Stop Weightlifting and Build Muscle Fast in Just 10 Minutes a Day

Here are the top 3 topics we discuss:

• Why Weightlifting is a Waste of Time

• Why cardio is a waste of time

• How you get better results while working out just 10 minutes per day

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 resistance 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.

Also make sure to check out part 2.

Full Transcript

Faraz Khan: Friend, it’s Faraz Khan. On this episode, I talk to Dr. John Jaquish on his new book called Weight Lifting Is A Waste of Time And So Is Cardio. He talks about how to build muscle three times faster in just 10 minutes a day with his invention called the X3 Bar resistance band training system. So, if you’re a busy person who wants a better body, stay tuned for an exciting interview. Dr. John Jaquish is a scientist, an inventor, and a Wall Street Journal best selling author. He spent years researching and developing improved approaches to health. He’s the inventor of the most effective bone density building medical technology, which has now partnered with Tony Robbins and OsteoStrong for rapid clinic development. He’s the inventor of the X3 portable gym, which is the technology that has proven to develop muscle much faster than conventional weight lifting, all at the lowest risk of joint injury. Dr. Jaquish’s methods are used in training the world’s most elite athletes in associations such as the entire Miami Heat organization, various NFL and MBA players, as well as Olympians. Hey, everybody. Today I have a very special guest on the show. It is Dr. John Jaquish, who is a prolific inventor of our times. He’s not only invented the technology behind OsteoStrong, but also invented the X3 Bar variable resistance training system, which is a revolutionary device for working out, getting muscle in much quicker time. So, we’ll get into all of that in just a second. But first, I would like to introduce him to the show, Dr. Jaquish, welcome to the Anti Aging Hacks Show.

Dr. John Jaquish: Faraz, thanks for having me.

Faraz Khan: Great. So, I want to start off with your background, because you have a very, very interesting story. And I want to walk through some of your interesting touchpoints in your story as you came to invent some of these technologies. So, for the listeners, if you would, please give us a background, your medical background of what you did after college and how you got into some of the medical devices?

Dr. John Jaquish: It was really all because of my mother. My mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. And I had just finished business school at the time. And so, I was a little bit out of undergrad. But I wasn’t particularly … I was doing software sales for an enterprise, like relationship management, custom solutions kind of company. And I loved that job. That was fun. But it wasn’t quite as satisfying as what I wanted to do, which I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just thought, “I could do something cooler than this.” And my mom got diagnosed with osteoporosis. And then I read about side effects of some of the medications. And I was like, “I don’t like this.” And mom said, “I don’t like it either.” So, I said, “Just hang on. Let me see what I can learn about this.” And as I started to learn, I determined that this is really just a dysfunction of disuse. So, we normally … Children get high impact forces in the body. Now, weight lifting will never really trigger bone growth. It’s not high level enough. I shouldn’t say never.

There’s somebody out there. But basically, the minimum dose response for triggering growth of the hip joint, bone in the hip joint, which are where the fractures happen that end life or contribute to ending life early, you need 4.2 multiples of body weight to get any bone growth at all. So, people won’t lift weights with that. Faraz Khan: That’s a lot.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right. Like, you’re not going to find somebody that squats four times their body weight. And the leg slide doesn’t count because most of the weight’s going straight into the ground. You’re at a 45 degree angle, you know? It’s like, you can push a car too. It doesn’t mean you can lift 3,000 pounds. So, I just determined that impact is the only thing that ever did anything for bone. So, I have to emulate high impact. I’ve got to get the benefit of high impact without the risks. And so, what I ended up doing was building a robotics system to adjust bars and plates, so that people could contract against these bars and plates and then have a realtime feedback computerized system show them how much force they’re putting through bone mass. And now, those are the devices that you find at the OsteoStrong franchises.

Faraz Khan: And they’re great. I’ve been to a couple of your franchises. And I got to know you first from Tony Robbins.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay.

Faraz Khan: I know a lot of folks who-

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s a partner of mine.

Faraz Khan: Sorry?

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s a partner in OsteoStrong.

Faraz Khan: Yeah, exactly. And I’ve been to a few of his conferences. And I have met Brian Bradley who runs the Egoscue, or is a key in the Egoscue leadership. And so, I got introduced to a lot of his partners, and that’s how I found you. And I’ve been to one of your clinics, which, these devices are great, you know what I mean? You get up there, and they’re completely easy to use and you put in, and they have memory, so you can put in your information. And then, they really load your bone with a lot of weight, which, as your research has shown, spurs bone growth and reduces the bad effects of osteoporosis. And what I’ve learned in this longevity journey is, especially as you get older and you fall or break a hip, I think if you’re over 65, your chances of surviving more than a year is less than 40%. The numbers are-

Dr. John Jaquish: You have a 50% chance of death within one year over 50.

Faraz Khan: Oh my goodness, so that’s even less.

Dr. John Jaquish: If you have a hip fracture.

Faraz Khan: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: And it’s not necessarily the hip fracture that’ll kill you. It’s the complications, you know? The surgery to put the hip back together, because they’ve got to split a huge part of your thigh open. And you have the most blood flow anywhere in the body right there, other than immediately around the heart. So, it’s complicated surgery. Recovering from the surgery is an issue. The infections that people are susceptible to. How weakened they are after a really invasive surgery like that. So, usually they’ll get pneumonia or have some kind of complication and end up in the hospital. People don’t hear about that. There’s actually as much death because of hip fractures, osteoporotic hip fractures, as there are with breast cancer, which for some reason just doesn’t seem scary. People are like, “Oh yeah, my mom fell down and broke her hip and went to hospital. And then she died of a complication.” And I mean, I don’t know, dead is dead. So, I don’t want that to happen, or at least if it happens, I want it a long time from now. So, why is breast cancer scarier? You’re dead. So, yeah. I think there’s a little bit of an awareness problem. But of course, the people with low bone mass, they’re made aware. Yeah.

Faraz Khan: Okay, so just a personal anecdote, my grandmother fell down and broke her hip. And luckily, she wasn’t the statistic that die within a year. She lived, I believe 15 years after. But her mobility was limited to 20 or 30 feet from where she sat everyday. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t walk. She couldn’t go out. She would go out in a wheelchair. It was really said to see her in that state, you know? So, I would wish that on nobody. So, with OsteoStrong, are you able to reverse … What are the results you’re having with the devices in a lot of locations now?

Dr. John Jaquish: Building bone mass. So, it’s difficult to really get away with saying … Like, there are people who have osteoporosis use OsteoStrong for a year and then are no longer diagnosed with osteoporosis. You’ve got to be careful when you say this reversed, because you’ve always got a physician who says, “Well, you don’t know it was that.“Well, nothing else does, so we kind of do. It’s not like if you just start having … if you go vegan or something. Actually, veganism destroys bone. You really lose a lot of bone density being a vegetarian and a vegan. There’s more than 20 studies that have proven that, and a meta analysis that puts them all together, just because of the oxalates and the chronic inflammation. And then, of course, bones are protein.

Faraz Khan: Yes, if you’re vegan-

Dr. John Jaquish: If you don’t have the building blocks, then, well, there you have it. So yeah. Shame. But I like talking about bone health. That’s how I frame it. Like, people improve their bone health. I don’t really say reverse osteoporosis. That has been seen for many users.

Faraz Khan: Okay. Dr. Jaquish, you’ve got a new book, Weight Lifting Is A WasteOf Time. Tell us about this book and why you wrote it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, while I was doing the research for the medical device, for the bone density device in OsteoStrong, I noticed that humans are capable of incredible power in impact of ready ranges of motion. So, when you trip and fall and you protect yourself from that fall, you brace for impact. You have 120 degree angle between your upper arm and your lower. And the back of the hand is in line with the clavicle. Little kids, elderly people, everybody falls that way if they have time to react. So, when that event happens, you look at what forces humans are capable of. And I knew this from the gymnastics research I first did before even building the prototype of the device. Impact, we handle tremendous amounts of force, well beyond what we … seven times greater than what we can handle in regular weight training. So, tested the device with elderly deconditioned women. And they were using weights that full range wise, a professional weight lifter wouldn’t even touch. And they were like 65 year old women who’ve never exercised a day in their life.

Now, doesn’t mean they’re as strong as those guys. It doesn’t really mean anything from a performance standpoint. But what it does show is we really missed out on stimulating the body completely when it comes to asking the central nervous system to build more muscle mass. And so, because that really means we’re under-loading muscle and overloading joints, which is why … Then ultimately, I looked at … There’s the anecdotal way of looking at it, but then there’s the research way of looking at it too. The top leanest 1% of males in the United States is just under 11% body fat, which is not impressive at all. That’s the top 1%. And 23% of males do strength training. Most of them do it at home. But you look at those numbers and it’s like, would you invest with an investment company that lost 99% of its money?

Faraz Khan: No way.

Dr. John Jaquish: No. You do not. Would you buy a car that 99% of the owners had to send to the scrapyard because it just constantly broke down and couldn’t be operated? You’d never buy that. But we go to the gym. And the fitness industry has a 99% failure rate. Why? In fact, you go in an average gym, and I’m not talking about Venice Beach Golds Gym. I’m talking about a regular whatever, 24-hour fitness or something in a regular place, let’s say Fresno or something like that, Cleveland. And you walk into the gym, and you go next door to the pizza place, the people don’t really look much different. Pretty much everybody’s fat, pretty much everybody’s tired. Yeah, and by fat, I don’t mean necessarily obese, but they’re not in shape. So, it’s like why would … Like, at first, I didn’t really want to attack the whole industry. But then I thought, it’s a total failure.

It’s probably the most failed human endeavor. Like, I can’t think of anything else that people habitually do that has a 99% failure rate. And I think it’s actually worse than that because really, how often do you see somebody that has a physique worthy of admiration?

Faraz Khan: Not much, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Performance physique, I don’t just mean just like, pretty girl.

Faraz Khan: Rare.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, like somebody that you’re like, “Wow, that person looks like a statue.” I mean, that’s certainly not 1%. That might be one tenth of one percent, maybe 100th of 1%. Here’s something else for you, one in six males over the age of 18 have been on or are on anabolic steroids right now.

Faraz Khan: A lot of my friends.

Dr. John Jaquish: Apparently that doesn’t work either, because look at the top one percent. They’re not even, I mean 11% body fat, because body fat’s a great number because it takes muscularity into consideration. The more muscular you are, the more your body fat goes down by proportion. So, what are we even talking about? Like, if people see someone in shape, “Yeah, they must take steroids.” Like, every fat guy with no musculature is like, “Everybody’s on steroids except me. I’m the only one doing it right.” No, your workout sucks and your nutrition’s probably just as bad. And that’s like the story for everybody, because they don’t understand why weight lifting is so inefficient. And until I came along, there wasn’t really a good way to stimulate muscle at all. And so, when I went to develop, my first thought was, I’m just going to write it. I’m just going to write a book about variable resistance and let people figure it out from there. And it’ll be a best seller and it’ll be great. But then, I looked at sort of the do it yourself approaches to variable resistance. They were not practical. You’d have to buy all kinds of equipment, custom modify it. You’d have to pay somebody to weld this stuff. Like, nothing was set up right, nothing.

Faraz Khan: Would you explain variable resistance, Dr. Jaquish, to the audience? There’s obviously the fixed weight that we’re all so used to in the gym. What’s-

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, so you see somebody in the NFL, they’re benching 225. It’s 225 at the bottom, it’s 225 in the middle, and it’s 225 at the top. When I do a chest press, it’s 100 pounds at the bottom, it’s 300 pounds in the middle, and it’s 540 pounds at the top. And that is much closer to the actual curve of strength than anything else. Like, you’re weakest in your muscle’s stretched position. And you’re strongest in your muscle’s fully contracted position. Now, there’s leverage and kind of geometry that goes in there also. And that’s different per movement, so we’ll get into that. But we just needed … What we need is a weight that changes as we move, so we fatigue in accordance to what our capacity is. And once we do that, that’s a much deeper level of fatigue, a much more intense stimulus. And as we know with sunlight or building a callous or any other adaptive response, the more intense the stimuli, the greater the response of the body.

Faraz Khan: Absolutely. And I know lots of men that have hurt themselves doing all kinds of crazy heavy exercises. Bench press seems to be common because every man wants to boast about how much bench they did last Monday. Mondays are usually bench days, at least in the circles that I run. But I have personally hurt myself doing a military press a few years ago. And that took me out for a while.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, the shoulder has the most range of motion of any joint in the body. And putting heavy load on that is not a good idea, unless you have a joint optimist, which is exactly how this thing works.

Faraz Khan: So, your whole premise then, coming out of the studies that you do with OsteoStrong and your data, is that we don’t want to use a fixed weight again when the muscle’s the weakest, because that is the weight limiting factor. You can’t go any higher where you could grow better, you could grow bigger muscles, you could grow stronger, if you could have more weight when you can withstand the weight, right? At the proportion with your muscles-

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, the weight’s changing, which means variable resistance.

Faraz Khan: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like, resistance becomes variable. And there’s a couple of different approaches to that. But I needed to come up with my own, because the other ones that were out there were just totally ineffective. Like, they were either too light or not. They were linear, instead of like a force curve. So, I needed something that would … The more extended, the shorter the muscle becomes, it wouldn’t be like a one to two relationship. It’d be more like a one and three relationship.

Faraz Khan: So, let’s talk about your solution, if we may. You’ve invented this barbell and a set of bands that go with it that allow you to achieve exactly what you said, variable resistance, but getting higher when your muscles are stretched. How does that work, Dr. Jaquish? Please explain to the audience how this device works, the X3 Bar resistance band bar system?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, it delivers force in accordance to your biomechanical capability. So, the top of a chest press, you’re capable of seven times more force than you are at the bottom. Now, that would be like at an absolute maximum. So, we dial that back a little bit. So, it’s more like X at the bottom and 5X at the top.

Faraz Khan: That’s what the bar does?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep.

Faraz Khan: Okay. And obviously just crosstalk-

Dr. John Jaquish: And the ground plate also, because the movements like squats and dead lifts and overhead presses, you basically have to attach the band to something where the band can move freely underneath your feet. And so, that’s what the ground plate is for. So, sometimes people are like, “We’ll kind of just buy the bar.” And it’s like, no. That’s like, let me buy the car without the engine.

Faraz Khan: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You need that.

Faraz Khan: Yeah. And so, what you’ve done is, you’ve supercharged this concept of variable resistance that we had with bands, with lighter bands. And you’ve provided a stable base and a sturdy bar that can handle the variable loads.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. We tried to use an actual appropriate for strength training level of weight band that we make. We’re really the only ones that make banes that strong. Let’s say you throw one around your back and just do a pushup with it, you might actually break your wrist because it’s twisting your wrist. So, you need the bar to keep your wrist neutral. So, somebody will say, “X3 Bar fitness band bar system doesn’t work because I tried band training once and it didn’t work.” It’s like, “Well, this is not band training.” This is way beyond that. This takes the shortcomings out of band training. I understand why people don’t like band training, it sucks. You’re either using a weight that’s so low, it’s not going to do anything, or you’re using a weight high enough to twist your joints and injure yourself. Those are your two options, injury or get nothing out of it. So, you know? I needed to come up with something different.

Faraz Khan: Great. And obviously you said this increases your muscle load when the muscle’s the strongest. So, therefore, it leads to a much stronger muscle, much more quickly. And you’ve listed a lot of studies in your book that prove that, right? Jump performance increases, your even sprinting speed increases, definitely muscles that you’re working, those increase. There’s a lot of benefits to using this the right way.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Faraz Khan: Okay. The other question I’ve got, and a few questions from people that I said I was going to interview you today. One question I got is, how does this do all the muscle movements that you would want to do, the complex, the simple, in a program?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I mean, it gets every muscle in the body. But I’d want to know specifically what somebody’s talking about.

Faraz Khan: I think at the gym, they’re used to doing,“Okay, I’m going to do a bench press. Then I’m going to go over, do a squat. I’m going to do a deadlift, or I’m going to do a bicep curl.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Everything you mentioned is a movement we have. Now, I mean hip adduction and abduction, that’s not something we do. But that’s also not really something the human body does, you know? I mean, when you run, do you flare your legs outward? No. I mean, is that muscle involved in running? Yeah. And you’ll stimulate it. It’s involved in squatting too. But some of the kind of sillier exercises that don’t really mimic something we would actually do, yeah, they’re not part of it. But also remember, the gym equipment business has been very good at convincing people they need more stuff, because that’s good for business. It’s pretty simple. It’s like, the basic barbell movements are all you really need, as long as you’re getting variable resistance with it. In fact, people do way better with barbell exercise then they do with machine exercise. And this is an amplification beyond that. So, I think why do you need a Cybex hip adductor and abductor? Because Cybex sells it, that’s why. And they got a contract with your gym. And so, yeah, just because it’s there, doesn’t mean it’s good. Cigarettes are there, are they good for you? Right.

Faraz Khan: Okay, let me ask you this. You’ve said that it’s called X3 Bar portable home gym because it provides three times the gains. Could you explain that? Three times muscle size, three times the strength, what does that mean?

Dr. John Jaquish: Muscle size isn’t really a metric that’s commonly tracked. Sometimes body composition change, but those are usually in like weight loss studies. So, when somebody’s doing analysis on a strength training intervention, they’re really more focused on power output, as opposed … I mean, some of them chase after EMG, which is fool’s gold, you know? I mean, it’s like activating a muscle and making a muscle grow are two different things. But a lot of people don’t know that. So, what was seen in the study that I’m citing of three times the gains was strength. But we know strength doesn’t come without size in some regard. So, it depends on how you build the strength. Is it more neuromuscular activation? Well, that’s probably not going to result in any size change at all. But if it was either sarcoplasmic hypertrophy or myofibril hypertrophy. So, there’s really three ways to get strong. It’s those three. It’s the neuromuscular engagement, then sarcoplasmic and myofibril. We get the maximum of all three. And then we see the muscle size gains also. But also, there’s people who, if they do … Let’s say they do X3 workout bar system. They’ve got the best strength training intervention ever. And then, they don’t have enough protein to grow muscle. Well, they’ll get neuromuscular changes. They’ll be able to activate more muscle faster. So, they’ll see a greater strength output, but they won’t gain any size. And some people want that. Like, there’s a number of others … There’s a gymnast, a male gymnast that we work with from time to time. And he’s just not interested in putting on any size at all. So, he really, really limits his nutrition, doesn’t get enough protein, but trains just like somebody who would really like to gain some size. So, then he just gets the neuromuscular adaptation, that’s it.

Faraz Khan: Okay. You’re obviously working with a lot of athletes, you’re working with a lot of celebrities in this sense with the X3 Bar resistance band training system. So, Dr. Jaquish-

Dr. John Jaquish: crosstalk pro-athletes. It’s really funny. When somebody wants to say, “This thing’s a scam,” or, “It’s not good enough,” or, “Jaquish didn’t go to a good enough university.” It’s like, I created a device that reverses a disease that kills as many people as breast cancer. And you want to talk about my school? Really? You think that matters at this point? Okay. Anyway, school was great. But when somebody wants to shoot a hole in it, I really started doing a lot with athletes to really try and help the less intelligent people understand how superior this is, because they can’t read research. And a lot of regular people can’t read research either. Research is not written in a way that the regular person can understand it. It’s a lot of statistics. It’s because they’re trying to get a lot of information across to an already educated population, because what you want when you publish research is for someone else to take that research and reference it. You want your research to be good enough, interesting enough, make a point either one way or the other, because you’re not supposed to have an outcome in mind when you start the study, right? Those researchers never do that. But you know, you’re trying to prove one way or the other something. And then, when your study comes out, you hope somebody goes, “I like that point. I’m going to make that point and cite this study in my study.” And the more citations you get, the sort of better you do kind of academically. You get sort of street credit points, sort of thing with professors. So, when people didn’t understand the research, I was like, well, I can work with a lot of professional athletes, give them personal help, and ask for an endorsement for free, because I don’t want to take any money for endorsements. I mean, yeah, sure, I could go pay Dwayne Johnson a million bucks a year or whatever. He’d do it for a million a year, I’m sure.

Faraz Khan: Worth it. That’d be worth it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Shoot a couple of ads for me. But if he’s paid, it’s like, what does it mean? Like, hey, it worked for Michael Jordan and Nike. But Nike was already Nike when they hired Michael Jordan. It wasn’t like they hired Michael Jordan and everybody was like, “What’s Nike? Oh, it’s what Michael Jordan wears? Okay.” They already all knew that, so it’s not a big comparison, because I get that with people who are trying to help me market and stuff like that. I’m like, “That’s not a good analogy.” But I wanted … Where was I?

Faraz Khan: You were talking about athletes using the program.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, getting the athletes was really to help the people who either didn’t have the patience to read the research or the intelligence to understand it, and at least they could go, “Well, Doctor Jaquish is working with 12 NFL players and 40 MBA players and a couple of Olympians and Swedish soccer.” And pro athletes would not sign onto this unless it was the real deal.

Faraz Khan: Correct.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like, you don’t see pro athletes endorsing something silly that’s out there.

Faraz Khan: Yeah, Pop Tarts. Yeah, they don’t do that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, they’re not going to waste their time. They would never take the picture. They’d never even pick the thing up. So, that made a point where somebody would be like, “Yeah, when Doctor J is talking about science, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. But I do know like three guys on the Detroit Lions. I know one guy on the … The best guy on the Pistons. My favorite bobsledder at the Olympics is using X3 Bar resistance band bar system. And those guys, they’re badass. They would not waste their time.”

Faraz Khan: That is great. Congratulations on building-

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks. That made a big impact.

Faraz Khan: Yeah, I’m sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because that was like, “Okay, I don’t need to understand all this. But now that I know that all these guys …” Also, we have a couple of bodybuilders in there who are pretty open about not being natural athletes. But if you look at an NFL player, they’re continuing to get bigger. They’re drug free. Like, they get tested all the time. And it’s been a long time since they have not been able to get away with anything like that. And of course, the punishment is brutal. Like, you lose a season. Well, most NFL players only last three seasons.

Faraz Khan: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then they retire because they get busted up. So, sitting out a season is like, you might lose a third of your career. So, they don’t take that risk. They’re not screwing around with that kind of stuff. So, I like pointing that out, these guys are growing muscle, are already being high level. So, being a high level athlete, it’s harder to grow muscle.

Faraz Khan: Absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: For a beginner, it’s a lot easier.

Faraz Khan: Okay. Let’s talk about an average person that wants to improve their body composition, wants to get stronger, that wants to lose some of the weight. You have a 12-week program that you’ve outlined on your website. Is that the recommendation for most people to start with X3 Bar variable resistance training system?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep. And that’s exactly what I did. At the end of the 12-week program, we explained how to continue. And everybody imagines that because I’m really big and strong and lean, that I must do something differently. There’s got to be a secret. There’s no secrets. There’s only science. And if you read the book and use the product as directed, I just quote the man, DeLorean, “This is the way.” Like, if you don’t want to listen to me drone on for an hour about why we do what we do, or read a 268 page book with 250 scientific citations, that’s not what everybody wants to spend their time doing. Just follow the program.

Faraz Khan: Well, the book’s a great read, and it’s a quick read. Okay, so somebody gets the X3 Bar fitness band bar system

Dr. John Jaquish: For you. It’s a quick read for you.

Faraz Khan: That’s true, that’s true. Fair enough. Now, somebody gets the X3 variable resistance exercise system and they want to start with the 12-week program. I think one thing that people get confused by is that it’s only, I believe, it’s less than 15 minutes a day. Is that what it is?

Dr. John Jaquish: 10 minutes.

Faraz Khan: 10 minutes a day. And you do this five days every week, at least in the 12 week program, and you’re done with your workout for the week, just 10 minutes times five. That is just hard to believe for most people, because they’re used to driving to the gym. And talking to their friends for 20 minutes, and then actually working out for 40 or an hour and then coming back. So, two hours has gone, and now they’re tired just from going to the gym, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: My now ex-girlfriend, she would wake up in the morning. And I’d be like, “All right, I’ve got a busy day, so I’ve got to get my workout in.” And she goes, “I’ll watch.” And I go, “Okay.” So, I’d make my IN-Perium, which is like my preworkout, with a little bit of caffeine, a little bit of Beta-Alanine. And then, I would start my workout. She’d go brush her teeth. And she wouldn’t even do makeup or anything. She’d come out and I’d be done. And she’s like, “I missed it?” “Well, I told you I was going to work out right now. Like, yes.”

So, the reason it’s more like 15 minutes for me is because the bigger a muscle becomes, the more resources it takes from your heart. So, when muscles begin to get larger, this is where the myth that strength athletes have poor cardiovascular health, it’s a myth. That’s where that comes from. They actually have stronger hearts than marathon runners in some cases. There’s about 100 studies on this, and a meta analysis that cites all those 100 studies, which I do cite in the book when I talk about how cardio is really not that great. You build your heart a lot stronger and build a lot more cardiovascular health. But that doesn’t mean you can run a marathon better, because that’s very specific. Like, you actually want to weight less. Whereas, a strength athlete, the central nervous system is trying to help you weigh more. So, it’s just very different training bjectives, different stimuli and different responses.

Like, if I run up a couple flights of stairs and I weigh 240 pounds and I’m next to a guy who weighs 140 pounds and is a marathon runner, he’s going to look at me, and I’m going to be like inaudible, you know? Out there after a run up a few flights of stairs. And he’ll go, “Well, your cardiovascular health isn’t good.” And I’m like, “No, it’s probably better than yours. I’m just twice your size,” you know? Like, my Lamborghini doesn’t have the same mileage that somebody’s Prius does. It’s a lot faster, a lot more powerful. So, it’s just different.

Faraz Khan: Yeah, I want to come back to nutrition in a few minutes, because I have a lot of pointed questions there, because there’s the two components, right? The workouts, the nutrition, and maybe sleep. So, let’s talk about how much muscle can a typical man that’s following your protocol to a tee, that’s not an elite athlete expect? What can people expect out of just 12 weeks?

Dr. John Jaquish: 12 weeks, probably longer. It’s 10 pounds of muscle I’ve seen before.

Faraz Khan: 10 pounds of muscle?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Faraz Khan: Wow, that’s unheard of.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, the metric I really look for when I put a before and after is first of all, somebody needs to be comfortable with sharing a picture of them out of shape and a picture of them in shape with their shirt off. And because our target market is busy executives, not a lot of guys want shirtless pictures on the internet. So, there’s a lot of people that say no. But I don’t blame them. Like, you’re an investment banker. Do you really want a shirtless picture of yourself? That’s not very professional. But there’s also a lot of people who are just cool, who are just like, “Yeah, I mean, I’m in awesome shape. I want everybody to see it.” So, I get it either way. So, when somebody puts on 20 pounds of muscle in six months or less, we want them to share that story. And there’s been a lot of people.

Faraz Khan: There’s a lot of people putting on 20 pounds of muscle?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, which to most people is like their ultimate goal. Like, they’ve already been working out 10 years to try and achieve that and they haven’t got anywhere close. And they can do it in six months with X3 Bar resistance band bar system, which is of course, the cost of the product has to do with high level of engineering it has to go through because of the heavy weights. Like, you lift so much heavier with X3 Bar resistance band training system than you ever would in a gym. People look at the picture of the product and they think they have it all figured out. Well, I mean, you look at a picture of an iPhone. It’s a piece of glass and a microchip. Should cost like, what? $5? I mean, there’s microchips and all kinds of stuff, and glass, that’s like three. That’s like a beer bottle. Why isn’t if $5? Well, because it’s not that simple, that’s why, right?

Faraz Khan: No, the quality, the construction quality-

Dr. John Jaquish: And neither is X3 Bar variable resistance training system. They need to learn something before shooting their mouths off.

Faraz Khan: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Which is not a common trend on the internet.

Faraz Khan: True. Listen, as far as I can tell, just holding this, the construction quality is solid. Looks great, just-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it costs a lot to make one of those.

Faraz Khan: I imagine. I believe it. And it’s made in America, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. The bands though come from inaudible. They come from Sri Lanka because we don’t have enough rainfall to get tree rubble. Like, that’s organic, a lot of it.

Faraz Khan: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You know? There’s nothing we can do about that. But everything else, made in America. Made in California, for most of it.

Faraz Khan: Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: We have one really critical part that’s made in Connecticut, great company in Connecticut.

Faraz Khan: Okay. Cool. So, you obviously have … You look ripped, man. You look huge. Is this just X3 Bar portable home gym? Are you on anabolic steroids? What else are you doing on top of X3 Bar fitness band bar system?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, I take testosterone replacement therapy. But I had testosterone replacement therapy since I was 28 years old, and I’m 43 now. So, I didn’t … And I started putting on muscle when I was 40. So, I had more than 12 years of TRT. It didn’t give me any muscle mass at all. And I was working out the entire time. And I put this in the book.

What’s way more important than the anabolics in your blood stream is the receptors of anabolics that are activated. And this is something that I don’t know why it’s ignored. I think it’s back to the whole, everybody thinks there’s a secret. Like, “The reason so and so is big and strong is because of the drug. Well, I should take that drug.” No, it’s because of their training, their genetics, the tendon positioning, which I told you is irrelevant with X3 Bar resistance band bar system.But that previously determined a lot of who was strong and who was not.

And yeah, I’m at the point where I used to do some videos with Enhanced Athlete, which is a company run by Doctor Tony Huge, is what he goes by, but Tony Hughes is his name. And he’s not an … He is an attorney, so he has a jurist doctorate. But he’s a great guy and he ran this company. And then, his partner in the business was Coach Trevor. And they kind of rearranged that company a little bit. But I used to do a lot of videos with them. And they’re big advocates of anabolics. But also, you check in with your doctor and stuff like that. They just really had this philosophy that anabolics are great and you shouldn’t be afraid of them. And I would always make these arguments like, how do you know you need that stuff? Like, you don’t. And look at guys in the NFL.

Look at people how have a really advantageous tendon layout. Why don’t we focus on triggering the body to open up those receptors? Because you can flood your body with anabolics, and if there’s no receptors that are active, all that’s either going to go nowhere. You’re just going to metabolize it. Or it might go somewhere you don’t really want it to go, you know? Like, your cardiovascular system, enlarge your heart or some other crazy shit.

Faraz Khan: Yeah, that’s a very interesting point you bring up, because researchers believe that even hair loss in men is caused by the response to androgens, especially DHT, which is a byproduct of testosterone.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, dihydrotestosterone. Right.

Faraz Khan: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I was lucky enough to have a lot of dihydrotestosterone receptors in my hair, which is why it all fell out, which is why I am gorgeous.

Faraz Khan: Right, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Lucky me.

Faraz Khan: So, how does that apply to the rest of the body and muscle building in particular? How do you, an individual … They don’t know how many receptors they have or how to turn them on. What is the right way that they can go about it?

Dr. John Jaquish: I think it’s chapter three of the book. There’s no way, if you want to gain muscle, you will not escape heavy. You’ve got to put extremely heavy loads on the body and show the muscle that it’s not enough. It needs to be bigger, it needs to be more powerful. It needs to grow in all three regards, the neuromuscular pathway, the sarcoplasmic, which is really the volume, the fuel in the cell for sustained contraction, and then the explosiveness of the myofibril adaptation. You need to show your body. Like, all you have in your body is your central nervous system. And the only way you communicate with it is put it in a harsh environment. You don’t look in the mirror and go, “Well, we could really lose 20 pounds, central nervous system. Do be a favor here and just change the hormones a little bit and the receptors and just get rid of this extra fucking 10 years of pizza that I hate,” you know?

That’s not how it works. But you put the body in an environment where it’s like, “I’ve got to get rid of this fat,” then it’ll do that. So, it’s about creating the right environment. And that environment is a 24/7 environment, by the way. You either need to be stimulating with heavy loading or recovering from heavy loading. That’s it.

Faraz Khan: Okay. And in your program, obviously you target the push muscles on day one. And then you do a pull set of muscles on day two, which gives roughly about two days for muscles to kind of heal from the damage that has been done. And so-

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, that’s kind of a myth also. If you damage muscle, you recover from damage and you don’t grow. That’s like a … There’s a lot of research on this, like four really, really powerful studies, where it shows when you don’t receive damage, but you too fatigue the muscle, then you have growth. But if you have any muscle damage, the protein synthesis goes towards repairing the damage, not growth.

Faraz Khan: I see, so the-

Dr. John Jaquish: My whole life, it’s like, you damage the muscle, and then it grows back stronger. No. Not how it works.

Faraz Khan: Okay, so it’s not the micro-tears in the muscle that are getting filled in that’s causing the increase in volume?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. Marathon runners have more micro-tears than weight lifters.

Faraz Khan: True, and they’re skinny and scrawny.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, they are. They look terrible.

Faraz Khan: They actually do.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sorry, marathon runners. You don’t look healthy.

Faraz Khan: They don’t look sexy naked, I’ll tell you that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Anybody who runs a marathon does not do it because they’re trying to enter a beauty contest.

Faraz Khan: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s because they like to run, and that’s fine. But I don’t think it creates the most pleasing aesthetic in the human body.

Faraz Khan: Okay. So, let me ask you the most important question for the listeners so far is, most of the listeners of this podcast want to live a long life and they want to look good naked, right? They don’t want to be, maybe as muscular as you are or as a professional athlete. But how do you look very proportionate and you have very little fat, how long does it take to get from where you’re at to that position using the X3 Bar variable resistance training system? And then, how do you maintain that using the X3 Bar as well?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m going to quote the man, DeLorean again, just get the 12-week program, and this is the way. But ultimately, get on the program and just keep going. Like, the longer you’re on it, the leaner and stronger you get. And you don’t need any alteration or changes. And there’s something about fitness programs, and I don’t know why people do this. But fitness programs are like Harley-Davidson motorcycles. You know anybody who owns a Harley?

Faraz Khan: Yeah, a couple of people.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re popular in LA. Yeah, it’s like, they get their bike. And then, everything they talk about is how they’re going to rearrange their bike. Like, they’re going to take this part off, and a different part. And they’re going to get this other part painted, which is normally not painted. And then, they’re going to get some extra chrome somewhere. And basically, they take something that was designed to be kind of sleek, kind of well designed, and they actually made it shittier. But it’s more like, “Look how I’m custom did my thing.” And you’re like, “Yeah, okay. Cool.”

Faraz Khan: Okay. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: And people want to do it, like they just can’t wait to get their program go, “I’m going to change these five things, even though I don’t understand any of the principles that are being used, and it’s going to be better.” No, it’s not. You don’t understand the principles. And you’re going to change something and you’re going to disallow some of the big things that were trying to trigger. And then you’re going to get worse results. So, just follow the program. If somebody’s already an A certified trainer, which is like a hard cert … not a typical personal trainer certification.

It takes two weeks of clicking true or false on … Two weeks, more like two hours on an online program, you know what I mean? Like, it’s a pretty low bar for a lot of certifications. Some of them are almost like getting another degree. Like, if you’re A certified, that’s a big deal. So, if somebody really understands what they’re doing, like some of the strength coaches that I talk to. The Miami Heat, they don’t use weights, they just use X3 resistance bands system. But they also do some drills that make them better basketball players. And they’re guys who need to improve their posture to avoid injury more than they need bigger biceps, because if they put on a lot of muscle that isn’t used to get airborne, they’re going to lose jump height.

So, I tell the guys who are trainers at Miami Heat, it’s like, the strength coaches there are like, “Apply it where it will be applied best.” And they can do little tweaks. I shouldn’t mention any players’ names, because I kind of know some of the strengths and weaknesses of some of these guys. And they wouldn’t be happy with me talking about that. But there were a couple of guys that had upper back muscles, trapezius muscles that were just like violin strings. Like, tight and very almost atrophied. And they had powerful calves and powerful quads because they’d been jumping all through high school. But they weren’t working anything else. And it’s like, you don’t need to work on your bench press. But you probably need to do some serious dead lifting, take that seriously, because you don’t want a neck injury. Somebody could hit you and you fall on a shoulder or something like that, snap your head sideways. Like, you could tear a trapezius muscle, which could then pull your spine out of alignment and you’d be in and out of alignment for the rest of your life.

Faraz Khan: Yeah, that would not be good.

Dr. John Jaquish: Don’t do that. Don’t let that happen. And so, these are the people who might want to customize something. But I do exactly what I tell everybody else to do. I’m trying to maximize the power and size of every muscle in my body, trying to be as lean as possible. And I’m trying to spend pretty much jack shit worth of time doing it.

Faraz Khan: That’s music.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I can have a life. I can go to parties. I can take trips.

Faraz Khan: I think that is music to everybody that’s listening, or should be. For 10 minutes a day, maybe 15 if you’re elite or you get to the next level, your workout’s done, and you can maintain a physique like Dr. John Jaquish, which is very good physique.