The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #116 - John Jaquish, Ph.D.

In this episode, Dr. John Jaquish, author of the groundbreaking book Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want, dispels myths, misconceptions, and potentially faulty science in exercise science. We also explore his revolutionary fitness innovations, which build muscle and strength much faster than any conventional weight training.

Full Transcript

Melanie Avalon: Hi, friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I’m about to have. A little backstory for today’s conversation. As you guys know, I’m really into health, diet, fitness, all of those things, but I feel I’ve been pretty transparent that when it comes to exercise and the gym and muscle building and all of this stuff like that, that I am a huge proponent of the importance of supporting muscle for health and longevity. But I’m not exactly a gym goer, I don’t really know a lot about that. When we get a lot of questions on the intermittent fasting podcast, I try to do my research and answer everything intelligently. But it’s not my forte as far as knowledge is concerned. It’s been on my to-do list to learn more about exercise science. Then something just sort of fell in my lap or I guess popped up in my inbox. That was a new book out called Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want

Friends, I saw this book, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure if it was just trying to sell a product or if there was actually something behind it. I sat down, read the book, researched the author Dr. John Jaquish. Oh, my goodness, friends, this book blew me away. I wasn’t really aware about all of the myths and misconceptions and potentially faulty science in exercise science. So, I’m glad that I wasn’t indoctrinated in that. This is my indoctrination into exercise science. So, it’s nice to feel like I’m learning it the way that it should be from the beginning. But I am so excited for today’s episode. We’re going to dive deep into all of that, as well as a product which might actually revolutionize your muscle building capacity. Dr. John Jaquish, you’re a PhD, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. John Jaquish: Melanie, thanks for having me.

Melanie Avalon: Like I said, I’m very, very excited. To start things off, I teased a little bit of this briefly, but you are the founder not only of the X3 Barthat we’re going to talk about, but also OsteoStrong, which I was very familiar with. I was really interested in bone health and I did an episode on osteoporosis with the Caltons, and they talked about OsteoStrong a lot in that book. So, I’m very familiar with the concept. Would you like to tell listeners a little bit about your personal story? What led you to creating, I know this is a big question, but OsteoStrong and X3? And why are you doing what you’re doing?

Dr. John Jaquish: OsteoStrong came out of a need. My mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis, and she was in her 70s. But she was very active, and she could do anything at the time. She was hiking, she was playing tennis, she was diagnosed with osteoporosis. She was afraid that she was going to be limited in what she’d be able to do for the remainder of her life. So, it’s like, “Oh, I can’t hike anymore, I could fall and break a bone.” And for those of you who don’t know, osteoporosis is because of disuse, the bone becomes brittle. Now, a lot of people think exercise, just general exercise or walking will do something for bone. The minimum dose response for the hip joint, which is the biggest joint in question in the body, it’s the hip fractures that are as likely to cause death as breast cancer, at the rates that people have hip fractures out and die from complications from hip fractures.

My mom, she was just like, “I completely have to change my life, I can’t do anything.” And I saw her really depressed. I said, “Well, let me look into this because I don’t think is very practical when you’re as athletic as you are, and you have low bone density, just hiding at home isn’t going to make it any better. If anything, you’ll just be worse faster and then you’re going to lose muscle, you’ll have sarcopenia, that’s a spiral to death.” I looked at the dysfunction in a very different way. This was before I did my PhD. Now, my PhD advisor told me if I had tried to develop this after doing my PhD, I would have talked myself out of it because my approach was so unconventional, which I found that comment very refreshing because I always felt standard education was very much “this is how it is and never question it.” And I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think everything should be challenged.

Right now, we’re living in new political challenging times, but maybe it’s needed. Maybe people need to learn that there’s either a better way or then you learn the hard way that we were doing it the better way already. They’re just screwing stuff up now. So, but either way, it’s good to know.

When I got to this point where I developed a prototype for the device, I put my mother through it, she used the devices, the OsteoStrong devices. She used them once per week, and after 18 months, you have the bones of a 30-year-old woman. She overcompensated, not only did she not have osteoporosis, but she had the type of bone she would have normally had 40 years before that. The good news is the effect of the device lasts for 30 years in the body. So, she’ll never have to worry about bone density again. So, this is not unlike other exercise, in anything in exercise science, this is the kind of thing you can stop doing after you reach a high level of bone density, which this device provides your projected potential for the rest of your life.

When doing that study, I noticed that humans are way more powerful than we think they are, but it’s only in very specific positions. Like for example, when doing the trials for the product, this was done in University of East London, the hospital near there called Stratford Village Surgery, when that was going on, some of the test subjects in the study, and I just participated in this study from methods perspective, because you’re not, like as an inventor, I’m not allowed to collect any data or really be in the middle of the study, I just have to be an observer. So, I was an observer. One of the test subjects was one of the physicians that worked the hospital. She says to me, “I’m putting hundreds of pounds through my hip joint, when I use this device. What is this compared to someone my age or someone young and athletic, just as far as a loading event? I said, “That’s a great question, I’ll find out an answer that question.”

And as soon as I found out the answer to that question, answer is, so the people using OsteoStrong, were using six, seven, eight, nine times their body weight in their lower extremities, which is you’re stronger than, like professional strength athletes can use. But these people had never exercised, they just did six months with the OsteoStrong devices in a very limited range of motion. I’m looking at that very limited impact-ready range of motion is what you’d call it, because it’s where we would naturally absorb high impact. So, if you jump and land, there’s very specific biomechanics to your knees, hips, spine, shoulders, so that you’re in balance, and you’re able to discharge those forces throughout the body.

When I looked at this data, I did an analysis on the NHANES database, which is the database that holds the most fitness data in the world, there’s about 20,000 test subjects in that database right now, and they add 2000 a year. When I looked at that, it turns out that regular people load their lower extremities with 1.3 times their body weight when they’re beginners, and when they’re advanced 1.53 times their body weight. Now I know when people hear those numbers, they’re like, “Well, I leg press more than that.” No, you don’t, because a leg press most of the weight is going into the ground, because you’re not pushing it in a perpendicular manner away from the ground, you’re pushing it an angle. A lot of people think their legs are a lot stronger than they really are, just because of the way equipment is set up.

Aside from that, it was very apparent that people were just so much stronger in certain positions and so much weaker in others. What I thought immediately was, “Gosh, weightlifting is a terrible stimulus. What if we can change the weight in accordance to our biomechanics, to our output capacity?” So now we already had bands training, but the problem the problem with band training is band training is waste of time. Also, because if you get heavy enough to be relevant to muscle, you’re damaging your joints, because bands twist your joints. If you throw a band around your back, and you do a push up, or you throw a band around your shoulders and you stand on it and try and do a squat, you’re bending your ankles inward. Lateral force in a join, in a small joint like that, would destroy it. So, that’s why people who do band straining, they work out like a 10-pound band, which is ease more strength to put on their shirt in the morning. So, that’s never going to work.

What we needed was something to mediate much more powerful bands, so that wrists and ankles were always kept neutral, and that brought me to my second invention, which is more focused on muscle than bone called the X3. That’s really got a lot of attention around the world right now. And that was mostly the subject of the book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. It’s like, “Why did I go through the trouble of developing this? Especially when I had a great business already with OsteoStrong?” And the answer was a thing that worked ridiculously well. The first year of testing it, I put on 30 pounds of muscle, and then 15 more pounds in the subsequent year. So, after turning 40, I put on 45 pounds of muscle. Nobody really does that. People using performance enhancing drugs don’t do that, or at least not at my age. It was totally mind blowing, it worked better than I even thought. It was going to be based on the research I had.

Now, at the time, there was quite a bit of research on variable resistance, which is what I was doing, but the applications of variable resistance were so weak. And I was the one that had the actual true variance curve. I was the only guy in the world that had that based on the OsteoStrong data. So, the variance curve is, let’s say you’re doing a push up, when your nose is against the ground, you have the ability to produce X amount of force. And then as you push away from yourself in the middle of the movement, where your elbows are bent, maybe just a little straighter than 90 degrees, you might have two X capacity. And then at the top, just before your elbows lock out, you have 7X capacity. So, there’s a curve there of what your motor output can be based on the biomechanical positioning, biomechanical advantages versus disadvantages. But ultimately, the problem was that that’s not how we work out. That’s not how anybody works out. The people who had experimented with variable resistance before, they were experimenting with arbitrary numbers, like X amount of weight on their chest, and as they push away, it’s 1.2X at the top, so nowhere near what it needed to be. And, of course, how many repetitions you’re going to do, would have to do, would impact what ratio you would want versus 7X versus X on the bottom, that would be a ratio that’s more like a one rep maximum. Only a fool does one rep maximum. I mean, unless you’re in a powerlifting competition, because you don’t grow muscle from that. It’s just a great way to get hurt.

When looking at what we need is, so we do want repetitions because we want to exhaust the fuel system of the muscle, which is the ATP, the glycogen and the creatine phosphate. So, you have three fuels in your muscle, you want to get rid of all of that. And then it’s the fast you get rid of all of it, the body’s stimulated to retain, replace it and then retain even more, so you hold more fuel in the muscle and then that’s what you call sarcoplasmic growth. And then there’s myofibril growth where you stress the muscle when it’s at its points of maximums in producing force. So, you take the tissue to or you take the cell to structural fatigue, which actually 23% of people cannot get to ever, no matter what they do with regular weights. Now they can with X3 , what I developed, it has to do with their tendon layout, but I’ll get to that a little bit later.

This ended up being– It’s the world’s strongest variable resistance device. But that variable resistance that’s applied to the body is so powerful, it changes people very quickly. And the only other sticking point I had beyond that with that I noticed with some of the users was, they just weren’t getting enough protein to put on the amount of muscle that they can, so I helped with that to by developing a protein product. The real answer here, the catalyst to everything was first a bone density and then noticing that, like weightlifting just didn’t make sense when you saw what the human body was capable of and other positions.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my goodness. Okay, I’ve so many questions. This is amazing. Really quick clarification question about the variable resistance. I just want to make sure I’m understanding. Is it basically that in the muscle, there’s a lot of different positions and ways that it can be and the ability to use it to its full potential at every single point of that?

Dr. John Jaquish: You want to take it to its full potential of fatigue. That’s the important part. Are you using it to its full potential? Yes. When you’re lifting a regular weight, like let’s say you get under a bar that has 200 pounds on it, and it’s 200 pounds at the top, it’s 200 pounds at the bottom, that’s just going to be a waste of time, because at the bottom, it’s going to stress your joints, and potentially cause injury. At the top, you’re hardly firing any muscle at all, because it’s easy, because you’re far more powerful up there.

Melanie Avalon: So, you would want it to be at the top to be like more weight?

Dr. John Jaquish: Very heavy. And at the bottom really much lighter.

Melanie Avalon: So that you’re always having the maximum potential without creating injury, and without being limited by weak parts?

Dr. John Jaquish:Right. When I chest press, as I push it away from myself, just want to start, I’m holding 100 pounds, when I get to the middle of the movement, I might have 250 pounds. When I get to the top of the movement, I’m holding 550 pounds. And I get the benefit of loading the by with that 550 pounds, maybe 20 repetitions. So huge force is going through the muscle. And then, as I begin to fatigue, we use what’s called Diminishing Range. That’s something I came up with, where as you begin to fatigue, because you’re using variable resistance, you just don’t go to the top anymore, because you can’t. So, you go however far as you can go, and you start doing shorter repetitions, until your last repetition is like an inch and then you’re done.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, gotcha.

Dr. John Jaquish:So, you fatigue the muscle to a much, much more extreme degree than anything else ever could. And thereby a greater growth response happens.

Melanie Avalon: Actually, going back to and even more foundational question. Comparing bone growth or bone strength to muscle strength. What is the parallel there because I know when we think of muscle, and maybe there’s more nuance to this, which you talk about in the book? When we think of building muscle, we think of injuring the muscle and rebuilding it with bone, is it injuring the bone and rebuilding it or what’s actually happening in both cases?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s a myth. The idea that we create damage in the muscle and then the muscle grows back stronger, that is not true.

Melanie Avalon: I like highlighted that and that blew my mind. So, would love to hear more.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, in fact, you do receive muscle damage with a regular weight workout, especially with multiple sets. Your body will not grow until it fixes that damage. It fixes the damage first. Damage is inversely related to growth. It is when somebody is not damaging the muscle in a workout, but still taking the muscle to complete fatigue. Anybody who works out is like, “Well, how do you do that?” Right, exactly. How do you do that? My approach does that every time. It does it profoundly, it does it to exponential degree of what regular weight training can do. When you’re lifting regular weights, you’re getting a mixture of damage and growth, a little bit of damage usually. The problem is, you damage the muscle and you also damage the joint. The muscle recovers, the joint doesn’t, and also what you do to your joints is permanent. So, I see guys who are doing heavy bench pressing in their 20s and they’re not going to be able to comb their hair in their 40s, because they can’t lift their arms up, because the shoulder damage they have.

It’s funny, some of the powerlifting advocates who they really emotionally have a problem with X3 Bar, because they look at it, it’s not a powerlifting. So, powerlifters when they train, they powerlift or they do different drills to make their lifts better or more balanced or more focused or whatever. But they’re still really beating up on the joints. And there are guys who have joint replacements, because of their lifting. And they still won’t change, they still won’t pick up X3. There’s even a few of them that are advocates of X3 and they use X3, but there’s still something about what they’re accustomed to, where they want to go back and lift heavy weights also. So, that’s certainly better, but also keep in mind, the stronger you get, the more joint damage you’re prepared to give yourself.

Joint damage doesn’t happen to the teenager of just beginning lifting, also because the teenagers are weak, they’re children, they still have child strength. And then, as they begin to build strength, the stronger they get, the more at risk, they put their joints. Now, there is a study done in 1999 by Benjamin and Ralphs, which showed that when you compress joints, and meaning, almost in lock-out opposition, then you get a fibrocartilage uptake within the joint capsule, so all tendons and ligaments that surround the joint become thicker and more powerful. But weights will do this, because you need a weight that’s too heavy, but X3 does. So, you actually can recover your joints with X3, whereas you’re destroying your joints with standard weightlifting.

Melanie Avalon: I just want to understand the muscle damage part. For a muscle to grow, does it just need to receive the signal that it’s not capable of doing what it’s doing?

Dr. John Jaquish: It needs fatigue, not damage.

Melanie Avalon: Okay. Fatigue, not damage. What creates the damage and how can it be fatigued without damage? What creates the damage in the muscle?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, variable resistance is one way. It’s the best way. When you get used to a workout or when you first start working out, you’re really sore, and then you repeat that same workout over and over again for a month. And then after a month, you’re not really sore anymore, that’s when you’re starting to grow. Which is ironic because people think the opposite. Once they stopped getting sore, they’re like, “Oh, I got to change up my workout because I’m not getting sore anymore.” They call that Muscle Confusion Theory. That amongst other things was some of the silly stuff that Arnold Schwarzenegger put out there that was just dead wrong. No science to back it up. And then when science tested this theory, it turns out it’s false. Switching up your workout is not more beneficial. It’s to the detriment of your progress. You actually make less progress than if you stick with a regular simple program.

Melanie Avalon: Does everybody have a genetic potential for their muscles to be a certain strength or size?

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome question. One of the biggest factors that defines who gets strong and who doesn’t. We also have to admit, fitness is the most failed human endeavor. When you look at the average person with a gym membership, I’m talking to average person, I’m not talking about bodybuilders here. And by the way, the leanest, one percentile of men are 10.6% body fat. That’s pathetic. That’s the best 1% in America. If it were 6%, that’d be impressive. But are 1 out of 100 people fit looking? No, maybe 1 out of 10,000 people are. But then why are we listening to the fitness industry? Because basically, everybody who follows it, doesn’t change. Think about your friends, I’m sure you have a bunch of friends who are going to the gym for years, do they really look any different? Do they really perform any different? Maybe a little bit of difference in the first couple weeks, and then they still have a couple of fat rolls and they’re not really any stronger, and they don’t have better posture or anything. I say, most of the time I can walk into– and I’m not talking about a place where athletes train, not Gold’s Gym, Venice, California, any gym other than that. You walk in, you see a bunch of regular looking people, fat people, skinny people, nobody’s muscular. You go to the Pizza Hut next door, everybody looks the same.

In general, when somebody says, “Well, that’s not the way it’s been done. What do you have to say about all this stuff that’s been done for the past 50 years?” Well, all that stuff that’s been done for the past 50 years didn’t work.

Melanie Avalon: It’s not working.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It’s obviously not working. We’re fatter and sicker as a society than ever.

Melanie Avalon: It’s like dieting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, it’s part of the same subject. The nutrition advice is pretty stupid, too. I mean, how many people are fasting? Hardly any. How about just resting your intestines and regenerating cells, having some autophagy in your intestines. Last thing your physician will say is that, but that should be the first thing they say.

Melanie Avalon: 100%.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I know you’re on board with that. And then also what are really the qualities of foods? The recommended daily allowances of vitamins. Those were, I should say, contrived in the 1950s via expert opinion. The lowest form of medical evidence there ever has been, and they’ve never been changed. A lot of vitamins that we hear we need, do we? Has anybody proven that? Scurvy, you need vitamin C, right? Wrong. You don’t need vitamin C. You need vitamin C, if you shoveling sugar in your mouth, because of vitamin C is an antioxidant. My point is, you don’t need an antioxidant if you’re not oxidizing. So, if you’re poisoning yourself, do you need the antidote? Yes. If you’re not poisoning yourself, do you need the antidote? No.

Melanie Avalon: I’ve heard they have never actually tested vitamin C and meat, either.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like vitamin C with a carnivore diet?

Melanie Avalon: I’ve heard that it hasn’t been tested. You know how we’ve listed a zero vitamin C, but it might actually have vitamin C.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, okay, so organ meats are actually loaded with vitamin C. So, that’s true. And that has been shown. Almost every vitamin that has ever been discovered is in organ meats. And I eat organ meats, but not that much, because I try and eat them in proportion to what’s available in nature. Let’s say, we have a steer that has 500 pounds of meat in it. Only 2 pounds of those 500 pounds are going to be liver or cardiac muscle, organ meats. So, how often do I need to have that? Well, say in proportion, let’s just say it’s 250:1 ratio. So, 250 nights of steak, I’ve got to have one with some organs.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow. That’s a good way to look at it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, I mean, if that’s what shows up in nature, then obviously we’re not beating nature. I have a funny approach to things like that, where I can prove it, hands down, with just the obvious. I’ve heard this idea that you need organ meats every day. Well, there’s no way prehistoric man ate at a different ratio than 250:1, is even if they were eating bigger animals, like woolly mammoths, there’s probably still that 250:1 ratio in there. They’re going to choose the muscle meats first, and they even continue to eat an animal after they took it down after it was rotting. which gave them the best amino acids they could have ever had.

Melanie Avalon: And they do choose the muscle meats first. I feel like a lot of people in the carnivore world say the opposite.

Dr. John Jaquish: Let’s look at other animals, like the lion doesn’t rip a gazelle apart and try and get to the liver first. It just eats the muscles. That’s what’s that’s there. And it’ll get into the organs too, but it might give up, once it starts to turn a little bit of the rotting, rotting meat is okay. But at some point, it just tastes terrible. Oh, by the way, like I said, the rotting meats are the best ratio of amino acids, which is the basis of my protein product. It’s all based on bacterial fermentation. So, it’s almost 100% usable by the body. Whereas like, even steak is only 38% usable.

Melanie Avalon: Really quick about the vitamins. I was reading the Caltons’ book, and they talked about this study that showed where they tested all of these different diets. A lot of which were, I think, whole foods based and how none of them could achieve the RDA’s for all of the vitamins.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. Jason Colton is a friend of mine.

Melanie Avalon: They’re really great. I feel most people see that information, they think, “Oh, that means we’re never going to get all of our vitamins, we need to supplement, but I feel it might mean what you said.

Dr. John Jaquish: We don’t need any of them.

Melanie Avalon: Maybe it means the RDAs days aren’t exactly accurate. Maybe we don’t need all of that every single day.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Here’s what I do. I don’t eat any of them. I mean, I eat steak and only steak. And then if I feel I’m missing something, I go get a blood test and figure out what it could be that are causing my symptoms. Funny thing though, since I switched to only eating muscle meats, which was about four years ago, I’ve never had a single issue. Nothing. I’m hardly even hungry anymore.

Melanie Avalon: I’ve had both Shawn Baker and Paul Saladino on the show, and it’s the two the two camps of– because he’s more muscle meat, like you, and then Paul’s more all the organs.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m friends with both those guys. So, I do eat organ meats, but I don’t do it because I think it’s necessary. I just like liverwurst. And there’s a great San Francisco restaurant that will serve venison heart, which I might have that once a year. And I like their philosophy of using the whole animal for environmental sustainability. That’s cool. I’m down with that. But as far as like you’re going to die if you don’t eat organ meats, not true.

Melanie Avalon: This is very liberating, I bet for a lot of people in the carnivore world. The genetic potential, so there is or is not a genetic potential to people?

Dr. John Jaquish: There is a genetic potential, but it’s mostly based on their biomechanics. There is only been one person in the history of drug testing that has failed the drug test based on her natural hormone levels, and she was kicked out of sports for life, because she just naturally had too high testosterone level. It was just an unfair playing field. It was just really unfortunate, but she just couldn’t participate. That’s only happened one time. The differences between people are not hormone levels. It’s tendon insertion point. Most people have their pectoral insertion at the top of their humerus bone. Your upper arm bone, that’s where your peck, your chest attaches and pulling that bone across your body is, is how to activate that muscle. But some people have a mutation. Some people, the tendon inserts at the other end of the humerus bone, towards the elbow. So, the humerus bone becomes a gigantic lever arm that they get a biomechanical advantage from. The people that have this mutation, typically, almost always become incredibly powerful athletes.

The other people who have the disadvantageous positioning, and I think it was Pancoast 2017 was a study that found that 23% of people were unable to trigger muscle protein synthesis, doing any type of free weight training at all.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow. Their muscles just don’t grow, were they grow with X3 Bar?

Dr. John Jaquish: What I’m looking at these two different observations, I’m going to infer that it’s because of their biomechanics, because there’s nothing wrong with their muscle, like they don’t have a muscle dysfunction. I get emails daily, maybe five or six emails a day where people will say, “I’ve been lifting for years, I could never get anything out of it. The day I got X3, I felt different. Everything was different. And then the next day, I used it, and I feel different again, and different again. All of a sudden, six months later, I’m 20 pounds heavier.” They might have lost 10 pounds of body fat at the same time because that’s usually what happened. They all of a sudden get in shape when they start using X3, and I’m like, “Okay, I know what your problem was. It’s the tendon disadvantage." But when people use X3, everyone’s on a level playing field. Anybody can put on muscle like an NFL player, including the NFL players, which, by the way, a lot of them use it. You probably see pictures of 17 NFL players, the entire Miami Heat team uses X3, actually endorsed the book and endorsements on the back cover of the book. Real sports, that have real coaching, i.e., not bodybuilding, we have incredible following from strength coaches, and from players, they see great results. And that’s all I care about.

Melanie Avalon: Speaking of bodybuilding, does strength at all correlate to size at all or is it–?

Dr. John Jaquish: It does. Yeah. There’s no weak bodybuilders. My disappointment with the practice of bodybuilding is, there’s not a lot of science there. In general, the fitness industry. Let’s talk about cardio just for a second. Cardio has always been the method that people use to try to lose body fat. Here’s the problem. When you engage in cardiovascular activity, your body is trying to take small amounts of fuel, and use those small amounts of fuel to go great distances. When that happens, the body is trying to optimize itself as a machine to perform that task. What’s it going to do? It’s going to do the same thing that Honda does, when it tries to make an economy car, it’s going to have a smaller engine, which means reduction of muscle. It’s going to have a larger gas tank, which means you store more fat, not less, more. And it’s going to slim down the chassis. So, like the chassis of a Formula One car and the chassis of a Prius are pretty different.

When the chassis becomes lighter, and this happens to cardio athletes too, that means you lose bone density. Cardio athletes have weak bones, they’re more likely to fracture. They have very low amounts of muscle mass, like maybe the lowest possible and then they store extra body fat. Now they still have a low body weight because they’re what’s called skinny fat. When you lose weight from doing cardio, you’re losing muscle, not fat. Your body is working as hard as it can to try and preserve the body fat you have. So cardio, maybe the worst thing to do. If you’re trying to lose body fat. The fitness industry is really the gym membership sales industry. It’s not really about fitness. It’s about selling more people on buying a gym membership, and they don’t care if you come. There’s a reason they charge $9.99, so when you’re looking at your credit card bill, you don’t notice it. It doesn’t irritate you, because they know you’re not using it.

Somebody told me they ran a big box gym, and I shouldn’t say which gym this is, but they had something like 10,000 members, and this thing was just like a small gym that could maybe only have like a 200-person capacity.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. If everybody showed up–

Melanie Avalon: They’d be in trouble.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, but they know. They know most people will not show up, they’ll keep their membership for six months, they make it hard for them to quit. Like you come in and say I’m going to quit the gym, and then they find some attractive person to talk to them, and talk them back into a life of fitness of which they still don’t show up to. The tragedy goes on. I don’t blame the fitness industry for not caring about science, because getting people fit is not really what they do. Getting fit is up to you. It’s about learning. Now, if all of a sudden everybody wants to use X3 at home, and I’ve already been getting calls on a regular basis, people want to start X3 gyms, like a group training sort of thing where everybody uses the X3. I’m open to the idea, but I want a really big entity to launch this. I don’t want somebody who’s just dreaming of starting their fitness bootcamp and then not being able to execute to create a movement. Executing to start a business, that’s one thing, executing to create a movement, that’s a very different thing.

Melanie Avalon: To clarify about the cardio just for listeners, because you talk in the book about how technically all exercise is cardio.

Dr. John Jaquish: I say there’s no such thing as cardio. It’s all strength training. You engage a muscle, you contract that muscle, you contract it repetitively for a result. When you strength train, you tax a heart even more than you do with cardiovascular exercise, and your cardiovascular health, remember I said health improves greater or equal to that of a person who does endurance exercise. The problem with endurance exercise is, you get the joint damage, but you don’t get any muscular result from it. So, the muscle never adapt, because you’re never called upon to be strong. So, you actually get weaker from it, because that’s the body responding to its environment. You don’t need strong contractions. So, it shrinks your muscle and allows you weaker contractions, which is more energy efficient. Carrying around all that extra muscle mass is the last thing the body wants to do, it is to go great distances with a small amount of fuel.

Melanie Avalon What about low intensity exercise and/or, like cardio, and/or low intensity cardio while carrying weights or somehow stimulating your muscles?

Dr. John Jaquish: Low intensity is low intensity. It’s all the same. It’s going to upregulate cortisone. The evidence we have is hormonal changes. You suppress your growth hormone growth hormone is what metabolizes body fat and builds tendons and ligaments. So, you suppress that, but you increase your cortisol. Now, increase in cortisol, a lot of people panic about that, especially in the biohacking community. It’s one of those things where you don’t need a panic unless it’s a chronic upregulation. So, like getting out of bed in the morning up regulates cortisol. So, there’s no such thing as a bad hormone. But there are certain situations you can put the body in where your hormone levels are at a great disadvantage in comparison to what you want. If you want to lose body fat, and you have high cortisol levels, no, you’re gaining body fat, or you’re staying the same. You can’t have chronically high levels of cortisol, and that’s what cardio athlete does.

Melanie Avalon: What’s the difference between, speaking of hormones, testosterone and human growth hormone?

Dr. John Jaquish: Huge difference. Totally different thing. In fact, human growth hormone should really be called human repair hormone once you’re an adult, because it doesn’t grow you anymore. It is actually not anabolic. Growth hormone does not grow muscle. Now bodybuilders argue that because they take a massive amount, along with insulin, which is just like you’re just playing Russian roulette with a lot of different systems of the body to get that effect. Really bad. I don’t agree with that practice at all. But aside from drug abuse, growth hormone will never put muscle on your body. It will make you leaner though. It can improve your eyesight and you can tighten up your skin. So, you want to do things that encourage higher growth hormone levels. Growth hormone is secreted based on a couple of things. You can get some from a good night of sleep, but the most powerful stimuli that I’ve ever seen documented in the clinical literature is stabilization firing.

Like sprinters, you ever look at a skull of a sprinter, it looks like it’s been lined up by a laser. Their head doesn’t move hardly at all. And their whole body is moving. They’re throwing their arm back, so they can pivot their pelvis forward faster. The whole body’s involved in sprinting. They must stay absolutely balanced, there’s a lot of stability firing, which up regulates growth hormone. Also, people who use whole body vibration, massive upregulation of growth hormone. That’s really the benefit of whole-body vibration. The other stuff that people say whole body vibration does untrue. That’s a really scammy industry, the vibration business. There’ll be claims that are just outlandish all the time.

Melanie Avalon: Do you have thoughts on, what’s it called, Emsculpt, the electrical stimulation of muscle that people are doing now?

Dr. John Jaquish: Let me just finish the testosterone. Now testosterone is mediated by how much force is required to go through a muscle in the activities of the subject. Literally, the heavier you go, the more testosterone receptors you have activated, and the more testosterone you make. Now, most testosterone in the human body goes places other than muscle. Now goes to repair different tissues, and sometimes it just circulates and ends up going nowhere. Activating receptor sites is the most important thing for using the testosterone you have. I really push this, because people, especially young kids think there’s shortcuts by taking some anabolic drug, like testosterone, synthetic testosterone, and I tell them, “You can inject all you want. First of all, it’s painful, and you’re risking an infection every time you do that. But other than that, if you don’t have the receptor sites activated, you’re just going to have side effects, you’re not going to have any the benefit.”

6% of males in the United States have used or are currently using anabolic steroids. 6.6% of people look like bodybuilders or look impressive in any way, absolutely not. Most people who take steroids also fail, because their exercise stimulus is garbage, their nutrition is probably also bad. But if you strategically get more load on the body, like with variable resistance, get more load on the body. So, there’s no getting away from heavy. But there’s a strategic way you can apply “heavy” to the body, like with variable resistance. So, that you end up opening more receptor sites without the risk of injury. And that’s a huge difference that we apply, and people read about all the time in Weightlifting Is a Waste of Time.

Melanie Avalon: It reminds me of people, it’s not the same thing at all, but people wanting to take tons of MCT oil to be in ketosis or exogenous ketones, compared to actually creating them yourself endogenously.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is everybody who’s making those– I shouldn’t say everybody, but most that are making people aware of ketosis are selling a product. But the best way to get into ketosis is to eat nothing. So, you use your own ketones and metabolize your own body fat. Yeah, who was the guy that had two sticks of butter a day? That was his approach to his ketogenic diet, and he got really fat.

Melanie Avalon: Was it Butter Bob or Jimmy Moore?

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t remember. I just remember thinking like, “This guy should not be allowed in front of the camera.” He does some big morning show. He’s like, “Oh, I eat is butte. I eat butter all day long.” He’s so happy with himself and he just kept getting fatter and fatter and fatter. No surprise to anyone, like, I eat one meal a day. When I do eat, it’s just meat. So, in ketosis all the time, but burning my own body fat in the fasted periods. Almost only three hours that I’m not eating.

Melanie Avalon And how long did you say you’ve been doing that?

Dr. John Jaquish: About four years?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. I first got obsessed with the whole low carb keto thing, probably 12 years ago, or 11 years ago, and then I did an experiment. This was way before the carnivore movement. I would just eat like rotisserie chicken every single night because I was in college and they marked them down to like $3 at 11:00 PM. So, I would just go–

Dr. John Jaquish: Because they’re super dried out at that time?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. They’ve been under heat lamps for like 12 hours.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, but it was like $3, I would eat my chicken and I’d be good to go. I did that for like six months. I felt fantastic.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sounds delicious.

Melanie Avalon: I actually meant that you’d like sort of returning to something similar or doing straight up carnivore. One more question sort of related to the genetic potential stuff. It’s not genetic, but you talked about the potential of muscle to reach a certain size, or was it strength based on what had been previously? Was it bag theory? Or something about the like the matrix around the muscle?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yes, I did use the term ‘bag theory.’ It’s proven, but in not so much in sports performance, a lot of it was from research on birds. So, you can just stretch a bird. Like, imagine a bird doing yoga, but this bird who does yoga ends up growing muscle from this yoga. Now people obviously don’t grow from doing yoga, because I would say not there’s anything wrong with yoga, per se. But yoga is not everything, and it will not build an ounce of muscle. There is a way where you can super hydrate a muscle. I call it the Hyperplasia Protocol, because what you’re trying to do in this protocol is getting muscle cells to split. It has to do with working out to absolute exhaustion, stretching having a vasodilator in your bloodstream, an over-the-counter supplement like Epimedium or a rather safe chemical, like Sildenafil, which is Viagra. No, wait. Tadalafil is Viagra. Sildenafil is Cialis.

Having a vasodilator in your bloodstream, having a little bit of carbohydrates. There is actually a beneficial– I found one benefit of carbohydrates. It’s a super hydrate the muscle and then stretching after the workout can cause some pretty rapid growth. But I would tell people, even though everybody wants to do it right away, I say in the book, like, this isn’t advanced then, don’t worry about this right away. But for some reason you say advanced and every beginner wants to start day one with it.

Melanie Avalon: I will say I laughed at the part with Viagra. You’re like, “Don’t tell your doctor this is [laughs] why you bought Viagra.”

Dr. John Jaquish:​ It’s funny, you go to your doctor and say, “Yeah, I want Viagra.” And he’s like, “Cool.” No questions asked. But if you’re like, “I want Viagra because I want to grow my muscle.” They’ll be like, “Well, that’s not what it’ll do.”

Melanie Avalon: No can do that.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, you can’t use it for that. So, yeah, just say you would like Viagra, they’re not going to ask any more questions.

Melanie Avalon: So funny, major question that we get on the Intermittent Fasting Podcast all the time, and you’re clearly going to be an expert person to ask this. Intermittent fasting and muscle. Can you do fasting and build muscle? Is there any truth to the– what is the anabolic window? Do you need multiple stimuli for muscle protein synthesis throughout, like, multiple times throughout the day?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. You only need one stimulus to recover from muscle building stimuli from complete fatigue and muscle, it takes 36 hours for protein synthesis to complete, if there is no damage at all, in the musculature. If you’re using X3 or some variable resistance measure, we wait 48 hours just in case somebody did some stupid, like two sets because you’re not supposed to do that. But there’s always some bonehead who doesn’t read any of the instructions and just does whatever he wants to do. That extra buffer in there is no problem. I wait 48 hours before exposure to the force. But huge forces to do the musculature, then 24 hours later, I exercise the other half of the body. We split the body like push and pull muscles, pushing muscles one day, pulling muscles the next. Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Actually, that taps into probably a huge question because I bet people, listeners are probably trying to envision what using X3 actually looks like. So, how much time does it take? Are there multiple different types of workouts that you do?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s two types of workouts. Pushing, pulling. Each of them have four movements, so you only have to exert yourself four times. Now there’s a couple other optional movements, I should say that. And then it takes most people 10 minutes to go through a workout. It takes me or a lot of the guys in the NFL, it takes them 15 minutes, because the more muscular you are, the more blood has to flow into a muscle. I’m glad you brought that up, because the myth is a myth that strength athletes have low cardiovascular endurance, or low cardiovascular health. I’m going to defeat that myth right now.

The larger a muscle is, the more blood it needs. When I run up a flight of stairs, my quadriceps are as big around as the waist of most people. I’m 240 pounds, 6 feet tall, 7% body fat, so my legs are huge. When I sprint up a flight of stairs, I’m out of breath because my heart has to work very hard to fill my quadriceps with blood. When somebody who’s lighter than I am like, let’s say a distance runner who probably weighs more like 140 pounds, sprints up a flight of stairs. It’s like nothing to them, because they have tiny legs. So, that’s where that whole idea comes from.

I used to travel to Russia with this guy who was a distance runner, he would always say like, we’re in the Munich airport, switching planes, as we fly out of London, he lived in London. I grabbed him in London, we do some business there and then we go to Munich, switch planes and go to Moscow. This guy would always say the same thing, it’s like, “God, for a guy as strong as you are like, you have terrible cardiovascular health.” I say the same thing every time. “No, I have amazing cardiovascular health.” I just have a bigger engine than yours. So, if you put a Formula One engine in a Prius, it’s not going to get the same mileage that it did before it had the Formula One engine. One engine is designed for massive power output in a short period of time. That is my body. I’m more like a Formula One engine. He’s more like a Prius. Go a long distance on a small amount of energy.

Melanie Avalon: What do you think are the longevity implications of those different scenarios?

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome question. The two uncontested, greatest drivers of long life are high levels of strength and low levels of body fat. When I get into conversation with a vegan and they want to nitpick some study that I referenced, and I bring up that all of their studies are funded by Nabisco because Nabisco knows that you people are not eating kale, you’re eating cookies and cake. Yeah, aside from that, I go, “Okay, okay. Let’s look at what makes people live the longest that has no argument against it.” High levels of strength, low levels of body fat. That is the opposite of what veganism does. veganism makes you incredibly weak. Unless you are at a perpetual caloric deficit, which has other health problems associated with it, you’re probably going to get fat, because all you’re eating is carbohydrates. You’re not doing anything for the musculature. That was always my rationale to nutrition. I’m going to go back a level and back a level back level until I find an indicator that is so basic, it shows me the answer that’s way upstream. That is why I’m a carnivore, and that is why I encourage people eat more animal muscle meat, I question whether fruits and vegetables have any value at all, and I don’t need any of them, and haven’t in four years.

Melanie Avalon: What do you think is happening in a population like Loma Linda, where they are vegan and long lived? Is it because of the calorie restriction?

Dr. John Jaquish:The people who live over 100 years in general, this just came out, like the Blue Zones are all fraudulent. What it turns out is what they all have in common was not a diet. It was no birth certificate records. All these people were lying. They just made it up.

Melanie Avalon: This is a new thing that just came out?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, a really new study. So Blue Zone dwellers do not live longer. Another food industry lie which is now exposed. Here’s a quote from the study, “Relative poverty and short lifespan continue unexpected predictors of centenarian/Blue Zone dwellers, and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.” And this was Newman 2019. Now of course, vegans, they can say they’re 100 years old, a lot of them look like they’re 100 years old, but they might only be like 65 because it’s very hard on the skin and they get the sunken in eyes. So, you may be looking at somebody who’s 100 is actually 70 or something. After reading this study, it was like, okay, well, I don’t know how common that is, but I know the idea that there’s this epidemic miracle all over the world where people who I guess eat cashews and kale, and just live incredibly long. No, they’re all lying about it. In Loma Linda is the same thing happening? Probably. Guessing they’re not from Loma Linda or have any actual birth certificate. It’s not happening just one place in the United States and then all the other places were seen as fraudulent.

Melanie Avalon: It goes back to what you’re talking about the beginning about just questioning everything. I’m just so confused by this because, on the one hand, there are all these researchers, like, I’m prepping to interview Valter Longo right now, and he’s very much on the low protein train and all of this research around low protein and longevity. But I personally, just from what I’ve seen, it seems like protein seems to be the most important macronutrient, arguably for our bodies. I do daily intermittent fasting, and then I eat so much animal protein every night. You talk about protein usability, amino acid usability in the book, and you dismantle another myth, which listeners, you’ve just got to get this book because there’s so much science in it and so much information that we’re not even remotely touching on. But you talk about, like whey protein being low on the usability.

Dr. John Jaquish:Yeah, it’s 18% usable by the body.

Melanie Avalon: Like, with the usability is not 100%. What is happening to those amino acids that are not being used? Are they being burned for fuel or excreted or–?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, just excreted as waste?

Melanie Avalon: Are they free calories in a way? I’m just wondering where they go.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, they probably would be free calories, because they’re just going to go through in form of nitrogen.

Melanie Avalon: Is it true that nitrogen balance adjusts to the nitrogen intake that you are eating?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, unless you might mean something else.

Melanie Avalon: I’ve read that, if you’re taking a lot of protein, your nitrogen balance in your turnover will adapt to match that and then if you go lower– this is what actually some of the– one of the vegan people that interviewed on the show, he said that like when you go lower, the nitrogen balance adjusts to that lower rate.

Dr. John Jaquish: Our bodies are good at making do with the situation they have. Homeostasis can be adjusted. I’m talking to all systems of the body, we have a very adjustable biochemistry, so that we can tolerate eating nonoptimal foods. If you try and feed a cat vegetables, it’ll die. Despite the fact that vegans actually do that, to feed their cats, some sort of vegetable, stuff that looks like meat, cats die. But then they might live a couple years before they finally give in to malnutrition. A cat’s not flexible. A dog is not flexible. They need meat, they’re carnivorous animals. Us, we’re omnivores, we can eat all kinds of stuff and live from it. That doesn’t mean living well. It just means living. In North Korea, people survive living on tree bark, because there’s food shortages constantly, it doesn’t mean we should go out and eat tree bark.

Melanie Avalon: How did you decide to develop your protein? It’s fermented?

Dr. John Jaquish: yeah, Bacteria fermentations. That’s great question. People were buying X3s, in the first year that X3 was being produced, and people were getting just smashing results, but I told them, they needed to eat one gram of protein per pound of body weight, or 2.2 grams per kilogram. The problem is, this blew my mind when people were like, “I can’t do it. I can’t eat them.”

Melanie Avalon: Wait, can I just say people tell me that they’re like, “How do you eat all the protein?” I’m like, “How do you not?” [laughs] But I eat so much.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, I mean, I do understand. I became a little more sympathetic, when I put on a lot of muscle, but I wanted to get leaner. So, I’m like, okay, so even in my meals, I should probably try and be slight caloric deficit. So, I get the benefit of fasting and I get the benefit of caloric deficit because you can gain muscle and lose body fat at the same time, when you have a protein surplus and a calorie deficit. That’s important. Most people don’t understand that. So, that’s pretty much where I am all the time, because I keep getting stronger, I keep getting bigger, I keep getting leaner. But people were complaining and complaining, or they would be like, “I get plenty of protein. I have 50 grams a day,” and I’m like, “That’s not even enough for a toddler.”

Melanie Avalon: I’ll be starving.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. That’s an eight-ounce piece of meat. That’s a piece of halibut at a restaurant. Like, what? That’s not all you can have all day long. Yeah, you’ll have malnutrition problems. But, of course, their problem is they’re filling their intestines with all kinds of carbohydrates. So, just empty stuff. Not worth having. I realize it, probably about half the X3 users are just unwilling, especially if they were bigger like me, let’s say a 200-pound person has to eat basically two pounds of red meat, or, like 1.75 pounds of chicken, they’re not going to do it. But if I give them an ability to get the benefit of 100 grams of protein from a drink, some powder they mix into water, well, that’s a different story. They’re more than willing to do that. Develop the bacterial fermentation product via anti-wasting protocol that was developed in Spain.

Essential amino acid complex that was designed to keep people from losing muscle when they were in chemotherapy and in radiation treatment. I don’t know if you know anybody in chemo, they lose muscle real fast, and they have very low levels of protein synthesis, mostly they just can’t hold out food. So, this is very easy to digest, this bacterial fermentation. We need rotting stuff in our diets, we just don’t get it because of sanitation reasons. But with this product, it’s called Fertogen. We take Fertogen, you can get the benefit of that without having the sanitation risks, and it’s measured, and simple. So, I’ll take four doses of that every day. So, that makes up for 200 grams of protein. Now I only have to worry about 50 grams. That’s not bad at all.

Melanie Avalon: Also, I’ve been fascinated by the overfeeding studies when they overfeed with just protein. Just as far as not gaining weight or even, I saw one where they gained muscle just from protein, and they didn’t add exercise.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Melanie Avalon: One last question about the food. How do you feel about raw meat? Speaking of fermented food– I will like crave raw meat. I don’t know if that’s a problem.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m a fan of raw meat. I was at a restaurant about two nights ago, and we got steak tartare. I’m not sure everybody knew what it was. I really loved it. I get a lot of criticism for doing my steak the way I do, is like sometimes I’ll have people over, my girlfriend’s over, and I want to do the stakes were like not raw, but rare, are very rare. Some people don’t like seeing blood on their plate. I’m like, “Well, the more it’s cooked, the less nutritional value it has. So, you sure?” I see a well-done steak is ruined. Like just throw in the trash, I’m not going to eat that. Now slow cook is a little different, because it’s more like warm in the middle. But really, where does bacteria live? Only on the outside. Yeah, so if you sear it good enough.

Melanie Avalon: They make the argument that fire, like cooking is what advanced us as a species for meat.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think is probably right because, remember, what I said about rotting meats. We don’t have a very good sense. A lion knows when its food is turned. There might be one day a gray area and then they move on to the next. Next prey. So, humans really don’t, or we did, and we lost that ability. But you can take a piece of me that maybe questionably managed, and as long as you sear the outside, your chances of infection almost zero. The inside can just be raw, like generally I sous my meat. I’ll get really thick cuts. I go get like a two and a half pounds chateaubriand. And it was just me and my girlfriend, and it’ll cook for maybe two hours on a sous vide setting. I use a cinder grill, by the way, if you know what that is. It has sous vide setting, so cooks it throughout with two cooking services, one on top, on the bottom. And then I’ll crank it up to 450 degrees and sear it for like 20 seconds. But if I’m all by myself, I would just sear it.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Well, now actually what I’m doing is probably not good. I will just sear the stakes. I’ll just eat the steaks rare or raw at home. And I shouldn’t do this, I’ll eat ground beef raw, which is a lot of surface area exposed. So, probably not good.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s okay.

Melanie Avalon: I just crave it sometimes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Actually, it’s good.

Melanie Avalon: What about the blood flow restriction training? Does X3 cause that at all? Or, is that completely different?

Dr. John Jaquish: X3 causes it to a greater degree than tourniquets do. I tell people, “Don’t combine these two things. You’ll do worse, if you combine.” Blood flow restriction is okay if you’re lifting regular weights, but the body knows there’s a tourniquet there, and it doesn’t like that at all. And therefore, you have massive neural inhibition. Meaning, the muscle won’t fire properly. So, while you are getting a training effect, you’re not getting a big one, because hardly any muscle is activated.

Melanie Avalon: So, the X3 does create that a little bit? How’s it restricting blood flow?

Dr. John Jaquish: It creates a lot because it’s with the variable resistance and constant tension. With a combination of keeping constant tension with the variants, you are having blood flow into the muscle but not out. Therefore, the heart which mediates the myostatin levels in the body. Myostatin is a protein that keeps you from gaining more muscle. However, when you engage in hypoxic training, which is what you would call it with X3 or blood flow restriction, which is a type of hypoxic training. With tourniquets, you’re having blood flow into the muscle and not out. It convinces the heart that some muscle is missing, that all of a sudden you have less muscle. So, it lowers your myostatin, so that you can gain more muscle. It’s really powerful effect. That’s every set of X3 does that as long as you use it correctly. I urge people, anybody who gets one, please watch the videos, you will do so much better if you know what you’re doing.

Melanie Avalon: Do they come with a system or is it online?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s online, but they come with a system. We just provide a link. There’s a couple exercise cards and a glossy cards that show you how to do the movements, but you want to watch the videos too because I explained in those videos why you don’t want to lock out, why you don’t want to rest at the bottom. I see people doing chest press. They rest with every single repetition they take. It turns the muscle on, turns the muscle off, turns the muscle on, turns the muscle off. Is that a clear signal the central nervous system? No, it’s not. Also, you’re letting blood escape, which denies you the hypoxic effect. Yeah, you’re going to do much worse if you do it like that.

Melanie Avalon: And just to clarify one last time because this is really mind blowing if you think about it. For the full effects from X3, it’s around 10 minutes, the two different programs like how many times per week?

Dr. John Jaquish: When you begin, it’s four times a week and then we move it to six times. I have one rest day, but it’s still a quick workout, so you can fit it anywhere.

Melanie Avalon: That’s an incredible return on investment. I’m so excited because you guys sent me a system, so thank you so much. I was waiting to talk to you, and now I’m so pumped, I can’t wait, no pun intended. I cannot wait to do it, and I’m sure listeners as well are going to be so, so thrilled. So, if they are interested, where can they learn more? Where can they get the system?

Dr. John Jaquish: The best place to find me is, I created a landing page because so many people have trouble spelling my last name, and I didn’t want to send them to just the X3 Bar website because there’s a lot more that I have going on than just that. So, go to doctorj.comD-O-C-T-O-R, the letter J dotcom. And there’s links to everything. I do the most on Instagram. If you want to follow me on one social media venue, that would be the one.

Melanie Avalon: Awesome. Well, for listeners, I will put links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much. This has been so incredible. Like I said, it’s such valuable information and I’m so grateful for what you’re doing. Actually, to that point, the last question I always ask every single guest on this show and it’s just because I realized more and more each day how important mindset is. What is something that you’re grateful for?

Dr. John Jaquish: I like that I can work outside. I really like doing all my exercise in the outdoors.

Melanie Avalon: Where do you live?

Dr. John Jaquish: California, mainly California. got one year. There’s a couple places I sleep, I guess. My girlfriend just hit me under the table, sitting right next to me. No, it doesn’t mean anything weird. Sometimes, I stay up on my office and then I have another place, but basically kind of Lake Tahoe area. Yeah, I really enjoy being outside and getting all my exercise. Last thing I want to do is be under fluorescent lights in a gym.

Melanie Avalon: Well, awesome. Thank you so much. I so appreciate your time and what you’re doing. I know my listeners are going to be thrilled to get the book, and possibly the protein and hopefully the X3 Bar and all of it. You’ve already done two incredible things, so I really look forward to your future, like some of your future projects, I’m sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, don’t worry. I’m already working on the next thing.

Melanie Avalon: I’m excited. Well, you have to come back on in the future for that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely. This was great. You had great questions, by the way. I really loved them.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, thank you so much. This was just beautiful. So, thank you so much.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.

Melanie Avalon: Bye.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks, Melanie. Bye.