Debunk Fitness Myths and Become The Superhuman You’ve Always Wanted to Be

Dr. John Jaquish joins Gayle Guyardo on Bloom to discuss why fitness may be the most failed human endeavor and how exercise science missed obvious principles that, when enacted, will turn you into the superhuman you always wanted to be. Watch as Dr. Jaquish shares his thoughts on everything from fitness myths to carb-free dieting.

Full Transcript

Gayle Guyardo: The doctor is in. Bad advice, outdated information, inconsistent recommendations when it comes to what your workout routine should look like, things can get confusing fast. Joining us today is Dr. John Jaquish, author of Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. Welcome to Bloom, Doctor.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks so much for having me. I’m very excited.

Gayle Guyardo: Even the title of your book is going to rattle a lot of people. Help us debunk some of these fitness myths.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Yeah, the title is kind of funny. I didn’t want to make anyone angry, but also people should not be committed to their nutrition program or their exercise program with religious devotion. That leaves them in a place where they’re unable to absorb new information or scientific findings.

It just so happens that just about everything we do in fitness is some degree of wrong. In fact, my general statement about fitness is how many people … And I’ll ask anyone random this.

How many people do you know that are truly exceptionally fit versus how many people do you know that have been going to a gym for years and they look exactly the same, they’re just as overweight as they were before, they’re same exact strength, nothing’s changed?

So I preface the conversation with that, and most thinking people who are not too emotional about it, they will agree with me, say, “Yeah, you’re right. Fitness is probably the most failed human endeavor.”

Gayle Guyardo: Well, let’s go back to the title of the book. So why is weight lifting a waste of time? Then yes, please parlay that into the other things that we do, like a rat on a wheel at the gym that might not yield the results that we really want.

Dr. John Jaquish: In weight lifting, you’re using the same weight through a range of motion. So if I’m doing a chest press and I’m pushing my arms forward, I’m holding the same weight at all positions.

The problem with that is the top position where my arm is extended, I can hold seven times the amount of force than I can at the bottom. So I developed a medical device called OsteoStrong, and it’s in 10 different countries now with 160 locations. It’s a clinic to treat osteoporosis.

When I developed that device, I demonstrated that people are seven times stronger in the impact-ready range of motion. Well, as soon as I knew that and I had proved that in published academic literature, I also knew that weight lifting was a really lousy stimulus for muscle because if we’re seven times more capable in one position versus the other, why would we use the same amount of weight in all positions?

It doesn’t make any sense.

So I started to play with variability, and of course, we’ve always had band training, but band training never took off because it twists your smaller joints. It twists your wrists and your ankles.

So if you just step on a band and try and do a deadlift, you’re putting lateral force through the ankle, and seven pounds of lateral force will break it. Whereas when I deadlift with variable resistance with the various protocols I describe in my book, I deadlift 600 pounds for a high repetition set, but the load is placed where my body can handle the most load and then the load drops off where it can handle the least.

It varies and the science is called variable resistance and there’s 16 studies, and 16 out of 16 of them found that this is a much better way to trigger muscular growth, just never a way to really easily access it until I came along.

So that was really the biggest myth in fitness, the whole: “you just keep lifting weights, and results will come.” For most people, they don’t.

Gayle Guyardo: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: In fact, the 2008 study showed that 26% of people cannot grow muscle with standard weights no matter what they do. They can’t grow any.

Gayle Guyardo: Real quick because we only have a few seconds left to talk. I think everything you’re saying is fascinating, and I’m going to let folks know how to get ahold of you, but you don’t eat any carbohydrates?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, I don’t eat any carbohydrates. They’re really not a macronutrient. They don’t fit the description of a macronutrient. There’s no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There’s essential fats. There’s essential proteins. Essential amino acids. But there’s no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There’s research that even shows that fiber, it’s inert. It goes through your system, and the idea that it kind of scrapes you clean on the inside is an interesting theory, but it doesn’t prove out to actually do that. In fact, people with high fiber diets have a greater chance of diverticulitis than those who don’t.

Gayle Guyardo: Wow!

Dr. John Jaquish: So I argue you don’t need it.

Gayle Guyardo: Well, I could talk to you all day long. Sadly, we’re out of time, Doctor, but thank you so much for joining us on Bloom today.

Dr. John Jaquish: Understood, yeah. Great. Thanks for having me.

Gayle Guyardo: For more information, you can visit johnjaquish.com. We’ll be back with more Bloom right after this.