Building Strength Isn’t About Weight Lifting Anymore – John Jaquish, Ph.D., with Dave Asprey, Part 1 – #862

In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dr. John Jaquish explains the importance of bone density and how he has developed a way to gain muscles faster than weight lifting through his series of devices, OsteoStrong and the X3 System.

Full Transcript

Dave Asprey: You’re listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today’s guest has been on the show about three years ago, where he launched a product that has since, and some of you have probably seen online. He spent years developing and researching ways you can improve muscle, cardiovascular bone density and he’s a qualified biohacker and walks around looking like that. I saw an article, they called him the Tony Stark of bodybuilding which was a cool thing although I wouldn’t call him a bodybuilder by-

Dr. John Jaquish: I think it was Tony Stark in the fitness industry.

Dave Asprey: The fitness industry, there you go. Because you’re not a bodybuilder. You look like one, but that’s not what you do. The fitness industry, there you go. So who was that anyway? Was that Men’s Health or something?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. Chicago Tribune.

Dave Asprey: Chicago Tribune, there you go. It was pretty cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: And so his name is John Jaquish, he’s Ph.D. And he first came on the show because he had this bone density building device, one that I’ve tested out in the labs down in LA. But most interestingly, he developed a way to put on muscle three times faster than you can do by picking up rocks, which is pretty much all of the weightlifting. And he launched it on the show three years ago.

And since then I’ve seen dozens of pro athletes talking about it, using it, and it’s done quite well. So I wanted to share with our listeners, what are the things that it takes to not waste time lifting weights or doing cardio, and even to talk about your book because you just wrote a book about all this stuff. So John, welcome back to the show.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me, Dave. I’m excited.

Dave Asprey: Let’s talk about your mom. What do you think?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. So I got down this path because my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis and built a series of medical devices to emulate high-impact forces. So in the emulation of high impact force, we get the benefit of the high impact with the bone mass and without any of the downsides, which would be potential injuries.

So like gymnastics, for example, very powerful bone density, they also retired an average age of 19 because they’re so injured. So the challenge was how do we get the benefits without the drawbacks? So building impact emulation devices is what I did and file patents on those and now you can find those in OsteoStrong clinics around the nine countries around the world. And there are I think 180 clinics now.

Dave Asprey: And there’s the bio density device as well, which is the one that you-

Dave Asprey: … originally pioneered. Yeah, that’s the one that people have probably seen on videos at Upgrade Labs. And it’s interesting because when you talk about mimicking high impact, I used to weigh 300 pounds and I’m still whatever, today, around 230 with the amount of muscle I’m carrying. So high impact for me as a 48-year-old, who’s had three knee surgeries seems stupid-

Dr. John Jaquish: Beyond. Yeah.

Dave Asprey: Am I right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. Yeah. We’re great with impact when we’re kids, and coincidentally peak bone mass is at 30 years of age. So people grow bone and then they reach 30 and then it starts to diminish. And I have an iPhone app called Fracture Proof.

And when you look at the way that works like you enter your body weight, you hold it on your hip and you jump up in the air and land and see how many multiples of bodyweight you can create. If you are beneath 4.2 multiples of body weight, you are doing nothing for bone, nothing.

Dave Asprey: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s the minimum dose-response. So it’s challenging. I meet postmenopausal people all the time who are like, “Oh yeah, yeah. I go for walks every day for my bone health and-”

Dave Asprey: Nothing.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep. I give them the grim reality. Yeah, that’s not doing s***. Sorry.

Dave Asprey: So, I mean, it’ll probably help with lymphatic drainage.

Dr. John Jaquish: Of course.

Dave Asprey: What about supplements like K2 and vitamin D3 and taking up magnesium and possibly calcium if you’re deficient, those seem to be pretty important for maintaining muscle mass. I’ve seen studies.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. They’re building blocks. So when I’m speaking at conferences and somebody asks that question, I give them an example, like somebody who lifts weights and takes extra protein or makes sure their protein intake is higher, they can turn that into muscle. Well, if you just ate the protein and didn’t work out, would you grow muscle? Now and everybody to know the answer to this question, which is no. So why would you expect to take the building blocks for bone, but then do nothing to stimulate the growth of bone and expect a change? You get nothing.

Dave Asprey: Except, I mean, if you take testosterone and you eat more protein and you don’t start lifting, you are going to put on muscle and lose fat because-

Dr. John Jaquish: A little bit. Sure.

Dave Asprey: … of hormonal thing. I’m figuring with vitamin D, you probably can get a tiny change, but it’s not enough to matter. It’s like, why don’t you give it a signal from the environment? And you’re saying a signal needs to be 4.2 times your body weight. This is jumping a couple of feet off the grounds because 9.8 meters per second square is the acceleration and gravity, so you jump up, if you jump high enough and then you land, you could do it, otherwise, you couldn’t do it. And it’s why 4.2? Is this your original research or did you find that somewhere?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. There have been a few studies that showed that one out of… You have Oscar and another one out of Bristol, United Kingdom, two out of Bristol, United Kingdom. So we’re right. They’re all right there at four-plus multiples of body weight to stimulate any bone growth at all.

Dave Asprey: Okay. All right, so I’m a relatively young, relatively fit guy. I’ve had my bone density measured. It’s pretty darn strong on all sorts of weird stuff, including the X3, ends whole-body vibration, and God knows what else. So what are the benefits, if you’re not 85, like your mom to increasing bone density? What do you get out of it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, I mean, you’re avoiding the potential for fragility fracture later in life. The bone you build through the osteogenic loading process through this heavy loading, whether it’s at Bulletproof Labs or it’s at an OsteoStrong location, you’re getting bone built that’s going to last in your body for 30 years. So it doesn’t go away like a muscle. Detraining of a muscle starts in 10 days. So you stop working out, you lose your muscle in 10 days. Takes you 30 years to lose the bone.

Dave Asprey: So you can put that bone density on and keep it on for long periods.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. And it can benefit you.

Dave Asprey: Your whole life.

Dr. John Jaquish: Huge percentage of your life. Yeah.

Dave Asprey: There’s something else that’s going on with this as well. And when people have more bone, more protein, and higher bone density, they better regulate their blood sugar. So you get less diabetes when you have more bone density. Can you walk me through whatever we know about that or at least whatever you know about that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. The more bone density you have, the more muscular tissue you have that’s active, that’s participating in GLUT4 signaling. So pulling in insulin and glucose and using it correctly. So we have a clinical trial on bone density and we have a clinical trial on type two diabetics showing tremendous outcomes. But also the outcomes are stackable. So somebody takes you to know Metformin.

Dave Asprey: It’s the diabetes antiaging drug, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And then… Yeah, it’s a very low side effect. Very, very high benefit if you have a lousy hemoglobin A1C score. And then it assists you because it’s doing something curative to the muscular tissue. It’s looking at GLUT4 signaling, it’s increasing the level of GLUT4 signaling. So the activity in muscle, not so much hypertrophy, but just the efficiency of having it be active and functioning and using its receptors for glucose and insulin, which, for somebody who’s got and metabolic syndrome, they’re not using those things.

Dave Asprey: Yep. It does appear to make a really big difference. If your bone density’s higher, even if you don’t add a bunch of muscle, you just have better bones and ligaments. There seems to be some correlation there.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, this would be theoretical. There’s just no study that’s going to look at similar populations, one with low bone density, one with higher bone density because they’re not going to be similar.

Dave Asprey: They’re not.

Dr. John Jaquish: They are going to be the only incongruency between the two populations, so you can’t study it. But what I would say is somebody who has a stronger chassis has stronger bone mass, are they going to be able to build more muscle? Yeah, absolutely. From an engineering perspective, there are limitations within the body governed by neural inhibition.

So the more force you put through bone mass, the more likely you are to be triggering at some point the muscles to shut off, sort of like you can’t break your finger by squeezing a fist, no matter how hard you try. You have a neural inhibitory process that is stopping you. But the stronger you get, the more force you can create. So I’ve got some sort of force measurement device in my hand, that force can continue to go up and up and that limitation is still there, but it’s at a different place every time.

Dave Asprey: It is at a different place. And this, again, there’s no study about this. We know that there are mitochondria and bone. We know there are mitochondria and even mitochondrial production bone marrow. So something is going on around higher levels of bone morphogenic protein where there’s crosstalk between mitochondria from different types of tissues.

So what I do know a hundred percent is people with high bone density have healthy metabolisms, the vast majority of the time, and people with low bone density, even if they have strong muscles, don’t have as good of metabolic profile. So we’re like, okay, even if you’re a 22-year-old dude, you want to make sure your bone density is where it ought to be, especially if you’re experimenting with some sort of weird plant-based diet because you are not going to like where your bone density ends up when you’re 30 if you’re doing that.

Dr. John Jaquish: No 20 out of 20 studies show you lose bone density very fast when you go on a vegan diet. Yeah. Very damaging the bone. Also, very high indications you’re going to die pretty young.

Dave Asprey: Is it?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a fragility fracture after the age of 50, you have a 50% chance of death within one year based on the complications of that fracture.

Dave Asprey: So does the bone density drop faster than IQ when you go on that diet or not?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Vegan nutrition also lowers your IQ. So I…

Dave Asprey: We’re bad people for saying that except…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you’re really… I mean, Hey, you’re point at what holes to dig. I’m just digging them.

Dave Asprey: I was a raw vegan for a while and, it actually does affect your cognition, especially your working memory, that there are noticeable differences. I’m sorry. I wish I could eat gravel. It doesn’t work.

**Dr. John Jaquish:**1] yeah.

Dave Asprey: All right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And I also wish plant farming didn’t kill 7 billion animals a year.

Dave Asprey: I know, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: I say this, of course, like I say that like at a cocktail party and there’s always some vegan that’s upset. I live in California, so they’re everywhere. And so I say, look, any species that is expanding is taking resources away from another type of species and-

Dave Asprey: True.

Dr. John Jaquish: … that’s going to equal death. End of story. It does not get more complicated than that. I love the image that you posted the other day. You responded to it when I sent out your comment, the scorched earth looking at the mono-crop farming. It’s what it does. It’s just ruining the habitat for anything that would have been there. So this is killing billions of ground squirrels and rats and mice and birds, and birds are being poisoned by the tens of thousands every day.

Dave Asprey: Oh yeah. And bunnies and-

Dr. John Jaquish: Over corns farms. Yeah.

Dave Asprey: … cute turtles and salamanders. You got to name the cute ones because that triggers the vegans.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s true. Nobody cares about the rats, but I mean, oh yeah, they’re killing the birds. Like, oh.

Dave Asprey: And that’s not counting bugs like butterflies and things like that. So at now that I’m running a farm with pigs and sheep and now cows and you can see the biodiversity when you have an ecosystem. So I’m looking at that, and we’re talking about in terms of bone density, I think what’s happening in your metabolism reflects what’s happening in the world of your food supply. So if you’re eating plant-based corn and potato and God knows what else based fake meat, it’s going to reflect in your bone density, in your cognitive function, in your cell metabolism and you can’t break it. Well, so what do you eat?

Dr. John Jaquish: Great question. Yeah. I mean, since the last time we hung out, I probably have adjusted a little bit to just more animal protein.

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Dr. John Jaquish: Keeping the fats moderate. So I’m regularly at a caloric deficit. I’m doing one meal a day consistently now. I’m trying to also experiment with some things that are a little bit easier. A lot of people will just not do multiple days of fasting. They just won’t do it. I hear a lot I can’t.

Dave Asprey: I taught all sorts, like 70,000 people have done my fasting challenge. I’ll teach it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I mean, anyone who says they can’t, my instinct is to be like, well, put that in a sentence like I can’t be attractive. Because if you stay an obese person, you’re not attractive, you’re well aware of this. So, I can’t keep from dying before 50. Say that to yourself.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Just don’t use the word can’t. Of course, you can. People drive fast and eat one meal a day during Ramadan. More than a billion people a year do this. If they can do it, I promise you, you can do it. So yeah, I mean, I kind of give the tough love to a lot of people who just whine about the fasting. But anyway, so I’m sick into this one meal day program. I do a bacterial fermentation product called Fortagen. It’s essential amino acids, a very high concentration of essential amino acids.

Dave Asprey: Let’s explain that for a minute for people. So, guys, amino acids are the building blocks of protein and you probably suck at breaking down the proteins you eat into amino acids. So you can take free amino acids that are 100% bioavailable. That’s what your Fortagen product is, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Dave Asprey: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep. Thank you. Yeah. Perfect. And so your body makes a certain amount of amino acids and then the ones that are called essential are the ones your body can’t make. So you got to take them in. So that’s really what this amino acid product is. It’s made from bacterial fermentation. We are supposed to eat things that are spoiling. That’s kind of the natural way we’re supposed to be eating, but for sanitation reasons, we don’t, nor do I recommend that, but Fortagen the amino acids from the fermentation without fermentation itself. So then it just has all upside and no down.

Dr. John Jaquish: And so that’s a significant portion of my protein. And then I’m just eating one meal a day and at a consistent caloric deficit. And till I’m going to keep doing this. So this is not sustainable, by the way.

Dave Asprey: I was going to say I’m a little worried about this OMAD for long periods. Most people break themselves on a regimen like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So, like, let’s say 2000 calories a day whereas my base on a metabolic rate plus the activity is more like 3000. I’m going to do this until I get to the level of body fat that I feel that I can maintain. And then so like-

Dave Asprey: What’s your goal?

Dr. John Jaquish: I just want to see where… Previously, many had said their body starts to fight them at a certain level of body fat. So I’ve heard this, 10% body fat, but is that really where… So I know with the essential amino acids, I have an advantage with X3 as a grossly superior workout that I’m able to build and maintain a lot more muscle than anybody else would be able to, who’s not using X3. So like I’m in uncharted territory right now. So how lean can I get? How much can I keep it? How easy is it to maintain? So that’s the current experiment-

Dave Asprey: So you’re happy to go into like 6% or something is, I mean, looking at fitness competitor levels or?

Dr. John Jaquish: If, that’s where the road takes me, yeah. I’m at a little over 7% right now, I’m 7.3.

Dave Asprey: So it seems like the studies I’ve seen when you get under about 10, there are issues, especially under seven where you get lung adhesions and tearing of lungs and some gnarly stuff.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, but you got to ask those people who studied, they weren’t getting a surplus of protein. They were starved.

Dave Asprey: It’s a fair point. It’s a fair point.

Dr. John Jaquish: So they had a lot of others… So I got a huge advantage where I get to go around the limitations of a lot of protein because I get to have in 16 calories, I can have the equivalent of 200 grams of protein. I know that doesn’t even make my mathematical sense, but because amino acids aren’t complete proteins, they don’t count as calories.

Dave Asprey: Well, some of them raise insulin and they sure act like calories. Some of them don’t though.

Dr. John Jaquish: They do act like calories, but according to the FDA, you can’t call them calories.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. But according to the FDA, glyphosate is safe.

Dr. John Jaquish: This is true.

Dave Asprey: If you say according to the FDA, it has a 90% chance of being financially derived bulls***. You cannot trust them to do anything true, anything.

Dave Asprey: They say it’s safe, someone got paid.

Dr. John Jaquish: Half of their revenue comes from companies they’re supposed to be regulating.

Dave Asprey: Oh yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: In form of fees.

Dave Asprey: I mean, I’ve had enough of those guys.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, still I have to comply with the FDA when putting nutritional information on my product.

Dave Asprey: We all do. But the fact that you can’t say there are calories in amino acids that get metabolized in the mitochondria to make electrons, that’s because the FDA is lying.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, this is why I put my Fortagen consumption with my eating window or about half an hour apart.

Dave Asprey: Smart. Smart.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: And there are some amino acids you can take probably during a fast that isn’t going to raise insulin. If you take a little glycine before bed, I don’t think that’s going to break a fast, but if you take 20 grams of it might. But I know the BCAAs will generally break a fast because of what they do to insulin.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely. Well, BCAAs are not really what your body needs and they don’t do anything. There are a couple of studies that show that they don’t even outperform the placebo.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. The only plus I’ve seen for BCAAs is for endurance athletes, by the way, that’s not good for your biology. But for endurance athletes, tend to get sick more often, and if they take BCAs, it reduces their likelihood of getting respiratory infections. So there’s some kind of a benefit there, but generally, I think they’re way overhyped in all that.

Dave Asprey: And let’s talk a bit about the X3s. So I’m going to explain what this thing is and then you can explain it better, but you sent me probably the first two prototypes ever in existence-

Dr. John Jaquish: That right.

Dave Asprey: … when you were first launching. So you launched on the show.

Dr. John Jaquish: You were the first guy. You and I were the first guys to use X3.

Dave Asprey: So actually you sent me three and I gave two of them to people at my company, a woman and a guy who’s about 10 years older than me and I had one. And this was before they were fully packaged. And I’m like, this thing works. And guys what it is, it’s a giant latex rubber band, there’s three of them, and a special bar so it doesn’t tweak on your joints. It’s very different than a TRX thing. Actually, that one’s all silver. The one I have is still black. I probably still have the prototype you sent me, huh?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, you still have the prototype?

Dave Asprey: I think so. I still use the prototype.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah is. It’s now it’s made out of anodized aluminum-

Dave Asprey: Oh, look at that sexy thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: … iPhone quality, yeah.

Dave Asprey: You never sent me a new one. I hope you launch your product and… Oh, John. My feelings are hurt now. Anyway-

Dr. John Jaquish: I didn’t know you didn’t have a new one, but now you said that I’ll get you a new one.

Dave Asprey: How would you know? But here’s the interesting thing. So the two people I gave it to in my company, neither one is an athlete or interested in muscles at all. Both of them at the end of the month or two are like, “Can I keep this?” They liked it, even though they weren’t into this.

And what I do now for my muscle stuff is I will do electrical simulation. I’ll do X3 and occasionally I’ll do some of the devices at Upgrade Labs. We’ve got a machine called the cheating machine. But they’re all based on a similar principle, but the most portable thing, I put extra my luggage on some trips, because it’s small enough. Sometimes I don’t bring the bar, even though the bar’s way superior, just because I don’t want to carry it, but I’ll bring the band.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. That’ll hurt your joints. You don’t want to do that.

Dave Asprey: It does… Yeah, my joints don’t like it, but hey.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I know. You got to have the bar.

Dave Asprey: The bar changes everything.

Dr. John Jaquish: Just check it. Just put in your check luggage. I used to fly 200,000 miles a year speaking at bone density and osteoporosis type conferences. And I was all over the world. And there were trips where I went from San Francisco to Chicago, to London, to Moscow, to Osaka, Japan, back to San Francisco, like literally around the world for like three weeks. You wake up and you like to walk into the wall because you have no idea where you are.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, right, yeah you do too.

Dave Asprey: All hotels look the same. People like, “Oh, how lucky you get to travel.” Like, no, I’m in a four-star hotel. It doesn’t matter. You’re there to help people to teach people and to show something that matters. You’re not there to be a tourist. I get it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Everywhere with me. I mean my current X3 probably has 600,000 miles on it.

Dave Asprey: Okay. Now there are a variety of tubing things you can buy on Amazon and all that. When you first reached out to me, I’m like, is this substantially different than the common brands out there? And what I found out was, yeah. There’s the alignment from the bar, but I think you’re using different strength of bands. What’s the difference?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s the quality of polymer is the difference. So a lot of things have come out since X3 in the last three years to look like X3, so it’s just like surgical tubing, it’s like five pounds of resistance. And I do realize there is a market in what I call fake fitness. So people will buy a bulls**_ product, knowing it’s a bulls_** product or suspecting it’s a bulls*** product in their budgets, like anywhere from $30 to $100. And it’s so they can say they work out at home. And they’re not even planning on using it. It’s like somebody’s overweight and they’re lazy and they don’t want to do anything and it’s just like, “Oh, I work out at home. I have a perfect push-up.”

Dave Asprey: I don’t think it sits there lazy, man. You’re talking to a guy who was fat and not lazy at all. I work myself off and I just couldn’t lose the weight. So it’s not because they’re lazy. That’s what people who easily lose weight think.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. But the people who do the perfect push up, they know they’re not going to get a work a real workout from that.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. That’s a fair point

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m just saying that there is a market out there for that type of thing.

Dave Asprey: There is. Doesn’t it feel great when people take your great idea and make a crappy knock off so then other people say it doesn’t work? No one’s ever done that to me, with the stuff I make.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yeah, I frequently say to my employees like, “Well, what would Dave do in this situation?” Because of that just cheap crummy, knockoff type stuff. And the funny thing, the customers, our customers, they don’t… Some of them accidentally bought the wrong things because they thought it was X3 and then they’re like, “Hey, look at this piece of crap that I bought, but then I went and bought an X3, and here are the results I got from the X3.” So yeah, it all comes like sort of the truth comes out, I guess.

Dave Asprey: It does come out over time. That’s why I’m doing the line of Upgrade Lab supplements separate from Bulletproof. I have no idea what’s going on at Bulletproof. I’m not involved anymore. So for me to have transparency and visibility, like no, I’m doing my coffee and all that stuff. And I think that’s it’s the right thing to do, because if I’m not willing to put my name behind it, just like you with the X3 Bar. You got to put your name behind it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: So what happened when you took the X3 to the Miami Heat?

Dr. John Jaquish: They got rid of their weightlifting program and they’re a 100% X3. They even… I mean, here’s the book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. They even-

Dave Asprey: Yeah, I guess.

Dr. John Jaquish: … endorse the book, it’s right on the back.

Dave Asprey: There you go. That’s so solid.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like pro teams, everybody thinks when’s the last time you saw a pro team put their brand on something? Never. They never do that because their brand is so valuable. But the strength coaching team, and Bill Foran, he’s the strength coach of the team and he’s in the strength coaching hall of fame. Like the guy’s an amazing guy. He’s done so many great things. The teams he has done programming for are the least injured throughout history. And he is been doing this for a long time. When he discovered the X3, we had a great phone conversation and I was on a plane the next day.

Dave Asprey: That’s so cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: By the way, your book hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, which is more credible than the New York Times list. The New York Times list is-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, the New York Times?

Dave Asprey: … corrupt.

Dr. John Jaquish: Dude, it has nothing to do with sales.

Dave Asprey: No. Nothing at all.

Dr. John Jaquish: They can’t pick those books. It’s the books they would like to see the most sales in, not the ones that had the most sales. And right now my… I’ll just say I was a consultant, someone you know very well and like a lot. He’s like, look, you’re a straight white male, you’re not getting on the New York Times list. They’re straight-up bigots.

Dave Asprey: Yep. The New York Times is not a trustworthy list anymore. Dr. Mercola, who’s been on the show lots of times and is speaking at the biohacking conference September 17th-

Dr. John Jaquish: Nice. Nice.

Dave Asprey: … he’s sold enough books to dominate the New York Times list, but he’s blacklisted. So if the New York Times can blacklist anyone from their list, it’s not a list anymore. So yeah, I’ve been on there four times. If they put me on the fifth time, I don’t care because the Wall Street Journal’s more credible and you hit the Wall Street Journal list, which is cool.

Dave Asprey: And you’re right. Something that just makes my heart warm, your weightlifting is a waste of time, the whole point around Upgrade Labs is guys, you can recover faster than you’re supposed. You do all sorts of stuff. And if you look at your results, you’re kind of ripped. What you’re doing works and you don’t pick up heavy things.

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Dave Asprey: Right. Except for maybe, you pick up your car, which isn’t that heavy, because it’s all carbon fiber or something.

Dr. John Jaquish: This is true.

Dave Asprey: But-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So the extra workout is hard.

Dave Asprey: Oh yeah, it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t want to sugarcoat and be like, “Oh, it’s so easy to be…”

Dr. John Jaquish: When I go to the grocery store, people ask me if I play in the NFL, they ask for my autograph and I’m like, who do you think I am? Do I look like an NFL player? I don’t know. Maybe there is one out there that looks like me. But I think they just think they see a six-foot, 240 pounds lean guy. And they’re like, “Huh? Like that guy, he’s not a librarian. He’s something else.”

Dave Asprey: I’m laughing at right now because I would be one of those guys who would probably say that. Once, in the early days of Bulletproof, I got invited to a celebrity poker tournament. And I was supposed to just be like an audience and a friend was like, “Dave, I just put $25,000 in so you can play, I was all for charity. So I’m sitting there and I’m sitting next to this guy, just like you described. Wall of muscle and I was like, Hey, like obviously you work out. Who heck are you? And then the guy next to him, Larry David is the guy next to him, says, “So Tebow what’s up.” And I’m like, “Oh s***, that’s Tim Tebow.” But I had no idea who he was because I don’t recognize any football player, except for Nick Foles because he is a buddy otherwise I’m clueless. So I would, I would hit you up in the grocery store and be like, you must be famous. So that’s awesome. And you’re getting that because you look. I mean, look at the cover of the book, it’s ridiculous.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: How old are you?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m 44.

Dave Asprey: You’re 44.

Dr. John Jaquish: I put on this muscle after turning 40. I got to point that out because that’s very rare.

Dave Asprey: You’re more muscular than you were even when we first hang out.

Dr. John Jaquish: Of course. Yeah. 40 pounds more. Yeah.

Dave Asprey: How many times a week or how many minutes a week do you use the X3?

Dr. John Jaquish: The workout’s 10 minutes. I mean, if you’re moving at a clip, you can get it down in 10 minutes. I tend to catch my breath a little bit more, so it might be 15, but six days a week. So I work out an hour a week.

Dave Asprey: Got it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: Life is tough.

Dr. John Jaquish: As I said, it’s a hard workout. It’s exhaustion beyond level. So like the way I explain the technology is X3 allows you to train with greater force, which gets you to a greater level of fatigue and then triggers more growth. And more growth than you’ve ever seen. Now here’s something Dr. Baker helped me out with, Sean Baker.

Dave Asprey: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So he’s a world record weightlifter and an X3 user. And he liked the title Weightlifting is a Waste of Time. And he said-

Dave Asprey: It’s a great title.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And he says and I lift weights. And I read this and it’s just like, I see it and he goes, my initial response, I got to know what this guy’s saying because I don’t think weight lifting is a waste of time. And these are his words, when I read the book, I realize what you’re trying to say. You’re saying that there’s just a much more strategic approach to reducing the chances of injury and upregulating your opportunity for growth?

Because the point of working out isn’t getting your workout done. You can do a sh*** workout that’ll never yield your progress. And you can do that every day and pat yourself on the back but at some point, you’re going to get injured. You’re going to quit and you’re never going to have made any progress and nobody looking at you will ever know you ever worked out. But he says your programming is for absolute maximum results. And yeah, I mean, he sees it. He sees it in his own experiences. And he liked that name and approach.

Dr. John Jaquish: Another thing he said was you got to point out to people. And I put this right on the back of the book that fitness like fitness as a concept is probably the most failed human endeavor.

Dave Asprey: That’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, humans have screwed up a lot of stuff, but nothing more than our health. And we butchered our health. And we know that being lean and being strong are the two greatest drivers of long life, yet weak and fat is how you would describe the majority of the world’s population. And then some people work out and we all know, I mean, you probably know 100 people like this, most people probably know 10 people like this, people who go to the gym a couple of days a week and have been doing so for years and they have never seen anything change. Nothing. One of the first references in the… So in the book, 250 studies are summarized. By the way, I get criticized for the book as like an ad for my products. Now, I describe the rationale-

Dave Asprey: Like man.

Dr. John Jaquish: You got that same crap too. Like, oh, go away.

Dave Asprey: You got to just tell the critics to kiss your ass. People say the same thing for him, like guys, no one knows about collagen. No one knows about MCT oil or the benefits of butter. So yeah, I’m going to write about all that and of course, I make them because I couldn’t buy them and now they’re all billion-dollar categories. So if you want to complain that an author cares enough to write a book and launch products about it, then don’t read the books. You’re kind of an idiot.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Just go and live in a cave.

Dave Asprey: Don’t learn new things. Because people will make stuff…

Dr. John Jaquish: Go and be fat and weak and post on Instagram about how loud you can grunt and throw your weights against the ground. Because these are the kind of losers I’m dealing with. You get nutrition trolls, I get gym people.

Dave Asprey: Look there’s a whole bunch of angry…

Dr. John Jaquish: And they’re stupid.

Dave Asprey: There are the angry calorie people, and you mentioned…

Dr. John Jaquish:…calories.

Dave Asprey: There’s an angry calorie, they’re mostly angry because they’re in a calorie deficit. You get the angry vegans, you get the angry ketos, and then you get the angry gym people. And all of them have something wrong biologically, and that’s what drives their anger.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. The gym people are in chronic pain if they even go to the gym at all. A lot of them are in such chronic pain, they quit going to the gym. So got string bean arms and a double chin and yet they’re like going around on the internet acting like they’re the world’s foremost experts. It’s great.

Dave Asprey: I want to ask you about these three aspects of strength that a lot of people don’t think about. And okay, muscles size, and strength, everyone thinks about that. So that’s one of them. The other one is ligaments and tendons.

Dr. John Jaquish: They require different stimuli.

Dave Asprey: They do. And then there’s interstitial tissue, which no one thinks about in the west. But if you look get like a Shaolin, that guy has no muscle, but they can stand on one finger and do all this stuff. It’s because there’s a different kind of interstitial strength.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Dave Asprey: When you’re dealing with X3, talk to me about not just muscles, but talk to me about ligaments and tendons and that interstitial strength without bulk. How does all that work?

Dr. John Jaquish: So there’s a great study from 1996 by Benjamin and Ralphs that talks about fibrocartilage uptake. And they’re very careful the way they worded that so that they didn’t say you’re growing back your cartilage or you’re growing tendons and ligaments, you’re thickening your tendons and ligaments which makes some, not only more powerful but the discharge when like, let’s say you trip and fall and you’ve got to protect yourself, put your arms up in front of you, a discharge over a larger surface area means that there’s less concentration of force thereby avoiding a tendonous rupture.

Dr. John Jaquish: So to stimulate tendon ligament growth, it takes very high levels of force axially, so meaning training in the strongest range with very heavyweight, weights that are far beyond what we could get in a gym. That’s exactly how X3 works. Because able to grow your tendons and ligaments. And this is why so many people use X3. We have over 100,000 customers now and they’re saying this is like the weirdest thing. I’ve had chronic tendonitis in my elbow and I never even messaged your company about it because I just thought I was just going to have to live with that forever, that was a permanent injury and I’ve been pain-free since the second week of using X3.

And I just thought it was a fluke, but now six months have gone by and it’s just nothing, no pain. And so that’s the reason why because we’re building the thickness of the tendons and the ligaments based on that loading in that higher more capable range of motion. So remember, and we said this on the first, first podcast and which I urge everybody to listen to, especially listen to both of them because there’s a big change in what’s happened since then.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re seven times stronger in your impact-ready range of motion. So when you trip and fall, you go to protect yourself. The back of the hand is in line with the clavicle. So right here, and there’s a 120-degree angle between the upper and lower arm. So when that happens, you can either absorb in a fall or create the greatest amount of force, only in that very specific position.

And it is not a linear relationship downward to where you would start the movement. So it’s a curve and it’s a very aggressive curve. And I put that two chapters in the book about those curves and the strength capacity. So you go from X, you can hold at the bottom, and then in the middle, you might be at like 2X, but at the top, you’re more like 5X.

Dave Asprey: Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And it has to do too with the stretchiness and that just happens to work out nicely with that. Okay. They had a-

Dr. John Jaquish: We did have to do some engineering there, but yeah.

Dave Asprey: I can imagine. I had a thing about maybe four years ago when SARMs were something I was working to bring into biohacking. I put on 29 pounds of muscle in six weeks without changing my workout or my nutrition. And I ended up giving myself a shoulder injury because my strength grew dramatically, but my ligaments and tendons didn’t.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. They didn’t. That is a problem with anabolic steroids too.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. It is. And I did heal it and I used stem cells and all that sort of stuff, so my range of motion and pain and all is gone. When people are doing SARMs or anabolic steroids, they’re putting on muscle rapidly, but they’re doing the X3, are they less likely in your experience, there may not be a study, but just from what you’ve seen, are they less likely to experience an injury compared to weightlifting?

Dr. John Jaquish: Speaking from experience and MRIs that people have sent me, the answer is yes. .