Creating Impact in the Fitness Industry - An interview with John Jaquish

Today’s show features an interview with Dr. John Jaquish, Ph.D., a fitness inventor. A riveting podcast that explores Dr. Jaquish product development for osteoporosis and training devices for improved health and fitness.

Full Transcript

Billy Hofacker: Hey, everyone. And welcome to the, Your Fitness Money Coach podcast. We’re up to episode number 62. Today’s guest is Dr. John Jaquish Ph.D. And this is a little bit of a different episode for us. So we’d love your feedback on it. I just tried to expose you to as much information as possible. And one of the big differences with this particular guest is I actually, didn’t know him prior. Most of the other guests, or all of the other guests I had somewhat of a relationship with. This one I haven’t.

I decided to do the interview and I decided to share it with you because I think there’s some great content. You’ll hear a lot more, but Dr. John Jaquish is quite accomplished. He’s an inventor here. One of the inventions started as he was trying to help his mother overcome osteoporosis. So I just think there’s a lot we can take away from this. One, in particular, is just thinking big.

Billy Hofacker: He’s a big thinker and I think we could always learn when we’re around people like that. And he has some interesting perspectives on fitness and success. So I enjoyed my conversation with him and again, would love your feedback on that. So for the rest, you’ll have to just tune in. And I do think you’ll enjoy this episode. So without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. John Jaquish.

Billy Hofacker: All right. Dr. John Jaquish is going to bring a unique and fresh perspective. I’m excited about that. And then, a quick story. I was training a guy and mostly business coaching, life coaching, that kind of thing. And he starts telling me about some of the stuff he’s doing and he shares about the X3 Bar, that he’s using. And to be honest, I didn’t know too much about it, even being in the fitness industry for a long time.

Billy Hofacker: And so, I thought it was really interesting. This guy told me about it. And then literally, maybe, I don’t know if it was the next day or a couple of days later, I ended up connecting. So I don’t think that happened by accident. So that was just cool. Well, John is the inventor of that, and he’ll share about that as well. So what do we call you? Is it John, Dr. John? What do you like to be called?

Dr. John Jaquish: You just call me John.

Billy Hofacker: Okay, John. Well, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate you being here.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Billy Hofacker: Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me.

Billy Hofacker: You got it, man. So can you just kind of start off by just sharing kind of, I know you’re into a lot of different things, but sharing what you’re up to now, for the most part where your focus is?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I’ve got a couple of products coming out and there, yeah. That’s sort of shifted back to engineering. Yeah.

Billy Hofacker: Cool. So right now you’re in the process of creating a couple of new products. So how do we get here? So obviously, that didn’t just happen. So how did you kind of start off? What caused you to get on the journey of product development?

Dr. John Jaquish: So my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. I wanted to figure out how to treat it because I just didn’t like what I saw in the industry. Now also, people from the fitness industry frequently say, “Nobody knows who the hell you are, where’d you come from?” And it’s like, well, it’s because I’m not part of the fitness industry. I’ve been a doctor of biomedical engineering since 2012. And then, I launched my product right then, but it was in physical medicine space. So not fitness at all.

Billy Hofacker: Gotcha. Now, what was that? What was that product?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s called OsteoStrong. So, yeah. OsteoStrong’s where you find the technology and it’s a medical device that treats bone loss and it grows bone very effectively. In fact, faster than any drug that’s ever been clinically trialed. So it’s superior technology and there’s no side effects to it. So it’s very popular with the post-menopausal population, because those are the people who have bone loss or the sort of most aggressive bone loss, but everybody does past 30 years old, you start losing bone density.

And so, it was important technology. And I licensed it to the company OsteoStrong, and now they have 150 clinics in eight different countries. So it’s a big business. The fitness industry should be the medical community. If we want to avoid disease, why don’t we listen to those people? Now I can tell you a good reason why we don’t listen to those people is that healthcare is not healthcare it’s disease care.

Dr. John Jaquish: And looking at how do we avoid this stuff? If we hadn’t looked at viruses and pathogens like some do now as it relates to the current pandemic, well, everybody would have a much better hemoglobin A1C score. They’d have better metabolic health. A

And then this virus, instead of having a 99.8% survival rate would have a 99.9% survival rate or even better. I mean, maybe it would only affect one in 1,000 people or something like that. So it could be better, but those who can demonstrate that they’re giving better recommendations and then cite their sources. They don’t need to be scientists like me.

Just get somebody like me to explain your program with scientific references. It’s just like, why are you throwing out all the treadmills? Oh, it’s because cardio is the worst way to lose body fat. And that’s what most people use cardio equipment for. So it’s just like, we don’t need them. You will do worse if you use a treadmill.

Billy Hofacker: So say I’m listening and I’m personal training. Maybe I even just got into it and I’d been fed the juice, the dogma of, you know what? I got to do long, slow, slow, long cardio. And that’s the way I’m going to get in shape. But I’m hearing you. And you know what? That kind of makes sense. What do I do? What’s my next step? Where do I go to maybe get a better understanding of what the science says?

Dr. John Jaquish: You asked the question.

Billy Hofacker: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want I have 250 scientific references in there. It’s 275 pages. Its not the quickest read. It’s technical a little bit. It passes the USA today test though. So first grade reading level can get through it.

But really, most people only have the first-grade reading level, which is a travesty, but okay. All right. Most people want all their health and medical information condensed into a meme. When I go online, I’m like, “Oh yeah, people are dumb, forgot.”

Billy Hofacker: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I let me rephrase that a little bit. I think they’re lazier than they are dumb because unwillingness to learn, which I see staggering amounts of every day is the bigger problem than somebody just so stupid they can’t understand.

Billy Hofacker: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: When you say know cardio is wrong, they’re like, “Yeah.” And talking to women about how they should focus on strength training to shape their bodies and lose body fat. If you have responsible nutrition, which very few people do, and maybe even principled nutrition based on published studies. So that probably means you don’t fill your body with oxalates and inflammatories.

So thereby, needing a bunch of anti-inflammatories, which come with just buckets of sugar, then you can do even better. I haven’t done cardio in, I don’t know, 15 years. And I have veins visible in my abs and I’m 240 pounds.

Billy Hofacker: So, what is it? A good couple of quick points I want to make. One is what drives you? So it sounds like obviously, you’ve been into the science of it for a long time. What kind of drove that?

Dr. John Jaquish: I started with science. I wasn’t even in shape. I was chubby. I looked like shit. And yeah, I was just kind of a chubby scientist. Even when I fixed the bone density problem, that didn’t give me an NFL-looking physique. But now I get stopped every day, people ask for my autograph and I’m like, “Who do you think I am?” And they’re like, “I don’t know, but you got to be in the NFL,” or, “You got to be an MMA fighter.” I was like, “Okay. No, I’m a scientist, but thanks.” Also, I am getting stopped now, especially in airports, because I think business travelers, really love the X3 product.

So, it’s because it’s so easy to travel with and it’s so optimized for their lives, or trainers that go to people and bring equipment with them. The X3 is just ideal because you’re going to give them a better… And so, I have trainers coming up to me in airports and they’re like, “Oh my God, your Dr. Jaquish. This is so awesome. Can I get a picture with you?” I’m like, “As long as you tag me.”

Billy Hofacker: Well, that’s another thing. I just wrote a couple of notes here. One of them is that’s pretty impressive. You have a million, at least a million followers. Now tell us about that. So we want to learn. Hey, I want to increase our audience, was it organic? Was it paid? Was it people sharing? Was it all of the above? What were the drivers there?

Dr. John Jaquish: It was people sharing and a lot of the book. The book was 600,000 hours. Anybody who publishes a book, especially one that becomes like this is a Wall Street Journal bestseller. People are like, “Oh, I just want to hear what this guy has to say.” Also, focusing on the Wall Street Journal was a very good move for us, because that’s our demo. At first, we started targeting fitness audience.

Because I was considering just licensing the technology to another home fitness manufacturer and just sitting on a beach with a drink in my hand and not even getting in shape or anything, just whatever, just let somebody else represent it and I’ll just get all the money, get paid a royalty because almost everything I talk about in this book is the opposite of what we were taught.

Like one rep maximums. Stupid, stupid activity. And I say that in front of power-lifters and they’re insulted and I go, “Look, they’re just some sports that are safer than others.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I mean, like Christopher Reeve. He was jumping his horse when he broke his neck. And basically, that ended his life over a painful couple of years. Well, you know how often I get on horseback?

Not often. I won’t say never, but not often, because there are risks there. And like the one-rep maximum. People were like, “What’s your one-rep max in the bench?” I get power-lifters asking me that all the time. I’m like, “Who cares?”

Billy Hofacker: Who cares?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. All I want to do is be strong and lean and I am. So what’s your point? By the way, when you bench 500 pounds, I don’t know if anybody ever got a marriage proposal, because they had a high bench press number.

But I do know some guys that got a marriage proposal because they looked awesome. Yeah. So, you don’t train for aesthetics. I mean, with me, with following my program, you train for strength, but aesthetics come.

Billy Hofacker: They come. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. So we want to make sure we’re biomechanically balanced and we’re loading the quadriceps as much as we’re loading the glutes because they’re equally powered, they’re antagonists of one another. So those kinds of things.

But these are all things that trainers should embrace and explain to people. I also think fitness has an opportunity where medicine can never go because we’re tricking people into being healthier by appealing to their ego.

Like men who exercise, everybody who’s listening to this podcast about the fitness industry and your fitness business has to keep in mind, people don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves.

Billy Hofacker: That’s good.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s the truth. You’re going to be a better person if you and I mean, I’ll give some examples. The iPod, when it first came out, it didn’t talk about hard drive space, it had a bigger hard drive than the other competitors. It wasn’t the first MP3 player to market. What did it say? What was the marketing strapline, do you remember?

Billy Hofacker Was it something like being different or something-

Dr. John Jaquish: That was Apple’s-

Billy Hofacker: It was Apple’s, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: But the iPod just said, “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

Billy Hofacker That’s right, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And everybody was like, “I will be a cooler person if I had 1,000 songs in my pocket.” If I plug into somebody’s stereo system and I’ve got the killer mix and everyone’s like, “Where’s this music coming from?” It’s like, “All these songs are amazing. I haven’t even heard half of them before.” Yeah, you’re the man when it happens. So that’s the vision that the customer has when they hear 1,000 songs in your pocket. But when you talk about hard drive size, they’re like, “Yeah, whatever.” It’s too esoteric, there are too many steps they have to mentally take to get there.

So you have to tell them what’s going to happen and why they’re going to be better. And so, a trainer needs to be able to tell somebody, “I’m going to train you with X3. You’re going to be able to train heavier with more repetitions and almost zero risks of injury.” And they know an injury will keep them from maybe ever lifting again, especially the people who were buying personal training because they’re thinking about it a lot.

Dr. John Jaquish: And am I getting something for my money? If I get hurt, I won’t be able to go to work. I might lose a lot of money. So it’s a more affluent crowd that buys personal training. Also, if you own a big box gym, I’m sure some gym owners are your listeners. Yeah. What if you had an experience at your gym where you take it up to the market, because why fight to go to the bottom? Why be the $9 a month gym?

Billy Hofacker: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: That business model is based on signing up the lazy people who are going to show up anyway because if they all showed up in one day, the building would collapse, right? Now, if you’re Planet Fitness and all your members show up, they can’t even get in the door.

Billy Hofacker: Yeah. It’s a very broken model. Yep.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s yeah. It’s a toxic model, because all you are doing and everybody knows. All you’re doing is just signing people up who won’t come in. And that’s the whole point of it. So be the more expensive gym. If I were to open a gym, it would only have personal training, but it would be quick sessions, because I’d use the X3, the sessions would be about 15 minutes for their entire workout and or maybe 30 minutes and they’ll hit the whole body.

And they come three times a week and you can charge them the same amount you charge an hour in half an hour and double your revenue, because they’re getting value out of it. They’ll see a difference every day they look in the mirror, because of the level of fatigue and thereby the level of growth that happens. I’ve been pitched by a lot of people like, “Hey, I want to be the official X3 gym.” I’m going to let somebody use my brand that are going to pay.

Dr. John Jaquish: And they got to use it right. They got to use it as I directed, because it’s not their brand. And so, yeah. Haven’t found the right partner for that yet, but that’ll happen.

Billy Hofacker: Awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: And yeah.

Billy Hofacker: Awesome. You shared some great stuff. Before we run out of time, I’d love to touch a little bit on the business side. So you talked about a lot of powerful things. You mentioned vision, you talked about leadership, you talked about decisions that you might make in your business and how you will make those. I know you didn’t get to where you are by yourself.

So let’s talk a little bit about how do your vision cast? You kind of alluded to pointing to where you’re going with your clients and with fitness clients. But how do you, because I’ll just share with the listeners. This is the first time I’m talking to you. I talked to two of your team members, which shows me that you are probably very disciplined with your time. You’re making sure that you’re spending time on your most important tasks and things like that. So what can we learn from you as gym owners and whoever else is listening?

Dr. John Jaquish: You got to spend your time where you have the impact. So I spend most of my day doing podcasts or talking to the NFL players and NBA players who use X3 exclusively.

And there are about 30 of them, you can see on the website. There’s not a lot of… And by the way, these guys were paid nothing. And there are a number of professional athletes that I cannot mention. You can probably, I mean if you look through the internet, there’s even one of them who puts X3 in his own ads.

Billy Hofacker: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. For his own variable resistance product, he’s showing my product and saying it’s his product. And then they go and spend $75 on his product. I’m like, “Who is this crap?” Hey, if he gets away with it, that’s up to the Federal Communications Commission. It’s false advertising, but I don’t care, because you can see X3 right on it. And this guy is throwing tens of millions of dollars in advertising here. And it’s just like, I see my product being used and he’s like, “Well buy my product.” And yeah, but that’s not what you show people. So, I don’t pay that guy. But we have so many professional athletes that do allow us to use their name, image, and even the entire Miami Heat, basketball team. They gave up on weights, they’re just X3.

Billy Hofacker: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: In fact, the back of the book has got a great quote from Bill Foran, the shrink coach at the team. And he’s in the hall of fame, strength coaches. He’s great. He has produced players that have less injuries because judging the performance, you can’t necessarily do that, because they might just have a lousy season or something like that. But keeping them injury-free, that’s easy to manage. And so, that’s typically how strength conditioning coaches are seen as you know, in terms of what’s their performance, keeping the guys injury-free.

Billy Hofacker: Sure. Well, listen, I want to respect your time. I do have just rapid-fire questions I’ve been doing. Are you game for those?

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely.

Billy Hofacker: All right, cool. Just three questions. The book that’s had the biggest impact on you? I know you’re a big reader.

Dr. John Jaquish: Let’s see, the book that’s had the biggest impact on me is-

Billy Hofacker: Well, one of them.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I’d say Peter Thiel’s book. I think it’s called Less Than One. I was going to say Less Than Zero, but that was a Bret Easton Ellis book. This is a fiction book. It’s not that. I think it’s called Less Than One. But Peter Thiel’s a really smart guy. I’ve had the opportunity to meet him once or twice. And he basically wrote this book about starting a business and what kind of business? If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, what kind of business should you start? And how can you protect yourself from the competition?

It’s just from the beginning until tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are coming in, what you should do. And I read it and I realized I was already doing everything he said to do. And it just really reinforced wow, this is a really smart businessman, but this guy is one of the founders of PayPal, he’s a genius. And I agreed with everything that was in there. Best business book I’ve ever read.

Billy Hofacker: Awesome. That was a great share. I’m going to have to check that out. I have heard of it. Second one is financial or otherwise, a mistake you’ve made that you’ve learned from, and we know that mistakes carry with them seeds of opportunity. So I’m sure you’ve learned and grown, but what’s a mistake you could share that kind of made you better or you learned from?

Dr. John Jaquish: Trusting people right out of the gate. Never do that. I don’t assume everybody’s a liar, but I don’t assume they’re telling me the truth either. And so, it’s like Reagan said, “You got to trust, but verify.” So people, a lot of people talk a good game, but yeah, I got some really bad advice, which set me back a few years. And I just trusted that piece of advice and it was the worst advice I’ve ever received in my life. And so, that you just can’t blindly trust.

Billy Hofacker: That’s a good one too. And last but not least, what’s either something on your bucket list or just something else, I know you’ve accomplished a lot, but what else is out there for you?

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get into politics. You’re still there?

Billy Hofacker: Yep . Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Yeah. The bar’s set pretty low for political leadership.

Billy Hofacker: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, yeah. I think pretty much anybody. Yeah. Pretty much anybody can. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I’ve been often told that’d be a great emperor. I mean, a couple of people said president, but I’m like, “Is that really what you mean?” They’re like, “No, dictator.” Yeah. So, I got a lot of ways to make people see things that they otherwise wouldn’t see. So I may have a future in that. I think right now we’re all focused on the differences between groups of people, instead of similarities. The similarities are much greater than the differences.

Billy Hofacker: Very good.

Dr. John Jaquish: And right, right. And we’ve got half of the country and almost all of Washington focused on dividing America and even in the Western world. Even what I see in Europe. What faction are you a part of? I would really rather English people say, “The United Kingdom,” that’s it. I’m not at this or that, don’t put a label on yourself. All the people that are different, all want great schools, clean water, fair police. And things were going pretty well for an awful long time to throw it all away and say, “Anarchy’s better.” No, it’s not, not at all.

Billy Hofacker: Well, that’s about our time. I just want to thank you again for being on the show and spending time with us. And I think we’re better for it. And I just want to make sure everything will be in the show notes as well, but just make sure people know how to get in touch, follow you, find out about the products, or whatever it is. What are the best places for us to go?

Dr. John Jaquish: So I created a landing page, so I wouldn’t have to say my Instagram handle and all these other places.

Billy Hofacker: Nice.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s doctorj.com. So D-O-C-T-O-R the letter j.com.

Billy Hofacker: Awesome, John, thanks again, and look forward to seeing what’s ahead for you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome. All right. Take it easy, man.

Billy Hofacker: Take care man.

Dr. John Jaquish: All right.

Billy Hofacker: Well, that concludes today’s show. Thank you once again for listening. And as I often ask, please share this. If you know, somebody who could benefit from the content, just share this episode or any other episodes. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. And once again, thank you for listening to the, Your Fitness Money Coach podcast.