You’re Doing Fitness All Wrong - A Conversation With X3 Bar Founder Dr. John Jaquish

In this episode hosted by Dr. Jay Khorsandi, Dr. John Jaquish, the author of “Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want, discusses what’s wrong with the fitness industry and explains why and how he came to develop an osteogenic loading machine and a muscle-building home workout system. Dr. Jaquish also shares his thoughts on nutrition, especially carnivore and OMAD, as well the problems and limitations of weightlifting and why cardio shouldn’t be in your routine.

Full Transcript

Jay: This is Dr. Jay Khorsandi, and you’re listening to the Best Night Ever. The show that’s dedicated to helping you get your best night sleep. Over the last 20 years of treating patients, I’ve worn many hats, including dentist, engineer, psychologist, artist, corporate executive, and more. I found the key to success, health, and longevity lies in sleep, and that’s why I created the show. I want to teach you how to make sleep your best friend.

Join me on a journey to uncover cutting-edge science, life-changing tips from renowned experts, ancient and modern sleep secrets, game-changing routines, and lifestyle hacks that will educate, inspire, and ultimately help you get the best night ever.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. And for those of you just joining for the first time, welcome to the Best Night Ever. All right, a quick heads up on this show, my guest is a very controversial thought leader in the health and fitness industry, so much that he has received death threats because of his perspectives. Now he’s not shy to share his thoughts and his goal is to revolutionize the way we think about getting stronger and healthier. In fact, his new book is called Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. And that should tip you off into where we go in this episode. And also this show has some strong language, so if you are sensitive to that, please be aware.

So who is my guest? His name is Dr. John Jaquish, and he’s a Wall Street Journal best selling author and inventor of the most effective bone density building medical device which has reversed osteoporosis for thousands and created more powerful and fracture- resistant athletes. He’s also the creator of the X3 Bar, which he claims builds muscle much faster than conventional lifting, industrial and less training time, all with the lowest risk of joint injury.

Dr. Jaquish is a research professor at Rushmore University, he speaks at scientific conferences all over the world and has been featured on many of the top health podcasts, is an editor of multiple medical journals and is a nominee of the National Medal of Science. In this episode,we talk about what’s wrong with the fitness industry as he sees it, the genesis of his inventions and osteogenic loading machines and the X3 Bar. The problems and limitations of weight lifting and why cardio shouldn’t be in your routine, his thoughts on why going to the gym is pointless.

And we also talk about his thoughts in diet, especially in the carnivore diet and OMAD, which is one meal a day, as well as his most recent style of dieting, which is inspired by ancient practices and very unique, you’re going to want to listen to what he has to say about how he eats and when he eats. And we’re going to talk about a lot more cool things as well. So stay tuned.

All right. So this show is brought to you by me, and my new website viasleep.com, it’s V-I-A sleep.com. And I created that site because I’m doing a lot more sleep coaching these days and telemed appointments. And if you or someone you know has issues like snoring, or sleep apnea, or has a C-PAP machine and doesn’t like it, or wants to take your sleep to the next level, check out my new site viasleep.com, and that’s where you can work with me directly, one-on-one on sleep optimization, sleep coaching, sleep testing, and getting you better. And the way to connect with me there is, you can email me directly at [email protected] or just check out the website,viasleep.com, and I look forward to hearing from you.

And as always, you can also check out my latest sleep tips, tricks, and gadgets on my website, sleepbiohacker.com or my Instagram at sleepbiohacker, and I look forward to hearing from you. So that’s it for now, but get ready for any wild and a bit of a different interview with the raw and uncensored, Dr. John Jaquish. All right, we are alive, John, welcome to the show.

John: Hey, thanks for having me.

Jay: So, you’ve been in the health industry and the fitness industry for a long time. I guess, I just want to start with a little bit about the origin story of you, of what compelled you to go into this field in the first place?

John: Well, I don’t feel like I’m in the fitness industry at all. I feel like I’m destroying the fitness industry as it should be destroyed. I mean, if I want to be generous, I’ll say it as a 99% failure rate. I think traditional fitness is a joke. Most people who go to gyms, you can grab any random 1000 people, where you’re going to find one in shape person, maybe. Maybe one out of 10,000. I mean, really with an impressive development, most people who work out don’t look like they work out at all. I’d say fitness is the most failed human endeavor, and I come from the medical device industry. Then it’s like, I needed an evidence-based development of a product that would trigger the body to a much higher degree. And when somebody says, “No, I’m going to stick with weights, that’s what everyone’s doing.” Okay. First of all, you just too lazy to either read or you’re too stupid to read it.

The book I wrote which is called, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want, the amazing thing there is, they’re sticking with something that has basically failed, like lifting a static weight from one point to another, who does that work for? I’m just going to pick a typical big box gym. I’m not talking about Venice Beach Gold’s Gym, that’s where all the pro bodybuilders train. Go to a Planet Fitness in Wichita, and you can see 100 people in there and they look chubby or skinny, not fit, then you go to the Pizza Hut next door and it’s the same people. There’s nothing different about any of these people. In the book, I explain the reasons why tendon layouts, inefficiencies, in movements, and these are all very solvable problems. That was the mission I went on after developing the world’s most powerful bone density treatment, which is OsteoStrong, and you are a member of one of those facilities.

After the data that I gathered from understanding and learning how bone works and how we can load bone to the highest degree, I realized that if somebody is seven times stronger in one position of a given movement, then they are in another position of a given movement lifting a static weight, meaning the same weigh at the bottom, and at the top is spectacularly stupid. We all knew there was a difference. You go to do a pushup and when your nose is touching the ground, that’s the hard part, and when you’re almost at the top, when your elbows are just getting ready to lock out, that’s the easy part. It’s because you’re seven times stronger there. But if you lift with a static weight even doing pushups, even your body weight, it’s static, it doesn’t change. So we need a weight that dramatically changes.

And there’s been other approaches that have yielded great results like this, where they put chains at the end of the bar. I won’t say my invention is the only thing that works, it’s the only thing that works really well and better than the other solutions. But when people would put chains at the end of the bar, so as they extend their arms or the legs and they squat, or the arms in a chest press, they’re putting more load as it become more extended, but the ratio needs to be right. So you need maybe not seven and X because that’s one rep maximum numbers that I was picking up on, but a massive degree of variance. And I do have this formula, it’s part of one of our patterns, we have 16 patterns, to really deliver the proper amount of force in accordance with human biomechanics and make it so that everybody can use it.

Because a bar with chains, most gyms don’t even have that. They don’t want huge, heavy chain links being tossed around because it’s total liability problems. And so they just end up having the same crappy equipment that is ineffective everywhere.

Jay: So you mentioned Planet Fitness in Wichita. Why do you think this status quo is so prevalent? Why is everybody just getting the same results, doing the same thing over and over again, without any disruption other than people like you coming on board and flipping it upside down, but why do people just keep doing the same thing?

John: Because people don’t ask that question. Why are we doing something stupid when we could do something better? Very few people ask that question. Steve Jobs asked that question. When the iPhone first came out, it was said by just about every tech reviewer with the exception of Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, very smart guy. He knew what was going to happen. Blackberry was the king at the time, and Blackberry was all about that comfortable keyboard where you could really press down the keys with your thumb, and you’d hear a click, it was very satisfying. And there’s no keyboard on the iPhone, so it was just like, “Oh, no one’s going to enjoy you using that, it’s going to be stupid. It’s going to be the biggest failure. Apple is going to go out of business.”

So many of my friends said Apple is going to go out of business. And I’m like, “Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, well maybe they know something about touch screens that you don’t.” And of course they came up with a much better user experience. It wasn’t even a standard touch screen, it wasn’t resistive, it was capacitive, so it was a completely different thing. So when you look at that, nobody asked the question, like, “Can there be a better design?” Except one guy, except Steve. So why do people go and do the same ineffective thing over, and over, and over again? You could probably say that about all kinds of things. We used to reduce fevers with leeches, by covering people with leeches or bloodletting. That’s how George Washington died. They killed the US president by trying to let him bleed up in order to reduce his fever. Does that work? I mean, yeah. It reduces the fever or kills you, either way your fever is gone.

I mean, I think they saw that as a success, but is there a better way? Yeah. We have a drug called acetaminophen, or even aspirin. Aspirin isn’t as good as acetaminophen in reducing fevers, but we have a biochemical method to address it now. So we just have a better way, but nobody asked, is there a better way? Somebody had to ask the question to themselves and then go find an answer. And I just think that thing is not something that’s taught in school, like, what are the better answers out there? This is more of an entrepreneurial question by the way.

Jay: Yeah, that’s fine.

John: Yeah. What is the thing that is going to make a person know that they’re wasting your time?

Jay: Yeah, that’s a good question.

John: Yeah. I don’t think anybody really knows, and there’s very few people that do it. When I get introduced to people at a cocktail party or something like that, someone’s like, “He invented a medical device and he invented a really effective fitness device.” And people are like, “Invented. I don’t think I’ve ever met an inventor.”

Jay: Inventor. Yeah.

John: Because most are just out doing the same shit that everybody else did. Their product is just shiny. It’s like, invention is met with great negativity also. So I’m trying to take this out to market. Unfortunately, I have a great attitude, ridiculing the stupidity of some of these people who fail to see the obvious. If you read the book, it is obvious. If you don’t read the book and just kick and scream over the title, well then you’re an adult child.

Jay: And that’s why I was excited to have you on the show.

John: Either you believe in it, or you are too lazy to read it/not smart enough to absorb the information. I love these, every word is misspelled kind of posts about what a bad guy I am, and I’m a scammer. And it’s like 100,000 people have bought the product, we have less than a 1% return rate, and by the way, consumer products typically have a 30% return rate. So it’s obviously working, nevermind the fact that we’ve got a whole bank of people who have put on more than 20 pounds of muscle in six months or less on the website. Also, we got almost 40 professional athletes using it. That’s all on the website too, that I didn’t pay. They gave me an endorsement because they just loved it. Of course I can’t use those guys in ads, I just put it on the website because that’s all I got permission for. I

Jay: Yeah. I think I saw Tom Brady, he’s a big fan, a big user as well. He’s been in love with this. And I want to talk more about… Well, go ahead.

John: Andre Drummond is up there. He’s one of the best players in the NBA, he plays for the Pistons. But there are others who may use the product, you mentioned a name, I cannot confirm or deny the usage of certain professional athletes because I don’t compensate them.

Jay: Got it.

John: So certain guys go out there, they’re using it, they’re making videos with it because if I use their name, that’s their brand, that’s how they make money. I can’t do that. There’s also a really famous actor who is known for an incredible physique, incredible strength, I can’t mention his name either. But it’s getting around. When I get a phone call and it’s like, “Hey, I was working out with so-and-so, celebrity athlete kind of person. And they said I really needed an X3.” Yeah. I mean you do, but they’re sold because they heard it from somebody who’s really in authority on the subject.

Jay: Yeah, I totally get it. I mean, I treat patients for sleep disorders and I’ve got some pretty high profile clients as well too. Some of them if I was to mention their name, would blow my business up, but because of confidentiality I can’t, which is frustrating.

Jay: Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing the response that we can get and the people that we can help. I am personally using it as well too. I want to dive deeper into obviously the book, you mentioned what we’re actually talking about, because people are probably listening going, “Well, what is this thing that you guys are talking about that’s helping so many people?” Just to rewind a little bit, as far as the biomedical device that OsteoStrong the bone density, just can you, I guess, give people a quick background on what that is and what it does, and then how that led to what we’re-

John: Yeah. That’s-

Jay: … going to talk about now?

John: Sure. It’s my first invention, it puts compression on the axis of a bone. So lengthwise, end-to-end compression and it highly influences the density of the bone. So you use it and you use it correctly, and minerals get absorbed into the bone and make the bone more powerful to make the user fracture resistance, or more fracture resistance. So people with weakened bone like post-menopausal or population, or postpartum population, they lose a lot of bone density. They can gain it back and even more. Also the bone they build with the device lasts 30 years. So bone doesn’t go away like muscle does when you stop. There’s a little bit of disuse or there’s a big buffer there, because it is a very high metabolic rate. In fact, when you go through an osteogenic loading session, primary mineralization takes five to 10 days. So with muscle, it’s 36 hours, this is why the 10 days. Secondary mineralization, the bone keeps growing for 120 days. This is after one hard impact. So very different metabolism of a bone cell versus a muscle cell.

Jay: Yeah. I’m familiar with bone in orthodontics when I was moving people’s teeth around, in the same osteoclast activity and the same two weeks cycle I was going for, for Invisalign or changing out retainers, you have to give time for the bone to remodel. So I totally get the same ideas. Okay. So you took that information as far as the mechanics of bone growth, and impact, and the architecture of muscles, and then that translated into what we’re talking about here, which is the X3 Bar?

John: Yeah.

Jay: Again, let me start with one question before we get into that. Is, do you think you would have invented the X3 Bar had you not invented the OsteoStrong?

John: No. No, because I wouldn’t have known and I try to point that out. There’s a lot of trainers of work, trainers of, well, sports scientists, actual PhD is a sports science. They’ve worked very hard to optimize strength training programs, and I’m probably their least favorite person because I came from another area in physical medicine, I came from physical medicine. You wouldn’t call necessarily with any physical medicine. And I came up with something grotesquely more effective, hugely more effective than what they’ve been doing, their entire lives. There’s a lot of jealousy and anger there and love. I mean, I get death threats on a regular basis.

Jay: And you’re like the Maverick Rogue. I mean, there’s a reason I guess they call you the Elon Musk, or the Tony Stark of this industry. I guess you tell it like it is. I mean, a lot of people like to sugar coat it.

John: Well, they shouldn’t take it personally, I’m not insulting them. Even when they personally insult me, and make videos about like, how I’m a scammer or whatever, first of all, I’m not going to dignify those clowns by using their name because they’re not on my level, they don’t deserve that. But at the same time, they just didn’t know. They didn’t know what they were doing was inefficient. So not knowing is not necessarily being an idiot. It’s, you just didn’t know. I didn’t know either. I had to go through the bone density experiments to see, wow, we can put powerful loads on the body, huge forces. But we don’t.

Jay: Efficiently and quickly. Yeah.

John: Yeah. Exhaust muscle through such a greater degree and get far better results and people, they don’t know.

Jay: So your goal is now to let people know and I guess educate or inspire. And you’ve written this book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time, which we mentioned at the beginning of the show, it’s a very controversial name, coming maybe from a controversial guy, but I just actually finished the book this morning and I’ve been doing this X3 Bar that we’re talking about as well too. So a lot of these things that we’re talking about, I have obviously firsthand experience with now. And for people listening who are skeptical, I mean, this is the real deal. I’m convinced, I come from a scientific background as well too, I’m not necessarily from a gym background, I wasn’t a huge-

Jay: I had gym memberships growing up. I think we all did for the people listening, we signed up for that monthly or the yearly pass, and we ended up going for a couple of times and then life happens, and I don’t want to go spend an hour, an hour and a half there packing my bag, driving my car, running on a treadmill like a rat and not having-

John: There’s a non-scientific comment I have, I usually don’t make those, that’s why I’m calling it non specifically. I think people’s problems sticking to the workout is, they’ll do it for a couple of months and they see no difference. I think it’s the lack of results.

Jay: That they quit. Yeah. If I didn’t see anything.

John: Right. I think almost everybody sees nothing. But if you see results every time, and I know I’m making this statement based on how many people stick with X3. They start using X3 and they send me before and after pictures in a week and you can actually see a difference, and then so on, and it gets better, and better, and better over time. And so I think the reason that this never sits in the closet is actually continuing being used is because it works so well. Why do people not use their spin bike and hang the clothes on it instead, and leaving the guest bedroom, is because it didn’t do anything for them. They were fat when they got it and they used it for a month and they were still fat, just as fat. It doesn’t work. I explained that, the cardio, we have 40 years of research that we’ll teach you.

Jay: Yeah. Let’s talk about the cardio. Cardio is a waste of time as well too.

John: 40 years.

Jay: What’s the problem? I mean, if you go to a gym, I think they devote 80% of a gym to ellipticals, and bikes, and treadmills, and cardio. What’s-

John: Right. So I talked to a really good friend of mine who was one of the largest, big box owners. The company had the most locations of gyms in the world, I think he had 300 in Germany alone, good friend of mine. And I was talking to him about, you really need to educate your members on this, and this, and this, and this. He says, “John just stop. I’m not educating anybody, that’s not what we do in the gym.” He said, “I own a nightclub with treadmills. Good looking people sign up to be around other good looking people, and they don’t really care what equipment they’re using. They think cardio is what they need, they’re not interested in learning anything. So they use the cardio equipment, they use the strength equipment, and if it’s effective, it’s beside the point. We’re here to sell memberships.” Now, if people come in and say, “Your equipment is not effective, I need something better than this.” Okay. Well like what? So designing the perfect gym is not what a gym owner operator does. They sell memberships. That’s the only thing we do.

Jay: All right. So you wrote this book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time and So is Cardio, these are myths that you bust in the book. I’m just curious, is there other things that you see people doing besides weight lifting and cardio that you just shake your head at and go, “That doesn’t seem right?”

John: Oh, there are exercises that are more damaging than helpful. There are stretching. People stretch the hell out of muscles before they use them, they just turn off their muscles.

Jay: How is that?

John: Well, you just keep the muscle from firing because they’re irritating the reflexes and the muscle that contract to protect from damage because it’s being stretched. So they’ve got to work out and they have less muscle activated because the body is protecting itself from damage. So you actually reverse potentiate. You keep more muscle from firing. So a more of a warm-up type movement is good with X3 because we go so high reps, the first few repetitions are the warmup. And weighty muscles, and tendons, and ligaments damage the easiest, at the bottom, at the weak range. So with X3 that gets offloaded.

Jay: Oh, of course. Yeah.

John: Energy is amazing. He’s not a fan of weight lifting because he says weight lifting overloads joints and under loads muscle. And he’s thinking what I was thinking, but I had the specific data that I could back into and match with the design of a product. Yeah. That’s the problem, when you’re holding the same weight at the top and at the bottom, at the bottom you’re destroying your joints, at the top you’re hardly firing any muscle at all.

Jay: What are your thoughts on this thing I’ve been hearing, this buzzword lately about something called exercise snacks? Have you heard that term?

John: No.

Jay: Okay. So from what I understand, it’s basically every hour just getting up for a few minutes and just doing some squats, or just doing some pushups, or just moving around every hour. Instead of getting one larger chunk of exercise, you just do little bursts throughout the day.

John: Is that really a thing?

Jay: Yeah. Exercise snacks. I think-

John: Well, what a stupid name? Wow. Okay. Yeah, I mean being more active is better than being less active. So that’s obvious. From a hormonal perspective, you really want to keep your workout together because you don’t want to turn a little bit of the hormone, receptors on, turn them off, turn them on, that’s a confusing signal and your body will do nothing. So the workout that’ll all be together, but if I’m tired, let’s say I had a crummy night sleep. Yeah. I’ll go and like some air squats or go stand on the powerplay, or a powerplay, growth hormone accelerator. Yeah, it’s after 2020. So let’s just move into the future. Yeah. I’ll engage my body, go for a walk, I’ll stand while I’m talking to somebody instead of sitting down, keeps me from drinking too much caffeine also, but intermittent-

Jay: Exercise.

John: … activation. I won’t even call it activation of the body, does not replace an actual, I’m going to be focused and do a real workout.

Jay: Got you. All right. Let’s talk a little bit about nutrition and diet. Obviously big buzzwords these days are keto, carnivore, intermittent fasting. What’s been your recent take on this? I know you were a big fan of OMAD, one meal a day, or even one meal every two days.

Jay: Still doing that?

John: No.

Jay: Any updates on the protocols that you’re doing or recommending?

John: Yes, but let me address the other parts of the question first. There’s no such thing as a keto diet. People are like, “Oh, is your diet keto?” You don’t want to see me in a grocery store, I just want to throw them through the window. Ketogenesis is a function of the human body. It’s not a diet. Now, can you eat food that encourages this state? Not really. You can avoid the foods that disable that state, which is carbohydrates. So if you quit eating carbohydrates, is that your keto diet? I mean this is stupid. But I mean, I guess there’s a foolish diet which has a lot of carbohydrates in it, and there’s one that’ll actually enact a function of your human body. Why would we have a function in the human body if there was something wrong with it?

Typically organisms don’t self-destruct. We don’t have a, “Oh I’m healthy and young. I’m going to turn on my self destruct system.” No we don’t have that. I mean, you can still eat like an idiot, but that’s not a system within the body that’s just your own poor judgment. Yeah. I mean ketos is most of the time when carbohydrates are ingested, it’s for performance reasons, and there’s a way to time that, but I also point out, that carbohydrates don’t fit the definition of a macronutrient anymore. Macro nutrients need to be essential to life, carbohydrates are not. And that’s the US food and nutrition board’s decision as of 2005.

Jay: That’s crazy.

John: I guess-

Jay: I saw that in the book, I couldn’t believe that.

John: I guess they didn’t get their check… I guess they didn’t get their check from Nabisco that month. Yeah. It’s obvious. What do we need them for? Now, I will say strategically from the perspective of a person who’s trying to grow as much muscle as possible. Yeah. There’s a way you can apply carbohydrates as a performance enhancement. But that doesn’t mean they’re macronutrient, that doesn’t mean they’re the reason carbohydrates exist in nature. I mean, first of all, they bloom in nature right before the winter. So they exist to get you as fat as possible so that you can survive the winter. You have thicker adipose layer on your body and you’re more likely to survive. Also, if you go for months without eating, you’re very obese, you can metabolize that. We’ve seen instances of people going on month long fast, and they just eat into their own fat storage, so you can live off of it. Yeah.

Jay: Okay.

Jay: We can encourage ketosis by omitting the right foods.

John: Right. It’s really just, ketosis is going to be, you have some of it, if you’re digesting protein and fats, and then when you’re void of anything in your intestines, not digesting a thing, your blood is depleted, then you go into a higher level of ketosis, and use a lot more body fat.

Jay: And I know you’re a fan of eating once every other day now and packing in a bunch of protein, steaks, eggs, whatever. How does that fit into like, if you’re doing an X3 Bar protocol and you’re working on every day, don’t you want to be getting a daily intake of protein to match that workout. I mean, taking it all in one big bolus and once every 48 hours, doesn’t that mess with-

John: Yes. Well, I have experimented with longer, fasting periods. Yeah. They work great, you’re not gaining muscle on a fast unless you use photogene, which is really low in calorie, really high in protein value. So you can do that and I’ve gained mass with no food at all, which I know a lot of people say it defies the laws of thermodynamics, but they don’t know what they’re talking about because of autophagy. You can reappropriate, you can digest old cells and turn them into fuel for construction of new cells. Yeah. I mean, it’s not at the same rate. I like one meal a day for a couple of reasons. it’s sustainable. I can do that seven days a week, every day. It doesn’t matter. Typically, the meals you have is dinner. So to have dinner.

Jay: Are you a fan of the Bulletproof coffee with the butter and MCT oil for a breakfast start?

John: Do you need that? Yeah. I don’t. I’ve graduated from that. I developed Imperium, which is a pre-workout coffee replacement drink. Where we have coffee bean extract in it, and it’s a powder, and medium chain triglyceride, moderate level. And then about 200 milligrams caffeine per serving, which is very low. A typical Starbucks is 400, like 450. So that’s something I can do in the morning, but also then you don’t. I’m doing something, now that we’ve gone through all of the things that we can do from a fasting perspective, there’s even some I never talked about because I didn’t think they were palatable. So even when I said do a 72 hour fast, 1% of people are willing to do that. Then I’m like, who wants to try a 72 hour dry fast? No liquid.

Jay: I mean, I’ve done those and I’ve done five day water fast, but yeah. It’s not for the faint of heart, especially if you’ve never done a fast before. You definitely don’t want to just jump into that.

John: Well, start with that. That’s grad school right there. Yeah. So I started experimenting dry fasting. So I really wanted to take all these things I learned and then make them easier to use, because I know my discipline is unreasonable to put on other people. I do have an incredible amount of discipline. Now, if I’m not going to eat or drink anything for 72 hours for three straight days, I just don’t. I don’t get angry and punch the wall. I don’t all of a sudden, gulp down a liter of Coke in the middle of that acting like I’m themed, but apparently everybody else does. So what I’m doing right now is, I’m running a compliance test. And what I’ve been doing is, how easy is it to just do OMAD with Ramadan fasting place over the top of that and why I really like Ramadan fast.

Now, I used to dry fast all the time because I’m an American wrestler. In high school I wrestled, and we didn’t call it fasting, we just called it cutting weight. We just didn’t drink anything for a whole day before the need and you’d wear a t-shirt, a garbage bag, and then a sweatshirt on top of that. Of course you’re sitting in class and sweat’s just pouring off your face and everybody thinks you have a fever or something like that, but no, you’re just in a sweat lodge.

Jay: Like a sauna. Yeah.

John: You’re in a sauna. Yeah, and it doesn’t need to be fancy, it doesn’t need to have beautiful lights in it. If you want to sweat, you can sweat with a garbage bag. I have no bedside manner. There’s a reason I didn’t try and become an MD. I have what zero bedside manner. So anyway, I’m trying to see what we can get out of dry fasting and the one meal a day. So I still won’t eat anything in the morning. I’ve been doing this a couple months now, and it’s working real well. So dry fasting yields about triple the fat loss. And some are saying, it might even bring on a top if you eat faster.

And the benefit is, your body will only get so dehydrated, and then it reaches in the fat cells because what are the only nonvascular cells in the body? That, fat cells. What can it look to, to use as fuel, the fat cells? What’s great about that is normally when you have caloric restriction weight loss, you just shrink the fat cells. But this is why somebody who goes on a really strict diet for a long time, then they hit their goals and then they go and start to eat the same stuff they used to look a little bit higher volume, they blow right up again. You’ve seen that.

So what dry fast will do is actually destroy the fat cell. So it’ll keep you leaner much longer. What I’m doing right now is, I’m doing five days, Ramadan OMAD fasting on the weekdays and then on the weekends, just one meal a day, but I’ll drink liquid through the day just because I’m with other people. If somebody wants to go out for coffee on a Sunday morning.

Jay: Yeah. Wow, that’s the Ramadan OMAD, that’s the new one. I’m going to hashtag that later.

John: Yeah. Nice. Thank you. I think what I like about Ramadan is there’s so much research on Ramadan fasting. So you can’t tell somebody. Let’s say you and I already in university, we are professors and we’re like, let’s do a study on the dry fasting that American wrestlers do. It probably wouldn’t get past an ethics board and we wouldn’t be able to get a big enough sample size unless we found wrestlers who were already doing it. You can’t tell somebody they can’t drink water, when they’re already not drinking water, then you can study them. But then of course the ethics board would be concerned if they’re being pressured at all, or if they want to stop, is there some sort of mechanism. So it’s a tough thing to research, but in the least, there’s 1.8 billion Muslim people, 93% practice Ramadan fasting, that’s a lot of people.

Jay: Yeah. There must be something to it if they’re all doing it.

John: They don’t get hurt and they do it for 30 straight days. I’m not even doing that, I’m doing it for just five days a week.

Jay: That’s an interesting one. All right. I want to go back to one other thing too, with the X3 Bar, obviously for people who are listening who want a picture in their head, there’s latex bands, like giant size rubber bands with an Olympic bar, like a trapeze bar type thing, something like that. There’s a plate, and then-

John: It’s an Olympic bar.

Jay: Yeah. And you do the exercises using this plate and the resistance of the bands and the bar. I see a lot of people on social media, on my feeds, doing all these kettlebell workouts and these functional pattern workouts where they’re throwing balls against the wall while standing on one leg and doing these natural organic type movements. What’s your thoughts on those? You know what I’m talking about, right?

John: Yeah. It’s like asking a formula one mechanic to work on your 20 year old Honda kind of overkill. You’re doing agility drills yet you have trouble even activating major muscle groups.

Jay: I’ve seen these. Yeah.

John: It’s okay.

Jay: Yeah. I mean, I see it’s popular.

John: If you do that, but you’re also not going to grow significant musculature. The agility turns gray is if that’s what you need or if you have trouble standing up, then it’s what you need. If you had a stroke or if you’re just a general clumsy person. Yeah. You can do that. But if you want to put on size, you would also do X3. Also these things aren’t very exhausting. I think things like planks, and kettlebell work, and medicine ball work, they’re all things that people are attracted to because it looks like you’re working out when you’re really not, you’re not taking a muscle but fatigue, not in the way where we’re using the term. There’s no real work being done there. It’s just going-

Jay: I mean, it’s sexy, I guess. You see these people that are shredded and then they’re throwing those ball and they’re catching these medicine balls and doing all these positions and it looks cool. Yeah. And when I do this X3 Bar, I’m hitting the ground after doing the squats, I’m begging for mercy. It’s painfully different than that.

John: Yeah. Because those guys who look really cool when they’re standing on Venice Beach and doing all kinds of agility drills and they are agile, that’s cool, but that’s not how they got their physique. They worked on it with putting huge forces through muscle. Yeah, when X3 replaces weight training for a lot of the pro athletes we do, the NFL guys, the NBA guys, what I tell them is, don’t take any of your skill training away because you still need those skills. Forget about the weightlifting, that’s just raw power. However you apply that raw power, that’s up to your sport, what you do. And the drills in football are different than the drills of basketball. But that agility work is very important. But it’s important to them. I don’t shoot basketballs and get paid for it. So I don’t care. I’m great at shooting a basketball or I’m lousy at shooting the basketball, it does not matter to me.

Jay: Right. Okay. Changing gears a little bit here, I know we talked about it before off mic, I treat patients for airway disorders, snoring and sleep apnea and a huge chunk of my patient population are people who are weightlifters, muscular type people. Have you seen, or what are your thoughts on gaining weight and muscle and mass and higher incidence of sleep apnea?

John: That’s a great question. I don’t think I’ve seen it as much as you, but you have a population that comes in and asking about sleep apnea. It’s challenging. I know ultimately with X3, your musculature is going to grow much faster than it would normally, and sometimes your ability to process oxygenated blood isn’t there as quickly. So it’s a little easy for X3 users to get out of breath sometimes. But I’ve never seen somebody who wasn’t able to sleep from it.

Jay: Okay. All right. So lots of cool stuff you mentioned here, a lot of controversial thoughts, which I love. I mean, it gets people thinking, it got me thinking and that’s why I became a fan of this interview. Got a couple more questions here as we’re getting closer to the end here, a little bit different. If you could go back 20 years to John, probably back in school in that time. What would you say to him knowing what you know now?

John: I got a minute or-

Jay: Whatever you want.

Jay: Yeah. Health, nutrition, fitness, life entrepreneurial-ism, any of those you want.

John: I wouldn’t tell me a thing because I did it all right.

Jay: We all did it all right, right?

John: I mean, I make mistakes. Yeah sure. But I focused on developing the technology, the documentation. I really wasn’t distracted by much, I didn’t take undergrad very seriously. I was president of fraternity, I played rugby, president of the great council. I was very involved politically in the university and classes were like, “Wait, did I have any classes today?” It was that kind of thing. But I will also say that the most important education is one you give yourself, because it’s the things that you’re curious about and you go look for, and they’re going to make you unique to either yourself, if you start a business or to a potential employer.

So if you used to know the same stuff that’s in the textbook that everybody else does, you’re not that valuable and you never will be. Yeah, I didn’t find the standard education method to be very interesting or effective or whatever. Yeah, I just followed my own path, there’s probably a few years that I didn’t realize the potential of what I was doing and I lost a little bit of steam. So I instead focused a little more on going out and having a good time then just wasted nights. Like going out on a Tuesday night, don’t do that kind of thing.

Jay: All right, don’t do that on a Tuesday night. I’m in the same position as you too. I think I’ve learned more in the last 20 years through life and experience than I did in all my academic training. I mean, they’ll teach you core fundamental stuff, but it’s the trial and errors and the sticking to your gut instinct, and just focusing in on what you can control and executing, which I think is what you’ve done as well. I mean, it’s the fundamentals. All right. At the end of the day, what impact would you like to have on the world? I think I have a good idea, but I want to hear it from you.

John: Well, I’m going to get rid of this ineffective stuff that people are doing, and I do want to completely change the world. I’m not stopping until weight racks are being pushed into a landfill or recycled and somebody makes them, whatever. Belt buckles because what’s being done, it’s just not efficient or effective. Is everything going to go away? No, not everything, but close to it. Well, there’s also, some people want the skill. Is there a skill in doing a pull-up? Absolutely. It’s a movement pattern. It’s tilting your chest back. It’s getting your shoulder in the right position. So if somebody wants to climb, and they want to have that skill, they want to be able to climb a rope, is pull up a good exercise that they could do on a regular basis and probably have access to? Yeah, sure. But if you want to develop your back muscles, no, you don’t need it at all. So the vision is really change the world of that.

Jay: All right. So the gym will be the Blackberry basically?

John: Yeah. There’ll be a few gyms. But people with COVID, people have just started using X3 and not gone to the gym and they’re like, “I’m never going back to the gym. The X3 gave me better results in six months than I got in 10 or 15 years at the gym. So I’m sold. I’m never going to go with this.”

Jay: I think one of the things that we want to bring up with the X3, that it’s the time-saving too. I mean, it’s literally about 10 minutes, maybe 15 on my first couple of rounds. I’m watching the videos of how to do it just so I get better form, but it’s a quick workout and time is of the essence. People don’t want to spend an hour.

John: Yeah. People value time. I think sometimes people see what I have to say and they’re like, “Okay, that’s hard to believe that it’s better than weight training.”

Jay: All right. So just to wrap up this fascinating conversation with John here, I want to know at the end of the day, what impact do you want to have on the world in terms of your goal or your life’s mission?

John: Well, taking over the world, it needs it. Yeah. Standard fitness is just going to be, some people laugh about. There’ll be kids that will say, “Do you know our parents used to just lift static weights.” And they’ll be like, “Wow. That’s so silly.” Yeah. Because I’m going to bring a greater understanding of variable resistance and it will defeat most of what the fitness industry offers and is. Now we’re not going to throw out everything, people still do need to practice skills and there will be weights involved in that. If you’re a mountain climber, you need to climb, that kind of thing. But other than that, that’s my goal.

Jay: The gym will be the Blackberry that we were talking about at the beginning of the show.

John: It just stops the lead. I envisioned some gyms just having X3s in them.

Jay: I was thinking about that.

John: There’s a few already.

Jay: The OsteoStrongs have them, right?

John: Oh yeah. Yeah. Every OsteoStrong does, but they’re mostly concerned with their business model. So it’s a detail that they have, and they don’t make much money off of X3. Despite all the death threats I get for people saying I charge too much for it, I love how, when someone does a do it yourself, X3, then I’m spending more than they would have spent just buying it. I mean, also it looks like crap. Have you ever seen a homemade Ferrari? Like a plastic kit car? Yeah. It looks like a plastic piece of shit. That’s what these knock-off X3s

Jay: I’ll get the results then, and then they just poo poo it down and say, “It would’ve sucked anyways.”

John: Right. But that’s also like building your own super car. You didn’t drive a super car, so you really have nothing to say about it. Right?

Jay: Man. I mean, it’s amazing how much friction you’ve gotten and continue to get here because people, they don’t want to hear this. They’re almost like the sheep. I mean, I don’t want to even get into the pandemics and stuff like that, but people are just being told what to do, and if you say something different-

John: Yeah. Everybody wants to follow. There’s a really dark quote and I’m sure it’s a paraphrase of something Gobal said or something like that. But it was from the Mandalorian, which is my new favorite TV show by the way. It’s an Imperial officer, and he says, “People think they want freedom, what they really want is order.” I don’t know if that was a stab at all it takes today, but it’s true felt like one. I was like, “Wow.”

Jay: It’s prophetic.

John: Yeah. And of course the empire, they’re the bad guys and this is the guy is saying it. And so do people really want order? Is that really what they want? I mean, freedom is truly scary. Freedom means you have the freedom to starve to death because there’s no safety net. The government’s not going to be there to wipe your ass and treat you like a little useless baby.

Jay: All right. Well, this has been a fascinating talk, I’m so happy that we were able to spend this time here and get a peek under the hood of the mad mind of John Jaquish. If people want to learn more about you or the X3 Bar, or OsteoStrong, where can people go to learn more about any of these things we talked about?

John: I created a landing page, so I have to say 10 places to go and there’s links to everything there. It’s doctorj.com, D-O-C-T-O-R the letter J doctor.

Jay: That’s what people call me as well, so I like that. Doctorj.com. And I’ll put that in the show notes as well too, if people want to go there to learn more. And I think we’ve also got a discount code which I’ll put in the show notes as well, if people are interested. So it’s been great chatting with you today, John, thanks so much for your time.

Jay: I look forward to hanging out with you if you’re in the LA area, once all this craziness gets settled down.

John: You think it will?

Jay: I don’t know. Something’s got to happen. And like you said, we got to-

John: I think we’re going to stretch it out a lot longer.

Jay: It’s unfortunate. I’m really just at the end of the tipping point, but man, it’s frustrating.

John: Yeah, what are you going to do? Move to Honduras?

Jay: I’ve thought about it, actually. I’ve thought about Costa Rica.

John: I mean, Europe’s not a lot different. It’s better, but it’s not a lot different.

Jay: We’ll figure something out, and we’re in the right mindset. So thanks again. I’ll talk to you soon, John. Pleasure.

John: All right. Okay, Jay.

Jay: All right. Well, we made it to the end. And what did you think about what he had to say? Do you agree with his thoughts? And like I said, from the beginning, he’s very opinionated and does not hold back. And thanks again for making all the way through, I really appreciate the support and all the people reaching out to me and telling me how much they enjoyed the show. So just wanted to give you a quick heads up as well on my new website again, that’s viasleep.com. V-I-A sleep.com. And that’s where I am helping people get sleep better because people have been asking me for help. And I created the site to allow you to work with me directly one-on-one and get your sleep better, things like snoring, sleep apnea, C-PAP machines, sleep optimization, all these different gadgets that I always talk about. Let me know. And you can also reach me at [email protected] and as always, you’ve got my Instagram as well. That’s sleepbiohacker and that is it for the show. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you have the best night ever.