higher number and they’re not getting to that seven-fold capacity because everybody who lifts, picks the weight that they can handle in the weaker range of motion. But you actually have seven times the capability in that impact ready range of motion, just nobody knew it. So I was like the first guy to document this and I looked at the data and I’m like, wow I actually have documentation that Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time. Or said in a different way, now that’s the title of my book which comes out in 30 days, but I mean it’s really going to be inflammatory I can’t wait.

But ultimately, I mean I don’t say resistance training is a waste time obviously, but it’s that the way we apply weights to the body right now, where I’m holding X amount of weight here and the same X amount of weight here, well what we really need is X amount of weight here and maybe four or five X here, because seven X would be like the absolute maximum capacity. So we do repetitions for a reason, you want to exhaust the apt glycogen and creatine phosphate, you want to get a sarcoplasmic effect that’s a huge part of bodybuilding, but that’s also a huge part of like, being in the NFL, you got to grow, you can’t be just a sprinter, even the wide receivers, they need to have some size on too. So like that’s important and then we also need that myofibril effect which we’re going to get so much of, and you really helped me understand in serious growth with looking at the periodization, there’s really two ways to look at what you want a muscle to do.

There’s really heavy, explosive, extreme, low repetition type stuff, the myofibril growth. And then of course, there’s also a neurological benefit to that. And so it’s combination between being able to switch more on faster, because there’s a lot of athletes that don’t even use the muscle they have adequately, because they can’t explode. But then there’s also the exhaustion of the fuel in the cell. And so all this stuff was going through my head and I said I got to build another product and that’s where the X3 Bar variable resistance training system came from.

Leo Costa Jr.: That’s interesting. I wanted to ask you, with regard to your population, or your studies that you did, do you find that certain ethnic backgrounds naturally carry a higher density bone density than others? Did you find anything like that that was kind of predominant?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. But it mostly has to do with the thickness. So when looking at bone density, there is a grams per cubic centimeter, grams per centimeter squared also, that’ll give you. But then there’s also fracture likelihood and like Samoans and Tongans have very low fracture likelihood even if they have low bone density. Why? It’s because the gauge of bone, the thickness of bone is different.

Leo Costa Jr.: So that’s just part of their genetic makeup then, is that what you’re saying?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. They have… You can look at the thickness of your radius right here by pinching your wrist. And whatever, it’s three quarters of an inch thick, and then you can go to a Tongan or Samoan person, who may even look slighter in frame than you, and they’ll have a thicker radius bump.

Leo Costa Jr.: Why do you think that is? Because I’m assuming that it’s in some sort of an adaptation from way back. Why is it them?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well random mutation and then they survive better. Yeah, I mean they just, survival fitness. They were better for their environment so they thrived.

Leo Costa Jr.: And I’m assuming that the bone density is, like you said, with more explosive movements, then when you’re doing strength moves obviously, you’re going to get a better adaptation of bone, or better response to bone density than a bodybuilder who typically is more volume type conditioning, would I be correct on that?

Dr. John Jaquish: The shame of it is the minimum dosage of force to go into the bone, in the hip joint, that’s the most important place. I mean people ask, ‘Well, what about the clavicle?’ Well, we really don’t know and I’ll explain why. It’s because medicine is focused on testing the hip joint, because hip fractures are the ones that are associated with death. So you break a collarbone, it may hurt like hell, you may lose some mobility in your arm but it’s not gonna kill you, probably not. So medicine doesn’t care much for that research. But when we look at… Oh, and how we test this is like, the best way to test it is looking for turnover markers. So we do a CTX blood test, which looks for catabolic activity of bone turnover, so bolder bone tissue breakdown, it’s normal, the bone has a metabolism, there’s always a catabolic process going on in an anabolic process.

But when you’re young, your anabolic process is here and your catabolic process is here. And then as you get older, this might be you know 50s and then it kind of… There’s more catabolic activity so you do a blood marker test for catabolic activity, CTX is the most common one there, and then the anabolic activity is called P1NP. And then so you test the blood for the evidence that bone is being built and you just want the P1NP score to be higher than the CTX score. And with one load exposure, I’m talking about out of a high load that’s over 4.2 multiples, you can see somebody who’s, here’s their anabolic level here’s our catabolic level, five minutes after they do OsteoStrong session, this happens. And right, you can see a slowing of the breakdown and an increase in the anabolic measures. But with weight lifting, we don’t get to the minimum dose response, we don’t get past the 4.2. You don’t know many guys whose squat 4.2 times their body weight.

Leo Costa Jr.: Good point.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, so weightlifting… I mean we need something like OsteoStrong, which is limited range of impact range, which will trigger the effects. And so that you know that’s why OsteoStrong is a successful business, there’s 130 clinics around the world in eight different countries now. But another way which is doubtful this will work is with variable resistance. But that’s my other product, that’s way more targeted at muscle.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah. Have you had anybody actually get hurt from doing the OsteoStrong? Like fracturing a bone or anything like that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. We have hundreds of thousands of people using it so ultimately if you have hundreds of thousands of people doing anything, people break their necks by stepping on a tennis ball and slipping.

Leo Costa Jr.: I didn’t know if it was something that was really concerning, especially people that are older like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s extremely low. I had a discussion with an insurance carrier that looked at OsteoStrong versus regular gym type insurance and OsteoStrong was just a tiny fraction of what happens in regular gyms, the horrible stuff that… People drop weight racks, fall off the treadmill, drop weights on their feet.

Leo Costa Jr.: I think CrossFit has the highest injury rate that’s out there, last time I read.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s well documented.

Leo Costa Jr.: Well documented. I saw a documentary on the guy, I don’t think he’s with the CrossFit now anymore, I think he said something that got him in trouble and he stepped down. But he did an interview and he said, They’re making so much fucking money, that even with all the people that were getting hurt it didn’t even matter.’ That’s basically what he said. On one side they were getting sued like crazy because of all the injuries but they were making so much money on the other end of that thing it didn’t even matter. Go figure. I guess that’s the market…

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m shocked he said that.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, he did.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah exactly, so the X3 Bar resistance band bar system now, it says here that it’s a technology that’s proven to develop muscle much faster than any conventional weight training. So let’s talk about that for a while.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when I did that research in London, I realized, wow, there’s got to be a better way. Because I’ve been an avid weightlifter since the seventh grade when I bought your book. I never really got a whole lot out of it. If I were wearing a shirt, nobody would know I worked out nobody. Took my shirt off, somebody might be like, ‘You lift.’ Yeah I mean sure I guess. So I was lifting four days a week, three sets per, that kind of thing like just like everybody else, nothing special. And I never really got anything out of it and I always thought I was kind of wasting my time but I also didn’t want to stop because I knew that whatever I had built over 20 years of weightlifting was something. I certainly want to at least hang on to that. It was generally a frustrating subject and I’m looking at the data from the bone density medical devices and I’m like, I’ve just proven weightlifting to be incorrect, so I’ve got to come out with a product.

And so what we need is a weight that changes. So, like I said like, I need X amount of weight here and maybe four or five X here. And the same thing with a row type exercise to get the lats and we need that with a squat, and so decided I was going to build a product that was going to satisfy all of those exercises and was going to be super compact. It’s not a travel device or anything but you can throw in a drawer in your house. So the people who make their wives or husbands park outside so they can use the garage as like their home gym. You can sell all that stuff because your X3 Bar variable resistance training system fits in a drawer. And it works better. The first year I put on 30 pounds of muscle. And I mean I didn’t change my nutrition. I had been ketogenic for 13 years already, I did that when body opus came out, you remember that that book? Dan Duchaine.

Leo Costa Jr.: Oh yeah, Dan Duchaine.

Dr. John Jaquish: Dan Duchaine wrote that book. Everything in that book was an insane recommendation that probably nobody should follow. And then I got to the keto section and I was like, Oh, I could do this. This seems smart. This makes perfect sense and there’s research right there. I was like yeah, all the other stuff was some of the worst ideas I’ve ever read, But that made sense. I think the Bell Brothers are actually working on a documentary about him, which will be cool. Chris and Mark Bell, you know those guys.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I’d already been ketogenic and just because of variable resistance, I started putting on mass for the first time in my adult life and I was over 40 years old, And I’m 43 now. And so the first two years was 45 pounds of muscle. And I was chunky when I started, and I started to lean down a little bit and continue to do so, because my biochemistry was just using the calories I was taking in differently, and it was successful.

Leo Costa Jr.: So how does this work for your… Why don’t you paint… So how do you work train legs with this system that you’re talking about?

Dr. John Jaquish: Front squat format, you can either do a regular two-legged squat. But I like people graduating to the single leg squat, which is not a lunge, because you don’t you don’t lock any joints so you keep constant tension. That’s another thing we always keep constant tension on musculature. I want people to… I suppose I should explain why I like the single leg squat. Basically the quads and the glutes are the biggest muscles in the body, and they require the most oxygenated blood when they’re contracting. So when you train one at a time, you have double the amount of resources going into that leg.

Leo Costa Jr.: It makes sense.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. And the other thing is functionally, and I kind of don’t like the word functional because the function of a muscle is it shortens right, I mean you can say anything is functional, but humans run and walk on one leg at a time. So unless you’re a kangaroo you should really use one leg at a time. And so I really focus on that one leg squat and oh yeah and when you exhaust from that, you’ll see a training difference in your quads by the day. You’ll look in the mirror in the next morning your quads will to look different.

Leo Costa Jr.: Okay, so a front format squat. But you’re saying it fits in a drawer. What exactly is it? You put something on the muscle when you’re training it?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. Well, this is the most important part of it. I mean it’s an Olympic bar. You can see as I roll it, the hook stays level with the ground okay. So there’s a steel bar that goes through the middle and the exterior is anodized aluminum. And then these hooks are stainless steel. And so you hook, banding that is far beyond what you could commercially get. So there’s four bands that come with it, and then there’s a fifth one called the elite man for people are who are much stronger. So when I do a deadlift with this thing, at the top I’m over 600 pounds, I’m at 615 pounds. And when I’m at the bottom I’m at maybe like 180 pounds. It’s a 180 pound dead left at the bottom and then as I approach the top I got over 600 pounds on me. Well, that much more matches my biomechanics and I can just go to a deeper level of exhaustion.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, so you have bands that you’re training on with…

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Leo Costa Jr.: There you go, now I get it.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then and then there’s a second, I don’t like to call it bands, because people hear that think they know what that is. It’s sort of like you can have four rubber tires and it’s not a Lamborghini, it’s just for rubber tires. But somebody who doesn’t know what they’re talking about and who doesn’t know anything about automobiles, and is probably prone to comment on the internet without any information whatsoever, will be like just pile of four tires and be like, ‘Hey, check out this Lamborghini.’ That happens so I’m very careful to call it a variable resistance device and the bands are actually inconsequential. I may replace the band someday with some other type of loop that will deliver variable force, but the bar is the important part. And then the other important part is the ground you stand on, there’s a inch tall plate that you stand it’s made out of, I forget the type of steel, very powerful type of steel, and the banding runs underneath, so the band can flex but it doesn’t twist your ankles. Because if you tried to use these bands that are you know like 600 plus pounds and you tried to do like a push-up with them you’d probably break your wrist. Or if you tried to do a deadlift you break your ankle.

Leo Costa Jr.: So I would imagine that, because this has the appropriate tension based on biomechanics that you don’t have to do a lot of sets. Maybe one? Maybe two?

Dr. John Jaquish: One set, right. Because it’s a much deeper level of exhaustion. You are so wiped out at the end of that one set. Now if we go a little bit higher reps to ensure exhaustion and also the weight is so high, I just don’t want anybody dropping. My chest press is 540 pounds of the job, I don’t want to drop that on myself. I don’t go for four rep maximums which, crosstalk.

Dr. John Jaquish: How strong you think they are. You see that with bodybuilders too, they do like a bunch of shitty reps with regular weight and they’re like, Oh check out what I did,’ and you’re like, ‘Okay.’ Although I will credit CrossFit for something. CrossFit weights, the fake plastic weights where everything looks like a 45 pound plate, it’s great because there’s a whole wave of clowns out there that are like check out my 700 pound squat and you can see the plates just rattling because they have no mass to them. That’s like five pounds, that’s not 45 pounds.

Leo Costa Jr.: That reminds me of when I was first getting it bodybuilding, so about six years, I’m into it. I had never been to Gold’s Gym at this point, I was in my city, where I live. And I went to Gold’s Gym that I finally got enough, I thought, I’m going to go down there and see what the hell is going on. Because I would read the magazines, John, I’m thinking how could these fuckers be that much stronger than me, I’m not weak. I go down there well that I started finding out you know the real scoop of stuff down there, even like with these demonstrations a lot of fake weights were in between when they did these demos and it was so they brought these this 145 pound dumbbell waist, I was doing a photo shoot there. And I see him walking out of the back room with the big ass weights just hanging onto him with two fingers I think, what the hell is that, I never knew about that. And these fake weights that they used when they did these photoshoots, they spray water on your face and have you open your mouth and yell and get the veins out and they get that shot. Because it’s too damn hard to hold a weight like that. But anyway…

Dr. John Jaquish: But what happens if they have the event and nobody can pick it up.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, it’s like everything else, unless you’re in the thick of it you don’t really see everything. Even with the guys like Mentzer and Dorian, from my experiences, because what you’re talking about sounds like a part of what their philosophy was with Arthur Jones, that one rep max, frontwards and that’s what it sounds like to me.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you just don’t need more than one stimulus to create the maximum adaptive response, if the stimulus is powerful enough.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, that’s the key.

Dr. John Jaquish: The reason people do multiple sets with weights is because the stimulus is really not that great.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah that makes sense. Very interesting and I see that you’re into the NFL, NBA players and all that? Those guys are using it too?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I got a book endorsement from the strength coach of the Miami Heat. They’ve switched over and they just use X3 Bar fitness band bar system, because it’s safer and their guys are getting stronger, and so I got a great endorsement. Pro teams and pro athletes don’t endorse a lot of, especially these guys weren’t paid. We have more than 20 athletes that endorse us and one professional team. And they did that because it works, not because… They didn’t get paid anything.

Leo Costa Jr.: Do you have to go around with this new device that you have, are you the one that’s certifying the trainers that are working inside these camps? How’s that working to get those guys training on it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right now, we’re not doing that yet. But yeah that’ll come.

Leo Costa Jr.: Back in the day, I got certified as a strength and conditioning specialist blah blah blah, and I worked a lot of athletes. And it was interesting to work with some of those guys back then, especially baseball players. Because back then that was during the days when Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco were coming through, they kind of changed the face of baseball with respect to weight training. Because nobody wanted a weight train, they were afraid it’s going to mess up their swing, and all this kind of shit, of course we know that it doesn’t if, it’s done correctly. But I guess what I’m asking you that is because I found those guys sometimes it’d be very difficult to change over. They’ve been around long enough that they’ve done enough weight training almost to the point where they came to me but they were almost like trying to tell me what to do, even though they were hiring me, and I really knew more than they did at that point. So I’m just wondering, as you said, you’re going to have somebody come in or yourself to make sure they understand how to use it correctly to get the most out of it.

Dr. John Jaquish: I travel a lot.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah. I bet.

Dr. John Jaquish: And now with coronavirus, I do a lot of Skype and Zoom calls because I need to make sure that they’re gonna use it correctly.

Leo Costa Jr.: How many times a week, when you’re using this system for putting on muscle mass… By the way, before I ask that question, can this develop explosive power? This training that you have, the X3 Bar resistance band training system?

Dr. John Jaquish: It can, but like so many things, nothing does everything. If I were training for explosiveness, I would have people do drills for explosiveness. Switching musculature on, like plyometric push-ups kind of thing, biometric squats. That’s the right tool for that job and that’s a neurological job. Most people don’t realize explosiveness has very little to do with how much muscle you have, it’s how quick you can turn muscle on.

Leo Costa Jr.: Exactly, that’s right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and it’s like, don’t take one tool that’s designed for building mass. When you lift slowly and you get to a really high weight, you have a high level of myofibril growth, that’s the only way to explain that. But then there are other people who wouldn’t be able to lift it slowly, but who can just explode with it, and use momentum to move a weight. I’m talking about regularly, not X3 Bar, because there’s no momentum with X3 Bar fitness band bar system. Which is a great thing because the people who like to do that sort of thing, which does have a high injury risk, you don’t have momentum with latex, it’s totally unforgiving. So you’re actually encouraged just through your own reflex system to move slow and in a controlled manner. But yeah, those are really drills that you need to do to switch more muscle and I tell people, you look at them as completely different subjects.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah and that’s very true. I’ll tell you one of the things that plays to what you’re saying. When I was in Bulgaria, I studied with the… During those days I was in Bulgaria, Russia and Czechoslovakia. And the Bulgarians, at that point, were the ones that were dominating after nine years. And they talked about what you’re talking about, they said they have all this weight that they’re lifting off the ground, they said, ‘We’re not strong enough to let this all the way up to here we just lift it up to about waist high and the athletes jump underneath the bar.’ That’s that explosiveness, that’s how they did that. And when you started watching that especially in slow motion these fuckers were quick. I mean even to the point they said like in a 40-yard dash they were hard to beat in 40 yards because of that muscle explosion. So that makes sense to what you’re saying.

And the other thing too, which I would think that you’d have to be very careful about when it comes to muscle mass is, that because athletics is a combination of strength and explosive power, if you get too much… I know back in the old days, these strength coaches in high schools, they had their athletes doing five sets of five. So they built a lot of strength, they made them strong but they were slow because they weren’t doing that explosive power and those drills that you’re talking about. But I would imagine…

Dr. John Jaquish: And see it as different. It has a completely different effect. Now also, the target market for X3 Bar variable resistance training system is not bodybuilders, it’s typically busy professionals. Because busy professionals are the industry that exercises. There’s one out of like 1,000 people who identifies with bodybuilding. A lot of people read bodybuilding.com, which does them no favors, but it’s just like an abomination of health literature. But their goal is to be in shape. They want to look good when they go to the beach. They want their kids to think their dad is a superhero, right? This is what it what people really want. Most people don’t want to look like bodybuilders.

Leo Costa Jr.: That’s very true.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I mean…

Leo Costa Jr.: Ew, that’s gross.

Dr. John Jaquish: They take it if you made it real easy for them, but we all know it’s not easy so no, they’re good. If they can if they can swap out 10 or 20 pounds of fat for muscle, they would look like a superhero, especially to their kids and their wife and that is a massive victory, massive, for most guys. So that’s really our target market mostly because these are the people who are willing to read a little bit of science. They’ll read a couple paragraphs and go, Okay, this sounds really good. This sounds like it makes sense.’ So they make the determination that it sounds good and then they cross reference that with the fact that they’ve been lifting for years and they haven’t got jack shit out of it. So it’s like, ‘I might as well give this a shot. Weightlifting does almost nothing so I’m just wondering if I should go into triathlons now or something. So I’ll give this a shot,’ and then they do well with it and, did I even answer your question or I just go down a different path?

Leo Costa Jr.: I think you did.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay.

Leo Costa Jr.: It struck me because I just thought about those days when the coaches in the gym were just lifting purely for strength and the athletes really weren’t performing as well as they should have on the field.

Dr. John Jaquish: I know where I wanted to go. These guys, who are our target market, lifting speed, every once in a while some of them says, ‘Well I should do some fast reps and some slow reps, right?’ And I’m like. ‘No. You’re not training for an event where you’re going to need that speed. And if you want to do speed drills, okay. But don’t do them with X3 Bar resistance band bar system necessarily.’ You can but I would do speed drills the way speed drills have been perfected like that’s something in health of fitness that works pretty well yeah and I would tell them… is it, what’s the name of that plyometric board that you kind of hook on your vest.

Leo Costa Jr.: Oh, I don’t know…

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s one where you wear a vest, and you hook yourself to a board and you do all kinds of upward work. And then if you can mount it to the floor, screw it into the concrete you can do work going different directions. If you’re a wide receiver, you need one of those. If you’re not a wide receiver you don’t need one of them.

Leo Costa Jr.: Exactly. Yeah, that’s where you know the body becomes dysfunction and being a sports specific trainer one of the things I learned with athletes, especially in baseball, but it applies all sports. Because my kid played pro baseball for Kansas City Royals. I got to know the scouts back then and I was very fascinated by they said, in each position there’s these priorities that the athletes need to have which are the most important to the least important. And that started making a lot of sense to me in how and where you put athletes based on variables and then train, not only for the sport, but you’re training to that position. And I found it to be very, very useful.

This is really fascinating stuff, John, I mean here’s the thing that I’m always attracted to because I’ve tried to be a student of the game and to know the why of everything. And you’re that guy and there needs to be more of you out there because I guess it’s like anything else it’s very few that really they really know their shit and it’s obvious that you know yours.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think I have like a, and you had this too but this wasn’t really where you were going, but the ability to understand something is one thing, the ability to teach it.

Leo Costa Jr.: Another animal.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and you got to have both of those things, you got to really know the subject, and then you gotta be able to teach it to people and get people excited about it. And I think if we look at the success of both OsteoStrong and X3 Bar exercise band bar system, it’s really like I just got good at teaching people.

Leo Costa Jr.: I can tell. Your demeanor, the way you present your information. I had a coach one time who was a, and this happens more often than not, he was a great running back in college, spectacular. As a fucking coach, he just couldn’t communicate that to his athletes to make them be that athlete on the field. He had to show you all the time but he couldn’t show and tell. He couldn’t do the telling to where they really understood that. And that’s not an easy thing to do, it’s hard. It’s hard to be able to do that, what you’re talking about. But I can tell you’re… And I’m very attracted to that. I mean, I was telling Phil, Phil cracked up because he’s known me a long time and he saw me dress up like this and he goes, ‘What the fuck? You’re all dressed, up you look great.’ I said…

Dr. John Jaquish: I feel really underdressed. I wear a tie all the time. Dammit, man, I could have worn a tie.

Leo Costa Jr.: No, but the thing about that is that, even when I was bodybuilding, I didn’t give a shit how it looked, I looked homeless. All I cared about was looking on stage a certain way. And then after I got out of the game, I needed something to motivate me and, John, this did. This is my new bodybuilding, it’s a lot safer for me, you know what I mean? But it’s just, I take the same approach and I learn shit to the nth degree and I try to communicate that to these fucking trainers that are out there. Learn this stuff to the nth degree because there’s a reason why, which I was shocked when I saw this, 95 of the trainers out there fail, fucking fail. And I know why because I see the half-assed approaches that they take and, like you were talking about.

Dr. John Jaquish: Misunderstanding a science, it’s like I said, what percentage of people are actually in shape? One tenth of 1%.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, it translates.

Dr. John Jaquish: Why do we keep following the way the industry has always done it when one tenth of 1% of people succeed. You invest in an investment company that lost all but one tenth of 1% of the money that you invested?

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah right, look at it that way.

Dr. John Jaquish: Would you invest in those guys? Probably not.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah, John, listen I want to thank you very much for taking your time to come on the Serious Growth Podcast. I mean we told a lot of truth today and I really appreciate when I meet somebody where I can keep learning stuff. I’m very enthusiastic and I have passion for all this and you got me inspired some more, so I do appreciate that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome I’ll get you an advanced copy of my book also.

Beautiful. While we’re here if you’d like to, feel free to promote whatever products that you’d like. I know you have a little bit at the top but feel free to do that. Yeah, you really blindsided me with that one. Normally I try not to promote though I didn’t invent two things so people invite me on to talk about that.

Leo Costa Jr.: Come on, tell us about that again.

Dr. John Jaquish: So yeah, I mean x3bar.com is where you can go and read more about the science of X3 Bar portable home gym and look at the athletes who are using it, there’s also some before and after pictures. People seem to be more interested in the athletes who are pictured using it because before and after can be faked I guess, but you can’t really fake pro athletes using your products so I think people really looking into that and then also the science and the big press section where we’ve been featured, LA Times, Entrepreneur or Forbes. So yeah, x3bar.com or jaquishbiomedical.com I know my last name is not easy to spell don’t worry about it just go to x3bar.com and then on Instagram it’s D-R-J-A-Q-U-I-S-H. By the time you get to J-A-Q, you’ll know which one is me. @drjaquish

Leo Costa Jr.: Beautiful. All right man. Well listen, I’d like to have you back on again I’d like to get, like I said at the top, you and Phil and myself I think that would be a really fun interview to do. I mean, Phil’s the one that got me, he directed me to you and now I understand why. But I’d like to do this again sometime at some time if you’d like to do that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely, a couple times this is super.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah. I’d like that there’s a lot to learn here so I’d like to keep on top of what’s going on with your product always.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome, thanks Leo

Leo Costa Jr.: All right man, well you have a meaningful day if that’s necessary or at least have a good day.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ll do both.

Leo Costa Jr.: And be safe, during this whole pandemic, one of the things I talked about and I don’t think is talked about enough I’m getting off on maybe a mini rant here, is I don’t think we’re talking enough about building the body’s immune system because if you do that it can pretty much fight off just about anything that’s out there, that’s my opinion.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, my hemoglobin A1C score is four.

Leo Costa Jr.: Yeah and I just had some labs done I think so too. And I just believe in that and you know we’ve been we never stopped training we just keep on going. But anyway, all right man we’ll talk soon someday okay John?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes awesome.

Leo Costa Jr.: Take care of yourself.

Dr. John Jaquish: All right see you.

Leo Costa Jr.: Bye.