Episode 41: Why Lifting Weights Is a Waste of Time and What to Do Instead

In this episode, Nathalie talks to Dr. John Jaquish about the X3 Bar, possibly the smallest and most efficient full home gym system. X3 has helped thousands to build muscle faster than with weights. Dr. Jaquish’s patented X3 Bar variable resistancee system offers amazing results with less risk of injury in just fifteen minutes a day.

Full Transcript

Nathalie Niddam: Welcome to the Biohacking Superhuman Performance Podcast. My name is Nathalie Niddam. I’m a nutritionist and human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all, from new technology to ancestral health practices, personalized interventions, and a very special interest of mine, peptides. Enjoy the show.

Nathalie Niddam: Welcome back, guys. Today’s episode is a doozy. Today’s guest wrote a book last year that I think made a lot of people very unhappy and certainly went against some of the most deep-rooted beliefs that we have around building a better body. The book is called Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want.

So you can just imagine, telling a bunch of people, whose entire existence revolves around lifting heavy weights, that they’re wasting their time is not a great way to make a lot of friends.

Nathalie Niddam: But it turns out he’s got the science to back it up and he’s created a system that can prove it, and the system is called the X3 Bar, and if you haven’t heard of it, is a variable resistance system and what that means, it’s a very fancy way of saying these are very special but very specific … Imagine giant rubber bands and a mini-Olympic weight lifting bar and a metal platform that you stand on and the most amazing thing about this next to the part about how you can build lean muscle in 15 minutes a day is that this entire system that I described fits into a yoga bag. It can fit into your carry-on bag. It’s the most portable system, it’s the most time-efficient system, and it’s the most efficient way to build muscle and safety.

Nathalie Niddam: Anyway, I would say that the timing for this thing could not be better. We’re in the middle of a pandemic here, hopefully, we’re at the end of it but access to gyms has been disrupted and a lot of us have also just figured out that we love working out at home, so if you’re one of these people, you want to hear this podcast because this system could be the answer. Because we need muscle, why? We want to look good, but we also want to age well.

So whether you’re in it to build a ton of new lean muscle or whether you’re just in it to get stronger so that you can live better, this episode for you and this system I’m telling you is pretty freaking amazing. So Dr. Jaquish has a great website that is jaquishbiomedical.com.

You can also join their Facebook community which is X3 Bar and if you want to buy the X3 Bar for yourself, if you believe that this is something you want to try, you can go to the show notes, get the link in the show notes, and from that link, you can use promo code SAVE50 and that will save you $50.00 off your X3 Bar.

Nathalie Niddam: So as always, if you get benefit and value from this episode, please make sure that you share it with your family, your friends, your networks, and also leave us a review. Send me your comments and let me know what you think. I love hearing from you guys. I get so many great comments all the time, so number one, it keeps me going, it helps me to know what you like and what you don’t like, and also it helps me to get more amazing guests on the podcast.

If you’re looking to connect with me, you can find me through my website which is nathalieniddam.com, N-A-T-N-I-D-D-A-M.com, or you can find me on Facebook in the Optimizing Superhuman Performance Group or on MeWe which is the Biohacking Superhuman Performance Group and you can also find me on Instagram which is just my name, nathalieniddam.com and that’s Nathalie with an H, N-A-T-H-A-L-I-E-N-I-D-D-A-M.com.

Do I have anything else I need to say to you? Oh yeah. This podcast, like all the other podcasts that I put out there, are really for inaudible purposes only and healthspan especially when it’s coming to using new supplements or taking on a new fitness routine, we want to make sure that you check with your health professional, your doctor, your trainer.

Nathalie Niddam: Welcome to the show, Dr. John Jaquish. It is a pleasure to finally meet you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Hey, thanks for having me. This is great.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. So now that we’ve gotten geography figured out, I was convinced for some reason, I was convinced Dr. Jaquish was in sunny Florida, instead, he’s in sunny West Coast USA. But what can you do? At least I had the sunny part right. So, Dr. Jaquish, I am so excited to talk to you today because I’ve had the X3 Bands since at some point last -

Dr. John Jaquish: Bar. You had X3, it’s a bar.

Nathalie Niddam: Bar, sorry, the X3 Bar.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s all right.

Nathalie Niddam: But it’s a band too because the band -

Dr. John Jaquish: The bands are worthless without the bar by the way.

Nathalie Niddam: Right, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, they’ll break your ankle or your wrist.

Nathalie Niddam: Except for on the squats. I find I can’t use the bar on the squats but we can talk about that afterward. It hurts. I don’t have big giant muscles.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re going to dislocate a shoulder using it just by wrapping it around your arms.

Nathalie Niddam: Well, I almost popped my head off one day doing the tricep extension wrong, so then I had to go back to the video and re-watch that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: All the people, all of my clients who have bought the X3 Bar have gotten detailed instructions from me on how to do and not to do the tricep … You know what?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, just give them the video that I did. Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: And there’s a video recently, we are so off-topic for the intro of this episode. The video recently that you posted that describes it as a skull crusher is the one that drove the message home. Ever since I watched that -

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Because the bar ends up right across the bridge of your nose and pressed down.

Nathalie Niddam: And I kind of lean forward a bit and then the band doesn’t roll off my shoulders or up onto my neck.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, but the only reason the band would move at all is that you’re putting slack in the band which is improper use. So by turning the muscle off and letting the muscle relax when you have slack in the band, that denies hypoxia. So there’s a huge growth factor that you’re missing if you allow any slack to get in the band. You need to keep constant tension the entire time.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay, we’re coming back to that. But first, let’s talk about you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay.

Nathalie Niddam: Why don’t you give us the closed notes version of Dr. John Jaquish and how the heck you are sitting there on that beautiful couch, talking to me today about the X3 Bar? What’s your journey? How did you get here? Were you a weight lifter, ever? Now that you published a book, now that you’re saying weight lifting is a total waste of time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So I was always athletic. I played Division I rugby in university and so I did wrestling, swimming, and track in high school, so I was always athletic but I was a pretty slim guy. I think when I graduated high school and started college I was 135 pounds. So small. I was 6’ but just skinny.

Nathalie Niddam: Interesting because rugby players usually are pretty solid guys. Otherwise, they get their ears torn off their heads.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I got beat up on pretty badly. But it’s okay. I’m tough. So I took it pretty well and I ended up through my rugby career just putting on body fat. So I ended up being a little bit bigger but not a lot stronger and what got me going on life sciences was when my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. So I had been lifting weights and I had been interested in fitness but not from a professional perspective and then my mother is diagnosed with osteoporosis and I started looking into it and I said, “Well children build high levels of bone density, and then they spend the rest of their life losing it.

So why don’t we look at where bone density comes from? Who has the highest bone density in adulthood, and how I can replicate that?” So that was what I told my mother I was going to do and I figured it out. Like it was pretty easy. I did a literature review on who the people with the highest bone density were and I was just searching and searching and searching.

Nathalie Niddam: Who are they? Gymnasts, right? I think I got that from -

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right, they’re gymnasts, and it’s because of the rate at which they hit the ground.

Nathalie Niddam: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: They contact the ground at multiples of their body weight. So incredible forces inaudible. Sometimes 10 times their body weight. So I told my mother, “I’m going to build a device that’s going to emulate high impact. It’s going to give you the benefit of high impact without the risks of injury.” So she was like, “Well, that sounds great.” She didn’t have to do anything. So it was just a way for me to put this together.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now a lot of research in biomechanics, took me years to get the prototype together but I did and within 18 months, she had the bone density of a 30-year-old, and she was in her seventies while having the bone density of somebody in their nineties. Then she went back basically to 60 years of bone loss and reversed it. So it ended up being very beneficial to her in such a short period.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then I had built a better-looking prototype, opened up a clinic, and started treating people. I couldn’t make very bold claims because there are no clinical data on it yet but I can say we’re doing this for bone health instead of bone density or osteoporosis. Got to be careful when you use … What?

Nathalie Niddam: Still to this day? You can’t mention that it’s a bone -

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh no-no. We’ve had data, now we’ve had publications.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay, so now you have data, I thought so, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So now we say, “Yeah, we can …” We say potentially address osteoporosis because it’s effort-driven. If somebody is not ambulatory, is not fully ambulatory, they can’t apply enough force to the bone to trigger the bone to grow. Sort of like a muscle.

Or some people are just lazy. Just don’t want to do it. You see that in people, people going to a fitness location, a gym and they pedal about one-tenth as hard as they could. They don’t break the sweat and then they walk out and then they’re like, “How come I’m not losing weight.” Well, yeah right. There are 10 different answers to that question, all of which show them that everything they’re doing is wrong and based on a misconception.

Dr. John Jaquish: So this device went very well and inaudible getting all over the world, Tony Robbins is a partner. The company is called OsteoStrong and there are 150 clinics in eight different countries.

Nathalie Niddam: Amazing, except for my country, which we need to fix by the way, so -

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah yeah yeah. There’s nothing in Canada yet.

Nathalie Niddam: That has to change.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ll help you with that.

Nathalie Niddam: All right, well we’re melting like everybody else honestly. And so on the bone density issue, still there are other lifestyle factors that come into play with bone density. There’s nutrition, there’s … I kind of wanted to ask you this question anyway, like there’s no getting around that without the loading, you’re not going to improve bone density.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, yeah, and nutrition gives you building blocks.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay, so then -

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s sort of like a weight lifter takes protein, extra protein, and then they lift weights and then they grow muscle. Well, why don’t they just have the protein and not have anything to do with the weight lifting? Well, nothing. Nothing will happen.

Nathalie Niddam: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So you need to do both, and there are many foolish people on the internet that say it’s all about diet. No, it’s not all about diet. It’s all about diet as long as it’s all about putting the proper stimulus on the body to use the nutrients.

Nathalie Niddam: Of course.

Dr. John Jaquish: So anybody who says it’s one or the other is just a complete fool. Not true.

Nathalie Niddam: The way I explain it to people in the human body is inherently crazy smart, and it’s not going to expend energy building something it doesn’t think it needs. So the stimulus is ultimately giving the body reason to build muscle or bone. Because muscle is super expensive from a metabolic perspective and why would the body expend a huge amount of energy building bone in advanced years if it doesn’t think that it needs it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. You just got to give the body a reason.

Nathalie Niddam: It has to have a reason, right? So now is it possible … Like I’m pretty sure I saw a study recently that maybe your name was on, that maybe you participated in. Some research study with this little organization called NASA, something about -

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: I was like, “Oh. inaudible.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So some scientists from NASA recently published an article in the Journal of Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance. What that determined, was a case report looking at bone turnover markers with the use of my impact emulation devices. So they saw an over 40% increase in the rate of new bone creation and an over 40% decrease in the loss of older bone.

Nathalie Niddam: Wow. That’s amazing.

Dr. John Jaquish: So tremendous differences.

Nathalie Niddam: That’s amazing.

Dr. John Jaquish: The best part about those blood markers is they show a trend. The problem with DEXA is DEXA is just a picture. You’re taking an x-ray/picture of a bone but it shows the outside of the bone more than the inside of the bone, and what we’re affecting is more the inside than the outside. Because the new bone cells are created and mature and build a matrix around them, a little wall, you see the cross-section of bone, looks like somebody cut into a honeycomb. You see all these little open spaces and then walls, you have more walls and thicker walls in that of a high bone density person versus a low bone density person.

Nathalie Niddam: Interesting. Okay. And of course, NASA has a vested interest in this because they send people out to space, their bone melts, right? Like the loss of gravity costs them -

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn’t say it melts.

Nathalie Niddam: Well, I’m being dramatic.

Dr. John Jaquish: It degrades pretty quickly.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. I’m just being inaudible.

Dr. John Jaquish: It becomes more porous. Because without the gravitational pull of the earth, the bone has no reason to maintain density. But then they could still fracture.

Nathalie Niddam: No kidding. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So we want fracture-resistant astronauts and that’s the whole discussion. I spoke on a panel a couple of years ago with some astronauts, talking about the feasibility and the challenges of getting an astronaut to Mars. It turns out that from a life sciences perspective, because really, we know we have the machinery to get there, we already put a roving vehicle on Mars and it took a bunch of pictures and we didn’t hear anything else about it so I’m pretty sure it’s broken. Or maybe the pictures are so boring it’s like, “All right. The first day of pictures and the last day of pictures are all the same.” I don’t know, I don’t know what ended up happening but generally organizations like that, they don’t brag about broken equipment.

Nathalie Niddam: Funny how that works. inaudible of dollars. Okay, we’re side-barring now. Okay, so OsteoStrong, great system, bone super important, but next to the other lifestyle factors comeone, what’s the next big organ we need to take care of here?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well the funny thing is, the number one organ in our body that we can affect the most is skeletal muscle. The muscle that moves us around. Like you really cannot dramatically affect your cardiovascular system. Like your heart and your lungs, there are few differences between endurance athletes and non-endurance athletes or sedentary people. Small adaptions of the lungs. Now what helps runners the most is just dropping bodyweight. Usually, they’re losing muscle to get to a lower -

Nathalie Niddam: inaudible

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, and so they just get to lower body weight and they increase their endurance by lung adaptations, cardiac adaptions, but also just getting used to a cadence and a breathing pattern and things like that. Those are more neurological changes than anything, but you can’t like triple the output of your heart. You cannot do it.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Most people have very little muscle. I’m sure some weightlifter is hearing me say that that’s like, “No you can’t do that.” Well yeah, you can do that now because you already did it. But for the untrained person, yeah, they can change musculature to a great degree, and then once they do that, they have the opportunity to affect the other systems of the body because they change their metabolism completely. Their glucose management is super-efficient when they put on a significant amount of muscle. This is men and women.

Nathalie Niddam: inaudible women that want to be inaudible 00:24:16, that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s okay. But a lot of women are afraid of it is my point.

Nathalie Niddam: But talking about muscle as an endocrine organ, it’s a foreign concept to most people and yet it’s one of the most powerful ways we have of managing glucose efficiently. You’re giving your glucose a place to go. You’re creating -

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s the only way.

Nathalie Niddam: Again, your liver can hold inaudible as glycogen.

Dr. John Jaquish: A tiny bit, yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: And it’s not going to increase its capacity no matter what you do. Whereas -

Dr. John Jaquish: No matter what.

Nathalie Niddam: A bigger muscle is going to have bigger storage, right? More capacity to inaudible that stuff. I was talking to someone else recently who was talking about anti-inflammatory compounds that are produced by muscle, that exercise. She was talking about myokines, and when people get injured and they get told to go home and sit around and do nothing and it’s essentially exacerbating a condition, right? Because you can inaudible access to … Anyway, so let’s talk about X3. So OsteoStrong bone density, so you leaped X3 saying what’s my next project going to be because I’m going to be bored or -

Dr. John Jaquish: No. Not at all. Not at all. I had to do some real reflecting when I saw the data coming out of the OsteoStrong, the first sort of a … It wasn’t a randomized controlled trial but you could call it a clinical trial, what we did in London. So when I was in London, I participated from a methods perspective and a training perspective of the principal investigator and his team in how it would be applied. So you want to make sure they don’t use the device incorrectly. Because then you can hurt people or maybe have a study that doesn’t have any results. So we know it has resulted in the clinics, so let’s see it in a clinical testing environment.

So what I ended up seeing was data of bone loading where post-menopausal females were putting six, seven, eight, nine times their body weight through their hip joints. Now that’s the weight that even professional weight lifters wouldn’t lift in full range. Now, this wasn’t in full range. This was in a very specific position where you would absorb high impact. inaudible impact-ready position is so powerful and the other positions of a movement are so much weaker.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like when I do a chest press, from the bottom where the bar is on my chest to when I’m at extension when the bar is far away from me, I have a sevenfold difference of power output capability. So you think about that. Sevenfold difference.

Nathalie Niddam: So that’s the seven-time weight you would never get off your chest.

Dr. John Jaquish: Of course not.

Nathalie Niddam: If it was down here you’d be crushed.

Dr. John Jaquish: It would probably crush you. Yeah, you’d probably just die.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

‘Dr. John Jaquish: But now that I have this information, I felt I had to do something with it because it seemed like I have evidence that shows like weight lifting as a stimulus to grow muscle is terrible. Like it just doesn’t make sense and I saw a quote from Peter Tia Lederer where … You know who Dr. Tia is, right?

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah yeah yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah yeah yeah, he has a great podcast.

Nathalie Niddam: inaudible.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. He said, “What I don’t like about weightlifting is it overloads joints and underloads muscle.”

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. That’s great.

Dr. John Jaquish: I was like, “Yeah.” I heard that and I was like, “Wow, this guy is thinking about the same thing I am, he just so clearly defined the problem.”

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: His attitude was, “I just don’t really like strength training that much for that reason.” I’m already working on a solution to the problem he outlined. I just didn’t know he had outlined it. So I was like, “Wow, this guy, he gets me.” So by the way, Peter, if you’re listening to this, invite me on your podcast when you talk about it.

Nathalie Niddam: inaudible Peter Attia was listening to my podcast to be clear.

Dr. John Jaquish: inaudible cool? All right, well … yeah, I’ve been saying that on podcasts recently. So at some point, he’ll be like, “God, the guy said my name. Like hey, it’s like a personal message.” So he’s just a brilliant guy and he’s talking to all kinds of people at a very high level and he does a really good job of boiling it down so the regular person can understand it. Like he gets people who write research that maybe only 10 people in the world can understand.

Nathalie Niddam: Absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: It doesn’t matter, because as long as those people do understand it, inaudible is going to move forward.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: But he takes that information and he makes it relevant to everybody else.

Nathalie Niddam: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Whereas they as researchers, they’re not good at that.

Nathalie Niddam: Not so much. We all have our -

Dr. John Jaquish: No, they’re told to be so thorough. Like I know when I did my Ph.D., it was like … Everything was about the detail and I would say like, “Gosh. I’m never going to use this stuff to market anything. Like nobody’s going to read this.” They’re like, “Oh. Somebody will.”

Nathalie Niddam: Well, and if they did it, they won’t understand it. Okay, let’s get back to the problem at hand.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. So creating X3. So after I had this data, I realized we need a weight that changes as we move. Kind of like band training, but the problem with band training is the band twists the smallest joints in your body, the wrists, and the ankles. Always.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. I remember using those. I used to be a fitness instructor and I remember using, we had the bands with the handles on the ends and you were always limited and you were limited actually by the weakest link.

Dr. John Jaquish: The wrists.

Nathalie Niddam: Which are your wrists.

Dr. John Jaquish: But it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be, that’s why we use Olympic bars.

Nathalie Niddam: I see, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s why we stand on a flat piece of ground. So if you try and do a deadlift with a really heavy Latex band like an X3 band because we make the heaviest bands in the world as far as I know.

Nathalie Niddam: I use it. I dig it.

Dr. John Jaquish: So yeah. But if you take one of those bands and let’s say you try to step on it and then do a deadlift, you could break an ankle. It only takes seven pounds of lateral force into the ankle to snap the ankle. Ask anyone who’s played in the NFL if ankles like lateral force.

Nathalie Niddam: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: They don’t. That’s what ends their careers. That and knees usually.

Nathalie Niddam: So you have to stand on the plate. I have to admit I -

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. The whole product is worthless without the plate. You need it.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and the bar, and so like … When some people … Like they see my product and they just start training with bands and they’re like, “Yeah, well it didn’t work.” Right, because you can’t get heavy enough to be relevant. That’s another thing I think the whole fitness industry, I have very little respect for the fitness industry. They’ve been pushing incorrect messages, cardio for weight loss. That was disproven 40 years ago, there are more than 100 studies that show that. Yet you walk into any big box gym and you’ll be told that cardio is for weight loss.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. No for sure. Well, it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s wrong.

Nathalie Niddam: You’ll lose your muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: As you get bigger.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Nathalie Niddam: As you get more voluminous, you will lose your muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay, so listen, why don’t we back up a second because there may be people listening to this who don’t know what the X3 system looks like. I call it the system because to your point it’s

Dr. John Jaquish: No it’s a system, I like that. That’s good.

Nathalie Niddam: It’s a combination of an Olympic weightlifting bar which is manageable. I mean the beauty of, there’s so many different, beautiful things about this whole system. Number one is that it’s portable, so you invest the money once, I bounce between my lake house and my city house in the summertime, I just throw it in a yoga bag, and up and down it goes with me

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Sure.

Nathalie Niddam: inaudible the Olympic weight lifting bar with the groovy hooks on the end that spin and you’ll explain to us why ergonomically that makes sense. You’ve got four bands unless you’re superhuman like you and then you have a fifth one and then there’s a ground plate to protect your ankles which I may or may not have missed that in an explanation at some point, so I’ll admit to sometimes doing an exercise with my foot on the band. Which I won’t do ever again for real.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thank you.

Nathalie Niddam: Then you have this cool ground plate which doesn’t look like much but yet it’s super stable that you’re going to use to wrap your band -

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, the bands can freely move underneath your feet.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so they’re not going to jerk an ankle one direction or the other, like just stepping on a band -

Nathalie Niddam: They’re also equalized, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Everything is equalized.

Nathalie Niddam: Because inaudible it will always be even between your right and your left. If you’ve got your foot, you can never really get your feet … Anyway, we don’t have to talk about doing it wrong. Do it right, use the platform. So this is what you have. You have an Olympic weightlifting bar, you’ve got a series of four different bands that represent four different tension, and you’ve got a plate underneath.

Let’s talk about this amazing workout which is 10 to 15 minutes a day that is like the most efficient workout I’ve seen and I have been part of that fitness industry. Yes, I did do that thing called teaching aerobic classes at some point. I’ve been there, done that, but you know, I’m old enough that it was okay. We didn’t know better at the time. I retired a long time ago.

But let’s talk about the exercises and how adaptable it is to so many different populations because we can talk to the very fit population but the people I like to talk to as well are people that are not fit and have to … We need to get them to understand that this isn’t necessarily … I mean yeah, we all want to look good in our jeans, in our swimsuits and this and that. This is about your health and longevity. This is about being able to live an amazing life.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Nathalie Niddam: Long after, past your supposed prime. It’s really about extending our prime into our fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: So it’s about having functional strength. So let’s talk a bit about what this routine looks like and how is it possible that 10 or 15 minutes could do the work?

Dr. John Jaquish: So I’ll answer it in reverse. The 10 or 15 minutes, wasn’t an objective to be efficient with time. It just happens to be that the body responds in the greatest manner with an adaptive response. Meaning like a callus on your hand or a suntan. It’s an adaptation of the body to make an adjustment for the environment that you are in. Well, when it comes to stimulating a muscle to grow, it’s the same thing. It’s like the most intense stimulus and shortest period.

So what the product does is it takes you to a level of fatigue that is impossible to achieve with weights. Because you’re using the appropriate weight in the appropriate position. You also go higher repetitions so when I’ll do a chest press, I’ll use 100 pounds at the bottom where my joints are weakest and then I’ll use 300 pounds in the middle. Now, this is all in one repetition. As I begin to stretch the Latex, it goes from 100 to 300, and then when I’m almost at extension, you don’t go to full extension. Because that locks the joint and just loads the bone. It turns off the muscle, you don’t want to do that.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when you go through that, I’ve been doing 550 at the top, 300 pounds in the middle, and 100 at the bottom. So I do however many 550 pound reps I can do, and usually, that’s 20 or 25 or something, somewhere in there, and then I can’t get there anymore. I have fatigue. But I can still get to the lower area. So I can just do half reps which are 300 pounds, and then the last repetition which only is like an inch, I can only handle 100 pounds now at the bottom. Which for most people it’s like …

So it’s a level of fatigue that somebody who bench presses 200 pounds for 10 repetitions with a regular bar would never be able to get to. Because they still have plenty of strength left over at the top, but here we kind of turn it upside down and we’re just using an appropriate load in this specific position. So the level of fatigue is so much greater. You only need to do one set. The reason we do multiple sets with weight training is that the stimulus is garbage. It sucks.

Dr. John Jaquish: So like how many sets do you need to do in the sunlight to get a tan? I ask that question and people are just like, “You just go out in the sun.” Right, yeah, you just go out in the sun, once. Like you don’t need to do go in and out. You don’t need to let your skin rest and then go out again. Like no, there’s none of that. Just go outside and then when you turn a little pink, just rub some sunblock on yourself. Or you can be like me and just refuse to do that and just be perpetually sunburned, which I am right now. It’s okay, I like it. I like dry skin.

Nathalie Niddam: All right. Whatever floats your boat.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, I don’t like being sunburned, but I’m usually pretty good at wearing hats and stuff now. But what I don’t like is the carcinogens in sunblock.

Nathalie Niddam: I know.

Dr. John Jaquish: I can’t advocate for sunblock because it’s just chemical garbage.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. Well there’s mineral blocks that are a bit better, but -

Dr. John Jaquish: I got to find where they sell those because I went to Whole Foods the other day -

Nathalie Niddam: Oh, I can give you the name of one. There’s actually, there’s a really good site called … There’s the Environmental Working Group.org, EWG.org.

Dr. John Jaquish: You got it.

Nathalie Niddam: They have a database called Skin Deep and on that database, they will rank sunscreens but I will send you the name and I’ll put inaudible 00:39:27 of the sunscreen I found last year, that was quite good. It’s just a mineral-based sunscreen so it doesn’t have all the -

Dr. John Jaquish: Thank you. That’s what I need.

Nathalie Niddam: All right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s what I need, yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: All right, so back to X3.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Back to X3. So putting all these things together, I knew I needed to make a consumer product. I knew what their requirements were. I needed to handle incredibly forces and so I had to custom-make everything. So mostly when they say something is American made, it’s American assembled with Chinese parts. Yeah, with X3, everything is made in America, except for the bands. The problem with the bands is they are tree latex, and tree latex is grown in a tree. It’s like the rubber tree, and the problem with that is we don’t have enough rainfall to have enough of those here. Like yeah.

So the bands are from Sri Lanka. They are the only place you can get Latex and yeah. I’d like it to be more sustainable and I have some plans in the future to do something that is … I mean it is an environmentally friendly process, but I think Latex should be used for surgical gloves and condoms I guess as opposed to … I mean hey, let’s keep disease spread down, and we’re all thinking about that now anyway, right?

Nathalie Niddam: Have you seen an uptick in sales this year? I’m sure you have. Like you must have -

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: This year has been really bad for a lot of people but I would think that in your business, it’s been the silver lining on a really s**** year.

Dr. John Jaquish: We were already doing so well. Like doubling the size of the company in very short periods of time all the time. Then when the lockdown started, what ended up happening was serious. First thing that happened was serious athletes, elite athletes, started coming to us. I was already doing inaudible strength training programming for the Miami Heat. In fact, they endorsed my book. It says right on the back of the book.

Nathalie Niddam: The back. Yeah yeah yeah, I saw it on the back.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you know, a team rarely lets you use their name. Like if you write, you’re just a regular person, you’d make a blog post about some NFL or NBA team, you’re going to get a cease and desist letter. Like they don’t like that at all.

Nathalie Niddam: Because I may or may not have seen pictures of a certain quarterback who is a bit of achieving legend status training with … It could only be your stuff.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, well so, some athletes are just cool guys and girls and they let me use their pictures, and all they get in exchange is a personal connection to me. So they have a serious question, or their physician has a question about how exactly X3 works, or let’s say they get injured and they want to reintroduce them to exercise with X3 and call me and ask me for advice. So they get my phone number. That’s all they get. They got no money. There are about 30 athletes on the website right now and these are pro athletes. There are some pro athletes like maybe the person you were describing -

Nathalie Niddam: Am I allowed to say his name?

Dr. John Jaquish: I know I’m not.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay. So inaudible

Dr. John Jaquish: But that guy, that guy, I’d prefer you not, so …

Nathalie Niddam: Okay, I won’t say his name.

Dr. John Jaquish: But yeah, that guy, he’s … A lot of professional athletes. They use it but I call them and I’m like, “Hey, I’d love to help you out. Like I see you’re using my product. I can answer a bunch of questions.” The particular quarterback you’re talking about, he wanted half my company. It’s like, “No.”

Nathalie Niddam: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: For what like yeah, you have a big brand, but you don’t think X3 is going to be bigger? Who’s bigger, Michael Jordan or Nike? Sorry Jordan, it’s Nike.

Nathalie Niddam: Jordan doesn’t care I’m sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, and why would he? But my point is the personalities, especially when they retire, are they still relevant? Maybe. As long as they don’t do anything embarrassing I guess. As long as they don’t get caught with anything. I feel like when you sign your NFL contract, there’s somebody in the room that’s like, “Here’s your complimentary bag of cocaine and an illegal gun. Please keep this right next to you in your car and drive erratically.”

Nathalie Niddam: Oh my god

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s like … They all make the same mistake. Come on, guys.

Nathalie Niddam: inaudible figuring it out.

Dr. John Jaquish: I almost think they’re set up. Like law enforcement follows them around, “Okay, you signed this contract, definitely has the bag of cocaine and the gun that is not registered.”

Nathalie Niddam: All right. Back to X3 as you drink your giant lemonade or Fortagen or whatever is in that.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s Fortagen . That’s exactly what it is.

Nathalie Niddam: I know. You should see the smile on -

Dr. John Jaquish: It is a giant Fortagen. It was full, it was right to the top when I started.

Nathalie Niddam: Totally was. I gotcha.

Dr. John Jaquish: I broke a dry fast.

Nathalie Niddam: Oh, nice. How long did you go? We’ll talk about fasting and working out with X3 also, I want to talk about that.

Dr. John Jaquish: It was about 18 hours. 18 hours dry.

Nathalie Niddam: Nice. Yeah. That’s long enough. Okay, so back to our X3 program. We have two sets of exercises. We have push exercises and pull exercises. So you’re going to … One day you’re going to push, you’re going to do your chest press, you’re going to do your overhead shoulder press, you’re going to do the -

Dr. John Jaquish: Triceps and calves.

Nathalie Niddam: Triceps and calves. Took me a long time to figure out the calf exercise, but I got it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Okay.

Nathalie Niddam: Then the other day, you’re going to do … You’re going to pull. You’re going to do a deadlift, you’re going to do dead row, you’re going to do your bicep curl.

Dr. John Jaquish: Bent over row, bicep curl, yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: Bent over row, and my favorite, the squats or the split squat.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Which are pushing muscles but you know -

Nathalie Niddam: I was going to say, those don’t … I’m not exactly pulling through that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well actually -

Nathalie Niddam: So is it appropriate for people to do both … Like do you ever get people that do both in a day?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: Push-pull together?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. People always say like I’d rather do a half-hour workout but three times a week.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or a 20-minute workout three times a week. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s fine.” I wouldn’t like doing that because I feel like I’ve been hit by a train just when I do half the body. Like it’s hard. That’s one thing that I will caution against, X3 is not for everybody. Nothing is, but it’s a quick workout. It’s far more effective than anything you will find in the gym. Far more effective. However, it’s hard, and generally the reason -

Nathalie Niddam: But you have to make it hard for it to work.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Consumer products typically have a 30% return rate. So 30% of the product they sell, they get back. Then they sell it as used or demos or whatever. We have a 1% return rate.

Nathalie Niddam: Nice.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. It’s almost like people see that when we’re talking about it. I mean even like finance people, and they’re like, “Well that can’t be right.” 1%? Right, and the reason it’s 1% is that people use it and they see results immediately. So they keep it. They love it. But the most common complaint when they return it is it was too hard.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. I can see that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and it’s like nobody ever said it was easy. Like it’s fast, it’s very efficient, but I’ve never called it easy.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then it’s funny because you get the return, and then you notice that only the lightweight band was unwrapped. So they tried the lightest one and they could barely move it, and so they’re probably extremely deconditioned people. But to me, it’s like where you are right now doesn’t matter. It’s where you’re going.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. inaudible.

Dr. John Jaquish: So like I tell them, I tell the guys who are coming out of let’s say undergrad, they’re right out of university, they’re primed to grow a lot of muscle, the same thing I would say to a 500-pound 40-year-old man who can barely get out of bed. Like where you are right now is just irrelevant. You’re going to become a better version of yourself every day when you use this thing. The 500-pound guy has a little bit further to go but if you look at the user’s form, do you remember that?

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Yeah, the user’s form for X3, 27,000 people in there. There are people who are fit and become extremely fit and there are those, they have 300 pounds of body fat to lose and they’re getting there with the product. The product also very aggressively upregulates growth hormone, which aids in lipolysis, yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: So let’s talk a little bit about that, yeah. Yeah, the hormonal benefits. So testosterone, growth hormone. So it affects like a bunch of hormones, right? It affects insulin, it affects growth hormone, it affects testosterone. So let’s maybe talk about that because I think what you’re talking about right now is so important in that it is adaptable to such a huge range of people, depending on what their goals are, and different populations are going … I guess everybody uses it the same. They’re just going to get different things out of it, right? Because you’ve got your inaudible, you’ve got your deconditioned people that are kind of athletic, but then you get that other … Like people who are either very overweight or who are so deconditioned, like who are in their forties and fifties and haven’t seen the inside of a gym in forever.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. I would say the exercise protocol is the same for everybody.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: The nutrition may be different. There was this trend a couple of years ago and I think it was started by personal trainers or maybe some personal trainer certification organization where they say I’m going to build a custom program just for you, for your goals and needs. I think that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. Because it’s like everybody wants to be leaner and stronger. Nobody ever comes into a trainer and says, “Yeah, I want to get fatter. Like I want to get a little weaker and a lot fatter.” Like nobody needs help doing that. Nobody needs a custom program. It’s all the same, everybody wants to be leaner and stronger. Now if you have a biomechanics issue like some people can’t raise their hand over their head, they may only be able to get it here, okay, you might need some physical therapy to get that mobility back. But that’s not the custom program. You just need some therapy. So I always thought that concept was so irritating. It’s just doing it right. Do it the way it’s supposed to be done. Everybody will do better. If you need something special, it’s not customized. It means you have something that’s just dysfunctional and let’s address that.

Nathalie Niddam: Right. Right. So basically what you’re saying is this should be well within the bandwidth of any functional body, should be able to … These are basic exercises. At the end of the day, there’s nothing … These are really … Yeah, I mean they’re basic functional exercises that if you can -

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re a much more comfortable and safe approach to a lot of standard barbell movements. So like the problem with the overhead press when you’re dealing with weights is when you’re in the position where your shoulder joint is progressively being destroyed by holding heavy weight right here versus here where you can handle it, like and you see people kind of drop-down and then push their body weight up to get momentum. It just shows that you’re handling a weight that you shouldn’t be holding.

Nathalie Niddam: So what do you do with people who can’t manage the white band on the shoulder press?

Dr. John Jaquish: We tell them to get a lighter band and we have a band provider.

Nathalie Niddam: Oh,, you do. Because the shoulder is in my mind one of the weakest, next to the wrist.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or you can do it from your knees.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, but then it’s too light.

Dr. John Jaquish: No no, I mean just start by getting on your knees on the platform, because it shortens the stretch.

Nathalie Niddam: So how many reps should you be able to do of each exercise to say that that exercise is not too hard for a person? Because you talk about doing 25 to 40 reps.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s 15 to 40, yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: Like inaudible can do 10 full reps and now have to start diminishing the range -

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, then they’re using too heavy a band.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Then they need to go down.

Nathalie Niddam: Interesting. Okay. All right, well then let’s talk a bit about … You know what’s cool about the book people, is that it’s not just about X3. It talks about X3, talks about the science behind it, why X3 works, how X3 works, how X3 supports your strength, but then it goes into all these other cool things. Like oh I don’t know, like nutrition for example. Which you wouldn’t necessarily expect in this book because mostly what it’s done is poke the bear and said weightlifting is a waste of time and by the way just for the rest of you, so is cardiac.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Nathalie Niddam: But then you get into nutrition which I love because the expression, you can’t work off a bad diet will never … It will never get old, and I’m a nutritionist.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Like nutrition matters. It’s the building blocks, it’s like I said earlier, just about the bone density. You just can’t build anything without the building blocks. If you’re going to build a house and you don’t have any wood, well, I guess you’re not going to build a house.

Nathalie Niddam: Well, or not a good one.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. You can’t make it out of nails. So yeah. I landed on a protein, an animal protein-based diet. I didn’t have any biases when I researched this. If the research had shown me that veganism was the way, I’d be probably the most annoying vegan. I know -

Nathalie Niddam: inaudible.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It would be hard to be the most annoying vegan because even … They’re all annoying.

Nathalie Niddam: It’s a tricky space, I will grant -

Dr. John Jaquish: It is. It is.

Nathalie Niddam: They tend to get very emotional about their beliefs and often it’s a choice that’s made from emotion versus on a scientific basis. I mean you make the point very well in the book, there are very -

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s how children make decisions. Or babies. Yeah. I understand. It’s funny like I don’t ever stand in front of a vegan restaurant and say they need to shut down because they don’t serve a good burger.

Nathalie Niddam: I’m with you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, and also by the way vegetable farming kills seven billion animals a year in the United States.

Nathalie Niddam: Absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: So you have a field that used to be a habitat for a group of animals, they keep coming back to that and they get chopped up into the till when they’re tilling the field or whatever. Or birds, like birds, get poisoned by the millions because they’ll go into a cornfield and pick it clean. So whoever owns the cornfield, might be an honest farmer. Like I think everyone wants to imagine it’s some like evil company and it’s just like no, this guy is just trying to feed his family.

Nathalie Niddam: And he’s been told that this is the only way to do it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. Anyway, we digress. So basically your research, you’ve moved to a meat-forward diet. Are you a full carnivore or do you eat some vegetables?

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t eat any vegetables.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay, so you -

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, this is bacterial fermentation. Vegans can eat this, there are no animal products in this. When we started the show, this whole thing was 200 grams of protein equivalent. It was very efficient.

Nathalie Niddam: Just in case I don’t end up putting up the video of this, Dr. Jaquish is holding up a … It looks like a beer stein, only it’s the size of a pitcher.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Nathalie Niddam: Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right, yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: Like a full pitcher of water, but it’s in the shape of a beer stein, and it was when we started talking full to the top with this pink drink which I correctly inaudible is Fortagen.

Dr. John Jaquish: You knew exactly what it was, yeah. It’s four doses of Fortagen.

Nathalie Niddam: Which is an essential amino acid blend that is just going to provide the body with the building blocks. Now what’s interesting is you’re saying you’re coming off a dry fast. So you do also talk about fasting in the book. Because it too is a very powerful way to manipulate and manage your hormones around workouts.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: Frankly just for life and for health, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Also just let your intestines rest. Like there’s never been any evidence that more meals mean you live longer, but there is evidence that fewer meals mean you live longer. So I didn’t have a horse in this race. Caloric restriction versus fasting. I think a lot of people think it’s like one or the other. I think not eating like a … Can I use profanity on your show?

Nathalie Niddam: I don’t care. I’ve never been, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Caloric restriction pretty much means just don’t eat like a f****** hippo, and fasting means you abstain from everything. Then sometimes when you finish your fast, somebody starts eating like a f****** hippo. So you have to keep both those things in mind. Both can do amazing things. I do think if you were to score the results of … I don’t think, I have scientific evidence to back this up. People are like, “What’s your opinion?” I’m like, “Well I don’t have an opinion but I can tell you what the science says.”

Nathalie Niddam: That’s what it boils down to, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s what a long-time restriction can do. Fasted, it just enacts systems of the body that never get enacted otherwise.

Nathalie Niddam: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So yeah, and there are emotional decision-makers on this subject as well. Because like fitness people, especially bodybuilders, they think you need to eat like every two hours.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, no.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s been out there for so long. That just seems like a good way to get Crohn’s disease or IBS.

Nathalie Niddam: Well, and it’s a good way to never be able to achieve any degree of metabolic flexibility. It’s just not … You want your body to be able to flip through … We have two fuel systems we can use. We should be able to flip between them.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Right.

Nathalie Niddam: That should be a goal and it should be where we are and that way, you also can choose when you eat when it’s available to you, and when you don’t eat so you no longer have that thing where you’re telling someone, “Well I had to have the donuts because there was nothing else around and it was time for me to eat.” If we are metabolically flexible we don’t need to eat at any given time. We can -

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. We have also done something very strange as a species in that we surround ourselves with a ridiculous abundance of food.

Nathalie Niddam: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like if you and I were in a tribe in Toronto, how often would we eat plant-based materials?

Nathalie Niddam: I don’t know.

Dr. John Jaquish: Probably about one month out of the year.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, a couple of months out of the year.

Dr. John Jaquish: Which would be the end of the warm season going into the cold season.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s the only time there would be fruit or any vegetation that would be edible. The rest of the time we’d just be carnivores. The rest of the year.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s just no other way around it. Fruits and vegetables only bloom in that general window of time. Now when you’re in a warmer place, that window gets a little bit bigger. But it also coincides with the idea that bears give themselves type II diabetes every year.

Nathalie Niddam: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So I mean learning this and trying to understand why they do this, they’re using type II diabetes to get fatter quicker.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, so they can hibernate.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because they want to store the fat so they can hibernate, right. So basically my theory on carbohydrates, carbohydrates by the way are not a macronutrient. This is a fairly recent discovery though. I’m the only one that seems to be saying it so blatantly.

Nathalie Niddam: It’s in the book, guys. He talks about it in the book.

Dr. John Jaquish: You don’t need them. There are ways you can use carbohydrates if you’re an endurance runner to enhance your performance. If you’re using X3, there’s a way you can use it to enhance performance, I call it the hyperplasia protocol.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, so let’s talk about that. Let’s quickly because we don’t have a lot of time. Can we talk a little bit about X3 fasted workouts, not fasted workouts, and using inaudible around the X3 workout? I just want to share that with the listeners quickly before we go.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. By, that’s 20 pages of really hard science you want me to summarize in a minute or two.

Nathalie Niddam: No, you’re the man to do this. You’re coming off -

Dr. John Jaquish: So basically carbohydrates force you to retain four to five grams of water per gram of carbohydrate. Because glucose comes into the body and then it gets paired with insulin and it goes into the muscle through the upright inaudible of glute force signaling when it’s needed. So what you do is you have your carbohydrates and then you work out and then the glucose picks up the insulin and then goes right into the muscle and forces super hydration of muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: When this happens, and then you stretch after your workout, and I’m talking about a maximum stretch, like you want some discomfort in the stretch, you will be splitting muscles, something that was previously thought to be impossible. So this is more of a permanent-growth of musculature.

Nathalie Niddam: So like getting muscle cells to clone each other almost? Like they just split in two, they divide?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep.

Nathalie Niddam: Interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Hyperplasia. Yeah, the studies have been done on birds primarily because you can stretch a bird out and they have a great pain tolerance.

Nathalie Niddam: A bird?

Dr. John Jaquish: Birds, yeah. A human ethics board won’t sign off on a lot of these types of things. Like putting somebody in a stretched muscle position for 24 hours.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Like they won’t do it because it’s like torture.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah yeah yeah. So how do we apply this to our workout though? Because we’re not going to stay in a stretched position for 24 hours.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, we stay in the position for less than a period. So I recommend a stretch for 30 seconds per target muscle you work out that day.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So 30 seconds is a lot better than 24 hours. I do think at some point I’ll try like six hours or something like that with one particular target group, just to see. Just to see what happens. I also have a lot of discipline that others don’t. So yeah. I may give that a shot because that may be an interesting learning experience. Also, our biochemistry is different than birds’, stuff like that but it’s just very interesting data that when you look at it all together, you can enhance. Because basically by super hydrating the muscle, you create less room in the muscle. What happens is as you stretch the muscle and it’s filled up with more blood and sarcoplasm than it normally has, that the casing around the muscle is being stretched. When there is space within the muscle, that’s generally because a certain set of things happened like we’re talking about have happened and therefore there’s room for the cells to split. Because they’re trying to recover and not just become stronger cells, actually cellular division.

Nathalie Niddam: Right. So then you would eat that carb, you would consume the carb source, whatever it is, pre-workout?

Dr. John Jaquish: You can do it pre or immediately post.

Nathalie Niddam: Right after?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I’m starting to think pre maybe a little bit better because your blood is moving is so hard and you’re breathing so hard and you’re gulping water down at the end of a workout. Sometimes people complain of heartburn. They have inaudible which is like it’s not acidic or anything, and then they get heartburn, and I’m like, “Well, that’s interesting. So it’s probably better to consume it beforehand.” So kind of either way. It’s got to happen, you certainly can’t do it during the workout. That’s guaranteed heartburn.

Nathalie Niddam: No, no. inaudible taking eating constantly to the next level. Eating during your workout, I think that would just be a bad idea.

Dr. John Jaquish: I see a lot of people, some products are heavyweights supposed to be like a carb hit. Well, there was one a couple of years ago, it failed. But the whole idea was you’re supposed to have … It was a concentrated carb mixture. Don’t know if it was good or bad, it could have been high fructose corn syrup for all I know. But you wanted to absorb fast, which is why a fast-absorbing carb would be better. But rice, there’s not a lot of cellular structure there. So it does get in your bloodstream pretty fast. So you want this. You want this to happen, yeah, yeah. But just because we can use carbohydrates as a performance enhancement doesn’t mean that they’re a macronutrient. We don’t need them to survive at all.

Nathalie Niddam: Right. Right. Yeah. I think for the average person, it’s not necessary.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. That’s right.

Nathalie Niddam: It’s kind of like that thing about how you get people who don’t do anything drinking Gatorade supposedly to … Never mind the fact that Gatorade is crap in the first place but inaudible which was meant for people that are expending colossal amounts of energy so that somehow you could sort of making an argument for it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Nathalie Niddam: Barely.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Something like that.

Nathalie Niddam: Anyway, that’s a whole other topic. So I think we’re running a little long on time, I think that you got to go and I want to thank you for your time today and for taking the time to talk about X3 with us. This is great, it was nice to meet you. I look forward to talking -

Dr. John Jaquish: Nice meeting you.

Nathalie Niddam: Yeah, I have to go … Maybe I have to get a lighter band for my overhead press.

Dr. John Jaquish: Just try doing it from your knees first.

Nathalie Niddam: I will. I will.

Dr. John Jaquish: Instead of standing, kneel on it and then just the same movement as normal.

Nathalie Niddam: Okay. So how can people … Let’s give people some links.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure, sure. I created a landing page because there are like 10 places you can get ahold of me or watch my videos or whatever. So it’s just a website, doctorj.com. D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter J, .com.

Nathalie Niddam: Nice. That’s -

Dr. John Jaquish: Everything is there. Instagram, Facebook, links to the products, links to the book.

Nathalie Niddam: The other thing you have, the other thing I want to say to people is you have this great YouTube video library that walks people through a 12-week program using the X3 system which I think is … For people who aren’t accustomed to working out, is great … It’s having you as a trainer in your living room or wherever it is that you’re doing your workout, so I think that’s a really great resource as well. So thank you again. It was a pleasure to meet you and I look forward to hearing about people’s experience with their X3 system.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome. All right. Thanks. I’m sure we’ll speak soon.

Nathalie Niddam: Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of The Biohacking Superhuman Performance podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please remember to leave us a five-star review on iTunes, because that’s what helps us to be heard and to be seen. If you’d like to connect with me directly, or if you’d like to leave any comments or if you have any questions about this episode, please reach out to me directly through my website, natniddam.com. Of course, if you’re not already a member of The Biohacking Superhuman Performance Community on Facebook, that’s where you’ll find me every day. It’s a short application, just answer a couple of questions and you’re in and interfacing with other amazing biohackers. Thanks again and we’ll look forward to seeing you on the next episode.