Are Weight Lifting and Cardio a Waste of Time? — Dr. John Jaquish

Are Weight Lifting and Cardio a Waste of Time?

Is cardio getting in the way of your fat loss goals?

And do we really need things to be a struggle in order to prove that we’re smart, special, or strong?

Dr. John Jaquish is a scientist, inventor, and author of Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time: So is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. He’s very outspoken about how the fitness industry is a failure, and he believes he has the scientific data to back up his claims.

He invented the X3 Bar fitness band bar system home fitness product which can fit in a bag. He claims that, along with an unconventional diet, by using this thing for only 10 minutes a day you can have the body of someone who spends hours in the gym every week.

Full disclosure: I don’t own the X3 workout bar system product at this time, and I was not compensated in any way for conducting this interview.

In this interview:

• Why is weight lifting a waste of time from scientific perspective?
• How does cardio keep you fat?
• Why “no pain, no gain” is outdated
• Why muscle soreness has nothing to do with a “good” workout
• The 99% failure rate of the fitness industry

Plus:

• A complete workout in only ten minutes?
• Why some folks make life harder than it needs to be
• Eating 4 steaks everyday
• Working with Tony Robbins on OsteoStrong
• How to knock a deer out of your garden

Click here for John Jaquish’s book Weightlifting Is a Waste of Time : So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want.

Full Transcription

Tripp Lanier: Hey guys. This is Tripp Lanier. I’m a professional coach, host of The New Man and the author of This Book Will Make You Dangerous.

Thanks so much and now let’s start the show.

Tripp Lanier: How would a scientist approach getting stronger and leaner? Is cardio getting in the way of your fat loss goals and do we really need things to be a struggle in order to prove that we’re smart, special or strong?

Doctor Dr. John Jaquish is a scientist, inventor and now author of Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time: So is Cardio and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. He’s very outspoken about how the fitness industry is a failure and he believes he has the scientific data to back up his claims.

He invented the X3 Bar resistance band training system home fitness product, which can fit in a bag and he claims that along with an unconventional diet, by using this thing for only 10 minutes a day, you can have the body of someone who spends hours in the gym every week.

Full disclosure, I don’t own the X3 Bar variable resistance training system product at this time and I was not compensated in any way for conducting this interview.

As I was reading through this book, there was a lot of stuff that just sounded a little too good to be true, but let’s start in with your story. Where were you a few years ago? Describe your world, because I went into this, I saw pictures of you before I read the book and I was like, oh this guy has been a fitness buff his whole life. He’s been a body builder, you’re all chiseled up and you’re this …

Dr. John Jaquish: No, the day I turned 40 I was not big and kind of chubby.

Tripp Lanier: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like most regular guys who are late 30s, early 40s, so I definitely had not seen my abs for years.

Tripp Lanier: What were the conventional things that you were believing at the time? What were the conventional beliefs that you were buying into about fitness back then?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I’ve been a scientist for a while, so I finished my PhD in 2012. I already didn’t believe in any of it, but I was doing it because I just didn’t have the time to really focus on it. Just a little bit of my background, I developed the world’s most powerful medical device that reverses osteoporosis, builds bone density. In that process, so what the device does, and I did it to treat my mother’s osteoporosis and then it grew from there and now there’s hundreds of thousands of people being treated in eight different countries. It’s called OsteoStrong.

When looking at all these things together and especially the data coming off of my medical device, I realized I’m the only guy in the world that has data that shows that weightlifting is awful. It is a totally lame stimulus.

Tripp Lanier: You knew this early on and you just went with status quo or was this all starting to come together at a certain point in …

Dr. John Jaquish: It was coming together in my head. I hadn’t written anything down and I hadn’t talked to anybody yet. Every time I’d go to lift I’d be like, this is stupid. This is just dumb. I’m just wasting my time here.

Developing a new product, it doesn’t happen overnight.

Tripp Lanier: I’m getting this context where there’s a lot of guys that are in lockdown right now, they’re getting flabby and maybe they’re putting … It’s really common for these guys, like you know what, now’s the time, I’m going to get back in shape. They start throwing heavy things around. They get injured. Now they’re worse off because they’ve got to rehab this thing, they’re frustrated, they go downhill mentally and emotionally, like this is never going to happen. That time has passed and I’m just going to be in pain from now on.

Now this is coming in with these ideas are like, wait a second, wight lifting is stupid, and you’re also really clear that cardio is pretty stupid in terms of …

Dr. John Jaquish: It depends. It depends.

Tripp Lanier: Right, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean is there ever a reason to lift weights? Well, if you’re a competitive weight lifter yes. Is there a reason to do sustained cardio? Well, if you’re a marathon runner and you really like going distances, yeah sure. I’m not saying that an entire sport is wrong because they exist on their own merit, but …

Tripp Lanier: For most of us that are just wanting to feel better, feel stronger.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, if you just want to be in shape, if you want to be lean and strong, which is pretty much everybody’s goal. I always love it when people say, ‘Well I want a customized program.’ It’s like, shut up, you want the same thing everybody else does. Yeah, it’s so stupid. Like, oh do you want to be fatter?

Tripp Lanier: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Is that the difference for you? I don’t think you do, so yeah, you want to be strong and lean.

The whole objective behind cardio as we’re told is cardio is for losing weight and strength is for gaining muscle. Cardio doesn’t help you lose weight, it actually keeps you from losing body fat. Now your weight may go down, but the weight loss is primarily the loss of muscle and it protects body fat. It doesn’t put more body fat on you, but it makes sure you don’t lose the body fat you have, which is the opposite of what people want.

Tripp Lanier: Right, so they’re walking and walking or they’re running and running or they’re cycling and cycling in order to lose body fat, but inherently because of that activity the body’s saying, wait a second, we need to store fuel because you want to move longer distances and for a longer period of time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right. It’s like your central nervous system is an engineering team that you can’t talk to and it’s trying to turn you into a vehicle that is optimized for the environment as much as it can. If you tell your body by doing cardio that you want to be an economy car, well it’s going to lighten the frame, meaning you’ll lose bone density and cardio people do lose bone density. It goes to a dangerously low degree. They have smaller engines. The economy cars don’t have big V10 engines, right, they have small four cylinder engines or small V6’s.

You’re going to increase your fuel storage capacity, so you’ll have a bigger tank, which is like storing body fat. Distance runners are what’s called skinny fat, so they don’t have a low level of body fat. You don’t see a lot of muscularity on them, but their musculature is very small.

None of this I’m saying is my opinion. There’s 40 years of clinical data on this and it’s ignored. The fitness industry just ignores it and it’s really because the industry just doesn’t understand reading scientific studies. There’s just nobody there that can really interpret it and teach it and there’s also no business model.

Tripp Lanier: If I’m wrapping my brain around this, at a real basic level cardio is basically designing, setting up my body so that I don’t lose fat efficiently because it thinks I need the fat in order to have longer fuel stores.

Dr. John Jaquish: Overall.

Tripp Lanier: Then if I’m lifting weights I’m not doing it efficiently and I’m also setting myself up for injury because of the way that the movements are designed and I’m more prone to injury, but I didn’t quite understand how lifting weights, in the conventional sense, is hindering my ability to lose weight. Can you speak to that?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s just an inefficient stimulus. The easiest way to drive your percentage body fat down is to gain muscle, because every pound of muscle compared to the same fat mass. The fat mass is going down by a percentage, right, so when people gain muscle and don’t put on body fat, they’re getting leaner or they might not change their total body fat, but their percentage body fat is going down so they certainly look a lot better.

Then on top of that, the new musculature is a metabolic engine that is using calories. The calories in, calories out thing is way oversimplified and oversimplified means wrong, but calories do still matter, there are just a lot of other parts to that story.

Tripp Lanier: Okay. What if I’m a weekend warrior, like I’m a surfer, I don’t necessarily want to be heavier, is this approach still for somebody like me where I want to be stronger, I want to be leaner, but I don’t necessarily want to be packing pounds of weight because it’s harder? I got to paddle more, I need a bigger board, all that kind of stuff.

Dr. John Jaquish: Even the people on the website who have gained more than 20 pounds of muscle in six months, number one they ate for it, so you got to have a lot of high quality protein to be able to put on that kind of muscle that fast. The other thing is, a lot of them are at the same body weight, but they lost 20 pounds of body fat and put on 20 pounds of muscle. I think that’s what most people are after.

When launching the product, so at first I didn’t want to launch this thing, I wanted to treat it like my medical device. I just want to license the intellectual property and have it basically be somebody else’s problem and I could go drink a fun drink at the beach, which I still do every once in a while, but I brought it to a number of fitness companies and they’re like, ‘Oh you want to make a scientific argument to the fitness community?’ Every one of them said exactly the same thing. ‘These are the dumbest people. You wouldn’t believe how unintelligent the fitness community is and it’ll never happen. You’ll never be able to sell them science. They’ll never understand it.’

Tripp Lanier: That’s crazy because there usually is this talk about all the hormones and all the … They do all this stuff. It’s from the outside. I’m looking at it from the outside there’s this …

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s not the fitness industry.

Tripp Lanier: That’s not the fitness industry. Okay, so the people that are making the products are the ones that they don’t really care about … You’re saying they don’t care about the data, they don’t care about that stuff, they just want to make a product and push it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I shouldn’t generalize. I mean it’s not all, but it is a very high percentage. The consumer in the fitness industry, people are still buying branshan amino acids. Branshan amino acids were proven worthless 20 years ago. Absolutely worthless, you might as well be swallowing sand. It’s the wrong ratios to be useful for the human body, but they’re cheap to make and every big supplement company has got a BCAA product, so just go okay, well.

Tripp Lanier: Sounds healthy so it must be healthy.

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk Yeah.

Tripp Lanier: One of the things I came across in your book was this idea … I grew up in the era of no pain, no gain, it wasn’t a good workout unless you’re really sore afterwards. I always hated being sore because then I couldn’t go do the activities I wanted to do. What’s happening when our body gets sore, because you were like if you’re sore that’s not a good thing, so what’s happening there?

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t want to be overly positive when it comes to the subject, because when you’re using my technology, it’s the hardest workout you’ve ever had. In fact, Doctor Shawn Baker, he’s an orthopedic surgeon, he’s the Carnivore Doctor. Well actually, I think he and Paul Saladino are going to have a pistol duel to decide who gets to call themselves that. We should do pistol duels. Those are cool. Tripp Lanier: Get back into that. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tripp Lanier: 10 paces.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Oh yeah, 10 paces, turn, fire. Yeah, what’s wrong with that? That sounds good. We could do it with paint balls.

Tripp Lanier: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: No one needs to get hurt, but I mean it’s just a great idea.

Tripp Lanier: Settle it and then it’s settled in that sense.

Dr. John Jaquish: I want to hit him in the face with a white calf skin glove and say, ‘I challenge you to a duel.’

Tripp Lanier: Yes. All right. It’s got to be in the street.

Dr. John Jaquish: We’ll use paintball guns.

Tripp Lanier: Yeah. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s fine.

Tripp Lanier: Bring it back.

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk Doctor Baker, he is a world record strength athlete. He has a number of world records, dead lift, indoor rowing, a couple other things. Very powerful guy and when he started using X3 Bar resistance band bar system, he and I had been friends and we had been exchanging science, because I talk a lot about his program and he talks some about mine. It was funny. Well he said a whole bunch of stuff I really didn’t want him to say and he goes, ‘Yeah, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.’ He’s like, ‘I’m a world record strength holder and this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.’

Tripp Lanier: This system that you can put in a bag and take on a flight with you is the hardest thing this guy has ever done?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. He’s one of the strongest guys out there and so I was like, oh man, do you really need to say that? Yeah, it’s hard, but I mean I invented it so it’s like it’s my kid. I don’t see it as hard, but it’s really hard, but it’s quick. I find that people are not lazy, they really like having their time optimized though.

Tripp Lanier: Well the whole 10 minutes thing, I mean my eyebrows went up. I was like, this bullshit.

Dr. John Jaquish: You don’t need to do anything else. Once Baker said that, sales totally improved. I think a lot of people who thought it was something easy, as soon as they realized it was hard they’re like, wait a minute, that means it’s really heavy. Okay, I’m in.

We didn’t even discuss that as an experiment in marketing, he just went ahead and said it. Yeah, but that was kind of funny.

I also didn’t design it to be a short workout. It’s not short. It’s exactly as long as it needs to stimulate the maximum amount of muscle growth. Then people say, why is there only one set per movement? How many sets do you do in the sun to get a suntan? People look at me like, what do you mean? One, you just go out and your skin’s stimulated, right, same with stimulating a callus, same with any other adaptive response. The only multiple exposure adaptive response that people traffic in is weight lifting and it’s because the stimulus is garbage.

Tripp Lanier: Then what’s happening, come back to my question about soreness and just feeling like I can’t move that next day. What’s the difference between exhaustion, which sounds like okay, that’s what the muscle needs in order to get the benefits, but then there’s this soreness you were talking about and say, well there’s something off if things are getting sore. Did I miss understand that or what’s your take on sore muscles?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, no. You got it perfect. Yeah, so soreness is not a good thing. Soreness means muscle damage. Now, there is a myth out there that, and I mean this is like almost every fitness person believes in this and it’s so idiotic, it’s just not at all true, I mean it’s not even how adaptation works, but you create micro tears in the muscle and then they grow back stronger.

Tripp Lanier: That’s the convention, that’s the belief?

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, that’s so foolish and ignorant of physiology. Yeah, it’s just like I can’t believe anybody believe that. I heard that when I was a kid and I was … I think I thought about it when I was in high school biology and I read the rest of … I’m reading in my biology book and I’m like, that’s idiotic. That’s not how that works. Micro tears.

Turns out, the people who have the most micro tears are cardio athletes. They don’t build any muscle, they lose it.

Tripp Lanier: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, so micro tears is not how the growth process happens. In fact there is, I think there’s four different studies and I detail these in the book, Weightlifting is a Waste of Time, that muscle damage is inversely related to growth, because you can only do so much protein synthesis in a night. You basically grow at night. Most of the protein synthesis happens while you’re sleeping.

If you have to attenuate damage, you can’t grow new tissue because you’re repairing, so damage is not the goal, it’s the opposite of the goal. You want to fatigue the muscle without any damage and the variable resistance does that. Heavy loads in the weakest range of motion, that’s where the damage comes from.

Tripp Lanier: If I’m thinking that’s at the bottom of a push up, my chest is on the ground, that’s where I tend to feel like I injure myself if I’m doing that.

Dr. John Jaquish: You inaudible injuring yourself.

Tripp Lanier: Yeah. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tripp Lanier: Soreness is not an indicator that we got a good workout, in fact it probably means that we went too far and we actually worked against ourselves?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. You know how sometimes you do a heavy weight workout and then the next day there’s no way you could play golf or tennis?

Tripp Lanier: Yeah, that sucks. What’s the point?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, because you just can’t move.

Tripp Lanier: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean I could do a day after a heavy chest workout where I’m using over 500 pounds for 20 repetitions with my chest, I could do archery, golf, tennis, knife throwing, ax throwing. I do ax throwing sometimes, it’s fun.

Tripp Lanier: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah.

Tripp Lanier: You want to bring that back?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Duel with axes.

Tripp Lanier: It gets a little messier than paintball. A little messier.

Dr. John Jaquish: We could get some softer ax inaudible.

Tripp Lanier: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: The point is settling an argument. It’s not killing anyone, because -

Tripp Lanier: Quickly.

Dr. John Jaquish: … remember when the pistols at dawn, you were shooting a little ball of lead, which would usually just bounce off somebody and create a major wound, but it wouldn’t kill them.

Tripp Lanier: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Those weren’t designed to kill anybody.

Tripp Lanier: Yeah, it sucks.

Dr. John Jaquish: You could hit somebody in the temple and kill them, but that’s rare.

Tripp Lanier: Okay, I hear you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Did you know Andrew Jackson would actually have pistol duels at the White House?

Tripp Lanier: I didn’t know he had them at the White House. No.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t know that’s 100% true, but I have read it.

Tripp Lanier: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Somebody in Congress is like, well the hell with you mister President. He’s like, pistols in the morning.

Tripp Lanier: Pistols, here we go. Well the white glove first.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes.

Tripp Lanier: It’s coming back, I can see the resistance to this because there is this attachment we have to needing things to be hard, because I encounter this with guys that I coach that they tend to find the hard way to do things because they’re still stuck in this thing of needing to prove something. If it was, quote easy, then I don’t know, there’s something that’s less than about that approach. Here comes all the science, all the data.

Dr. John Jaquish: Let me jump in right here. They identify with their struggle. It’s almost like they’re trying to use a victimhood mentality in some sort of positive way. A lot of the guys that want to argue with me, of course they’ve never read the book, I’m wondering if they can actually read. I mean, they’re not the smartest. There’s a sideways hat gym guy, that will say, well what about this or what about that and they’re just throwing out gibberish, stuff that doesn’t even make scientific sense.

Tripp Lanier: Yeah, so we identify with the difficulty and the struggle, that somehow makes us feel better about ourselves.

Dr. John Jaquish: The reason I brought that us is because those guys, it’s like their identity is, I lift to dangerous weights so therefor I’m badass. Yeah, but is the goal to talk about how dangerous your workout is or is the goal to get results?

The guys who are Navy Seals don’t say, I know the target is one mile behind enemy lines, but I want you to drop me off 100 miles inside enemy lines so I could just kill a lot more people.

Tripp Lanier: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: They don’t do that. They minimize risk also. All smart people minimize risk and maximize effect. It’s an unwise approach and for some reason the … Also with online community, it’s like how much you bench is a thing.

Tripp Lanier: Still? That’s still a thing?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah and you see people with really sloppy form, twisting their body, moving one shoulder forward, because they’ve injured the other one doing the same thing.

Tripp Lanier: I was going to say, they’re in surgery in six weeks.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, and they’re like, check out how much I bench and you’re like, all right, you didn’t bench anything because that was so sloppy and you didn’t really complete the rep.

Tripp Lanier: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Number two, all you’re doing is hurting yourself, so just stop. There’s no reward for that.

Tripp Lanier: Yeah, I like to challenge that belief because a lot of times we resist easy or easier. There’s that part of us that identifies with if it’s the struggle then I’m somehow exceptional. This is where I get to be special because I’m not part of the herd that’s taking this easier or just sitting on the couch or whatever. I like the way you’re discerning this was like, look, if you’re clear on your goals, which is to be fit, to be strong and to be effective at it …

Dr. John Jaquish: As strong and lean as you can be, right.

Tripp Lanier: Yeah, then don’t get caught up in this ego trap. If you want to go do the ego thing you can, but if you want to use the data and the way that you’re interpreting it and the way you’re coming at it and say, look, this could be mush more effective, then you’re offering something different there.

You mentioned something in the book about how the fitness industry has a 99% failure rate. Can you explain that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah and I didn’t realize at the time when I wrote it, but that’s probably one of the most powerful and understandable, relatable things that I said, because a lot of guys who are gym guys, they reached out to me and they’re like, ‘You know what, you’re right. Almost nobody that goes to the gym, you’d never know. You’d never see any changes in them for years.’ We all know, like I know I could probably name 50 people that I know that I’ve seen them go to the gym for years, they don’t look like they workout at all. They are as average looking as the guys who don’t workout.

Ultimately, you have to … And also keep in mind, one in six males over 18 in America have used anabolic steroids, so that means that almost every one of those has failed also, so when somebody sees somebody that’s in shape and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m sure you did a whole bunch of drugs.’ No, I’m sure he worked really hard, because even the people who take drugs fail.

Tripp Lanier: Wow. One in six? One in six males has tried anabolic steroids?

Dr. John Jaquish: Has used or is using.

Tripp Lanier: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that blew me away. I’m like, God, I didn’t think I knew any. Well, I knew some guys on my rugby team in undergrad. I played Rugby for Sac State.

Tripp Lanier: Well, it also points to a mindset where we’re willing to … We’re actually not trying to make our bodies stronger, we just want to make them bigger. It’s more about appearance than what’s best for my body, what’s best for my …

Dr. John Jaquish: Like in rugby, if you’re a forward, being heavy is an advantage.

Tripp Lanier: I guess I’m thinking long term, it’s like I’m willing to just destroy myself in order for this objective I’ve got, whether it’s for the sport or it’s for how I look or those type of things.

Dr. John Jaquish: Welcome to competitive sports. Yeah, it’s often not about health with these. I work with a lot of NFL players, about 10 of them, and I love these guys for two reasons. One is it’s great, because everybody online, every 14 year old kid who has a visible bicep vein is accused of being on steroids because there’s so many jealous people out there that just can’t stand it when they see somebody who has had some success, they just want to tear them down.

It’s like, okay, look at the NFL players, they’re tested regularly and these guys are like a lean 235, they’re like a running back. If they can do it naturally, so can you.

Tripp Lanier: Is that true though? How much does genetics play into that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Make that your next question. I will nail that.

Tripp Lanier: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: The second reason I like NFL players is they don’t care at all how much they bench. They think it’s an idiot’s metric, it’s a way to get hurt. All they want to do is perform better on the field because that’s how they make millions of dollars. They don’t make millions of dollars by posting videos on Facebook with shitty bench press form. That’s not how that works.

I’m like, yeah, you probably should never bench press again and they’re like, ‘Awesome.’

Tripp Lanier: Great.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I had no interest in doing that ever.

Tripp Lanier: It’s an injury waiting to happen.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I mean yeah. I do it because it makes me a better football player, but we don’t like that and they hate squatting, because the chances of just a small knee irritation that might take three tenths of a second off their 40 time, that’s a real problem. That’s like letting the air out of your tires before the race starts. Don’t do that.

Yeah, they are great for those two reasons. Love these guys. Now, I work with more NBA players than NFL and they all use X3 Bar portable home gym. Now, the entire Miami Heat team is using X3 Bar variable resistance training system exclusively and then a couple others, some guys on the Knicks. I don’t plaster the name over everything, there’s just a wall of athletes.

Your next question.

Tripp Lanier: The genetics, yeah, because if I’m sitting here and I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, well I’m not in shape because I’m just not genetically pre … My genetic makeup is that I’m going to be built this is way, this is what is natural for me. What are your thoughts about that?

Dr. John Jaquish: My latest Instagram post. Now, I couldn’t put a chapter of the book in an Instagram post, they won’t even let me do that, but I talk about how Patrella in 2008, in the Journal of Applied Physiology, which is best journal on sports science, so a lot of strength studies pick strength athletes and so if they’re able to build strength then they’re probably able to build more strength.

What these guys did is they took a random sample of the US population and then they tested them for triggering muscle protein synthesis by a standard weight lifting program, like three sets of bench, squat, dead lift. 25%, it was actually 25.7. 25.7% of the participants in the study were unable under any circumstances to trigger any muscle growth at all.

Tripp Lanier: Why? Why is that?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ll get to that. The rest of them had very nominal results. These weren’t athletes, these were regular people. You read the story and the authors didn’t say this, but the natural conclusion was fitness programming sucks. Wow, what a waste.

Now, that conclusion of that study was totally where my head had already been and I read this and I’m like, I can explain exactly why, because … And there’s a whole nother section of the book about genetic potential. I’ll explain what I’m doing for the listeners that aren’t watching the video.

Tripp Lanier: Great.

Dr. John Jaquish: If somebody looks at a human’s pectoral and then it’s attached at the sternum, which is the middle of your body, middle of your chest, and then the other attachment point is on the humerus bone, the upper arm. Now usually it’s very close to the start of that bone, sort of right underneath where your bicep starts, near your armpit but close to the top of the bone. If the objective of the pectoral is to bring the arm across the body or bring the humerus bone towards the midline of the body, so humerus bone towards the midline of the body.

We have different tendon layouts. Some people, instead of having it attached close to the top of the humerus, they have attachment points that are very far away from the origin, meaning they have a longer lever arm. Right, like you find a rock in a back yard and you can’t pick it up, then you get a smaller rock and a crow bar and you can lift that thing up right away. Somebody’s, ‘That guy has a 500-pound rick. How are you doing that?’ Well, because I have a 10-foot crowbar and it’s a long lever arm.

The people who have a longer lever arm have a stronger, weaker range of motion than most people do.

Tripp Lanier: They’re stronger at the point where most of us can’t … At the weakest part of the movement. I think what hasn’t been said here is that, it might be a given, I had to learn this, that in any given movement, let’s say we’re looking at a pushup, that we are stronger at different points and that we’re strongest at the most outward point and weakest at the most compressed, when our arms are in.

Dr. John Jaquish: Everybody’s like that, including these people with the tendon advantage, but when you train with variable resistance, especially high degree of variable resistance, which is the technology I designed, none of that shit matters at all. You bypass everything, which is why for the first 40 years of my life I tried to be a strength athlete and I just didn’t want to … Nothing worked. I ended up just being kind of chubby, because I kept thinking I was eating for size and platter of rib eyes with no muscle stimulus, that’s not a recipe for looking like a champion. It is if you get the proper muscle stimulus.

I was the perfect example of somebody with poor genetics for being a strength athlete and then I built my prototype and within the first year I gained 30 pounds of muscle. People would see me month over month and they’d be like, what are you doing?

Tripp Lanier: Had you already changed, because you’ve got a pretty radical eating … You go really into the nutrition here because we’re not just saying that moving these bands around is what’s going to do it, you really go into the nutrition a lot. Had you already established a pretty rigorous, radical nutrition?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I had been ketogenic for 13 years already. I was ketogenic before anybody was talking about it.

Tripp Lanier: But you were still chubby. You were describing yourself as chubby even though you were in that ketogenic …

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I was inaudible body fat. That’s fat.

Tripp Lanier: Okay, and then so you didn’t change anything nutrition wise or how you were eating, but then you did change how you were moving, the type of workout you were doing and that’s what shifted this and it turned on hormones, it changed everything. Not just moving muscles, but it …

Dr. John Jaquish: I knew you had to have the proper building blocks. You basically have to have a gram of protein per pound of body weight.

Tripp Lanier: Is that true for everybody or is that just true for part of the bell curve? What is that, because there’s a tendency to want to, hey I found the thing and this is going to apply flat across everybody.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s true for everybody.

Tripp Lanier: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: That kind of gets me to something that I hear all the time, the whole everybody’s different, find out what’s right for you. That’s not true.

Tripp Lanier: Really?

Dr. John Jaquish: I could give you 100,000 different clinical studies on whether it’s nutrition or biochemical responses to pharmaceuticals or whatever, and think about it, the test group everybody turned out the same, the control group everybody turned out the same in those groups and it’s the comparison of the two groups because there’s a different variable between the two groups. Why don’t they all bust up into a scatter plot of the 20 different types of people where everybody’s different, find out what’s right for you?

Everybody’s different, find out what’s right for you was the medical community’s way of allowing patients to cop out and not feel bad about their poor health. That’s my theory, that’s not science.

Tripp Lanier: About getting fit with regards to getting fit.

Dr. John Jaquish: I hear people all the time, ‘Well, my doctor says dieting doesn’t work for me.’ I’m like, hmm, your doctor probably didn’t want to get sued because your doctor probably told you you’re fat. I try and make light of it because I want these people to stop making the excuses and just go, okay, maybe I’m not different.

Tripp Lanier: Quit using that as a cop out.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah and that’s why I like the way I approach nutrition. It’s pretty easy to stick to. There’s some things that you have to avoid long term.

Tripp Lanier: My understanding was you have one meal a day and it’s three or four steaks, that’s what I read. Is that still the play?

Dr. John Jaquish: Mm-hmm (affirmative), but then I’ll do a fast longer than 24 hours. I’m in the middle of a 72 hour fast right now, so the last time I ate was Sunday night and it’s Tuesday morning right now. This was a dry fast, so I haven’t any food or water since Sunday.

Tripp Lanier: Okay. In your world, is that the one size fits all? You would prescribe that to anybody that you talked to or how do you deal with the nutrition stuff?

Dr. John Jaquish: The way I’m doing it is, and I’m going to do a lot more writing on nutrition.

Tripp Lanier: Okay. I want to come back to a point, it was the way of eating combined with the way of moving that triggered this effect in your body to shift, because you’d already had by and large the nutrition thing worked out, but when you started moving differently.

Dr. John Jaquish: If you have one and not the other, nothing happens.

Tripp Lanier: Okay. I want to make that really clear, because it’s really easy, most people want to sell a device and be like, yeah, this is the thing that’s going to change you and you’ve got to be really clear that they go hand in hand with what we’re eating and how we’re eating and when.

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk body of the building blocks. If you hire a bunch of construction workers and don’t give them any wood, you’re not getting a house.

Tripp Lanier: Tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing with … Is Tony Robbins still involved with OsteoStrong?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tripp Lanier: Give me a little bit of background? What is OsteoStrong and then what’s your involvement with Tony on that project?

Dr. John Jaquish: OsteoStrong is a series of franchise clinics. There’s 140 I believe and then it’s in eight different countries. It’s very successful, helped a lot of people. Tony has been promoting it and he’s been a user of it since it was a prototype.

Tripp Lanier: What is it compared to X3 Bar fitness band bar system so I understand the difference?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a series of medical devices that hit every point in the body and stimulate bone growth, but the equipment is $120,000.00. X3 Bar resistance band training system is $550.00, so it’s very different.

Tripp Lanier: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: OsteoStrong devices are the size of a couple of cars.

Tripp Lanier: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a lot of computers and robotics, there’s a robotic arm on every one that ensures a correct and repetitive positioning.

Tripp Lanier: Okay. Got it. What do we need to know if we’ve crossed this threshold and it’s like, hey I’m starting to think about my body in a longer term? As men, what do we need to be thinking about in terms of bone density? How does your program address the bone density issues we might be facing as we get older?

Dr. John Jaquish: It grows bone like we grow bone when we’re kids, so it’s an emulation of high impact.

Tripp Lanier: Without the risk of energy or …

Dr. John Jaquish: Without the risk of impact, right. It works for people of any age. Now, they need to not be damaging themselves nutritionally. There’s 20 different studies that show that vegan nutrition damages bone and you get osteoporosis much faster. Well, I recommend carnivore nutrition. I’m told that my recommendations are extreme. I disagree with that. I think they are well thought out and easily backed up by science, but okay, call it whatever you want, but eat animal protein you’ll live longer and you won’t fracture a bone, you won’t live in misery.

Tripp Lanier: The concepts and the ideas that you’re touting and you’ve built the technology with X3 Bar exercise band bar system, I mean is X3 Bar resistance band bar system the only way that we can practice this stuff if the guy out there can’t lay down the bucks for an X3 variable resistance exercise system system right now? Are there other ways that he could look at his current movement patterns and start to integrate some of the things that you’re talking about into them?

Dr. John Jaquish: You know, I’d love to have a starter X3 Bar resistance band training system that instead of being $500.00 was $50.00, but here’s the problem, regular people who are pretty strong already, would buy the $50.00 one and then it would shatter and injure them and then they’d file a lawsuit. Everyone would want to buy the cheap one and act like it’s the expensive one.

Tripp Lanier: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thought about it, from a liability perspective it can’t be done.

Tripp Lanier: I got it. All right, here’s the question I’ve been wanting to ask. Your dad was part of the lunar rover project, which is awesome, but I got more intrigued by what was written about the system that he, is this true, he developed a system to protect the home garden from intruders?

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk

Tripp Lanier: Okay. I got to hear about this.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, so my dad, when you’re a California resident you’re just kind of surrounded by animals and you love them, so you want a garden and you don’t want to put a big ugly fence around it, but you don’t want deer taking one bite out of every tomato and just ruining the whole thing, so what he did was he had motion detector sprinklers, but he took a motion detector and hooked it up to different pipes and different sprinklers that would handle 300 pounds per square inch. When the deer would, they’d see the tomatoes and they’d see the cucumbers and all the vegetables in there and they’d slowly walk, these things would trip on and they’d get hit with a beam of water that was just like getting punched by Mike Tyson. Just, bang. We’d sit there in the lawn chairs and sometimes they’d be far enough away where it would come on and they would just get the spray and even the spray was so hard they’re like, no way, not going anywhere near there. They cut a wide berth around that garden.

The funny thing was, the raccoons could get underneath it, but the second they tripped it it was so loud that they were gone too.

Tripp Lanier: It would scare. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and I mean it was like nobody ever took a bite out of anything.

Tripp Lanier: That’s so good.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s not where we go.

Tripp Lanier: All right, man. Well, this book, Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time: So is Cardio and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want, available everywhere. Anywhere and everywhere, go check that out.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I know Amazon is … Amazon prints them, so I would go to Amazon.

Tripp Lanier: Okay, and then where do we learn about X3 Bar?

Dr. John Jaquish: You know, you can find everything, I did a landing page with all the links. It’s Doctorj.com. D-O-C-T-O-R J.com, the letter J.

Tripp Lanier: How did you get that? I figured he would have …

Dr. John Jaquish: Julius Irving?

Tripp Lanier: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: You knows he’s been fishing for the last 15 years.

Tripp Lanier: He slept on that.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think he did have this website, but I was contacted by a domain broker and they’re like, ‘Do you want this?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I really do.’

Tripp Lanier: All right, Doctorj.com. Man, nice work.

Dr. John Jaquish: I guess I’m Doctor J now.

Tripp Lanier: You got it. You got it. Hey man, it’s been really good to connect with you. I’ve appreciated. You’ve opened my eyes to a lot of things and some of the things you’re bringing here are going to be confronting for a lot of people. It will be interesting to see how this stirs things up, but looking forward to how you develop this.

Dr. John Jaquish: You know, in a way yes, in a way no. I tell people, if you’re going to get emotional about scientific issue, you’ve already defined yourself as a fool.

Tripp Lanier: If these interviews are helping you, please leave a positive review on whatever podcast app you use so that others can discover the show more easily.