Episode 62: Dr. John Jaquish - What Does it Actually Take To Create Strong Muscles & Bones?

Dr. John Jaquish, the inventor of the most effective bone density building medical device, explains how his product builds muscle faster than conventional lifting with less training time and also with the lowest risk of joint injury.

Full Transcript

Tara Garrison: Today’s episode is with Dr. John Jaquish. This is such a fascinating episode because Dr. Jaquish has his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. And he’s going to teach you today about the importance of bone strength and how we get it and how we don’t and make our bones stronger. He’s a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, and he’s the inventor of the X3 Bar.

So if you’re in the fitness industry, you may have heard of that. It’s quite incredible. It’s a variable resistance training device and it’s also the world’s most effective bone density building medical device. He’s going to open up by telling you guys about the study that he just did with NASA about bone strength for astronauts. Super fascinating.

Tara Garrison: Dr. Jaquish, wow, his list of accomplishments just goes on and on. He’s a longtime partner of Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins wrote the forward to one of his books, Unbreakable. Another book he has is called Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. Super interesting. He’s going to tell you what he means by that in this episode.

He’s worked with dozens of professional NFL, NBA, and MLB teams. He has been on the board of directors for American Bone Health and the editorial board of Steroids and Hormonal Science. I mean, it just goes on and on. Super fascinating. I love how he’s looking at patterns of the human body and then mimicking those in ways that we can strengthen ourselves. So, anyway, I think you guys will enjoy this episode with Dr. John Jaquish.

Tara Garrison: Dr. Jaquish, thanks for being here today. We have so many different areas we can go to because your career is like has built and built and built. We can talk about your books. We can talk about the research, the boards you’ve been on, the X3 Bar, like wow. But I want to start, we just spoke briefly about a paper that you published recently with NASA. Can you tell us about that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So some people from NASA were analyzing my first invention, the bone density medical device. And they found it to be extraordinarily effective for the very rapid building of bone. And what was different about the Dr. John Jaquish studies? They looked at bone turnover markers and blood tests. And that’s not the preferred way to look at bone density or it has not been the past, but I believe it’s going to be in the future because you can affect bone… So this has more to do with the trend, what direction your bone is going in, but the previous way to look at it as DEXA scan.

Tara Garrison: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So the DEXA scan-

Tara Garrison: I just had one yesterday.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, right. Yeah. Dual X-ray absorptiometry is what that stands for. And so there are two x-rays and they combined to sort of look through the bone, but do they? Not really. They get a good aggregate of bone material, but they can’t tell you the difference or define what’s going on in the trabecular bone, the middle versus the outer cortex.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: What’s the temperature today? Well, it was a hundred-mile an hour winds. That’s going to change if it’s a good weather day or not. So just by asking the temperature, you don’t have the whole story.

Tara Garrison: I see. So, what-

Dr. John Jaquish: Same thing with bone. And you get a look at the outer cortex more so than the trabecular. And the trabecular is the trend. That’s where development is happening.

Tara Garrison: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And a DEXA can’t see it. So that’s why this study was so profound and it found an almost 40% increase in the growth in the formation marker of the bone and a 41% decrease in old bone breakdown. So you’re keeping the older bone longer and you’re building new bone faster.

Tara Garrison: Can you tell us a little bit about how that works? Do we know? What causes it?

Dr. John Jaquish: If I give you the details, I’m going to bore everybody.

Tara Garrison: Well, no, I mean, just what about the blood markers you’re talking about? Like, can you give us some hints of some of those?

Dr. John Jaquish: So building formation markers and you asked your doctor for this is like BAP or P1NP are the two most popular bone marker tests, but it’s just an accurate look at what’s going on in your bone. You have an anabolic growth level going on to the bone and then you have… Before you’re 30 years old, it looks like this where your anabolic level is higher than your catabolic level, which is the breakdown. Then when you get older than 30 years old, those two things reverse positions. And you start losing at a faster rate than you are gaining?

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, the objective is to turn that around.

Tara Garrison: Wow, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you do that with the post-menopausal population or people who are contact athletes, and they need to build higher levels of bone density. So there are several different applications, and I’ll read you the quote from the study that was in the Journal of Aerospace Medicine, which is the top journal in the field. And what the study said and my favorite quote here is, so they call it an exercise apparatus, it’s a medical device, it’s founded OsteoStrong locations, “If the exercise apparatus could be condensed to the size of a shoebox to meet the weight and volume restrictions imposed by NASA, it could potentially serve as a countermeasure for bone and strength loss in exploration vehicles.” So about three years ago, I spoke on a panel with a couple of astronauts and some of the medical staff at NASA to talk about how do we get astronauts to Mars. And the two biggest hurdles are radiation poisoning and loss of bone.

Tara Garrison: Really? Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: And I believe, of course, I mean, you read what the paper.

Tara Garrison: That’s amazing.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tara Garrison: That’s got to feel pretty good. You’re like, “Man.”

Dr. John Jaquish: It felt pretty good. So I got to do something custom for them because like… And I don’t remember where I heard this statistic and I didn’t read it, I heard it which makes me question its accuracy, but the ballpark it’s there. Now, my father designed to build the lunar rover for NASA.

Tara Garrison: Oh, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, he knows a little bit about the weight of a space exploration vehicle and especially long-distance. We’re going to go to Mars. We’ve got to bring a lot more s***, right?

Tara Garrison: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot more food, tools, supplies, whatever. I mean, the water gets recycled, but other things don’t, so you need to bring a lot more stuff with you. But the lunar roving vehicle was incredibly lightweight. It would crumble if assembled on earth.

Tara Garrison: Oh, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, it was designed specifically to be assembled with lunar gravitational pull, which is much lower than the earth.

Tara Garrison: Amazing.

Dr. John Jaquish: So yeah, getting a wine bottle in the space would cost another $100,000 in fuel to be able to lift the weight of that wine bottle off the surface of the earth, right?

Tara Garrison: Wow. Yeah, that’s some context.

Dr. John Jaquish: If it’s something they need, they need it, but it needs to be condensed in size. It needs to be condensed in weight.

Tara Garrison: So, for some context, for people who aren’t familiar with the exercise apparatus, can you tell them a little bit more about that? I think you have one in front of you, the regular X3 Bar. Yes? For people-watching on YouTube, can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Tell you about the X3, sure.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when doing the bone density medical device research, it became very apparent when I’d be taking post-menopausal females through this pre-study. And then during the study, I can take anybody through because I have a bias. So I was there from a methods section standpoint only. So I authored the methods section, The methods of the study are like how the studies perform, who was selected and you got to pick the right population, you got to use the medical device correctly. And there are all kinds of things that can be used incorrectly. It was also a little more arcane back then. It was a little more prototype than production.

Tara Garrison: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So the software was ugly and hard to understand. And we needed the principal investigator and the other technicians who were going to be putting people through their osteogenic loading sessions, so to emulate high impact. And then in the study, some of the test subjects that were randomly chosen were physicians at the hospital, and this was at the hospital right next to the University of East London. So, the research was all done in London. And so we needed these British government officials to be recording the data because of the easier talk to the British government about applying this in their hospitals, especially because those are social health care. So, they were paid for by the government.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, it’d be a great relationship if we could establish that and that’s well on its way. It’s going well. But the physicians who got chosen for the study, would say, “What do people lift because we’re lifting like eight, nine times our body weight?” And there was an answer to that. The American College of Sports Medicine pulls from the innings database, which is a large collection of health data. And so I went to the innings database and I looked at what people load on average in their lower extremities. It turns out the unfit person is 1.3 multiples of body weight and the fit person is 1.53.

Tara Garrison: Oh, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: And it just so happens that we know what the minimum dose-response for loading the lower extremities and bone growth is, it’s 4.2 multiples of body weight.

Tara Garrison: Oh, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when you lift weights, you do nothing for bone.

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, if you do a high-impact activity like box jumps or something like that, that can influence bone because of the impact. The impact will give you a lot more loading than weight lifting will.

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so like certain weight lifting programs, they can have a bunch of weight lifting that they do, but that’s all irrelevant as long as they add in like the box jumps and… It’s more the landing, the jump doesn’t do anything for bone, it’s the back jumping.

Tara Garrison: Really?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s the impact.

Tara Garrison: That’s so interesting. After all, in some of the certifications I’ve been through, they’re against the back jumping off because people will tend to hurt themselves.

Dr. John Jaquish: But that’s the fitness industry. It’s just giving direction with no understanding of what you’re talking about.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, that’s super interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: You can still say cardio is great for weight loss. No, it isn’t. It’s probably the worst thing for weight loss.

Tara Garrison: Just makes you hungrier.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or you

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m sorry.

Tara Garrison: I lived it. Lived it. You’re preaching my message.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, sure.

Tara Garrison: I think most women did.

Dr. John Jaquish: For 40 years of wellness. For 40 years, science release this document. And I go around, I’ll say this at a big box gym or something I’m doing a lecture and people are like… Well, that’s how we tell people, “How are you supposed to lose weight if not cardio?” There’s core restriction, there’s fasting. I realized that has nothing to do with your business. You guys sell the use of treadmills because that’s all you have, but you got to push strength training more because-

Tara Garrison: Big time.

Dr. John Jaquish:… a metabolic engine that is running all the time in the body, burning calories, especially when you’re at a deficit or fasted, what is that? What is the one engine in your body, the one organ you can double the size of? There’s only one and it’s skeletal muscle. You can’t double the size of your heart. If you do, you’re probably dead. So it’s like that’s the thing we influence that is going to control our level of body fat.

Tara Garrison: Yeah. Not to mention just being more insulin sensitive. And when you go do it, you’re using up some of the glycogen creating space for food instead of it all going to fat stores. And yeah, I mean, that’s a huge part of my message. I was a marathoner, an overweight marathoner forever, and then I let that go.

Dr. John Jaquish: Many of them are.

Tara Garrison: What’s that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Many of them are.

Tara Garrison: Yeah. That’s just like what we were raised on is like, “Oh, I’m fat. Go run.” I was like, “Okay.” I mean, my mom was a world champion track athlete. So my experience was a little different running with her growing up. It was like a passion for sure, but it was not an effective fat loss strategy. I have four kids and after a little bit of finally lifting weights and cutting way back on the running, my entire body transformed. So, I mean, you’re preaching my message completely. I am such a huge advocate of weight training and things like overcoming isometrics. And I’m wondering because I know some people listening to this, they won’t know what the X3 Bar is, can you kind of explain through words basically how X3 Bar works? What it is?

Dr. John Jaquish: So I developed another product outside of medical-wise that would provide the strongest level of variable resistance. It’s an elegant product. It’s very simple. It’s incredibly heavy latex banding. And when I say heavy, I mean, most bands carry 20 pounds of force. Our heaviest band is a to 800 pounds, depending on how tall you are. But the typical female that if they’re going to do an overhead press, they may grab a 20-pound bar like the pre-linked up ones, not an Olympic bar.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And they’ll do overhead presses with 20 pounds. Well, you can handle 20 pounds at the bottom, but you can handle a hundred at the top.

Tara Garrison: I love that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. And so what X3 does is because of the banding, but also keeping your wrist neutral. So when you go to hold the bar over your head, it’s not twisting your wrist. That’s the whole reason why an Olympic bar is probably the only good fitness innovation there has ever been. Until now, of course, no bias. But the Olympic bar was brilliant because it doesn’t allow your risk to be twisted. These are some of the smallest bones in the body outside of the bones in the ear, which I’m not counting, and in the ankles. And if we go to interface with a resistance training apparatus, it’s got to keep wrists and ankles neutral. Bands by themselves don’t and they will hurt you. And if you try and use an X3 band without the bar and the plate, you might break an ankle.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right?

Tara Garrison: Yeah. So basically the band-

Dr. John Jaquish: Why does it happen again?

Tara Garrison: The band goes underneath the plate, you stand on the plate, and then it hooks up to the bar and you can like overhead press the bar. And he’s not kidding, my friend Erin brought one to my house when she was visiting. She’s like, “You got to try it.” She was talking about the whole week. “Hold on. I can’t leave until you try the X3 Bar, I want you to try it.” And wow, I was impressed because when I train people, one thing I’m looking for is like I want to see that shake. I want to see that their nervous system is not yet capable of firing efficiently for what the load that they’re giving it. That’s a sign of progress. And man, I was like, “Oh, this is no joke.” You’re not just like going through emotions. Sometimes I say people aren’t lifting, they’re just moving. I’m like if you’re just like effortlessly-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, I see a lot of people.

Tara Garrison: … going up and down, you’re not lifting weights. That’s not resistance-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, they still talk while they’re lifting.

Tara Garrison: They’re talking.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’d be like in a conversation.

Tara Garrison: I say that all the time. I get mad about it. I’m like, “If you’re going to be like doing lateral raises and talking about your weekend to your friend, go home. Come back when you’re ready.” Because you’re wasting your time. And then you’re like, “What? I work out six days a week.” I’m like, “No, you don’t. You didn’t work out one day of those weeks. You were just moving.” I guess it’s better than sitting at home eating Doritos but-

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, if you’re into developing the body, there’s no getting away from heavy.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so that has to do with the mindset, the understanding of how you need to fatigue the body with a heavy force. X3 allows you to train heavier with more repetitions because the weaker range becomes offloaded and they need to take that with diminishing range. So the reps get shorter and shorter as you begin to fatigue. So, when I do a chest press, it’s 550 pounds at the top, it’s 300 pounds in the middle and it’s a hundred pounds at the bottom.

Tara Garrison: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I hit that 550 pounds, maybe 20 times, which I would never be able to do with weights. I’d never been able to get the benefit of contracting against 550, 20 repetitions in that impact-ready position, that is the benefit. I am stimulating myofibril adaptations by doing that. And then the balance of the repetitions is more about exhausting the sarcoplasm I’m holding in the cells. So I’m burning ATP, glycogen, and creatine phosphate. That’s what sarcoplasm holds. So as I’m burning those fuels, I’m still stimulating the body to store more fuel there. So, I’m growing from two perspectives. And then by keeping hypoxic by evenly loading the muscle, which you can only do with variable resistance, and X3 because most of the other approaches to variable resistance are so weak. It’s like, you’re holding X at the bottom and 1.2X, whereas with X3, it’s X to the bottom and 5X at the top.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s got to be the right ratio variance.

Tara Garrison: I’ve worked out at gyms. What’s that brand of machines that has the variable resistance. You know what I’m talking about, it’s like a machine in a gym. I can’t remember the name of that company.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a couple.

Tara Garrison: I can’t remember the name of the company right now. What’s that?

Dr. John Jaquish: MedX is one of them. MedX or Nautilus or the original model-

Tara Garrison: Maybe not.

Dr. John Jaquish: It actually.

Tara Garrison: It might be not.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tara Garrison: But I’ve worked out with machines that have variable resistance and I’m like, it is not even fair. It is like an unfair advantage to have variable resistance. So you can make it harder at the bottom or the top or whatever, and then you go to this rinky-dink gym machine. It’s not the same experience, but what’s cool about yours is that you can travel with it. So I’ve recommended your product to my clients who travel. They’re like, “What should I do?” Especially like men that need to go heavy, but they’re traveling. And they go to these like little gyms in the hotel and there’s like, it goes up to 25-pound weights.

Tara Garrison: It is a cool solution for people who travel or just, well, you want like a in-home gym that’s super small. It’s a cool solution for that because it’s what… Do you know how much it weighs? I mean, you can pack it in a suitcase obviously with the whole NASA thing. 12 pounds. Yeah. That’s awesome. Okay. Do you want to talk a little bit about Tom Brady? So I’ve seen Tom Brady, he’s using the X3 Bar. Gronkowski using the X3 Bar every day. Do youThat’swant to talk about that a little bit?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, there’s a lot of pro athletes that use X3. Some of them have given me written permission to use their image on the website for free and those guys are just cool.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: But other guys, their brand is worth so much, they just don’t feel that they can do that. And some of them may give me an outrageous offer that nobody would accept. So, I don’t have permission. I can’t talk about who uses it, but there are at least 10 that I know of absolute top best athletes in the world that are using X3 exclusively now. And even when, let’s say, an action movie star that everybody knows and loves for throwing people through windows and he’s big and strong, like I can’t. I can’t do a deal and also you got wonder like you get a paid endorsement. I like the unpaid ones. They just like it.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: But a paid endorsement and it’s just like, well, does that mean anything?

Tara Garrison: Yeah. Kind of becomes like a transaction.

Dr. John Jaquish: Write somebody a $5 million check. What does that say? Does that mean they love it or does that mean they want $5 million?

Tara Garrison: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Probably the latter.

Tara Garrison: Right, totally.

Dr. John Jaquish: Everybody who gives the thumbs up to X3 was not paid to do so. And we have over 30 freshman athletes and the entire Miami Heat basketball team. In fact, in the book Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want, you turn it over and look at the back of it, there’s the Miami Heat’s endorsement. They let me use their name.

Tara Garrison: That’s cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: And NBA teams don’t do that. So, that’s cool of them.

Tara Garrison: Speaking of working with professional athletes, I also want to ask you about Tony Robbins wrote the intro, I believe, to your book Unbreakable with Kyle… I’m going to butcher his name, it’s like Zagrodzky. Is that his-

Dr. John Jaquish: Zagrodzky, you got it right.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, okay. Yeah. One, can you tell us about the book Unbreakable? And two, can you tell us about your experience with Tony Robbins? Because I’m a little bit of a fangirl, I’m not going to lie.

Dr. John Jaquish: Tony? I’ll start with the experience. In real life, Tony is the same person he is on stage. He yells all the time or screams, like just… That’s how he communicates. And you’ll go over to his house for a 15-minute meeting and you’ll be there the entire day. You leave at midnight. You’re putting instead of a 15-minute meeting, it turns into a 15-hour day where you like eating a meal there.

Tara Garrison: And you’re like ice plunging and like bleeding-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah.

Tara Garrison: … the whole time?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah. He has custom cryo tubing and an ice plunge.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t like the cryotubes, they take too long and I think people think they’re extra tough. They’re like, “I was standing in negative 220 nitrogen.” And I’m like, “No, you weren’t.” If that came out in negative 221, by the time it contacted your skin, you were radiating heat. So it balances out at like 30 degrees. It’s not. You’re not that cool.

Tara Garrison: Are you an ice plunge fan?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes.

Tara Garrison: Cold plunge? Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tara Garrison: Me too. I’ve also-

Dr. John Jaquish: I was in Reykjavik recently and we broke through the ice and just jumped in the sea.

Tara Garrison: That is amazing. That’s cool. I’m a big Wim Hof fan too, so that resonates.

Dr. John Jaquish: You feel so tough after you do that.

Tara Garrison: What’s that?

Dr. John Jaquish: You feel so tough. And also like the idea, I remember I was a little kid. I grew up in San Francisco right by there. We’d be on the bay all the time, sailing or whatever. And it was like, well, if you fall in the water, you’re going to die.

Tara Garrison: I know.

Dr. John Jaquish: … shore because-

Tara Garrison: I know.

Dr. John Jaquish: … people fall in the water before. And some guys supposedly swam from Alcatraz to the bay.

Tara Garrison: I know, and then Wim Hof shows up and he’s like, “Actually, I’m not only going to fall in it. I’m going to go half the length of a football field in one breath underneath of it.” It’s so amazing.

Dr. John Jaquish: Those rumors were so ridiculous that now there’s a triathlon that goes from Alcatraz.

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, everybody tries it as chubby soccer moms do it. It’s like, okay. No, bet it hurt. Most of them are wearing wetsuits, but I do know a couple of open-water swimmers that just wear swim trunks.

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: And they just swimming for like an hour. No problem.

Tara Garrison: That’s amazing. So how did you get hooked up with Tony?

Dr. John Jaquish: He called me.

Tara Garrison: Because he-

Dr. John Jaquish: He heard through one of his coaches. A guy’s like he was barely able to walk and then he was a big golfer. Tony used to live on a golf course in Palm Desert. It’s by Palm Springs.

Tara Garrison: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so his friend waved at him, was golfing by, “Hey, Tony, I haven’t seen a little bit.” And Tony looks at him. He says, “You couldn’t even walk the last time I saw you and you’re playing golf right now?” “Yeah, found this machine that completely fixed my joints and all my osteoarthritis…” Like, it doesn’t do as much for rheumatoid arthritis for various reasons. They’re very different dysfunctions. So they shouldn’t even have the same thing. But the guy was a broken man and he went back to being like a normal man. And he’s like, Who owns this thing? Who owns the company?" And he was like, “Oh, it’s a scientist.” He called me some scientist kid. It was 10 years ago, so I guess… 13 years ago, I was a kid back then.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, he just calls and he’s like, “I want one of your devices.” And I just thought it was some crazy person I’m like, “Yeah, well, I only have two prototypes. I need them both. So I would have to custom make one. And the cost of building another prototype is a little over $300,000.” And the guy on the other end of the phone who had a very distinctive voice was like, “I’ll buy one for 300,000.” And I said, “Who is this again?” He laughs, “This is Tony Robbins.” Oh, that’s where I recognize the voice from. Okay. “Well, I’m guessing you’re serious. You wouldn’t waste your time in this phone call if you didn’t want.” He says, “Because I want one.” I said, “Tell you what. I’ll install it in your house and we’ll go over together and I’ll show you and your wife how to do it and it’ll be awesome.”

Tara Garrison: Sorry, this is OsteoStrong. Is this the device you’re talking about with Tony Robbins?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tara Garrison: Can you describe what that is?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s a bone compression device. It puts compression on the axis of a bone. So from end-to-end and we are very powerful. We’re just short of the axial formation of bone. So meaning like a 120-degree angle of inclusion between upper arm to lower arm, very powerful there. And this is how I discovered the optimized positions, the impact-ready positions. I call them because that’s how they’re seen in gymnastics where some of the highest loads go through the human body in impact. So, we want to emulate impact.

Tara Garrison: Very cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: You notice like a gymnast lands with a 120-degree angle behind their knee.

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. They don’t land straight-legged, it shatters.

Tara Garrison: Right, right, right. Yeah. Wow. Super insightful. What made you so interested in bones? Where did this begin?

Dr. John Jaquish: My mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis and she was suffering and she liked to garden and she liked to hike and she played tennis and she was very active in her 70s. And I was like, well, now she doesn’t want to do anything. She wants to hide in the house. And I was like, “Well, that sucks.” Because even though she’s in her 70s, she doesn’t look or seem like an old lady at all, but she was just terrified. She’s like, “If I get a hip fracture, I get a 50% chance of death within a year.” And that’s true.

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: 50% chance of death because of the compounding factors, you get pneumonia in the hospital, you can’t heal up, whatever, infection. After the age of 50, 50% chance of death after the age of 50-

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: … because of hip fracture. So she was just terrified. And I said, “Well, what if I can fix it?” Because I had an idea, so I built a prototype, applied my idea, treating my mother. 18 months later, she had the bones of a 30-year-old.

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tara Garrison: So your dad was-

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a great video on my Instagram.

Tara Garrison: Okay, yeah. We’ll have to-

Dr. John Jaquish: My mother and I are on one of the Fox programs.

Tara Garrison: Oh, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s mother’s day. It was like, what do kids do for their mothers?

Tara Garrison: Oh, man. Yeah. I’m looking forward to seeing that now. Yeah. Guys on Instagram, I’ll tag it in the show notes, but I mean, you’ve got over a million followers on Instagram. So, not a small account there and lots of really good value. I was flipping through it and I was like, “Dang. Okay, this guy is well-established.” And I wanted to hit on another one of your books, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time, that you co-authored with Henry Alkire. Is that how we say his last name? All right, great. He’s got it up here on YouTube. Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want , can you tell us about this book?

Dr. John Jaquish: So it lays out what the problems are with regular weight lifting. Once I realized that we can handle seven times the amount of force in the most powerful range of motion, the impact-ready. If you trip and fall, how do you brace yourself from fall? In those biomechanics, you handle seven times the force, absorbing impact than you do in any other formation while holding resistance. Well, I mean, knowing that it means we’re hardly fatiguing anything when we’re in that range of motion or even halfway there.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It means weight lifting is a waste of time-

Tara Garrison: Interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: … because you can’t simulate the body to any significant degree. If you’ve chosen a weight, you can only handle the weak arranged motion, which is what everyone does. That’s what weight lifting is. So what we need is a weight that changes as we move. So like I said, in the chest press, it’s a hundred pounds at the bottom, which is very light. But also remember this is the most compromised position, this is where we damaged joints. So it’s lighter there. It gets to 300 pounds in the middle and then it gets to 550 as I come closer to the top. And that’s what we use to fatigue the body to a much more profound degree. And when you get that level of fatigue, you trigger a massive amount of growth.

Tara Garrison: Wow. That’s super interesting. Yeah. If you think of it as a bench press, but instead you’re falling flat on the ground. And so the most force is right when your hands hit and that little bit more extended position, and then it slowly becomes less and less. That’s a really… I like the way you, look at things, you’re following patterns of what would happen naturally. You’re looking at the gymnast, how they land, you’re looking at our bodies, how they will fall, and then you’re mimicking that in a way that can help us become stronger in that same pattern.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Tara Garrison: It’s cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s funny. I laugh at the term functional exercise. Well, a muscle shortens. So anything with shortening a muscle is functional. And people figure that out and they use all kinds of stupid exercises and say, “This is functional.” Now, what they’re really, I think, attempting to say is this is a movement pattern that humans engage in a lot. And by practicing it we’ll have better biomechanics, we’ll have better balance. And better biomechanics and better balanced means your nervous system will allow you to lift heavier because like a lot of people were like, if you’re off balance, your body won’t even allow you to lift what you even potentially could.

Tara Garrison: Right. Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Beginning weightlifters only activate a small fraction of the musculature that they could, but like people at a high level, they activate all of it.

Tara Garrison: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So just from a potentiation standpoint, like activating. You got to be able to activate. So what the book is about is showing the biomechanical inefficiencies, also explaining why some people, their biology allows them to get incredibly strong and grow from weights. But the majority of people don’t have this at all. And it has to do with tendon layouts. If your tendon has a longer distance to the insertion point. So, like your pectoral attaches at your sternum, that’s the same with everybody. But the mutation doesn’t have it attach at just where the bicep starts. That’s normal. Most people have the attachment point just onto the bicep on the humerus bone. Some people have the mutation where it’s at the other end of the bone. It’s far away, which means they have a longer lever arm.

Tara Garrison: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And longer lever arm means they can produce more power in that awkward position of the bottom, the bottom of the lift. So those are the people who become NFL players. Those are the people who become strong athletes, right. And so what’s the difference? You look at something that has helped players and they look… And they’re drug tested like crazy. So, I hear the steroid excuse all the time and it’s whatever loser says who’s never been able to get any results. I shouldn’t say… Because most of it is a box just given… Well, they’re losers because they’re jealous.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And complain like, “Everybody who’s bigger than me is on steroids.”

Tara Garrison: Right. Or victimizing, “My dad didn’t practice with me enough,” or something like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: How like overweight women, I’ve heard this, so they’ll call every conditioned woman anorexic.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like, okay. Yeah. You got a little Twinkie right here. Just unwilling to admit what the problem is.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So yeah. And it’s okay to be tired of these people because they’ve been making excuses for themselves. We need to do something in society too and self-imposed victimhood.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, for sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tara Garrison: Right. And don’t worry about what other people do, worry about you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners.

Tara Garrison: Yes. Amen. And I love what you’re bringing to the table because you’re bringing in just like a whole another dimension that hasn’t been talked about that much in the training industry or athletic performance. No one’s talking about where your tendons are attaching.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve done research here. See, this is like the cardio thing. Cardio is the worst way to lose weight, lose body fat. You’ll lose muscle. So your body weight will go down but upregulates cortisol long-term cardio.

Tara Garrison: Yup.

Dr. John Jaquish: And what does that do? It gets rid of muscle and encourages you to store more body fat. So you stay fat or longer. It’s the opposite of what everybody wants when you do cardio. But it’s the same kind of thing like the tendon research has been out for years and nobody looks to that. Maybe they didn’t look too… There’s no way around it, but X3 Bar completely circumvents that genetic issue.

Tara Garrison: That’s cool. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, because it loads you appropriately.

Tara Garrison: Right, yeah. Right on. No, the OsteoStrong is like between that and the X3. I mean, the first time I came across it, it was another company. They probably copycatted you, but I tried their thing. I was like in love, my mind was blown by this. It’s basically like progressive resistance as you go through the motion. And especially for like squatting, like I do online training. I’m never going to put a barbell on somebody’s back as part of their training program because I’m just too worried about injuries.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Tara Garrison: It’s not worth it. I can’t see them.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re talking about functional strength.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: When you stack some heavyweights on my neck because that’s how animals move stuff, right?

Tara Garrison: Yeah, like ants. But it’s like it’s asking for injury and then… But if you can just sit and push hard without that kind of crazy low like just compressing in your spine, it just makes so much sense to me. So, I love what you’re doing there. I also wanted to talk to you about you’re on the board for Steroids and Hormonal Science and-

Dr. John Jaquish: The Medical Journal.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, that Medical Journal. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what you were doing there or any cool insights that you gained from your time doing that.

Dr. John Jaquish: It was a good journal. It’s a shame it’s not around right now and they’re kind of dormant. I think they chose their name poorly. It’s got the word steroids and so everybody thinks it’s about cheating. But most people read the title and none of the content and then just jumped to a conclusion. So, you don’t want a title that implies something negative.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: The journal was about exogenous growth factors and endogenous meaning created by your own body. Like my body demands testosterone because of the receptor site activity. I have receptor site activity because I put heavier loads on the body than anybody else does. So that’s what drives the receptor sites. So it doesn’t matter how much testosterone you have in your bloodstream. It matters how many receptors are looking for it.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tara Garrison: Wow, I love that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Tara Garrison: For growth factor-

Dr. John Jaquish: One in six males over the age of 18 have used or currently using anabolic steroids. How many males over the age of 18 look like you’ll have an oppressive, like a statue, similar physique. Is it one in six? Like people using the drug? No, it’s probably more like one in 6,000 or maybe one in 60,000. That’s why everybody with visible abdominal seems to have a supplement contract or an affiliate deal on Instagram. Do you know what I mean? It’s like everybody is in good shape, it’s like, “Oh, you got to check this out.” It’s like this guy’s making money, but he’s not that exceptional. He just has visible abdominals.

Dr. John Jaquish: It doesn’t matter. It’s rare. That’s why it’s such a big deal when somebody has a perfect set of abdominals and he goes to the beats. That’s what everybody’s talking about. It’s so rare, maybe the fitness industry has just been wrong for a long time with just about everything. Why are you defending an industry? There are some studies I quote in the book, let’s just say lean is one percentile of men in America and body fat is a great measure because it considers muscularity. The more muscular you become, you drive your percentage body fat down.

Tara Garrison: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s 10.9%, basically 11%. That’s not impressive at all. That’s the best 1%. The top percentile is almost 11% body fat. That’s pathetic.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, on average, wow.

**Dr. John Jaquish:**Right. So it shows you a fraction of 1% is really… I would say a very small fraction of 1% is really who’s fit.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Why are we paying attention to an industry that is by any account that I can find the most failed human endeavor?

Tara Garrison: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: You go to a regular gym, not Venice Beach, but a regular one. You go to Wichita and you go into Planet Fitness there and the people that are hanging out there don’t look any different than the people next door at Pizza Hut.

Tara Garrison: Right. Yeah. I think it’s evolving and I hope it starts to keeps evolving in a better way. But if you think about it, I mean, when I was a little kid there, no one went to gyms. There was the YMCA that a few random people-

Dr. John Jaquish: And they all look the same as people do now.

Tara Garrison: Yeah. We have a long way to go for sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: People age.

Tara Garrison: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: I have some really good friends who are highly intelligent and they won’t exercise. And I said, “Well, why don’t you exercise? Why don’t you care?” And I’m thinking, they’re looking at me thinking, “Yeah, I want to look like John Jaquish.” But what they would say to me is, “Other than you, everybody that I know that goes to a gym doesn’t look any different than I do. No difference. So I think they’re all just wasting their time. I can’t figure it out, but I’m certainly not going to act unless I see some strong indicator that there’s going to be some series of results there.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I can’t help you. I do think everything in a gym is garbage.”

Tara Garrison: And there’s a nutrition component to that, nobody wants to think of, except the reality of, but it’s a huge part of health and being lean. And yeah, I feel you on that. And I sense your frustration and I do too because there’s a lot of BS out there in the fitness world. It’s a lot of parroting and people aren’t thinking deeply about things and we’re just repeating the same stuff over and over. And I mean, I had my little-

Dr. John Jaquish: Wrong stuff.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, the best thing I think that we can do like for you being so experienced, you’re a Ph.D. doctor, having so much time in the industry, living at yourself, just keep leading. Just keep leading, keep reaching to then hopefully the right people will find you. And then you’ll have mentees and they’ll start educating and creating their in-depth insights on things. And I believe that it will get better and better. But, man, we’re kind of in the dark ages for sure. I 100% agree. And I mean, speaking of Planet Fitness, it’s like don’t they have like pizza nights or something? It’s like, what? What’s going on? What is this?

Dr. John Jaquish: Just this metabolic health.

Tara Garrison: Yeah. So anyway, I appreciate your time so much. I won’t take much more. Your career is just seriously astounding. There are so many different places we could go. I will link everything that we talked about and hinted at in the show notes, as well as some other cool things you guys might want to know about Dr. Jaquish, but thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely.

Tara Garrison: And is there anything, anywhere you would like to direct people that might be interested in partaking of more of what you have to offer?

Dr. John Jaquish: So there are two things, one, if you want to find me, I have a landing page, so I don’t need to give you different handles.

Tara Garrison: Cool, perfect.

Dr. John Jaquish: Doctorj.com

Tara Garrison: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter J.com.

Tara Garrison: Perfect.

Dr. John Jaquish: So Instagram, YouTube, you can find my products there. You can find my book there. If you loved everything I said and it made perfect sense to you, buy the products. Buy the optimized protein it’s made out of bacterial fermentation. It is more usable by the body than steak and it’s cool with vegans because it’s not made out of any animal. It’s made from bacterial fermentation-

Tara Garrison: Oh, cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: … meaning the byproduct of bacteria eating something.

Tara Garrison: All right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So even the bacteria didn’t die by humans. I mean, they lived their whole life, which is like three days.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then the other thing is that I do realize… At first, I was a real hard-ass about nutrition, it’s just like eat steak, eats your Fortagen . Everything else is varying degrees of not worth eating. And if you say you can’t do it, it’s like that’s what you are. You’re a person who can’t. Just look in the mirror and say, “I can’t. I can’t do s***. I’m a loser.” Or just do it right. It’s not that hard. It’s not that hard to skip breakfast and lunch and eat one meal a day. So you get a fasted benefit every day. It’s not that… Well, here’s the thing I found out, apparently it is that hard because there are people who email me and they act like they’re going to die if they can’t have their pizza.

Dr. John Jaquish: And it’s like, okay, imagine I showed up at your house and I kidnapped you. I just took you out of the country and we got dropped off in Sub-Saharan, Africa, with nothing to eat except animals that we have to hunt first. I would like to do that with just about everybody, but I’m pinched for time, so I can’t. So just imagine you’re not being deprived, you just can’t have it. You’re not going to have pizza today. You’re in Sub-Saharan Africa, “Hey, where’s the nearest Little Caesars?” Tribesmen will look at you and be like, “I don’t know what to tell you, but there’s some wildebeest over there and we were going to go get one of those. How about some of that?” So, great. And you notice the tribal people are in incredible shape. Isn’t that a mystery?

Tara Garrison: Yup.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I would say, you got to take the word can’t out of your vocabulary and say, “I don’t want to.”

Tara Garrison: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a lot of things I don’t want to do. I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. It’s much nicer to just stay there. I don’t want to get out of the hot tub, especially when we get a drink in my hand. But okay, sometimes you just got to do things.

Tara Garrison: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I tell people and I’m taking a much more… I’m building a new nutrition program that keeps… It’s going to be optimized by having a few carbohydrates. And I also talk about the hyperplasia protocol where I’ve been… We now have evidence that shows that carbohydrates are not even a macronutrient. We don’t need them at all. But there is a way to apply them to get some better results in… If you’re a distance runner, it can give you some better results there. And if you’re doing resistance training, you can grow muscle faster by super hydrating your muscle, right. And the best way to super hydrate is to dehydrate first. And so I’m working on some programming that is going to be helpful to people who don’t quite have the self-control I do but will also be very beneficial.

Tara Garrison: Super cool. We’ll look forward to that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Tara Garrison: Yeah. All right-

Dr. John Jaquish: Everybody just stays tuned. Yeah. Follow me on Instagram.

Tara Garrison: Yeah, follow him on Instagram so much good content. And I guess you’ll direct them everywhere they can go to learn more about all these things that you’re talking about. Dr. Jaquish, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for bringing cool insights that’ll keep me thinking about ligaments and bones and angles. I love everything that you’re bringing to the table. So, thank you so much.

Dr. John Jaquish: Perfect. It’s fun for me too.

Tara Garrison: Hey, thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Inside Out Health podcast. I hope this episode served as inspiration and something that you needed to hear in your life. If you have a friend or family member that you think would benefit from this episode, please share it with them.