Ep 182 - Dr. John Jaquish Argues That Weightlifting Is a Complete Waste of Time

Dr. John Jaquish is an innovator, thought leader in the biomedical fitness market, and a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of the book Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. In this episode, Dr. Jaquish dives into his research-based but controversial approaches to strength training, muscular development, and diet. He also addresses the criticisms he’s received online.

Full Transcript

Dr. John Jaquish: The reason I called it Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want is that weight lifting is a waste of time.

Matthew Januszek: Welcome to this week’s Escape Your Limits podcast . Today, we’re speaking with the Wall Street Journal’s best-selling author, an inventor who believes weight lifting and cardio are a complete waste of time. In our conversation, we dive into his research-based, but controversial approach to strength training, muscular development, and diet.

We also address the criticism he’s been receiving online for some of his radical ideas. So for a different perspective on working out, please welcome 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, and the inventor of OsteoStrong and the X3 Bar , Dr. John Jaquish to the Escape Your Limits podcast.

Dr. John Jaquish: Something that got me in a lot of trouble as a kid, was always like the class clown. And when someone tells me I can’t do something, I’m doing it. Like you can’t drive your car 200 miles an hour. Really? I probably shouldn’t say anything else, it’d be pretty incriminating.

Matthew Januszek: You’re a rebel.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m not just going to be told what to do. And when somebody says you can’t, or that’s not the way it works, I say, “Are you sure? Like two masks are better than one? Where’s the evidence on that?” I jumped all over people that were all of a sudden wearing two coronavirus masks. “Where’d you read that? Give me that clinical reference.” It turns out it was bulls***. Fauci just made it up and he admitted it. “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t have any evidence.”

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I’m always second-guessing what I’m told, which is why I like, about half of the trolls are just skeptics, half the people are like, yeah, they’re angry. Yeah, they’re dumb because they spoke before they read and so they didn’t know what they were talking about. But then I’ll say something and usually the ruder I am, the more they’ll want to read the book so they can criticize me more.

So, it’s kind of by design. I want to rattle the cages because they all come over and my biggest haters have multiple versions of my product. They just hate the fact that I’m successful. I can’t do anything for them. I wish I could help them, but they want to see me burn. Well, I’m not going to do that. So, I’m not quitting anytime soon, everything’s getting and better all the time, including me.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, I’m sorry guys, but it’s the way it is. So, they love the pictures with my Lamborghini and on great vacations. I got a lot of hate out of doing a workout in front of the Parthenon, from my hotel balcony window. They’re really mad about that, but it’s what they’re really mad at is themselves because they haven’t done anything. They’re pretty sad people. There’s an article forum that says Internet trolls are just losers and they’re angry at themselves because they’ve never succeeded. So they see someone who’s successful, especially in the space that they’re in, and it makes them very hateful because every day they see me, it’s a reminder that they’ve not achieved.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: … I’d rather them focus their energy instead of yelling at me. It’s like the expression, “Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners.” The losers are always complaining about the winner. No, don’t look at the winner, look at the finish line. I’m not stopping them from doing anything. They can do something creative. That’s fine. But, or get a better job, maybe? I don’t know.

Matthew Januszek: So, Dr. John Jaquish, I’ve got it right that time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you did.

Matthew Januszek: Thank you so much for coming to see us in Newport Beach all the way down from San Francisco.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: I think the most interesting part of this conversation was off camera. And unfortunately we can’t share that with anyone.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, well it’s okay. Let the people wonder.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah. So I’ve been reading your book and it’s quite controversial or very controversial, I guess, was that intentional?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, my read of the academic literature puts me in a position where I’m just going to say what it says. And so if I don’t see why that’s controversial, it’s a result of research. And if somebody wants to cry about it, well that’s like being a science denier. Like you can have whatever, 62 different genders in weight lifting too because both of those can be easily defeated by looking at the scientific literature.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I don’t particularly see why when something can be proven scientifically it’s a controversial stance. But for example, Twitter considers the word steak, one of the ones that have to be, somebody has to review the post because they might want to ban you or delete your post.

Matthew Januszek: Steak?

Dr. John Jaquish: Steak.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, Why is that? Is that kind of, is that got some sort of?

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, because, because they’ll do whatever vegans want.

Matthew Januszek: Oh right. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: But they won’t conform to anything that promotes the eating of animals.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So like just complete loss of free speech on social media. I mean, that’s nothing new. We’ve all heard that. But yeah, so the fact that I promote having a heavier animal protein approach to nutrition, I don’t think that should be controversial, but apparently, it is.

Matthew Januszek: Right. So weight lifting is a waste of time and cardio makes you fat?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, I said cardio is too. There’s a better way to get the body you want.

Matthew Januszek: Right. So, what motivated you to sort of put that book out? It certainly got my attention when I heard about it and I’m sure it’s a great headline, but what was your motivation to put it together?

Dr. John Jaquish: Motivation to put it together or call it what I called it?

Matthew Januszek: Both.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. I wanted a resource where I had all the information in one place. There’s a lot of things that myself and my company recommend. And those things were scattered in different videos, and some of them are on Vimeo and some are on YouTube. And then there’s always somebody who’s like, “Well, I don’t watch YouTube videos, I’m too busy.” And it’s like, it’s a two-minute video. And they’re like, “Well, I don’t care.” So, it’s hard to keep everybody happy. So, what I wanted to do is just get all the information to date that we have thus far about the absolute optimal exercise and the absolute optimal nutrition. Get it all in one place.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, that was the intention. The reason I call it Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time is that weight lifting is a waste of time. And I can back that up with, there are 250 studies in the book. When I did my research with my medical device, which is called OsteoStrong. There are clinics all over the world, eight different countries, we have clinics.

But when I was doing that for the medical device, I participated from a method’s perspective only. So what that means is I authored just the section of how the principal investigator and other technicians were going to approach running the study because I’d have a conflict of interest being a data collector. I can’t do that.

Dr. John Jaquish: So they collected all the data and reported the outcome. But while that was happening, some of the test subjects in the study were physicians that worked at the hospital and it was done in East London, which is how I know so much about East London. So, it was actually at the Stratford Village Surgery where that went down and then the University of East London, students and professors participated in the authoring of the paper.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when that was happening, I looked at what de-conditioned people, like elderly women. Elderly whatever, 55 plus post-menopausal, that’s not elderly. So older women who were never athletic in their lives and they were pushing six, seven, eight, even nine times their body weight. They were contracting against that after six months of therapy. And I thought, “Well, that’s crazy amounts of force.” And the physicians were looking at the forces and saying, “What is this compared to regular weight lifting?”

Dr. John Jaquish: And so I went to the database, which is maintained by the National Institute of Health. So it’s the biggest sort of health and fitness database in the world and they interview 2000 people a year and have been doing it for about 10 years. So there are 20,000 people in there now. And so you look at the average loading when people load their low extremity. So they have a number for that and everything else you can imagine. And it turns out that the differences between the impact ready range of motion, which is like this, the 120-degree angle from upper to lower arm and back of the hand in line with the clavicle. So you can either absorb or create the greatest amount of force right here.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: This is how your trip and fall and brace yourself. So the difference between that position and the weakest range of motion, which is like at the bottom of the sort of chest press type movement is sevenfold. So, if there’s a seven-fold output capacity difference, weight lifting is useless because now we know if you’re trying to exhaust the musculature and you’re choosing the weight based on what you can handle in the weakest range, which everyone does, that’s what you have to do. Well, because you got to be able to handle it. Well, then you’re stimulating very little.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So you’re really only fatiguing the cells that are active in the weaker range of motion and not in the stronger range and Peter Attia had said this a couple of times. You know who Dr. Attia is?

Matthew Januszek: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s a really famous, he’s been on all kinds of TV programs and just speaks about health in general and comments on a lot of fad diets and stuff like that. He’s a very smart guy. And he says, “I’ve never liked weight training because it overloads joints and underloads muscle. So people ultimately just end up getting injured.”

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And I love that because it was like he was thinking the same thing I was thinking when looking at my data. The difference is, I had the quantifiable data, he’s making an observation.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so I decided, “Okay, I got to do something with this data. I’m the only one in the world that has this. So I’ve got to do something with it.”

Matthew Januszek: Is that because you’re the only one who’s just spent the time trying to collect all the stuff together.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So I knew I was the only one looking at probably the most profound data that will ever be seen in fitness. And what do I do next? So, okay, definitely, if you hold X here and you hold seven X here, well we need a weight that changes as we move. That’s the only answer to that question. So, okay, what proportion do I want it to change? Because X and seven X is sort of like one rep maximum sort of thing. So it’s got to be dialed back a little bit. And there was some power data that I also had that I gathered in kind of a proprietary way to figure out exactly what we need for repetitions. So I used that ratio.

Matthew Januszek: Yep.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then, really identified certain positions and how we would pull off something. In theory, I was just going to write a book about band training, just rubber band training. And I was at the time, well still am, having OsteoStrong grow. I already had a job. I had already invented something and it was great everything was going fantastic.

Dr. John Jaquish: But I thought, okay, once I looked at this band training thing, I realized what I would ultimately end up recommending would be too dangerous to ever use. Because if you throw a band around your back and you haven’t run it across your hands, and then you go try and do a pushup, with the kind of weight you would need to actually stimulate strength, you’d break both wrists.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it would just work with band training and the bands would need to be different than the bands that had ever existed in the market. So I needed to design bands that would hold four or five, 600, 700 pounds. And that’s the tension they would deliver.

Matthew Januszek: So with that, just for a second. So would that sort of idea that you’re explaining, so when I read your book, I was trying it. I was doing some bodyweight stuff with dips and I kind of understood if you did say 10 reps, four reps, and a dip, you would get to the stage where you couldn’t push yourself up anymore. But you could, when you were at the top, you could kind of almost do like half reps for probably another 10 or 20 that you couldn’t do. So is that what you’re explaining? Is that a similar thing that is happening to the muscle where you’re…

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Matthew Januszek: It’s not?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. Because that’s the same weight you’re dealing with. It’s not changing the weight.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. But what about the volume? Because I guess normally I’d have finished at 10 reps because I can’t do 10. But if I’m doing half reps, I’m arguably putting more volume through the muscle than if I was just finishing because I couldn’t lift myself in a full range anymore.

Dr. John Jaquish: You could. You still wouldn’t go to the same level of fatigue. It would not be as effective.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr John Jaquish Because in the weaker range you have less musculature firing, especially when you’ve exhausted the stronger range first because that casts aside some of the cells. So some of the cells stop participating in increasing tension.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because they’ve fatigued.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: And it’s the percentage. You want to get to the lowest percentage possible when you finally fatigue. But I’ll use a chest press as an example. So when I chest press, I’m holding 550 pounds at the top.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then as I lower, it gets to 300 pounds. And then when I get to the bottom, well there’s still tension, I never let the tension go.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: This is about a hundred pounds right here.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I get to the point where I do 20 or plus repetitions with the 550.

Matthew Januszek: So, what you’re doing is full reps, but as you’re pushing the weight up and bringing it down, you’re going through different levels of resistance as opposed to doing four reps and then finishing off with a partial range. Is that what you’re doing? So, if you weren’t using a band, if you’re using a weight or something.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: You would?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, I wouldn’t.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: I haven’t touched a weight in years.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But because it’s so inefficient, why try and use the wrong tool?

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like the weight, it is just the wrong tool. So even doing partials and trying to skip the weak range, you’re still just scratching the surface of the potential of the kind of fatigue you’re going to have. Because the way I do it, the way X3 users are all doing it, is they’re fatiguing the stronger range of motion first. The way you’re describing it, you never would fatigue the weaker range of motion.

Matthew Januszek: Well, okay, which should be at the bottom.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’d never shut that down.

Matthew Januszek: No?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. With the way I’m doing it, it’s strongest, medium, weakest.

Matthew Januszek: So you fatigue the strongest first, and then you go into the weak.

Dr. John Jaquish: This is all in one set.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So you’d still be leaving a lot of potential growth on the table.

Matthew Januszek: So is that the sort of statement, “Weight lifting a waste is a waste of time,” and you mentioned that earlier that there are all these different camps and steak and fitness, for example. Is this for the book, is it kind of like a general statement, but that you could argue depending on what your goals were, and I guess there are some people don’t just want or need to build muscle there’s another sort of reasons for sort of developing strength and maybe not muscle and vice versa? Are you saying that this is the best way for everything? Or is it kind of more leaning towards people with a particular goal?

Dr. John Jaquish: Boy, I can answer the question either way. I mean, ultimately nobody exercises to get weaker and fatter.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re trying to get stronger and leaner. And there is no way to make a muscle, well, there’s a neurological way to make a muscle stronger and not bigger. You can just train more cells to fire. That’s a pretty specific objective and I can see that out of a gymnast or a dancer or somebody who needs to stay light but wants more explosiveness. Yeah, X3 might be something that they do.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But then they might not eat the same way a guy who’s trying to get bigger would. But then they would have to do a lot of skill work because neurological and skill work are the same thing.

Matthew Januszek: So if you wanted to develop skill work, and I know this is sort of relatively like 10 minutes and you can be done.

Dr. John Jaquish: Do the X3 first.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. And then you would do your skill.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’d have to do that.

Matthew Januszek: I think that’s an important thing because like I say, I’ve read a lot of stuff where people have been critical of it. And I kind of get the concept, but I suppose maybe some of the things that you’ve not said that maybe people would assume that you’re saying, you’re discounting that. But are you sort of saying, “Look, there are, within this sort of exercise…”

Dr. John Jaquish: X is not the answer to every question.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But for 99.9% of the population, their problem isn’t explosiveness. I mean, you see guys at the gym and they’re like, “I’m working on my rep speed and explosiveness.” And the guy’s just like a fat slob. It’s like, “Dude, you are years away from worrying about that. Like how about you have it so you can wear pants that don’t have an elastic waist.” I mean, there’s s**_ people talk about, and then there are s_** people need and it’s different.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, while I see people saying like, “That’s what I need.” That’s not what you need. You need to quit putting pizza in your mouth.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And maybe focus on some of the basic compound movements. With X3, you can gain some muscle while you’re dropping fat by being in a protein surplus and a caloric deficit, which has been proven multiple times. If you’re in a protein surplus and a caloric deficit, you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. So this whole bulking cutting thing is just BS.

Matthew Januszek: So, in general for people that like in the general population, people that are probably out of condition, carrying too much weight, then the X3 is a good way, effective way to sort of progress their fitness goals without spending a lot of time doing things that is probably not necessary for them.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or will hurt them.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I see a lot of weightlifters just doing cumulative damage to joints and ultimately they’re not going to be lifting. If they’re lifting, some of the guys I walk in and I’ll tell them in five years, “You won’t be able to hold a coffee cup because of your shoulders.”

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But, you know.

Matthew Januszek: What I’d like to do is probably go back to sort of, or rewind from a time perspective and just to give sort of everyone an idea of where you started. So I understand that your first product or one of your early products was the OsteoStrong, which your mum had a bit of an influence on. Could you tell us a little about that story?

Dr. John Jaquish: She was diagnosed with osteoporosis and as I read about osteoporosis, I thought this is a deconditioning of bone. Why don’t we try and recondition the bone? I didn’t like the biochemical approach that had been taken. It just didn’t make sense to me. Maybe it makes sense for somebody who’s immobile or can’t get out of a chair? As that person, some of the pharmaceuticals would be okay for and also just as a general approach, physical medicine first.

Dr. John Jaquish: I say that all the time and a physician can’t argue with me when I say that. And what that means for people who don’t know, physical medicine is when you stimulate the body to create a change and the body starts fixing itself from whatever the dysfunction is. And if there’s a physical medicine approach to anything, we got to explore that option first or a nutritional option. Now a lot of the nutritional options, for a lot of things, there’s so much conflicting evidence. There is no conflicting evidence for the two greatest drivers of long life though, which are being strong and being lean. Two greatest drivers.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So if you want to be strong and be lean, well, it’s easy to find out how to do that too nutritionally. That was my approach to nutrition and it’s been making X3 users very fit. Yeah. Extraordinarily fit, like putting on 20 pounds of muscle in…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Extraordinarily fit, putting on 20 pounds of muscle in six months or less.

Matthew Januszek: All right. So, with your mum and the OsteoStrong then. You wanted to go down and I guess, help your mum with her weak bones. And so you developed a machine specifically to do that? Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And those are the OsteoStrong machines.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. And tell us a little bit about what they are and how you developed them and what they do differently from regular machines then.

Dr. John Jaquish: We isolate the impact ready position, what I was talking about right here.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when you isolate that position, it’s done in the lower extremity spine, and core, so there are four movements. And we isolate those positions so that we can have the individual self-impose guided by comfort.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: If your own neural inhibition stops you, then that’s the normal process. Or something like acute pain will happen, like in the shoulder or something. That’s how we find an injury. And then we tell that individual, “Okay, you need to address an injury before you continue.”

Dr. John Jaquish: So isolated positions. You may move one or two millimeters in one of those movements. There is movement, but the movement is from the compression of bone and joints. When that happens, massive growth is triggered.

Matthew Januszek: And what causes that to happen then?

Dr. John Jaquish: Alterations in the bone matrix. Do you know how the inside of a bone looks like a honeycomb? And so it’s like all these little walls inside the bone. And when the bone becomes compressed from end to end, the humorous bone going this way and going this way. So putting compression on the bone from the top to the bottom, not side to side.

Dr. John Jaquish: That distorts the shape and length of the bone matrix. When the bone matrix has that distortion, it becomes irritated and bounces back into position. And then it starts pulling in minerals and re-calcifying to build more little walls inside of the bone to make the bone more powerful. Yeah. I mean, it’s that simple.

Matthew Januszek: How long has that been going and is that documented in research that that works? I’m guessing it is because you’ve got a ton of these OsteoStrong locations. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Had a publication two weeks ago, or last week. Yeah. One just published. Yeah. That was the one I was telling you.

Matthew Januszek: Right. And is that the NASA?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So it’s in Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance. It’s a top journal in aerospace physiology. And so, what they’re looking at is how to keep an astronaut healthy and alive. Well, first alive then healthy, because nothing about space is healthy. And we love the science section ideas of space travel, never going to happen. That’s not how it’s going to be at all.

Dr. John Jaquish: You are being destroyed when you are outside of the Earth’s gravitational pull and you’re exposed to that much radiation. Your body is just dissolving. Yeah. Yeah. It is killing you very quickly. And so, those are the two challenges, the radiation and the loss of bone mass. Muscle mass too. But the bone mass, you get a fracture up there. The fracture won’t mend. You’re useless. You can’t do anything.

Dr. John Jaquish: Having them maintain strong bones is what the subject of the paper was. And now, I’ll read you a quote from what the paper said. Especially something this important, I want to go with quotes because I don’t want to give my interpretation. And I did participate as an author in this study, but similar to the other one, only in the methods. Only to make sure they use the device correctly.

Dr. John Jaquish: It said, “If the exercise apparatus could be condensed in 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 on exploration vehicles.” And everything NASA is focused on right now is Mars. We’ve got to get somebody to Mars. We’ve got to figure out how to keep the radiation from killing them. And get them stronger bone density.

Matthew Januszek: Right. Sorry, is there a link between then improved bone density and muscle? How does that work?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Yeah, look at the chassis of a Formula One car and look at the chassis of a Honda Civic and you put a Formula One engine in a Honda Civic and tried to race it. What would happen? The thing would just come apart. Right. Because it’s not meant to handle that kind of power. So, as your chassis improves, you can hold more musculature. Let’s call it a genetic potential alteration.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: And so using the OsteoStrong machines, as well as it developing your bones through these small movements, does that also at the same time, impact muscle development? Or do you have to do that separately off the machine?

Dr. John Jaquish: You really have to do both.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’d have to do OsteoStrong and X3.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. What you learned from the OsteoStrong, I guess there’s a lot of research you must have done with that. Did that help shape where you went in terms of understanding training with bands?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. I didn’t understand training with bands particularly well, bands by themselves. Until I just concluded that training with bands by themselves is either going to be ineffective or almost a guaranteed injury. Because that’s, the problem is you’d do a chest press with a band around your bag or a pushup and your wrists are being twisted outward. That can cause an injury that could keep you from being able to use your hand correctly.

Matthew Januszek: What about when you sit. This has been around for years, but you got say an Olympic bar, whether you’re squatting or pressing. And you have a band on a rack. So you… Your product specifically fits those needs, but being fairly open, could you arguably achieve similar results by combining those two?

Dr. John Jaquish: One of the 16 studies specifically says variable resistance is superior for growing muscle and developing strength through standard weightlifting. Of those 16 which are cited in the book, one of them says the greater the level of variance.

Dr. John Jaquish: Let’s say you have a power rack with some weights on it and some bands. The variance is this big. And then, you have another setup where it’s just all variance. So you’re holding very little at the bottom and a crazy amount at the top. That’s more like X3. Well then the growth is like this. The greater the variance, the greater the response of the body.

Matthew Januszek: All right. And just so I understand what you’re saying there, when you say the greater the variant. Let’s stick with the Olympic bar squat with the bands on the power rack. How would you define a greater variance? Is that something to do with the band or the amount of traveling?

Dr. John Jaquish: It would be the weight at the bottom versus the top. What’s the ratio?

Matthew Januszek: All right. I’m with you. Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Is it X to 5X?

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or is it X to 1.2X? This is like, a lot of the people who use variable resistance in a gym, have weights, and then they have bands. Now, if somebody were to build a power rack that just had nothing but hooks and clamps all over it, where you could attach bands. I mean, it may take you half an hour to set up an exercise, but could you mimic what a X3 does with some giant rack with hooks all over it? Yeah, I guess. But that would cost you thousands of dollars and X3 is $550, so why would you do that?

Matthew Januszek: But the principal than that you’re getting, just to… Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I guess what I’m saying is you don’t need weight.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah. The principle you’re saying then is essential that, if you’ve got this great variance between the bottom and the top, then you’re getting the best impact, the best bang for your buck, that you could have and bands in general that allow that difference, is the most effective way to do that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. That makes sense. In terms of science and research, we’ve been talking off-camera and you’re a bit of an encyclopedia of research.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t forget. There, I have a photographic memory.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. Dr. John Jaquish: I see something once if I find it interesting. If I see something I don’t care about, I won’t remember it for 10 seconds. But yeah, I never forget.

Matthew Januszek: You’re into your research. I guess two things. One, where did that come about? What’s your journey in research. And then two, you can look at a lot of different… And like I say, I don’t spend my head on research papers, but from what I understand, there are a lot of different studies, some are good, some are bad, some are biased.

Matthew Januszek: And there are so many variables within certain bits of research. How do you determine… Can sometimes you can get research to fit your needs? Or how have you been able to stay relatively independent without someone saying, “Well, yeah? You can pick and choose what you want and then package it up”?

Dr. John Jaquish: Cherry-picking research.

Matthew Januszek: Yes. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. There’s a section in the book that explains why I don’t cherry-pick research. I present the opposing view also. Now, I don’t need to present library literature that says, “Eating breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” which was written by the Kellogg family to sell cereal. That’s the origin of breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So total bulls***. Just selling our kids poison.

Dr. John Jaquish: I can point that out. And also, we all have to acknowledge that there is a huge bias in nutritional research. And this is in the cherry-picking section I’m talking about, where we have to acknowledge that from swatter to the table, normally people say from farm to table, but I’m just going to keep it real. There’s a 16% margin on a steak.

Matthew Januszek: Margin.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: What do you mean?

Dr. John Jaquish: That 16% of what you buy it for, goes to the people who handled it, butchered it.

Matthew Januszek: Oh, okay. Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. A Triscuit, which is made by Nabisco. It’s a little cracker. Right. There’s a 600% margin in that. Who has better research? The meat producers or is it Nabisco and Kraft and Kellogg’s? Well, they have purchased research that says that eating carbohydrates is wonderful. And why do they bother doing this? Why do they want everybody to be vegan?

Dr. John Jaquish: Because vegans don’t eat kale. Vegans eat cake and cookies. Because they have to eat processed foods, otherwise they can’t get enough calories in the body to keep from dying. So they have to have these processed foods.

Dr. John Jaquish: They love talking about how natural they are. Like they’re like some sort of tribesmen. Oh, but wait, where’s the truck that’s going to show up with my vegan donuts? Because they need their vegan donuts, otherwise they can’t get enough calories to live. I don’t see the movement as heroic in any way. Also, farming vegetables kills 7 billion animals a year in the United States. I think we only…

Matthew Januszek: Why is that? Just…

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s less than a million cattle are slaughtered per year.

Matthew Januszek: Right. Why do vegetables kill animals then?

Dr. John Jaquish: Destroyed habitat.

Matthew Januszek: Right. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And also, birds are poisoned by the millions, flying over cornfield. Crows or mockingbirds can destroy a cornfield if they don’t immediately get poisoned when they fly into the cornfield. Gophers, ground squirrels, rodents in general, deer. I grew up in Orinda, which is a suburb of San Francisco. But then for high school, I lived in Napa.

Dr. John Jaquish: My parents had this great, great spot. It was overlooking a hillside with a vineyard on it. And so, I could see a deer running around in there a lot of mornings. And then I’d see the vineyard maintenance people just come out and shoot the deer. You can’t tell the deer to jump back over the deer fence. He won’t. He’ll just stay in there and eat the product. So they go shoot him. And then of course, they just take him to a burn pile, let him rot. And then when he dries out, they just set him on fire. Pile of dead deer.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, that’s farming vegetables. I won’t say that’s veganism because I think a lot of vegans don’t know that. So basically, any speed that’s expanding it’s population is going to be taking resources from another species. There’s no getting around that. Vegan or meat eater, it makes no difference. You’re killing things. Our existence kills other things.

Dr. John Jaquish: And we’re going to continue to grow our population, which is an interesting conversation. Henry Kissinger wrote an interesting paper about that in the 1960s, which made him one of probably the most hated men in the world. But it was about population control. At some point we have to say, “Hey, we got a lot of people. And how much nature do we want to destroy to keep our population growing?”

Dr. John Jaquish: And that has economic implications too, because everything is built on economic growth. Well, what if we can’t have economic growth because we just have too many people? So, opens up geopolitics big time when you want to talk about that. But ultimately, everything we consume is at the expense of death of animals. No way around it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, I can eat an entire steer in a year. Period. I can eat 500 pounds of… Yeah, that’s about right. I can eat 500 pounds of red meat in a year. That’s one life of an animal. But if you’re eating vegetables, thousands of lives.

Matthew Januszek: In terms of the research then. What you’re saying in terms of the food industry. Now, they will cherry-pick the research to suit their gain, which makes sense. You see it in sugar and the whole thing about fats and carbohydrates. In your research then, what have you done to ensure that You’re not cherry-picking then?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, usually when I go to publish something, especially some of the more controversial statements I run it by a lot of other professionals. I’ll give it, like Ben Greenfield has been really nice about proofreading some stuff, because he’s a middle of the road guy. He’ll try a certain type of veganism for a month. Say how he felt. He’ll try carnivore. He’ll try some mixture of organ meats. The guy experiments on himself. And he’s a great advocate of just what the right answer is.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ll make sure that I don’t do that. But also, the way I approach nutrition was similar to the way I approach exercise. I saw something with exercise that was an undeniable truth. Huge difference between our power output capacity here, versus here, versus here, versus here. And that’s just the range of motion. A weak to strong range, huge, huge delta in the capacity that we have.

Dr. John Jaquish: And we have to exercise accordingly, otherwise we’re just wasting our time. That was one thing. And then, I couldn’t really find the one catalyst to say one diet was better than the other, because there’s always people who… There’s this really obese powerlifter. He says, he’s a world record holder, but no one in power lifting has ever heard of him. No one could find a meet he’s ever been to. Maybe he set a record in somebody’s backyard and he said he’s world champion. I don’t know. But he was in Game Changers.

Matthew Januszek: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: A really short, chubby guy. And he says he’s never eaten meat or something like that. And talk about cherry-picking. This guy is just lying. That’s their evidence. We actually have scientific studies, like the whole cholesterol thing. And I also don’t want to make it an us and them.

Dr. John Jaquish: But other than all the evidence, like I said about 15 minutes ago, the two greatest drivers of long life are high levels of strength and low levels of body fat. That’s uncontested. There’s hardly a thing you can find in medical resources that’s uncontested. Well, if those things are true and they’re so uncontested, let’s just assume they’re 100% true. And those ideas will never be defeated.

Dr. John Jaquish: What is the optimal nutrition to get to the highest level of strength, and the optimal nutrition to get to the lowest level of body fat? It’s carnivore nutrition. That’s the answer.

Matthew Januszek: What was your introduction? And I suppose why did studying science and research become a passion for you? Where did you get into it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, first it was my mother.

Matthew Januszek: That was right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. And so that’s where it started. I started doing literature reviews back then, but I just noticed I was good at it. And it’s because of that memory thing. I can read something and then six months later I’ll read another thing. And I’ll be like, “Hey, there’s a connection between this and that paper I read six months ago.” And I would remember the author, the journal. I would have the APA reference in my head. And so I’d be able to find that other one real easy.

Matthew Januszek: Did you find that also, when you looked through it, and you probably looked through it than many people, but you did get some questionable research and studies? And if so, what were some of the red flags that you looked out for to almost say, “Well, I don’t want to be using that because of X, Y, Z”?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a variable resistance study. There’s one study that says variable resistance isn’t good and it’s regular weights are better. But the study was designed with that outcome in mind. And I’ll tell you why. Because some people lifted weights to whatever they can handle. That was one test group. The other test group use variable resistance training, but the banding they were given was TheraBand. Four pounds. Four pounds was the maximum resistance they could handle.

Dr. John Jaquish: You gave somebody four pounds to train with. And then the other group could train with whatever they could handle. Well, obviously, the other group did better. And the four pounds, that’s not going to grow anything. And so, it was designed to make variable resistance look bad. I don’t know why the researcher wrote that, other than just extraordinary bias. But if you read the study it’s just garbage. It should’ve been thrown out.

Matthew Januszek: And how much do you see of the studies are generally done to prove a point for a commercial reason? Or do you get a lot of just independent stuff that just generally wants to try?

Dr. John Jaquish: Very infrequently do I read something that’s where the commercial intention.

Matthew Januszek: Oh, is that because there isn’t a lot of it or because you just don’t come across it?

Dr. John Jaquish: It gets weeded out pretty easily. With the exception of nutritional. A lot of nutritional research is bought and paid for. And it’s bought and paid for by Nabisco and Kellogg’s and Kraft and Nestle. And they also have organizations the whatever they’ll call it. It’s a government in a third world country. The people’s Republic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The people have nothing to do with this. Is they’re looking down the barrel of a gun.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a little bit like that where there’ll be an institute of health and nutrition for longevity research. And it turns out that they’re solely funded by Kraft Foods. Right. So they have surrogates that look good in name, but then when you look into them, they just work for people that sell crackers.

Matthew Januszek: I guess it’s a strange balance because you’ve probably got more research on the food. After all, there’s more money and more motivation to do it. Although, those studies could be biased. And you’ve probably got less in the strength and fitness side because there’s probably not the money into it. But you’ve just got… Yeah, it may be more honest, but there’s just less of it because it’s less well funded.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, smaller sample sizes in exercise science, whereas you’ll get it. This is my favorite total bulls*** story about a study was… A lot of nutritional research is survey-based. They tell people to take a survey.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, are they honest in that survey? Nobody knows. Maybe. Maybe they just want to answer what they’d like to believe about themselves. I mean, how many overweight people have you talked to that are like, “I don’t understand why I’m overweight. I only eat 1,500 calories a day.” And you’re like, “Oh my God, no, you don’t.” They’re just lying to you and they’re lying to themselves. They’re like sociopaths. They believe in the lie.

Dr. John Jaquish: I have an ex-girlfriend like that. She wasn’t fat, but she would lie, and then she would believe in the lie. So that’s what a sociopath is by the way. What happens is these people, they’re constantly stuck in this… How do I want to say this? You’re asking about-

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I want to give this the most understandable answer because I was just about to rant. You’re asking with all the bias research in nutrition.

Dr. John Jaquish: Here’s an example of how we can spot that. So, there was a study that was written by a group of people from a Seventh-Day Adventist university.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, Seventh Day Adventists believe it’s their mission, as part of their religion, to convert everyone to be vegetarian. Not vegan, but vegetarian. So, they’re extraordinarily biased.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then, they ran a study looking at the chances of colorectal cancer. And so it was a long-term survey. And so, it was a little over a thousand people, who had said they had eaten nitrate meat, but the word nitrate was buried down the study. The title just said meat. Nitrate meats.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, what is nitrate meat? It’s a preservative. So, you have preservative meats. You really can’t find them anywhere other than like an Oscar Mayer hotdog, which is something you can keep in your freezer for a few years, and then heat it and it’s fine.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, they found a group of people who ate an Oscar Mayer hotdog at least once a day for 40 years. Now, did they do that for health, do you think? Probably not. This is a gas station hotdog. In the United Kingdom, that’s illegal, by the way. You can’t even sell meat and nitrate in it. So, this is very American.

Dr. John Jaquish: And I think they’re trying to weed this out because this study came out. But the title said meat eaters have a 2% greater chance of colorectal cancer, but the meat-eater group ate a gas station hotdog every day.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, if somebody is going to eat a gas station hotdog every day, do you think any other variables might be unique to that individual, like greater alcohol consumption, tobacco consumption, hard drug use, whatever, like an unhealthy lifestyle?

Dr. John Jaquish: And then, of course, anybody who’s going to be a vegetarian is… They’ve been told is a healthy choice. So, they’re going to be healthier people. They’re probably going to work out. The hotdog group, probably not going to have a workout.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, what does that study say? It says nothing. It’s a piece of trash.

Matthew Januszek: Great.

Dr. John Jaquish: You got to be able to know, when you’re reading the study, like are there any real biases in here? I also don’t cite any studies that were paid for by the beef lobby because that’s their business, I understand.

Dr. John Jaquish: But they may come up with a great study, and then somebody may be trying to disprove them or has an open mind. “Well, they might be right,” and replicate that study, but it’s an independent non-biased group, that’s the study I’m going to cite.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. So, coming back to the workout part, you mentioned that you can do this band training in about 10 minutes a day, which seems quite a short amount of time. I know you can get tough workouts in that, but what’s the basis of being able to… You’re pretty buff.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks.

Matthew Januszek: And you’re not 25 years old either.

Dr. John Jaquish: Nope.

Matthew Januszek: I guess 26 is…

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Matthew Januszek: So, are you getting that from just the band? I’ll use band training because I don’t want this to seem as though we’re just pushing a particular thing. But are you getting that from training out in this particular way?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, remember, you can’t train with bands because bands if you get heavy enough for them to be relevant to strength, they will twist your joints and injure you. So, bands by themselves are worthless. So, you have to have the Olympic bar and you have to have the plate that keeps your ankles from being twisted.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, whole idea of the product is really protecting the smaller joints of body and then putting tremendous loads through the body because the body can handle it in specific positions. So, I started using X3 after I turned 40, and I’m 44 now. So, I have put on 60 pounds of muscle since then. So, in four years, I’m completely different. And I was kind of chubby when I started. I’m 16% body fat. And I was working out, but I was using weights.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m also bothered in general. At the back cover of the book hits on this. And I have references in the book that really look at like how fit do people get with standard fitness? And I think that’s a great starting point for a conversation about a new idea. So, people seem to be very closed off to the new idea. But who’s fit?

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re fit, I’m fit. But I don’t know what gym you go to. We’re in Orange County. So, you got a couple of gyms here that have some pretty athletic people.

Dr. John Jaquish: But let’s go to Wichita and go to Planet Fitness there. The people that are in the gym are no different than the people that are at the Pizza Hut next door now. Not at all. And that is almost every gym in the world.

Matthew Januszek: Is that more like your view of it when you’ve traveled around these places? Or…

Dr. John Jaquish: No, there’s data on this. So, the leanest, best one percentile of males in the United States has 10.9% body fat. That’s pathetic. But that’s not even visible abs, but maybe just the top, a little outline. But that’s just pathetic. That’s the best 1%?

Dr. John Jaquish: And then percentage body fat considers muscularity, too. Not just… Whatever. How good your diet is.

Dr. John Jaquish: And here’s another statistic for you. One in six males in the United States has used or are currently using anabolic steroids. One in six.

Matthew Januszek: One in six.

Dr. John Jaquish: One in six.

Matthew Januszek: Of what age group is that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Over 18.

Matthew Januszek: Over 18.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s over 18.

Matthew Januszek: One in six.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, are one in six people super fit? No, not even close. I mean, go to the shopping mall. Look around. There might be a thousand people you see when you walk through the shopping mall. So, that fit number, we’re just talking males here. It’s not one in six. Is it one in 600? No. Is it one in 6,000? Maybe more like one in 60,000 people are really in exceptionally good shape.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, why the hell do we care what they’re doing? They’re genetic outliers and that whatever they’re doing does not apply to the rest of us. And also, in the last chapter of the book, I explain what the genetic differences are. Did you read that chapter?

Matthew Januszek: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: That chapter is a bitch. So, I can imagine you’re like, “There’s a lot of science here.” It’s just tedious, but it’s worth it. That last chapter. Read that chapter.

Matthew Januszek: So, give us a sort of a rundown of that.

Dr. John Jaquish: The biggest difference between the people, who put on muscle easily and become strength athletes and those who don’t, is where their tendons attach to the bone that moves.

Matthew Januszek: So, it’s genetic?

Dr. John Jaquish: From the core of the body. So, for example, everybody has a sternum attachment to the pectoral, right? And then, your pectoral attaches somewhere, usually right here before the beginning of the bicep.

Dr. John Jaquish: And the object of the pectoral is moving that bone, the humorous bone, towards the body. So, even when I go cross the body, I can feel the thickness getting greater because the muscles are getting shortened, those cells are pulling together.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, what if we had an individual, but instead… Here, we’ll use this arm, so the camera can see it. So, instead of having an insertion here, the insertion is on the other end of the bone by the elbow.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, the people that have this mutation, have more leverage when they’re in the weaker range of motion, so they have a stronger weaker range. So, they can always engage more in the weaker range. So, it’s almost like everything they do is using X3, right? Because-

Matthew Januszek: So just-

Dr. John Jaquish: …. offloading or engaging more in that weaker range.

Matthew Januszek: So, people who are in this more muscular section have got longer for…

Dr. John Jaquish: Longer moment arms.

Matthew Januszek: Longer in their arms. People who are not as muscular are shorter. So, if it’s shorter, it’s better to train in the way you’re talking about, then? Is that…

Dr. John Jaquish: So, there are 15, 16 now, NFL players I’m working with. Everybody should use X3 . I mean, I’m not just promoting my product. I mean, it’s just a fact. Like the strongest level of variable resistance. And there could be some other approach at some point, but there isn’t now.

Dr. John Jaquish: Everybody’s doing better. I mean, all the NFL players that I’m working with, all the NBA players, the entire Miami Heat, they stopped using weights and they’re just using X3 now. And they even endorsed the book and they put the endorsement on the back of the book.

Dr. John Jaquish: They gave me permission to do that and use the name of their team because usually when you’re working with the team, you have to say, like a football team that’s based in Chicago, but you can’t say Chicago Bears. But Miami Heat gave me permission because they really like it. It works for the guys. It keeps the guys from getting injured-

Matthew Januszek: So that just-

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re stronger than ever.

Matthew Januszek: So just explain to me that short thing again. So, people who are not as muscular developed, they’ve got short… What do they call them-

Dr. John Jaquish: No. What if somebody doesn’t work out and they have great genetics? So it’s if you have a longer insertion, then you are more likely to be able to build a greater amount of muscle. It doesn’t mean he will. That guy might-

Matthew Januszek: He got the potential.

Dr. John Jaquish: That guy might just sit at home and play PlayStation.

Matthew Januszek: So, if you’ve got short ones, then what do you do? If you’ve got short ones, it’s better to train in this way. Is that burning than regularly?

Dr. John Jaquish: Always better to train in variable resistance, in all cases. So, 23% of people are incapable of stimulating any muscular protein synthesis at all. I think that was the second reference in the book.

Matthew Januszek: And why is that?

Dr. John Jaquish: They can’t engage enough muscle to cause fatigue, but they’re lifting regular weights. It’s different when you’re using something that fatigues the entire musculature.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not that one will do better training with variable resistance. Everyone will do better training with variable resistance because the weak range is still the weak range, and stronger range is still the stronger range. Nobody has it reversed. Some just have more of an advantage when using regular weights, and some have a great disadvantage, but it ultimately doesn’t matter.

Dr. John Jaquish: So now, with this new approach, everybody can be as strong as that NFL player they like. Now, maybe they don’t have the size to be a linebacker and they look more like a wide receiver. Well, that’s still cool. So, everybody can grow more musculature as a result of this. And especially, the majority of the population has that tendon disadvantage. And so now, we can do it.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. So, what would you say is a worthy goal then for… Let’s talk about the average person. But what should be a worthy goal in terms of your general fitness? Is it, like you say, you just want to be strong and lean, and that’s what you should aim for? You mentioned coming to the cardio part of it. Strong and lean is great, but what about your endurance and your cardiovascular capabilities?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Matthew Januszek: For example, I love to do weights because I enjoy the feeling of it. For me, working out is also quiet… It’s almost like a bit of a meditation. I like to run for a little bit, not too long, but 20 minutes along the beach is great. It clears my mind. And I like lifting weights. I like doing squats. I like deadlifting. I like some of the Keiser machines because that’s a different approach. Ropes, for example, I enjoy that because it gets my heart rate up. So, strong and lean is great, that’s one of the things I want to do, but I also like to be able to move better and do a bunch of other stuff. So, what do you think is a worthy goal in terms of someone’s fitness, that’s not an elite athlete?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, you certainly got to be comfortable when you move. Skill training, like movement drills, sprinting, and cutting. Cutting to one side or another, like when I played Rugby, I did a lot of that. I was an outside center, so I had to do a lot of running.

Dr. John Jaquish: X3 doesn’t do everything. It’s not going to make you better at your skill drills because they’re skills, and you’ve got to develop those independently.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, when it comes to cardiovascular exercise, you get a better or equal cardiovascular health effect from strength training than you do from, what we call, cardio training. Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But cardio training, which is sustained more than 20 minutes, that’s actually the magic.

Matthew Januszek: I work-

Dr. John Jaquish: No, it’s got to be more than 20 minutes, where you really start to aggressively upregulate cortisol. And if you do it, like three times a week, that becomes a chronic elevation, which means your body protects body fat. So, you don’t lose your body fat, but you do lose your muscle. So, it’s the opposite of what everybody wants, is what cardio gives you. Cardio’s garbage.

Matthew Januszek: Do you-

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m friends with Zach Bitter. He’s the world record holder for a 100-mile run. I mean, I’m friends with him, but I’m never going to go running with him. No way. I’ll drive my car, maybe.

Dr. John Jaquish: That would destroy what I worked so hard to build. It would destroy my physique when I started getting into habitual distance running because cortisol gets rid of muscle. Why would you want to upregulate that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, also, I’d like to say, there’s no such thing as a bad hormone. Cortisol has its purpose. A lot of things to create a little bit of cortisol. Getting out of bed in the morning secretes cortisol, drinking coffee, eating anything, anything will get a little bit of cortisol going. But it’s those high chronic levels that are the problem.

Matthew Januszek: Hmm. So, what you’re saying is running under 20 minutes is not going to do a lot of harm, but if you’re trying to lose weight and you’re running above that, there’s a science to say that, that isn’t really what you want to be doing.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a meta-analysis, it’s more than a hundred studies combined, that demonstrate this. This information has been out there for 40 years. This is my best example of why the fitness industry is just a garbage industry. Just trash. I know you’ve been in the middle of it for a long time, so you probably don’t like hearing that.

Matthew Januszek: To view what is the right thing to do.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So, cardio is so bad because it’s giving everybody the opposite of what they think they’re getting. And then, of course, they’re perpetually frustrated.

Dr. John Jaquish: And especially the ones who do cardio in isolation. I’m talking primarily about women, who will go into the gym, do an hour cardio, and they’ll do that for six months. And then they’ll see me out somewhere, and they’re just like crying. Like, “Nothing has changed.” And like, “My scale weight went down a little bit, but my pants are even tighter.” And I’m like, “Right. Because you’re gaining fat and losing muscle,” because that’s what cardio does.

Dr. John Jaquish: And if you think about it, from an engineering perspective, your central nervous system is like your pit crew, the formula one. They’re going to try and make adjustments to optimize you for the environment you’re in. You can’t talk to your central nervous system, but you can give it information.

Dr. John Jaquish: You can create a harsh environment. And, what you want to do, is punish the cells of the body, so that that central nervous system goes, “We’d be better off. We got rid of some of his body fat and added some more muscle, maybe some more strength than the tendons and ligaments, too.” That’s what we all want.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, we all want the sprinter’s body. Well, why the hell aren’t we sprinting?

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, I was going to ask that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Why are we going in the opposite direction? And what is a sprint? It’s high intensity, high force because when you hit the ground when you’re at speed, you get a lot more than your body weight. You’re getting three times your body weight. When you’re just jogging or doing sustainable type cardio, I think it’s like 1.2 times your body weight.

Matthew Januszek: So, what about that, I think it’s called Sprint 8, where you sprint hard as fast as you can for some time and rest, and sprint and rest. Is that something? Because I read the book a long, long time ago, but apparently, that releases a lot of growth hormone and improves your overall strength. So, is that-

Dr. John Jaquish: Stabilization firing. So, I wrote a meta-analysis, the only meta-analysis I’ll ever write. And it’s the same co-author of the book, Henry Alkire. He was one of my co-authors in that project. I’ll also never write a meta-analysis. It’s just so punishing.

Matthew Januszek: What is it?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s when they take all the research on a particular subject, and they might filter it for certain parameters, and then rate the strength of each study based on things, like sample size, duration. And how you ran a study with a thousand people who only went for two weeks, and there was another study with 12 people that they ran for a year.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, which is more powerful? Depends on what you’re looking at and what the time scale of that is. So, you have to weigh all those things and put your mathematics together, how you justified weighing one versus the other. And then, you get an answer to the entire subject. All the literature that’s ever been published, again, is based on certain parameters.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, this is the highest level of medical evidence. And so, naturally, you’d imagine it would be. So, when you look at some of the answers that have come out of meta-analyses, that I authored and Henry, we looked at stabilization firing. Because what’s going on when you look at a sprinter’s skull? This is how I got the idea for doing this study.

Dr. John Jaquish: The skull doesn’t move. The whole body is moving. I mean, they’re throwing their hand back, so they can pivot their pelvis and get a longer stride. Everything’s moving in the body, but the skull is stabilized. It’s because almost every muscle in the body is doing extra firing to keep the sprinter as balanced as possible, so they can propel themselves forward with speed. Stabilization firing.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m like, “Let’s look at that.” Its theory was stabilization firing upregulates growth hormone. Because if we can prove that, then we know things like vibration. Because vibration is also associated with higher levels of growth hormone, which is why it’s been called a weight loss device, body vibration.

Matthew Januszek: Is it important for both men and women to upregulate growth hormone, then?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s incredibly important. Growth hormone is really what it is when you’re a child. It’s a repair hormone when you’re an adult because you call it human repair hormone. Because it only plays into growth, like height and your anatomy, when you’re growing. When you’re done growing, you’re done growing. Nobody took growth hormone as an adult and got taller, right? And there’s a lot of concern, that I think is misplaced like, “It’s going to enlarge the heart.” There’s no evidence of that.

Matthew Januszek: So, in terms of the way you’re training, you want to be training in a way that’s going to release your natural growth hormone-

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Matthew Januszek: And can you continue to release that as you age? Is that still accessible?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you can.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And that’s in that meta-analysis, too. A couple of those things were. Now, it seems to appear, the older you get, you get a higher IGF-1 level, which IGF-1 converts to growth hormone.

Dr. John Jaquish: But with older people, seem to do more conversion as opposed to just creating more growth hormone itself. Not sure what that means, but it’s the same effect on the body.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so, anybody who’s taking exogenous growth hormone or exogenous IGF-1… Insulin growth factor-1 is what that stands for. They’re the same thing, a little bit different timing in how they work. But some bodybuilders use those particular exogenous, meaning injection.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re taking those and performance-enhancing drugs, and they get great results out of them. But our body makes those things. And when our body makes them, they can’t hurt us. The body’s not going to make anything to kill you.

Matthew Januszek: So, in terms of your training then, if you’re combining X3 or band training with the vibration, that is optimum for helping you to release your natural growth?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: So, you just stand on a vibration power plate or something and do the exercises?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, the growth hormone accelerator, which is a product that my company sells, the top of it is the X3 platform. And so, you can do your X3 workout on the platform.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, if you want to put the top of the X3 on a power plate, boy, it would be loud. I mean, it would make a terrible noise, and probably beat up on the power plate, probably destroy the power plate eventually, but you could do it. And you could certainly do it.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a lot of great vibration products and there are all sorts of different price points. So-

Dr. John Jaquish: And products and there are all sorts of different price points. But you got to be aware of the $600 ones. Those are trash.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. But you also want to look for vibration. So not the fulcrum vibration, which is like a teeter-totter. You want uniform vibration, which is up and down, side to side, and forward and backward.

Matthew Januszek: Does the powerplay do that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Powerplay does it. Yep.

Matthew Januszek: Does that. Right. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish:** So, I’m a fan of the technology of powerplay, for sure.

Matthew Januszek: As well as your own hormones then. So what about testosterone? Obviously, it’s a big thing for men that want to put on muscle. Is there really a way that you can actually naturally stimulate testosterone through working out?

Dr. John Jaquish: Of course.

Matthew Januszek: And if so, how would you do that?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, testosterone… Growth hormone has to do with stability. So the more your body has to self-stabilize. So when I do an overhead press with the X3, my core is just jackhammering to keep that weight, which is a weight that I would never be able to handle because as I lower it, it gets lower weight.

Dr. John Jaquish: As I raise it, when I get to the powerful position, it’s a higher weight than I can only handle so I’m holding it up here. And my core is just, there’s so much muscular contraction going on in my core to keep me stable. That’s what’s up regulating growth hormone while I’m doing that. And it’s more of an upregulation because there’s more stabilization firing because of the extra weight.

Dr. John Jaquish: But some people try and separate the two they might lift or something like that. And then, they’ll do just vibration with their body weight. And then they’ll put themselves in a disadvantageous position for balance, like standing on one foot or trying to stand on your toes on one foot. That’s hard. And so

Matthew Januszek: But does that help to stimulate…

Dr. John Jaquish: Those will stimulate growth hormones. Yeah. I call it the sprinting effect.

Matthew Januszek: Right. And what’s happening then, is when you’re off balance or you’re trying to balance whether it’s overhead, or on one foot, or whatever, it’s engaging all of your different muscles, which then releases that hormone.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Matthew Januszek: Right. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And certain muscles will do it. And certain ones won’t. Your quadriceps won’t have… Primary actors don’t do it.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s the stabilization muscles. So, hip flexors will do it. And they figured this out at NASA actually, at one of their California facilities. They would put a precursor on a certain muscle and measure before and after blood tests. And then they would put the precursor on a different muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: So they just push on a tendon ending and, via irritation, a force that muscle to contract. And so, certain muscles will and certain muscles won’t. But the stabilization muscles, like your abdominals, your quadratus, your obliques, will upregulate. So you don’t have to worry about it. If you’re in a slightly unstable position, lifting with variable resistance. So you can get to a heavier weight than you could ever handle, which delivers a maximum result.

Matthew Januszek: What is the top two or three hormone testosterone releasing exercises then or movements?

Dr. John Jaquish: Testosterone just has to do with how heavy you go.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: With X3, or I can say with variable resistance, you’re using more force than you ever would with regular weight training. I’m holding 550 pounds here. I’m 44 years old. I’m never going to get under a bar with 500 pounds. That’d be stupid. And I think anyone who gets under a bar with 500 pounds, I have to question why they’re doing it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, are they professional weightlifters? That’s their job. Okay. I guess. I mean, I would say you get a better job. You ever thought about badminton? That pays too. Yeah. I see so many guys get so screwed up with weights and I just see it as thankless. The reward is not worth the risk.

Dr. John Jaquish: But I get the benefit of hitting that 500 pounds and engaging all the musculature in that position where I’m not at risk of injury. And then, the weight goes down as I go down into the joint compromising ranges of motion. I get that benefit of hitting that really high weight and then the lesser weight and then the lesser weight, till I basically just can’t move. Does that answer that question?

Matthew Januszek: Yeah. You’ve got, the ones in terms of testosterone, you’re basically loading the muscle in a safe way.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. And the heavier you go, with the more repetitions you go, the more receptors are going to open out.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: The key to testosterone is not having more testosterone itself. It’s having more receptor site activity. You want the receptor sites to be open. For example, my testosterone has been laser line the same since I was 28 years old. I had some testicular damage because of a bad rugby hit. You probably know how that goes.

Dr. John Jaquish: I didn’t have the right level of testosterone. So I got a testosterone replacement therapy, by the way. For all the idiots out there who think that that’s like a prescription for steroids, you should look up the WebMD definition. It’s considered the natural level of testosterone because that’s what it is. That’s what the R stands for, replacement. It doesn’t mean more. The replacement doesn’t mean more. It means replacement.

Dr. John Jaquish: So many clowns on the internet. I want to argue with that point. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it’s so hard for them to swallow. I think they want to imagine everybody’s cheating but them, which makes them righteous and glorious. But they’re just jealous and they haven’t tried lifting yet. They’re just losers.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a lot of ego in fitness. And so, that brings a lot of anger to people who don’t succeed. And I understand why they don’t succeed. They should read my book. Now, when we’re looking at… Where the hell was I?

Matthew Januszek: You’ve got the testosterone heavyweight.

Dr. John Jaquish: The benefit of the heavy is going to open up the receptor sites. Oh, I know why I brought that up.

Matthew Januszek: Utilize testosterone.

Dr. John Jaquish: Mine hasn’t been different. Even from the time at 28 years old, I got the prescription I put on maybe five pounds of muscle in 10 years. That’s not what happens to somebody who’s aggressively gaining muscle. That’s pathetic. So then I turned 40 and then I gained 60 pounds of muscle with the same level of testosterone.

Dr. John Jaquish: What’s the difference? Well, the difference was variable resistance because I could now put heavier loads on my body. And those receptor sites were open. So they were using the testosterone I had. Before I was probably just not using it.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: That’s for testosterone. And in terms of your growth hormone release, you mentioned the standing overhead press. Is that one of the best ones to stimulate that, would you say?

Dr. John Jaquish: The overhead press, the deadlift, and the squat are all self-stabilization-type movements. Especially one-legged squat. We focus on the one-legged squat for two reasons. One is more stabilization firing. Two is you’re not a kangaroo. You walk and run on one leg at a time. And your body’s designed to provide resources to one leg at a time when you try and squat with two legs, and people get so mad at me when I say a two-legged squat is not a functional movement. It is for a kangaroo, but it’s not for-

Matthew Januszek: I suppose to get off the toilet if you…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s really the only time you use both legs. Yeah. But you could do a pistol squat right off the toilet. Right.

Matthew Januszek: You could, yeah. Maybe I’ll try that. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Give that a shot. Don’t make a video of it.

Speaker 2: Or do.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or do. Or do. What we have, the only time we use two legs is when we stop. The impact is when we use two legs, but we run on one leg at a time. Train one leg at a time and imagine how much further you can go. And here’s where every weight lifter is going to start listening after I say this.

Dr. John Jaquish: What could your legs do if you put all your body’s resources, all your oxygen, all your blood into one quadricep and one glute, as opposed to dividing them in half? One leg at a time, all the resources. Is that going to be a better training experience? Absolutely. Because those are the biggest draws of blood in the body, the two biggest muscles in the body. And we’re going to work both legs at once. Why would we do that? One leg at a time, and then you get incredible growth. Yeah. And the stabilization firing.

Matthew Januszek: All right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: Then, to boil down, we’ve covered quite a lot of ground, but one of the things is the worthy goal that you said is, ideally for longevity, is to be strong and lean.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep.

Matthew Januszek: That’s something to focus on. The optimum way to do that is to have, what do you call it? Progressive resistance?

Dr. John Jaquish: variable resistance.

Matthew Januszek: variable resistance.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Matthew Januszek: The ultimate way to do that is with variable resistance. And also, in terms of engaging those hormones, you want to be doing that in a way where you’re developing your stabilization or your balance to make an effect. That’s the recipe for guys that want to look like you is just follow the book.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Just follow the program. I tell people all the time, like when I review something. Do you know anybody with a Harley Davidson motorcycle?

Matthew Januszek: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I have few friends with those. And they buy the motorcycle and they can’t wait to fuck it up. They immediately want to change the mirrors and they got to get a different color wheel.

Matthew Januszek: I think it’s an American thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: Is it?

Matthew Januszek: They do it with the cars as well.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. People screw up cars all the time. They put thin tires on a classic car. That’s not how things were back then.

Matthew Januszek: Extra exhausts.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Right. You just took a nice car and you screwed it up.

Matthew Januszek: And they do the jack wheels here as well.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Of course. Yeah. Maybe it is an American thing. Of course you’d say that. It’s okay. We can make fun of the United Kingdom too. But my point is that people get an exercise program and they can’t wait to mess with it. Because I guess they think they’re going to make some little tweak and it’s going to be twice as good.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, a lot of research went into the program the way it is. And I just tell them, “Follow the program. This is the way. Don’t question it, just do it.” And I have seen thousands of people try and mess with the program, do it a little bit different way. And they don’t succeed because they don’t understand the principles that are lying underneath them.

Dr. John Jaquish: They don’t understand what hypoxia is. I can do another hour’s lecture on hypoxia if you wanted. They don’t understand the difference between sarcoplasmic and myofibril growth. Two types of growth are happening with the exercise you do. Most people don’t know that. Most people don’t know if you exercise in what they call a rest, pause manner, which is a stupid name. It doesn’t even barely describe what it is. But it’s like one rep and then you rest. And another rep and then you rest.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re denying hypoxia. You denying sarcoplasmic growth. You might get a little myofiber growth out of that. Two-thirds of your growth potential, you just threw in the trash. They don’t know what they’re doing because they didn’t do all the research. They don’t understand. It just follows the program. This is the way.

Dr. John Jaquish: he great followers out there, just repeat me, “This is the way.” Yeah. And I’m serious about that. Don’t mess with it. Way too much research went into this for you to just go, “Oh, I’ll just use it in my customized way.” No, dude. Don’t. Then if you’re going to do that, just go, get TRX and suck your thumb, just like a fucking baby. I don’t care.

Matthew Januszek: And the final question on this, we’ve had some guests that have been talking about fascia. There’s a lot of new research on that and how to train the fascia. How does that fit into your… Is that something you’ve done any research on? And if so, does that play a part in the training methods that you teach at all?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s an entire chapter on that. And about super hydration of the muscle and then stretching while it’s super hydrated. When you stretch the casing of the muscle, you allow for hyperplasia, which is the splitting of muscle cells. We have a whole protocol for that.

Dr. John Jaquish: You combine your workout with a little bit of carbohydrate. It’s a very calculated amount so you don’t have a big insulin event. I mean, you’re going to have an insulin event, but it’s going to be small because you’re going into the workout fasted. And we want to be optimal. So the blood’s not flowing to the intestines. It’s flowing to the muscle. Combine that with a vasodilation agent, which could be HydroMax.

Matthew Januszek: What’s HydroMax?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, it’s a supplement that…

Matthew Januszek: Is it a beetroot sort of thing?

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t know.

Matthew Januszek: There’s a beetroot supplement that…

Dr. John Jaquish: HydroMax is not made of beetroot.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: HydroMax is… I don’t remember how it’s made.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: But it was actually on the banned substances list for a long time. But you can get it at any nutrition store or online, on Amazon. But it just super hydrates a muscle, but it does it via vasodilation. Caffeine is vasoconstriction. This is opening everything up. Now, the other way to do vasodilation.

Matthew Januszek: I know we’re going around a bit, but don’t a lot of the pre-workouts not have caffeine in it then, which reduces the… Contracts the…

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a benefit to both vasoconstriction and vasodilation. And you can take benefit out of both because your body will enact vasoconstriction when you’re doing work. But when you’re relaxing, you won’t have as much vasoconstriction, especially if you’ve taken the vasodilator. Or if you have a blood demand in your extremities. Or just in musculature in general.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re basically if this is the range of what you have for standard arterial flexibility, if you take a vasoconstrictor, you’re further on the construction site. You take a vasodilator, you move out here. But you have a wider range when you have both in your system. There’s no conflict is my point.

Dr. John Jaquish: The best vasodilator, of course, is Viagra. Yeah. And there’s a great study that put some people through some workouts.

Matthew Januszek: That before your workout?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. For more blood delivery to the muscle and it strikes the fascia.

Matthew Januszek: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Viagra will enact what is being talked about there. And will provide for more muscular growth.

Matthew Januszek: Are there side effects of doing it in the gym then?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. I mean, yeah. Hey, I work out at home. There’s a reason. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the jokes are free. Yeah. I haven’t had a problem with it. Yeah. I mean, when you’re focused on your workout. But if you work out with your girlfriend, it could be a problem.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah. I’m sure it is. Look just to wrap up, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve watched a bunch of your stuff and tried to get my head around it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Are you sick of my voice yet?

Matthew Januszek: No, it’s all good.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, most people are.

Matthew Januszek: I can see though, why you are a troll magnet, I guess, with some of the stuff.

Dr. John Jaquish: Hell yeah, I am. Well, the more trolls I get, the more they invite their friends to come and make fun of me. And then there will be a percentage of those friends that get the book and reads it. And then they say, “This guy is totally onto something. There’s no way he’s scamming anybody because what I read makes perfect sense.” And it also points out why what we’re doing with regular weightlifting, most people, 99.9% of people, get nothing out of it. It makes sense. Yeah. If you have questions, yeah, read the book.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah. Before we finish then, what’s some of the stuff you’ve got going on if people want to find out more about you, the clinics, the book? Just let us know what you’ve got going on at the moment and where people can find more.

Dr. John Jaquish: I created a landing page with links everywhere because yeah, it was tedious to hit every place. You can find everything on doctorj.com .

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s D-O-C-T-O-R and the letter J .com.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. And we’ll put that in the show notes and emails and everything. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Cool.

Matthew Januszek: And then the final question. Escape Your Limits is about escaping what you’ve believed is impossible and gone on to make it possible. What would be an example of escaping your own limits?

Dr. John Jaquish: Jesus, everything I’ve done. I’m really good at something that got me in a lot of trouble as a kid. I was always like the class clown. And when someone tells me I can’t do something, I’m fucking doing it. You can’t drive your car 200 miles an hour. Really? Hand the… I probably shouldn’t say anything else. It’d be pretty incriminating. But yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I’m sorry, guys, but it’s the way it is. They love the pictures with my Lamborghini and on great vacations. And yeah, I got a lot of hate out of doing a workout in front of the Parthenon, from my hotel balcony window. They’re really mad about that, but it’s like, what they’re really mad at is themselves because they haven’t done anything.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re pretty sad people. There’s an article in Forbes that says internet trolls are just losers. And that’s what they’re… They’re angry at themselves because they’ve never succeeded. So they see someone who’s successful, especially in the space that they’re in. And it makes them very hateful because everyday they see me it’s a reminder that they have not achieved.

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’d really rather them focus their energy, instead of yelling at me. It’s like the expression, winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners. The losers are always complaining about the winner. No, don’t look at the winner, look at the finish line. I’m not stopping them from doing anything. They can do something creative. That’s fine. Or get a better job maybe. I don’t know.

Matthew Januszek: I guess some of it as well, it’s a very different way of looking at things. And some of it, it’s taken… We’ve been speaking for almost a couple of hours on and off camera. And some of it’s just trying to understand that there’s a lot of parts to pull together. And I guess some of it is genuine, “Okay. I’ve not heard that. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve not seen it before. But tell me how that works.”

Matthew Januszek: Well, look. If nothing else, whether you agree or not, hopefully, it’s provoked people to at least think about things differently. And maybe go on their path of researching things and finding a better and more effective and efficient way of working out.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Matthew Januszek: John, I appreciate your time. Thank you for coming down.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me. This was great.

Matthew Januszek: Thank you very much. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this podcast.