How to Build Strength Faster – John Jaquish, Ph.D., with Dave Asprey, Part 2 – 863

Building bone density and longevity was the focus in part 1 of our two-part episode with Dr. John Jaquish. Now in Part 2, our conversation dives into John’s other findings and lifestyle choices, both as a public figure, a mentor for professional athletes, and a fasting enthusiast.

Full Transcript

Dave Asprey: 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.

Dave Asprey: Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: You would be less likely to injure based on the loading curve of X3.

Dave Asprey: When we talk about the loading curve, I’m going to expound on that a little bit and correct me if I need correcting. Guys, if you’re picking up a heavy bar loaded with weight, and you wobble a little bit, it accelerates at that 9.8 meters per second squared, and all the proprioceptors, the little local networks that are trying to protect your joints and the rest of your body, they inhibit you from doing that.

But if it wobbles a little bit too much, it weighs more and then you get overloaded. But if you’re dealing with an elastic band, gravity is not the accelerator. Because of that, you’re not getting the same risk of injury because you can’t wobble and have it continue to accelerate almost indefinitely like it’s in free fall, which is what happens if you drop a bar. Good description?

Dr. John Jaquish: Good description.

Dave Asprey: All right.

Dr. John Jaquish: That wouldn’t be good for most of the trolls out there. They wouldn’t be able to understand it. You’re speaking above their reading level.

Dave Asprey: They’re welcome to comment if they want to. It means they’re listening, and maybe someday there’ll be fewer trolls when they realize they were bullied in seventh grade and that’s why they act like trolls.

Dr. John Jaquish: Man, you taught me a great lesson, and this was before I got trolled hard. You were like, “These clowns bring their friends who aren’t always as stupid as they are, and their friends will buy the product.” I was like, “Really?”

Dave Asprey: It’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you got harassed by a whole bunch of clowns and it did nothing but make sales go up.

Dave Asprey: I had a mob of them that were sent over by Rogen when he was starting or investing in a competing company. Yeah, it was pretty traumatic at the time, but the reality is that it was helping to sell more. Even recently, this is a great thing, you’ll want to do this. Some guy I never heard of called Fitness Chef in the UK nominated me for the biggest con artist of the year because I talked about circadian rhythms or something. I’m like, “Who is this guy?” I took him up and he’s one of these guys-

Dr. John Jaquish: He doesn’t think circadian rhythms are a thing?

Dave Asprey: No, he doesn’t. He also thinks-

Dr. John Jaquish: You don’t even have a product around that.

Dave Asprey: Exactly. He also thinks that diet soda does the same thing. He’s one of those people, it’s okay to eat Oreos all day as long … Anyway, not a-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. There’s a couple of idiots that are out there like, “Espousing that aspartame is great.” You’re like, “People are fatter and sicker than ever, especially those who consume more aspartame.”

Dave Asprey: It’s dumb. Here’s the hardcore-

Dr. John Jaquish: Research s*** dude, what?

Dave Asprey: With trolls like that, you put them on your page and you use their handle as a discount code on the X3 bar. That’s what I did.

Dr. John Jaquish: Beautiful.

Dave Asprey: Fitness Chef drove 10s of 1000s of dollars of sales of my circadian product using his account name.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. He might like that a lot.

Dave Asprey: Right? Thank you, Fitness Chef. I love you, brother. Could you say more about me?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s funny. There was a guy recently who … I like him. I’m not going to mention names, just because I don’t want to have …. The guy was a real jerk. But I kind of like the fact that he raises at least awareness of some science.

Dave Asprey: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. This guy’s just like … He trolled me based on the promotion of fasting, and it’s like he’s all about calories in, calories out.

Dave Asprey: Oh my God.

Dr. John Jaquish: Hormones don’t exist to this guy.

Dave Asprey: There are still people like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s just like, “Okay, dude. First of all, I’m not one or the other.” I might do … I eat one meal a day, that’s an intermittent fast, and then my meal is a caloric deficit, but I’m getting a protein surplus. We know you can gain muscle and lose body fat at the same time. Now, testosterone crashes within 30 days of doing that, but I do have a prescription for testosterone replacement therapy. Maybe one of the only advantages is that. It’s funny, I don’t care how many times I mention that I have testosterone replacement therapy.

Dave Asprey: People do the same to me. I’m like it’s an anti-aging thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s the body yesterday. I’m not trying to hide it.

Dave Asprey: It’s in all my books. People used to go … I’m like, “Guys, just stop. If you want to find a problem, you can find one, but it might be you.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. Frequently.

Dave Asprey: And that’s okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Go look in the mirror in the bathroom. That’s where the problem is.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I can avoid that based on the TRT. Oh, here’s another funny thing. I think you got this, I think you were the one that stimulated me to do this. Somebody who said you had been on TRT and that’s why you had such an advantage.

Dave Asprey: Of course, unfair advantage. I’m also on the thyroid. Gee, it’s like I’m going to-

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Dave Asprey: … live a long time or something. Who would have thought?

Dr. John Jaquish: Whatever. Yeah. Also, you get a decent night’s sleep and you work on your sleep. Is that an unfair advantage to everybody else? Should the police come over and bang on your window in the middle of the night just to make it fair?

Dave Asprey: That’s right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right. Yeah. I lost my place here. What the hell was I saying? Yeah. Oh, yeah. If you look up testosterone replacement therapy as defined by WebMD, which is better than the FDA.

Dave Asprey: A little bit. I don’t know. Anyone who Google will rate on a health thing is not a reliable source. I don’t use Google anymore for health searches. But I think WebMD rates too highly on Google, so it’s probably not accurate.

Dr. John Jaquish: Probably.

Dave Asprey: Sorry, guys.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. But they defined testosterone replacement as a natural level of testosterone. Full stop. It’s okay.

Dave Asprey: That’s what it means. What are your average numbers when you are on a replacement?

Dr. John Jaquish: What are the advantages? There are advantages. If you miss a night’s sleep, does your testosterone crash? No, but it normally would. Or if you drink a bunch of alcohol, does your testosterone crash? No, but it normally would. Those are a couple of advantages. But the one I’m-Just living longer seems like a good deal to me.

Dr. John Jaquis: What? Say that again? Say it again?

Dave Asprey: Plus, living longer seems like a good deal to me. There’s always that.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s that.

Dave Asprey: I published the studies about that aging book, but people just get mad about it. But what are your levels? Where are you normally targeting when you do TRT?

Dr. John Jaquish: My endocrinologist wants me around 1,000, a little over 1,000.

Dave Asprey: I target between 800 and 1,000, for me and that seems to work well. If I go above that, I don’t know that I get a lot of advantages, but-

Dr. John Jaquish: No, you get side effects.

Dave Asprey: … it doesn’t feel quite right. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then it’s like you start getting symptoms that you’re converting some to estrogen, which should not happen. If you have those symptoms, you’re taking too much.

Dave Asprey: Yep. I’m with you there.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve won over a lot of endocrinologists, including my own, because I’m like, “Look, you’re not supposed to be … Aromatase inhibitors, they’re not candy. You shouldn’t give them away like that.” Because they have a much bigger downside than testosterone does. For those that don’t know what an aromatase inhibitor is it slows your estrogen down or shuts your estrogen production down while you have the high androgenic in your body. Well, testosterone is converting to estrogen for a reason. It’s because you have too much and you’re not using it. Cut back, and you got to work with your doctor on this. If you get a testosterone prescription, it’s not there so that you can have a supernatural dosage. That would be illegal and your doctor would be thrown in jail if that was the objective and that’s never the objective. The objective is to get you at the most healthy level, which means you don’t have side effects.

Dave Asprey: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. I was originally prescribed 200 milligrams, and now I take like 140?

Dave Asprey: A week?

Dr. John Jaquish: A week.

Dave Asprey: Once a week or twice a week?

Dr. John Jaquish: Once a week.

Dr. John Jaquish: I do 70. Wow. I do 70 once a week, maybe 75. That seems to be enough. But there’s a lot of evidence that says if I cut that into two, cut it in half, and did it twice a week, more frequent dosing seems to be healthier. It’s just a pain in the ass literally to stick a needle-

Dave Asprey: Literally.

Dr. John Jaquish: … into your ass.

Dave Asprey: Stick a needle.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you could also do subcutaneous shots. Those aren’t-

Dave Asprey: Yeah, those aren’t so bad. There is some evidence. A Sub-Q is more effective on a per meal basis, but it probably aromatase is more easily than going into muscle. I did a lot of research on that, and I switched from Sub-Q going to IM, and I’m getting better results on IM. But I’ve played around a lot and it may be individual variability. You talked about something else in your book that’s cool about an anabolic rebound after fasting. Tell me what you’ve written about there.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes, yes. Okay. You’ve never met Henry, my co-author. He’s one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. He’s just awesome. I called him one day and I’m describing something, and every time I get done with a fast, whether it’s a 24 hour fast, or 72-hour fat, whatever, I feel like I have … It’s like I went through puberty again for a day, and I just put on a pound of muscle. All of a sudden, I look a little different, or like I was already leaner, but all of a sudden, it’s like muscle came on but none of the body fat or even hydration even came back. I feel like I’m gaining muscle at an abnormally high level. Here’s what I want you to do. The problem with the fasting studies is fasting is generally looking for weight loss, fat loss, checking hydration, but it’s also … They’re looking at body composition.

Dr. John Jaquish: If somebody abnormally gains muscle, it’ll be recorded. But it probably won’t be in the abstract. What I want you to do is read the discussion section. I think we were referencing 20 different fasting studies at the time. This is why we were writing the book. Read the discussion section and look for any abnormal gain in muscle mass.

Because the researchers were looking for it. It will not be the thrust of the study. The thrust of the study will only be about whether this is a good weight-loss method or not. Henry says to me, he’s like, “That is like … The chances of me finding that are next to zero. That’s a really specific request.” I said, “Just humor me.” It was in the morning, I’m like, “Just give me the rest of the day, give me seven hours. Just do this for seven hours.”

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s like, “All right.” Calls me an hour later, and he’s like, “Was this a trick? Did you read these already?” I said, “No. No.” I was actually in the middle of meetings. I was at meetings all day long. I was traveling. I said, “No, but tell me what you found.”

He goes, “I found exactly what you were describing,” and there’s one specific study that just they said we can’t explain why the fasting group gained 2.2 kilos of muscle, so five pounds of muscle, in 24 weeks, and they did not work out at all. Neither did the control group. Of course, the control group lost a little bit of muscle because they were on a caloric deficit, which is to be expected. The fasting group gained five pounds of muscle, doing nothing.

Dave Asprey: It seems like fasting might be good for you. I don’t know.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s weird.

Dave Asprey: It’s been a part of the Bulletproof diet since 2011, intermittent fasting.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s like one of the first things you wrote about. Even when all you had was the Bulletproof executive website, you were talking about it back then.

Dave Asprey: Because it was one of the things where I was seeing those results, where I was feeling better, my muscle composition, and I was getting … I had abs for the first time, even though I’d done Atkins and I tried Paleo and all that stuff and I wasn’t getting the results, it’s like just don’t have breakfast already. It’s not that hard. I love that fasting has enough studies now that it’s very hard to argue with the fact that fasting has metabolic effects. People say it doesn’t. They’re lost in cloud lands where I have a belief if I’m wrong, I’m a bad person, mommy won’t love me, and they’ll never see new ideas because new ideas will make them bad people.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, there’s a whole crowd of nutrition scientists out there that almost have an orthodox way of looking at things that are not scientific.

Dr. John Jaquish: Dismiss anything that isn’t a caloric restriction, because caloric restriction has more studies. Well, caloric restriction was studied for longer. Right?

Dave Asprey: I’ve been studying psychology a lot lately trying to understand the behavior of certain executives that I’ve hired in some of my portfolios, and I realize … In fact, I’ve seen the studies now, what narcissists do. Anytime they’re wrong, it means they’re bad people and it means no one will love them. Therefore, they can never be wrong, and they will walk off a cliff. When you get a narcissist who was either bullied or abused by their parents and they become a research scientist in nutrition, they will find an idea, they’ll glom on to it, and they would rather die than evolve their thinking, because no one will love them if they evolve their thinking.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re biased. They just have a confirmation bias going into absolutely everything they do, and it’s just beyond me. Also, I don’t see either-or. Its caloric restriction is fine. Intermittent fasting is better, but …

Dave Asprey: You could do both if you want, or you could try-

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s just mind-blowing how unscientific they’re willing to be when it comes to something that they made a stand against. I don’t want to get political, but I just remember when George W. Bush just wouldn’t admit that he was wrong about weapons of mass destruction, and it was just like … I think the world would have forgiven the guy if he’d just said, “Our data said it was there, and it wasn’t.”

Dave Asprey: Yep, well-

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s all he needed to say. It was just like, he was a wildly unpopular president in the second term because he just wouldn’t say it.

Dave Asprey: The recipe for government is very tightly tied to that never be wrong, do whatever it takes to stay in power lines. Okay. That’s not a partisan thing. That’s just, what’s the rule of government? Don’t lose power, and it doesn’t matter what you do. Because if you lose power, you’re not a good government.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re not government anymore.

Dave Asprey: Exactly. It’s like we can teach though, in academia, you’re not the government. We can teach you to be kind as a scientist, and to be humble, and to be curious. When you see those, those are the ones who change the world. Because they’re, “Oh, my God, I always thought this and now I saw new evidence so I evolved my learning versus I defended my pedestal.” I’m just so tired of that. You’re seeing, that these things crumble because of social media. We all talk about stuff that works, and then you get all these crusty old academics who are saying, “Can’t be, therefore, it isn’t.” Same thing, X3 case in point, right?

Dave Asprey: You can’t put muscle on faster than you can put muscle on, and you say, “But I just did.” These are the same people who said you can’t put butter in your coffee because you’ll die. They’re like, “Well, that’s funny. People lost a million pounds and they improve their blood markers.” That’s so weird, right? I’m with you there. You talked about some other radical stuff, though, that we haven’t touched on. Taking carbs and Viagra together to trigger a muscle cell splitting. Okay, what’s up with this? Are you telling me I can take Viagra to grow muscles other than the one it’s supposed to grow?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep.

Dave Asprey: All right, tell me how that works and what I could do that wasn’t pharmaceutical.

Dr. John Jaquish: What I was looking at was how do we induce hyperplasia? Hyperplasia is the splitting of muscle cells. It’s very rare. Professor Jose Antonio at Florida State University has done the most work. This is like the protein guy. He’s one of the world’s experts on protein consumption and building muscle, and just what you generally need for health. A brilliant guy, but he did his doctoral work on hyperplasia. What he would do is take birds and put them into an extremely stretched position. Pull their wings way back, and he-

Dave Asprey: Sounds mean.

Dr. John Jaquish: Animal studies. Hey, it’d be better we did it to people, but I don’t think people would agree to 24 hours of being in a stretched position.

Dave Asprey: As long as you eat the birds when you’re done. It’s probably better than what they do to industrial chickens.

Dr. John Jaquish: Probably.

Dave Asprey: There’s that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, there’s that. He showed, he demonstrated in his research that these birds could grow, they could increase their muscle mass in the pectoral muscles by 140% with the stretching. Well, stretching doesn’t do it for humans, and birds are very different biomechanically, biochemically. Yoga people don’t put on muscle. We know that that’s not a thing.

Dave Asprey: Is that true? Because when I did yoga, I was freaking ripped.

Dr. John Jaquish: Really?

Dave Asprey: I couldn’t believe it. But you do crow pose. That’s some weight-bearing exercise, handstands, and all that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Sure. Yeah. There are aspects of that, but it’s not like bodybuilders are like, “Oh, forget weights. I do yoga.”

Dave Asprey: Oh, yeah. You will not be a bodybuilder, but you can get pretty muscular from yoga if you’re doing a muscular practice.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, there’s something there, and that’s where I’m going. The idea is you stretch the fascia of the muscle, the casing around the muscle, and that’s one of the limitations when it comes to stimulating the muscle and either having growth of the cell or splitting of the cell. If there’s extra room in there, the cell can split. What you do is you take a vasodilator, which would be like Viagra or tadalafil.

Dave Asprey: Niacin?

Dr. John Jaquish: You can take niacin. You can take niacin. You can take epimedium. I think epimedium … I don’t know. Every form I’ve ever stumbled upon it, it was just the worst smelling, worst tasting thing ever. But niacin would work. Yeah, just as long as you get vasodilation, and then you want to super hydrate the muscles. What I do is I take like 40 grams of glucose, glucose tablets, which you can find in any drugstore usually in the diabetes treatment section. I’ll do that. An hour before the workout, I’d take the vasodilator. 15 minutes before the workout, 40 grams of glucose, workout, and then stretch afterward. The blood’s rushing into the muscle. I’ve hyper hydrated the muscle. Now when I stretch, the fascia is put at such an extreme that it is stretching to trigger hyperplasia.

Dave Asprey: That’s cool. Wouldn’t a little bit of creatine help as well?

Dr. John Jaquish: It could, but you know how much red meat I eat.

Dave Asprey: But if you took a micronized creatine at the beginning of that, glucose is of course going to be good. Nothing is stopping glucose in your pre-workout, or hell, you can put in your Bulletproof coffee if you want to have a great day. You don’t want to do it all the time because it’s bad for you. But if it’s a high-performance day, 20, 30 grams of glucose plus the MCT is holy crap, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Dave Asprey: But the coffee and all isn’t going to do anything for your protocol here. Epimedium is a horny goat weed. How much of that would you recommend? I’ve taken that stuff on and off.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t remember the-

Dave Asprey: You don’t remember the dose? Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dave Asprey: Is it a normal dose or is it a lot?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, it’s the normal dosage.

Dave Asprey: Okay, got it. You take a couple-

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s whatever it says on the bottle.

Dave Asprey: … of capsules of that stuff?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Asprey: Okay. A couple of capsules of horny goat, some glucose. Could use honey. It doesn’t spike quite as high, but you probably could use it-

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Dave Asprey: … if you wanted to.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Honey is fine.

Dave Asprey: All right. Sizeable-

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I’m not a big fan of fructose.

Dave Asprey: Me either. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, the studies are not a fan of fructose either. There’s a pretty new study called F is for Fat, F is for Fructose. Did you read it?

Dave Asprey: I haven’t read it, but I came across it. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s pretty new. It’s this year. Oh yeah, it showed like 25% more fat storage when they took two groups of people that they primarily gave fructose to versus glucose. The fructose crowd put on a lot of body fat and the glucose crowd. There wasn’t a high amount in either case. But it seems a lot like the fructose went right to fat storage.

Dave Asprey: Oh, it does. It raises triglycerides. Gus, if you’re listening, fructose, glucose, sucrose, the sugar that you normally eat, white sugar, brown sugar, all that kinds of coconut sugar, it’s half glucose and fructose. If you’re eating high fructose corn syrup and honey and agave and all that, it’s got way too much fructose in it. There’s a ratio. There’s an argument, it’s on the Bulletproof diet even, that you toss out the fructose, you minimize that. If you’re going to have carbs, you have glucose. You’re still going to get advanced glycation. It’s not good to spike your sugar all the time. But if you were to do it once or twice a week in conjunction with stretching after a workout and it fixed your fascia, all right. I’m thinking that the risk-reward and the pros and cons, the pros are-

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Dave Asprey: … ahead there. You’re saying you don’t bother with horny goat weed, you just go straight for Viagra? It’s your favorite?

Dr. John Jaquish: I use tadalafil. Tadalafil.

Dave Asprey: Tadalafil? All right. Got it. Okay. It has other side effects. I wonder is there any peptide you could use there? PT-141 doesn’t cause vasodilation, but it sure has other Viagra-like effects. Anything like that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Thus far, like SARMs and peptides, I have not recommended or tried, only because a lot of them don’t have enough research behind them so I’m just super cautious.

Dave Asprey: Wow. BPC has enough research. That stuff is awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: It probably does. Yeah, I just haven’t.

Dave Asprey: Okay, got it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it could, but-

Dave Asprey: Guys, BPC is BPC-157, which is a gastric healing peptide that will heal a lot of injuries that people get. You can take it orally or you can take it injection-wise.

Dr. John Jaquish: Has that ever been trialed for stomach ulcers?

Dave Asprey: Oh, tons. Even IBS-

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s what I thought.

Dave Asprey: … and Crohn’s, they get better. You need to kill whatever’s causing the ulcer if you have H. pylori or whatever. But it’s-

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m asking because I had H. Pylori.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. You got to kill the H. Pylori, even grapefruit seed extract. There are natural ways, silver, or you could take antibiotics, but then it just heals fast. It’s meant to be active orally, and so it’s probably the best studied and safest of all the peptides other than maybe GHK, which is something you find in collagen anyway. That’s a copper tripeptide.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. One thing I want … This is a discovery I made while writing the book , and I couldn’t wait to talk to you about it. First, the premise of the book is the standard approach to fitness isn’t working. Most-

Dave Asprey: Yeah, it’s not.

Dr. John Jaquish: … people who work out all the time don’t see any results. Nothing. 23%. One of the first studies I cite shows a 23%. A quarter of the people cannot trigger muscle protein synthesis at all, no matter what they do.

Dave Asprey: What the heck? How is it even possible?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, that was the question. Now, in this particular study that I’m talking about, I just noticed that a lot of people who weren’t already filtered out strength athletes, because a lot of strength studies just use strength athletes, and a lot of them just use beginners. A quarter of them doesn’t have any response at all. It screws with the study. There’s a precondition to be muscle gainers already before a lot of these studies happen. When this particular study took a chunk of the general population and looked at it, they weren’t triggering any growth at all. The question is why? I always get a little bothered when somebody says everybody’s different, find out what’s right for you. That’s the cop-out. That’s for the people who want to eat Twinkies all day, and they’re like, “I do better with high carbs.” No, you don’t. You just want to eat that way.

Dave Asprey: I don’t know. There’s about 10% of the population who genuinely does better on high starch, but not high sugar.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay, yeah. Right.

Dave Asprey: Right? That’s a real thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ll take that. What I ended up looking at was what are the genetic differences between people? That’s where the book concluded, that’s at the end of the book. I look at hormonal differences. Hormonal differences, deficiencies aside, aren’t that big of a deal. Most People who are 20 years old are all the same.

Dave Asprey: That’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, pretty much all the same. Same level testosterone, same level … Races are a little different. Black people have higher testosterone than White people than Hispanic people than Asian people. But also not drastic differences. But here was the stark difference, and it was that the tendon layout where the muscles connect a bone is usually the same. However, there are outliers, and those outliers can become very powerful people. If you look at my arm if my-

Dave Asprey: You have ridiculous arms. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks, dude. If you look at my arm, and I’ll describe it for the people who are just listening to this, you have your pectoral and inserts on the sternum, and then somewhere on the humerus bone, usually right at the start of the humerus bone towards the top. But some people have a mutation. They have an attachment at the other end of the humerus bone. Now, they’ve got incredible leverage on their pectoral muscle. Therefore, they’re able to engage the weaker range of motion to a greater degree than you. These are the people who become NFL players. These are the people who seem gifted. These are the people who … I knew a guy in high school. He looked like a professional bodybuilder, 17 years old, and he looked like he was on every drug you could imagine.

Dr. John Jaquish: But no. The guy was just mowing lawns for the summer and went through puberty, and all of a sudden, he was gigantic, and he was our best football player in high school. Yeah. We all shrugged our shoulders, and I was friends with him, it was just like I guess it’s genetic. Well, the genetic difference was I watched this guy bench press, he seemed to bench press with no sticking point.

You know about it. Just getting it off the chest, and this is the sticking point. Whereas other people, this guy was … a little more trouble in here, but then when he got to the top, he got to the top. We have a certain group of people, maybe 1% of the population, that has this tendon mutation. They’re the ones that can become outrageously strong. Now, there’s the limit to the strength they can gain, but when you have a high degree of variable resistance in your training, their advantage is gone.

Dave Asprey: Oh really?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes, and that is why X3 works so well. That is the main thrust of why I want everybody to read Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. Why once you understand this … Also, I love the NFL. I have I think … No, 19 NFL players I’m working with right now, and you can see them all on the website. Terrell Owens is one of them.

Dave Asprey: Nice.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s still in NFL condition and he loves X3. He came to us, and we have an unpaid endorsement from one of the NFL Hall of Famer, one of the great receivers-

Dave Asprey: That’s cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: … that has ever lived. What he can do … Now, he does have this mutation, but it’s still an advantage for him because he’s offloading the weaker range of motion and hyper loading the stronger range of motion. That’s the difference between these athletes that can access more of the muscle in the weaker range of motion. In essence, anything he does is almost like variable resistance.

Dave Asprey: Very cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: But not to the same degree. Now that X3 s available to the public, everybody can take advantage. Everybody can gain like the NFL. What I love about the NFL is they are drug tested like you wouldn’t believe. When you look at an NFL player and their conditioning, that’s natural, that’s real.

Dave Asprey: We humans aren’t built to sit in a chair for hours on end. It makes your brain tired, your joints get stiff and creaky, you end up with chronic pain and your brain just doesn’t work. Standing increases your spinal alignment, boosts the supply of oxygen-rich blood cells that get into your brain, and the wooden Harmoni standing desk solves the sitting problem easily. It’s got two shelves, one for your keyboard, one for your laptop. There are only four pieces on the desk. They slot together in less than 15 seconds so you can move it anywhere you want to work. It’s height-adjustable, even while you’re using it, so you can stand and sit and just move your body around the way it was meant to.

Dave Asprey: It uses only sustainably harvested solid wood and several finishes, birch, oak, walnut, and maple, so it even looks good. You want to try a stylish, very simple, and affordable easy standing desk, go to Harmoni, that’s H-A-R-M-O-N-Idesk.com. Use code Dave 20, and they’ll save you 20 bucks off any desk. This is a quick, easy, and good-looking way to have a standing desk. That’s H-A-R-M-O-N-Ideck.com. Use code Dave 20. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. It is real. I came up with this idea. I read about it actually in the fastest way. It was the first time I elucidated it. I called the slope of the curve biology, and we’ve often thought, for endurance exercises, how much time, how many calories did you burn?

Dave Asprey: What was the total energy output? This comes from the calories in, calories out kind of thinking. But it appears that the most biological adaptation comes from not the area under the curve, the total volume of work you did, but with how quickly did you go from zero to 100 and back to zero? A very brief spike of almost anything causes way more adaptation than spiking up to 70%.

Dr. John Jaquish: The stronger the stimuli. For sure.

Dave Asprey: It’s not just the strength of the stimuli, it’s the rapid onset and the strength. In other words, it’s like a vertical wall of, oh my God, I can’t do this, causes way more benefits than I could barely do it and I did it for three minutes. Right? Does that seem to jive? I feel like the X3 is one of the things that turns on that muscle simulation faster than lifting heavy stuff.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah. No matter what, you’re training with a higher weight with more repetitions than you could ever handle in a conventional setting. Yeah, absolutely. It is the most intense stimulus a muscle’s ever going to get, and the muscles respond.

Dave Asprey: Cool. One more question for you. In your new book, you talk about some nutritional recommendations. You and I, with the Bulletproof diet, we’re very close to an agreement. How did you dial into where you ended up? There are a few small differences, but how did you there?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m glad you asked this question. My approach was you had a whole series of challenges, as a Silicon Valley executive, to get past when it came to your brain function when it came to just brain fog. Just-

Dave Asprey: By losing weight, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: For me, it was more like, okay, I need to recommend a nutrition program, something, and I had always been … I was ketogenic before without really even knowing, as I told you. Shane wrote about in his book years and years ago. It was like all these bio hacks that involved all these highly illegal drugs, and I was like, “Wow, this book is useless with the exception is one section about ketogenic nutrition.” That’s the only thing I could do in that book. Everything else was just curiosity. Like, “Wow, I’m surprised you didn’t die running this experiment, Dan.” Coincidentally, he did die young. Nobody knows how.

Dave Asprey: It’s true.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think there’s a documentary film coming out about that guy’s life and I can’t wait to see it.

Dave Asprey: Interesting guy. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Very interesting. Chris Bell is doing a movie.

Dave Asprey: Oh, is it Chris? Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dave Asprey: I was just texting with him yesterday.

Dr. John Jaquish: What a great guy. Yeah, and it’ll be an amazing movie, as all of his movies are. I knew about ketogenesis and I knew that it might be somewhere in there. But I wanted to pick the nutrition that was associated with the longest life because that’s really where we all want to go. We want to live the longest. Now, you start reading nutrition research about longest life, and because Nabisco wants everybody to be vegan only because they know that vegans don’t eat kale, they eat cookies and cakes, they want to promote their products. There are so many bizarre funding conflicts in nutrition research.

Dr. John Jaquish: I tried to go in a different direction. What are the things about the human body that make people live the longest? Then when I go from that point, it doesn’t matter what the conflicts are because I already have a start point. What was going to make people live the longest? There were two things I came across the were absolutely 100% stark, and it was being strong and being lean. If you’re strong and lean, you’re going to live longer and everybody else.

Dave Asprey: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: I was like, “Okay, strong and lean. How do you get strong and lean? What’s the best nutrition for the greatest amount of strength and the lowest levels of body fat?” It’s like ketogenic carnivore-type nutrition. Now, I wanted to be at a caloric deficit more often than not, so I chose lower levels of body fat and higher levels of protein. That’s the only difference between what you’re telling people and what I’m telling people.

Dave Asprey: Yep. Yep. My target, by the way, isn’t as lean as you can get. My target is 10% to 13% longevity levels of leanness, and what you’re talking about may confer longevity because you’re saying I have extra amino. I don’t think we have enough evidence to say that that’s the maximum longevity diet. But I got to say, you look pretty good. What can we do?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. As I said, the information would go against what I’m doing. Your body fat is too low, these were people that were starving to death. They had all kinds of problems-

Dave Asprey: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: … that I don’t have.

Dave Asprey: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: I also may determine that 7% is just as low as my body wants me to get. It’s a shame that this … I don’t even want to call it a sport. The pageantry of bodybuilding is … Bodybuilders will agree with this. I’m not making fun of bodybuilding. It is a sport of illusions. I can hold my arm …

Dave Asprey: The mic out of the way?

Dr. John Jaquish: I can hold my arm like this or like this, it looks bigger when I hold it up at an angle because the cross-section is longer. Right? They know this. The guys who are presenting themselves on stage, want to do so so that if they have a wide set of hips, they want to pivot their waist just a little bit every time they’re showing the audience their hips so the waist looks narrower and the upper body looks bigger. They’re contouring muscle. The tan they put on is a little darker, where the shadows are supposed to be.

Dave Asprey: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a little lighter where the shadows aren’t. Then, of course, they … It’s just all sorts of things they’re doing, with carb-loading right at the last minute. The carbohydrates go into the muscle and not into the skin because there’s a lag there. What they look like on stage or for a photoshoot, they only look like that for maybe an hour or two. It’s like if you know that because you know people who are in the sport, it loses its luster. You’re like, “Okay, this is calculated nutrition timing that has nothing to do with health. It has to do with creating an aesthetic.”

Dave Asprey: Yeah, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I just forget that whole thing. But the problem is it’s given a lot of people an unrealistic expectation as to what lean is. You want to look for how lean you probably ought to be. Look at performance athletes, because-

Dave Asprey: Exactly right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, a bodybuilder

Dave Asprey: That’s crazy lean.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, a bodybuilder will fall over if they try and sprint when they look like that at the contest.

Dave Asprey: I have lost track of the number of fitness competitors, especially women, who say, “I never looked better and I never felt worse.”

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. Yeah. I don’t know. Of course, I’m presenting a product I want people to be excited about. I want to look at my best, but do I want to go down that same road? Now I dehydrated and carb-loaded one time. I felt like total garbage. I felt like I had-

Dr. John Jaquish: … like 11 red bowls. Just splitting headache, I couldn’t open my eyes all the way, light hurt my eyes, doubled over in pain from my stomach.

Dave Asprey: But you looked good, so it was okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah, it was just like … I looked like a skin cadaver. Again, it lasted a couple of hours, and it was a week of just s*** I went through to pull that off. The photographer was like, “Well, was it worth it?” I looked at the pictures and I’m like, “I don’t know.”

Dave Asprey: Men’s Health came to my house a few years ago, and it was supposed to be a thing about Upgrade Labs, and it was. They were filming all this cool gear that I use. Then like, “All right, take your shirt off,” and I’m like, “Hold on a second, guys. I know what people do when they take their shirts off for Men’s Health, right? Diuretics and all this crap.” I’m like, “A, I’d spray tans. I haven’t done any of this crap.” The photographer’s like, “Well, all right. If you don’t like it, we won’t do it.” I’m standing there in then cryo machine with my shirt off, and I’m like, “This is just how I look. You can see stretch marks in the picture.” I was somewhere around 10.1% body fat with no prep. You know what? I look pretty good. Right? But I did not look like Wolverine. Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Dave Asprey: That’s the difference.

Dr. John Jaquish: Wolverine doesn’t even look like Wolverine. He just did for that one scene.

Dave Asprey: Exactly. If you’re listening to this going, “Oh wait. Maybe my goal isn’t to look like that all the time,” because the look of a hunted animal is the look that we’re achieving, and it’s not attractive. It’s sculpted and interesting, but in terms of actually been attracting the opposite sex to look like a good partner in bed, we know in our bones that someone that lean is a stressed hungry person and it’s not attractive. It’s okay to have a little bit more body fat and to be healthy and muscular and energetic. There’s something with our perceptions and our desires there that’s getting set by social media that will probably get turned off over a while.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Dave Asprey: Yeah. Cool. Well, John, I do want to congratulate you on the X3.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks.

Dave Asprey: It’s taken off. You’ve, like you said, 100,000 customers?

Dr. John Jaquish: 100,000. More now. But, yeah.

Dave Asprey: It’s cool. The very first thing I got to play with was when it was an unknown product, and it’s proven over the last three years that it works. Go to jaquishbiomedical.com, is the best site for it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Jaquish Biomedical. Now, people have trouble with my last name.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, it’s hard to spell.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. I have a landing page and you can get anywhere from there. It’s just Doctorj.com , D-O-C-T-O-R.

Dave Asprey: There you go.

Dr. John Jaquish: The letter J.com

Dave Asprey: Doctorj.com . D-O-C-T-O-R-J.com. Yeah, guys, go there. You can check out all the cool stuff that John’s working on. He knows a thing or two. Is there a landing page for your new book or do people go to Amazon? Or what’s the best way to get it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Doctorj.com . There’s a book. The link to the book is there. Then it says superior nutrition that takes you to, a superior exercise that takes you to X3, and then there are a couple of other scientific links.

Dave Asprey: Okay. 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, and I would-

Dr. John Jaquish: Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time.

Dave Asprey: I would agree with that 100%, and that you can do better in less time. It’s a whole hypothesis for a lot of the work that I’m doing in different businesses. Thank you for just continuing to push the limits. I want to know what happens with your how lean can I go. I want to see your labs-

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely.

Dave Asprey: … when you’re at leanest. Show me your CRP and your Lp-PLA2, and homocysteine and all that, and let’s see if you can-

Dr. John Jaquish: Let’s do it.

Dave Asprey: … break some new barriers there, John.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Dave Asprey: All right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.

Dave Asprey: Thank you, brother.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks, Dave.

Dave Asprey: If you liked today’s episode, you know what to do. Read the book. There’s always something to be picked up. There’s a lot of new research in here. You’re going to learn about how to put muscle on faster than you think you can, and a lot of other new and interesting thinking in a way that’s worth your time, and it’s called Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. Check it out.