Fitness Is The Most Failed Human Endeavor of All | Dr. John Jaquish

This week’s guest on Health Coach Radio is Dr. John Jaquish, the inventor of the X3 Bar and the OsteoStrong methodology. During this episode, we discuss how to reduce the risks of lifting heavyweight, why and why fitness is the most failed human endeavor of all.

Full Transcript

Erin Power: Hi, I’m Erin Power.

Laura Rupsis: And I’m Laura Rupsis.

Erin Power: We’re certified health coaches, and this is Health Coach Radio.

Laura Rupsis: This podcast is about the art, science, and business of health coaching.

Erin Power: We share our insider tips to help you become a better coach and entrepreneur.

Laura Rupsis: And we interview expert guests to discover how they’ve made it in this growing field.

Erin Power: It’s time for health coaches to make an impact.

Laura Rupsis: It’s time for Health Coach Radio.

Erin Power: I was pretty starstruck to have this conversation today. Our guest is Dr. John Jaquish, the outspoken inventor of the X3 Bar , and by the way, also the inventor of the Osteostrong methodology that builds bone density, helping to reverse or prevent one of the main causes of advanced physical aging, reduced bone density. Ostensibly, the other equally daunting aspect of advanced physical aging is reduced strength and muscle mass. That’s why Dr. Jaquish invented the X3 Bar. Dr. Jaquish’s book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want , grabs your attention, and he knows it. The title is a pure marketing hook, but also, weight training is very time-consuming.

Erin Power: The benefits seem to come in needlessly slow increments, and the way force is applied to the joints in typical weight training is inefficient. The X3 Bar uses variable resistance, very heavy-duty rubber banding to create more intensity at the easier part of the range, and lower intensity at the harder part of the range, which makes a ton of sense, and he describes it very colorfully. This conversation though is not a plug for the X3 Bar. Dr. Jaquish barely mentions it. Instead, this conversation ends up being a rallying cry for the fitness industry to get in gear and modernize its views on how we get people moving, and how we get them stronger.

Laura Rupsis: Dr. Jaquish, thank you so much for joining us. How are you today?

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me. This is great.

Laura Rupsis: Oh my gosh. We were already laughing our asses off before we ever even hit record, so this is going to be such a fun conversation. So, Erin and I have a little bit of your background, but if you wouldn’t mind, for our audience, give us the five-minute backstory on Dr. Jaquish, please.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. I got started in life sciences about 13 years ago when, my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis, and I wanted to research it, and as I read about it, I just had a very different take and different feeling on it than others. Now, I did not have my Ph.D. at this time. So, my approach was like, okay, let’s rebuild my mother’s bone the same way we build bones as kids, like with force through bone.

Now, kids go through high-impact, which you’re not supposed to do with older people, for obvious reasons. They can get hurt pretty bad. So, the decision I made was I was going to emulate high-impact forces by isolating the positions that people would normally absorb impact, and then allow for self-loading in those positions, and that worked very well.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s now called OsteoStrong. You can find it in nine different countries, and 160 different locations. They’re all independent clinics. It’s like a franchise model for clinics. So, I believe we just opened one in India and, but Australia, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Spain, US, of course. There are like 140 in the US.

Laura Rupsis: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, so it’s doing fantastic, and it reversed my mother’s osteoporosis, and it, all it does is just emulate impact. It was very interesting, because being in the medical device industry, I thought selling to physicians, because you have to get the physicians to tell them to go to the clinic, right? You want them to refer, because people don’t just, very few people take it upon themselves to just check out what’s out there, and not get their physician’s advice to treat something, to look into something that’s like a medical problem. So, you have to depend on the physician’s referrals.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I go and talk to these physicians, and they told me like, “Well, in theory, this sounds great,” because I was talking about theory in the beginning, and they’re like, “But you have to have evidence. You got to show in a clinical trial.” Okay. So, got a couple of studies put together, and they were very enthusiastic. Once I showed them the evidence, they were on board, and that was it, and that just continued and continued. Of course, there’s more research coming out all the time. There was just a paper that was published in the world’s top aerospace journal about the potential of using this for astronauts. Positive.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I’m super happy about that, and that’s moving in a great direction, but while I was doing the research, the original trial was done at the University of East London, and then it was conducted at a surgery center nearby, a hospital that the students and professors from the University of East London could come to pretty easily, and conduct the trial. So, a lot of the test subjects ended up being physicians, because they met the inclusion criteria. So, what they would say to me while this was running is, “Gosh, we’re using high loads. How is this possible?” These women, who had never, so it’s just a postmenopausal population.

Dr. John Jaquish: These women had never exercised. That was part of the inclusion criteria because we didn’t want somebody to be like, “Oh, well somebody exercised before, so that’s probably why they reversed their osteoporosis so easily.” No, no, no. I wanted something that was more like the regular population, because the average population, especially females, does no strength type exercise. If they had done cardio before, that’s fine. But no like loading of any kind. So, they were pushing six, seven, eight times their body weight with their lower extremities. Now, they’re pushing it about that far, about an inch, and that inch comes from the compression of the bone and the joints.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, there’s, the machine doesn’t move. You move. So, while they were doing this, there’s like, “We’re dealing with just incredible forces. Like, how is this possible?” I said, “Well, the body’s optimizing to handle those incredible forces.” They said, “How does this compare to people that lift?” So, I found a paper that was done by a group that’s with the National Academy, no, American College of Sports Medicine. They were looking at the NIH’s database, which is the largest health database maintained by the National Institute of Health.

So, what they determined was that beginners typically use 1.3 times their body weight with their lower extremities, loading the lower extremities. Advanced athletes, 1.53. Now, keep in mind, like a lot of people imagine that they leg press like 1000 pounds or whatever, but keep in mind when you push a car, your car weighs 4,000 pounds. That doesn’t mean you bench-pressed 4,000 pounds.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: The car’s rolling. So, most of the weight-

Laura Rupsis: Right. It’s on wheels.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Same thing with a leg press. You’re only pushing up at like, a 30-degree angle, so most of that 1000 pounds, like 700 of that 1000 pounds is going right into the ground, and it’s rolling on rollers. So, just because you can, like, if you can push a car uphill, like just a little bit, it doesn’t mean you can bench press 4,000 pounds. Because people hear that 1.53 number, they’re like, “Well I can do way more than that.” I’m like, “No, now you really can’t.” So, the minimum dose-response for bone growth is four multiples of body weight, 4.2.

Erin Power: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, what people use in the gym, and what people need to trigger bone growth, there’s a huge difference. So, no wonder impact was so successful, because people when absorbing impact, gymnasts, when they absorb impact can get 10 times their body weight. Now, they’re trained for that, and that’s also very dangerous. They retire at an average age of 19-years old for a reason.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, okay. So, what we were getting was the benefit of high- impact, without the risks of high impact. But, when I’m looking at this model, like how much load difference there is between what someone can handle in the weaker range of motion versus a stronger range of motion, there was a sevenfold difference on average. So, if you know you can hold seven times more here at the extended position of an exercise, then you can’t here, why would you ever lift a weight? It doesn’t make sense. So, that was like the first day, I was like, “Huh, maybe weightlifting is a waste of time. Let me go into this.” So, that became the title of my book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then, so I researched variable resistance, on just general loading and output, force curves, a lot of conflicting research on some of these different kinds of subtopics, only because they’re not looking at it from the perspective that I was looking at it, as in there’s like something flawed with just picking up a static weight because that’s what we’ve been doing forever. Just basically, weightlifting is no different than picking up heavy rocks.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: There are better handles I guess. So, that’s-

Laura Rupsis: More equally weighted.

Dr. John Jaquish: Say it again

Laura Rupsis: More, and more equally weighted, and not necessarily conducive to real life if you think about it.

Dr. John Jaquish: True, but also like lifting full range. If you had a heavy piano to pick up, you would try and optimize your range of motions, so you are only using the strong range. When you run, you only use seven degrees of action behind your knee, even though you have 180 degrees available. Why wouldn’t you use the whole 180, if the full range is so important? Why? Well, because you wouldn’t, that wouldn’t be running. That would be like a knee touching the ground. You’d go very slow. I mean-

Laura Rupsis: That would look weird as well.

Dr. John Jaquish: It would be stupid. It would be stupid. Keep moving. Right. But I mean like, because it’s sort of like, we’re very excited about full range, which has merits for sure in exercise science, but we’re very excited about full range, so it’s sort like when we come up with a rule, it must be applied everywhere, which is not really the case. So, what I concluded was like, we need a weight that changes as we move. So, we need a lower weight where our joints are exposed to injury in the weaker range. In the middle, we want kind of a mid-weight. Then, when we’re close to lockout, when we’re at the more extended, more contracted position, we want to hyper-load something that’d be way heavier than we could deal with in the gym.

Erin Power: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Dr. John Jaquish: So, when I do a chest press, I hold 550 pounds at a 120-degree angle of inclusion of my elbow. So, right here, for those watching. So, this is a 120-degree angle right here-

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And the back of the hand is in line with the clavicle. So, this is exactly how I would absorb force if I were to hit the ground.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, it’s an impact-ready position. So, I use 550 in that position, and I keep doing repetitions with 550 until I can’t get there anymore. Then I start shortening up the range. So, I just go as far as I can, so then all of a sudden I’m training with 300-pound repetitions because half of the stretch of the band that I’m using gives me 300 pounds. So, these are very heavy bands. These aren’t like bands, like-

Erin Power: Boogie bands.

Dr. John Jaquish: Exercise bands, you just get a bag of bands at Walmart.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Those things are very lightweight because if a band is heavy enough for strength, see this is the reason why bands are used rehab. A band that’s heavy enough for strength, is heavy enough to twist your wrists and potentially break them, which is why band training never took off because the band itself always wants to be a circle. Your body interfaces with flat surfaces well, like the ground, like bars. Notice they’re straight, or at least where you grab them is. So, I needed an interface between heavy banding and myself, so I developed an Olympic bar.

Dr. John Jaquish: There was one here a minute ago. Just walked off with it. It was right here. So, an Olympic bar has a swivel inside of it, and then another plate that you stand on a second ground, which protects the ankles and the wrists from any twisting because those are your interface points. So, with that, then we do regular Olympic movements, or just kind of both like Olympic lifting, powerlifting type movements. So, we do like a chest press, squat, deadlift, row, and do it with the variable resistance. So, you go to a deeper level of fatigue, because you’re training with more weight in the position where you’re using more muscle and less weight when you’re using less muscle, so a deeper level of exhaustion.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, keep in mind, this is after a whole set because a lot of the critics of variable resistance would say or do say, that the problem is when you try and match the weight to your biomechanic strength curve, you’re not, it’s not difficult enough. Like, as in, you’re not starting to fatigue in the weaker range, sort of at the sticking point. I’m like, “Right. That’s the point,” because that sticking point keeps you from doing anything, from growing-

Laura Rupsis: From getting stronger, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Because, you fatigue your connective tissue, instead of the muscle. When you see young guys who have stronger muscles and tendons and ligaments, so like teenage boys. You see them grow muscle real quickly, because they’ve got the tendons and ligaments, they just don’t have the muscle yet. So, you see guys that start lifting, they put on like 10 or 15 pounds of muscle and they’re like, “Awesome. Keep this up. In six months, I will be like Dwayne Johnson.”

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then, guess what? Nothing happens after that. They put on those 15 pounds, and then never again. Then they keep on repeating the same program with maybe some added in extra crap that they read about in some terribly-written article, and then, like, they still don’t go anywhere. Then, they train, and then, and the reason is that you get strong enough to where, when you’re in your weaker range, you’re just damaging your joints.

Laura Rupsis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: So, the pain associated with lifting goes higher and higher and higher, but there’s no growth.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because the tendons and ligaments, and what causes a tendon and or a ligament to grow, has to do with compressive forces that are much higher than what we get in weightlifting, much more like OsteoStrong, or much more like what we do at the top of these movements with my device, with X3. So, like when I’m holding that 550 pounds out here, that’s putting compressive force through my elbow, my wrists, my shoulder, and I’m building the tendonous and ligamentous tissue. There’s up-regulation of fibrocartilage. This is seen in a 1999 study by Benjamin and Ralphs, that looks at like, how do we increase the performance of tendons and ligaments?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, they determined that it is putting force through the tendons and ligaments, but not in the way we lift weights. But that is the way that we do loading with my newer device. So, the whole research project, after doing the clinical trial on OsteoStrong was building another device. Like I said, the bar and the plate that’s now called X3 bar . The premise that was like, it grows muscle three times faster, which was seen in the study, but a lot of people just didn’t understand or didn’t want to read that study. So, I kind of went away from that, though the name is still X3. So, we pretty much just talk about how you train with greater force. That gives you greater fatigue, thereby greater growth.

Laura Rupsis: Well, there’s more and more research, and more and more people have got on the bandwagon that the way to improve lies in the intensity of the work, not in the volume-

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely.

Laura Rupsis: Or the frequency. And so the-

Dr. John Jaquish: The level of fatigue.

Laura Rupsis: Yes, this is becoming much more widely stated. I don’t know if it’s widely practiced, as it should be.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t think it is.

Laura Rupsis: I don’t think it is either . Dr. John Jaquish: Well, because most people it’s like, it’s got to be more intense and they go, “Oh, okay, but how do you do that with a static weight?:

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You can’t.

Laura Rupsis: But, can you-

Dr. John Jaquish: You still have the same limitations. I guess you could try harder.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not like most people that we’re lifting weights were not trying.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Laura Rupsis: Right. Can you, just as an old-fashioned gym rat, I’m having a hard time kind of visualizing how this works.

Erin Power: Right.

Laura Rupsis: Would you mind kind of relaying an example of a, I don’t know, you can pick-

Erin Power: A bench press.

Laura Rupsis: A bench press is a good example. Yeah.

Erin Power: The bench press is an easy one because you were kind of demonstrating, but I think for people listening, it’s like, take us through which range is the weaker, so-

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Erin Power: You kind of expressed that-

Laura Rupsis: Explain the movement weak versus a strong and then, … how does your device or your program aim to improve on that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Laura Rupsis: Or get better results?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, when I’m in a weaker range of motion, you can still hear me, right?

Erin Power: Yeah.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. So, when I’m in a weaker range of motion, that’s back here

Laura Rupsis: So, when you’re, the weight is down across your chest.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Laura Rupsis: It’s lowered to your chest.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, this is where the shoulders are at the greatest risk of injury.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: This is why people who been like heavy bench-pressers in their 20s, in their 30s, it hurts them to put a dress shirt on. Then, in their fifties, it like brings tears to their eyes if they have to just like rub their ear or something like that, because they can’t lift their shoulder anymore, because of the chronic damage.

So, yeah. It’s a shame because I know so many people who use X3, so they can be better at powerlifting. I’m like, “Yeah, you want to power lift less. You want to use X3 bar more, so you’re focused on growing your body, developing,” even however they choose to use it. I tell everybody to use it, the same standard program. Powerlifters always want to do their own thing. I love NFL players. They do exactly what is instructed. Awesome. I’m working with 19 of them.

Erin Power: Oh, cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, at the bottom of the movement, you’re the weakest, and then you’re a little bit like, let’s say you can hold X here, let’s say maybe 1.5X or 2X here and then 7X here.

Laura Rupsis: At the full range. The top of the movement.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, a steep curve up. Let’s say I’m doing repetitions. I’m doing slow and controlled repetitions, like this. This kind of cadence. Then let’s say I do 20 and then I can’t get to the top anymore. So, then I come down, and I’m going like maybe three quarters. So, now I’m using 400 pounds, and then I go half. Now I’m using 300 pounds.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then the last repetition may only be like this.

Laura Rupsis: Like an inch or two.

Dr. John Jaquish: That would be a 100-pound repetition, but I fatigued the entire muscle. All ranges of motion.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: At the same time.

Erin Power: Okay. So, people who haven’t seen the X3 Bar, and people who are watching this on video and YouTube will have seen you demonstrate this, but also picture that there’s a band wrapped around your back. It’s wrapped around your back, and you’re holding the bar. So, I just want people to visualize that this is against elastic resistance.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. It’s layered latex.

Erin Power: Layered latex. Great. Yeah. So, we understand how bands work. When the band is stretched more, it’s heavier. When the band is stretched less, it’s less heavy. So, you start with it as much as you can stretch it, and then as you fatigue out of that far range, you pull it back, fatigue out there, fatigue out. You just go until you are done.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, all repetitions are full range.

Erin Power: Okay. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Erin Power: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, as you begin to fatigue, you just can’t keep doing the whole range because you fatigue the heaviest-

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Your most powerful part of the muscle.

Erin Power: Got you.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, you go to fatigue, and in all ranges of motion, and of course, there’s only one set per movement.

Laura Rupsis: I love that.

Dr. John Jaquish: You never do more than one set, because you go to such incredible fatigue. To your point, intensity is better than volume.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, and it’s funny, if somebody does one set right, they cannot do another set. I get a lot of messages. “Wow. Like I was planning on doing like three sets for exercise, no matter what you’re saying is your recommendation. But now I realize why you say one. " Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s because I-

Erin Power: It’s crazy.

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of people are close to losing consciousness.

Erin Power: I tried, a buddy of mine, my buddy of mine was selling one, and he had bought two and I was, I went into his, he has this little bakery shop. I went to go check it out. He said, “Here, try a set of squats with this thing.” I died.

Erin Power: I literally died.

Laura Rupsis: You did not die. You’re here. You felt like you died.

Erin Power: But here’s the thing. One thing that you mentioned a second ago, when you’re describing how this works, is you described that our tendons and ligaments tend to be the thing that holds us back as we get older.

Dr. John Jaquish: As you get stronger.

Erin Power: Right. Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like the stronger you are, the more limiting joints become.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because, they’re the bottom.

Erin Power: I felt that. Yeah. I felt that.

Dr. John Jaquish: You need something, so the way X3 works, you’re hyper-loading the extended portion-

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: … of the movement, thereby, you’re actually stimulating the growth of tendons and ligaments too, which is something weightlifting does not do.

Erin Power: Yeah. I felt like subconsciously that my tendons and ligaments were the things that were holding me back or something. Is that, am I experiencing that correctly or what

Dr. John Jaquish: You’re experiencing it correctly. Yeah. That’s basically the feeling of everybody who, what, when they think they like get to their genetic potential or they think like, “Oh, I just can’t get any stronger than this, this is kind of my ceiling,” it’s just like, “No, you just, your strategy of loading the body needs to change.”

Erin Power: Exactly. You didn’t say that it in-

Dr. John Jaquish: No. What I said when we were talking before the show started, the biggest difference … like I generally hear, let’s talk about the failure of the fitness industry.

Laura Rupsis: Please.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, fitness is the most failed human endeavor of all.

Erin Power: Oh.

Dr. John Jaquish: People have not failed at anything like this.

Laura Rupsis: A bold statement, given how many failures we’ve seen in health and wellness.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. I mean, health is a disaster, and people are figuring out like a lot of medicine is just kind of like scratching your head and going, “Well, this is the best we can come up with, with the information we have to date.” I think a lot of people, have this like they watch too much Star Trek or something like that, where the doctor just like waves some sort of blinking light wand in front of your eyes, and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t have cancer anymore.” They think that’s like, where this is going. It’s just like, there’s a lot we don’t know. A lot. We haven’t even identified all the growth factors in muscular tissue.

Erin Power: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re discovering other things, other chemicals that show up that are like, oh yeah, that has to do with growth. We didn’t think it did. Lactic acid has to do with growth. So, remember when everybody’s trying to flush all their lactic acid out?

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. They didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. But it’s fine because we’re all learning. The problem is the fitness industry doesn’t learn anything. It’s like sports science knows a lot of things. Like, for the last 40 years, most sports scientists will say cardio is a really bad approach to losing body fat. Yet, every gym you go to, they’ll be like, “Oh, if you want to lose body fat, cardio.”

Laura Rupsis: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just in … yeah. I cover that in the book. Like 40 years of research just ignored, and it’s a shame. Then, we have, and like nutrition isn’t even bigger in research.

Dr. John Jaquish: But so, my point, when I talk about the fitness industry, I am saying that we have, it’s such a failed endeavor. Who’s really in shape? Who really sees a huge difference.? I say to most people, “I bet you can think of 10 people right now who go to a gym, two, three times a week. They’re all about their fitness. If they do CrossFit, they never shut up about CrossFit.” I always tell them, “The reason you tell me about your CrossFit is that nobody could ever tell that you exercise by looking at you. That’s what you tell me.” So, yeah. I got a lot to talk about.

Erin Power: I have an anecdote that might make your head spin, so buckle up.

Erin Power: I’m a group fitness instructor. I’m sorry. I am.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s great.

Erin Power: I did the math one time, that in my 28 years, seven years of teaching group fitness, I’ve probably taught to 90,000 people.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Yeah, a lot of people.

Erin Power: I don’t think 1% of them got fitter. I think I don’t think 0.0 1%.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s where I’m going.Yeah.

Erin Power: That’s, I walked into the gym one day to teach my class, and all my participants were lined up outside the studio, waiting to get in, waiting for me. I looked at them and I was, I thought to myself, not in a disparaging way like these 30 people have been showing up to my class every Monday night for 10 years, and not one of them-

Dr. John Jaquish: Is any different.

Erin Power: … are getting stronger. Their body composition’s not changing. What are we doing?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, we have the wrong approach.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, my observations about variable resistance, all of the research on variable resistance shows the same thing, that people gain strength and muscular size faster, with variable resistance than they do with standard training. However, why is it? I think this is the question about, first … I mean, I’ll make, I don’t like making blanket statements, but I’ll make one. 99% or maybe 99.9% of people who engage in fitness, get nothing out of it.

Or, they might grow in the very beginning, like when they’re teenagers, and that’s the only time that happens. Most people who think they’re fit are just skinny fat, which means very low muscle, and they still have a significant amount of body fat. So, these are like the girls in their mid-twenties that are, they wear a size zero, but they still have cellulite on the back of their legs, and they’re all upset about it.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s, yeah, because that’s just fat back there. You didn’t develop your hamstrings. You didn’t develop your glutes. Yeah. It’s not going to look good. It’s an underdeveloped body. So, even the top leanest, 1% of men in the United States is 10.6%. That’s like, maybe you can see the top two abdominals. Then you got a little bit of a gut hanging over your belt. That’s the best 1%, and 50% of American males engage in a strength exercise, by the way. So, most of them are at home.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: For whatever they’re doing, and then the rest of them go to a gym. So if the top 1% is still like, really not that impressive who is fit? The answer is almost nobody. The reason is, that there are outliers, so there are genetic outliers. When you understand the genetic outliers, everything I’m saying is going to make a whole lot more sense. The genetic outliers, their genetics don’t put them, like a lot of people think that like some people are born with 10 times a natural amount of testosterone, and which I think there’s also, I think we live in a world where everybody wants to just take some sort of medication, and then they’ll get exactly what they want, like a vaccine, maybe. So, the, hey, jokes are free. So, they think they’re going to get everything they want.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I have people coming up to me and like, if someone sees me in like an airport, because I don’t think they want to put this in writing, but I get it in writing all the time anyway, “Hey, how do I get onto testosterone replacement therapy?”

Erin Power: Oh, my gosh.

Dr. John Jaquish:“What?”

Laura Rupsis: What? Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: “You clearly don’t know what that means, because it replaces what’s supposed to be there. So, if you don’t have a natural level of testosterone, they give you a natural level of testosterone, so it’s not an advantage at all.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like 0%. This is well written about. Web MD is like, it’s a replacement. It’s not the same as using anabolic chemicals at all. So, they’re talking about dosages and stuff like that. So, a lot of the troll comments are, like they’re pointing at me or whoever, like a 14-year old withvisible bicep vein is, people, say, “Oh, he’s on steroids,” because they’re jealous. Because they just want to point, and it’s sort of like any pretty girl. It’s like, “Oh, look at all the plastic surgery.” It’s like, “Shut up. She’s 19.”

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Whatever. So, this happens, and so people say, “Well, there’s a lot of TRT going on there,” and it’s like, you clearly don’t know what TRT means, because the R is for replacement.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you can’t have a lot of replacement.

Erin Power: Right. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Replacement is replacement. It’s 600 per 1000 nanograms per deciliter. That’s replacement. You can’t have a lot of that.

Erin Power: Right. Well, your assertion that I want to read it verbatim because it was the funniest thing. Fitness is the most failed human endeavor of all. I just would love to get your definition of what do you define as fitness? What would be your, if you had to define it, what is it, question for you?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m going to define this in a more of a cultural way than a scientific way.

Erin Power: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because ultimately, people will say they exercise to be healthier, but that’s bull. They exercise to be more attractive. Right? I mean we rope people in and we, I’m talking the three of us, I’m talking about your listeners. We rope people into doing fitness because they know they’re going to be better-looking. Now, the health benefits that come along with it. Yeah. People are happy about that, but that’s not why they do it. People, if somebody’s thin, and they think that’s healthy, and you want to talk to them about nutrition or something like that. They’re like-

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Not understood.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m doing great with what I’m doing. They might be eating nothing with candy bars or something like that, an extreme deficit, and you’re like, okay, well you can still be diabetic and thin.

Erin Power: It’s a very hard pill to swallow. I was just thinking that I, do you ever hear people who say, well, no, the gym’s my happy place. It’s like, sure, and-

Dr. John Jaquish: I hear that. I tell them, take x3 to the gym, and it’ll be an even happier place because instead of being the same overweight, weak person, you have always been going to the gym, you’ll be strong and lean.

Dr. John Jaquish: I just tell people the brutal truth.

Laura Rupsis: There’s a lot about what, most of what you said I completely agree with, but there are some things I push back on a little bit, just from my own experience.

Dr. John Jaquish: Certainly.

Laura Rupsis: We talked before we started recording. I owned a gym. I still legally own it. I moved, got the heck out of Illinois, and moved to Florida. Freedom. But anyway-

Dr. John Jaquish: Great. That’s right. I made the mistake of living in Illinois.

Laura Rupsis: There you go. So, I moved down here,

Dr. John Jaquish: I lived Lincoln Park. It was-

Laura Rupsis: I still legally own my gym, but I’m not training there anymore, but I have a little home gym here, and I just enjoy the act of moving my body and challenging myself.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure.

Laura Rupsis: But, my workouts change all the time, but I predominantly do strength training. But anyway, from being at the gym, and when we talk about what people do you see getting fitter, from a coaching perspective, over the last 10 years, people that stuck with it and followed my advice, which was not to be here five days a week. I think that’s too much. You’re over-training. But at the end of the day, they did get stronger. They noticed differences in their capabilities. People telling me in the real world, “Holy cow, we had a blizzard and I had to shovel a foot of snow, and you know what? I did it and I wasn’t sore for three days.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It was way easier.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah. My body was stronger because I’d been working towards this. But to your point, there’s a large number of people, don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of people that came in, including me, that will say that changing the way I trained, changed my body composition, like how I exercised. I was a cardio bunny for a long time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Lara Rupsis: And like you were saying, I lost weight, but I didn’t have the muscle mass. When I stopped the cardio-

Dr. John Jaquish: The cardio makes you lose muscle, not body fat.

Laura Rupsis: Absolutely. I was burning calories, burning muscle. I wasn’t building it. But at the same time, from the standpoint of CrossFit, I think of the, what I loved about it was the community that it built, the ability, like the mindset of CrossFit of-

Dr. John Jaquish: I agree.

Laura Rupsis: Even, there’s a sense of competition, it’s really about you just getting better, and I think there’s some benefit in that. As the coach, I did notice benefits and changes in my clients, but not all of them. Typically, the ones that didn’t see the benefits were the ones that were expecting magic to happen, just because they went to the gym and lifted something.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Laura Rupsis: They weren’t changing how they ate. They were recovering properly.

Dr. John Jaquish: … two weeks, and I don’t have a six pack yet.

Laura Rupsis: Yes. Like they just, like, I kept trying to tell them, “Oh my God, I only have you for an hour, three days a week. What are you doing for the other 23 hours of the days you’re here, and the other 24 hours of the day that you’re not?” So, this is where I think the disconnect is coming with the fitness industry, is we’re not tying this together. I don’t know. What are your thoughts there?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, nutrition, there’s a lot of bad information in nutrition also, which I cover heavily in the book. I also, I seem to have a controversial approach when you read my words. I don’t actually. I’m still cool with carbohydrates, but there’s a limit to how much carbohydrate you can take in to replenish the glycogen within your muscle. Beyond that, it’s just going right on your fat ass.

Laura Rupsis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: So, you got to keep that in mind. There’s a limit, and so also, carbohydrates play zero role in muscle protein synthesis.

Erin Power: Oh, insulin’s not anabolic?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right

Laura Rupsis: Erin says, with a sheepish grin.

Dr. John Jaquish: You know where that myth came from? It was people taking exogenous insulin, like at 40 to 50 times what your body could create. So, there’s a study in, I want to say the late 80s or maybe, maybe … I want to say ‘91, where they took exogenous insulin injections and combined it with growth hormone. This is where the body builders got their protocol of how they do this, and it was highly anabolic.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like, ridiculously anabolic, but you can never do this with your own biochemistry.

Laura Rupsis: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, that’s where that whole, you need massive amounts, and of course when they inject all this insulin, these … now I’m, this is me quoting bodybuilders, not me quoting the scientific study, because I don’t even know exactly what they did in the scientific study. But I know a body builder who injects a bunch of insulin, and then he has 900 grams of carbohydrates within the next eight hours.

Erin Power: Oh, my gosh.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m like, “How do you do that?” He goes, “I just get a box of Snickers bars and eat the whole thing.”

Erin Power: Oh great.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like, wow.

Erin Power: For the love of God.

Dr. John Jaquish: You are going to have so many health problems later in life. I don’t even know what they’re going to be, because like this is uncharted territory. It’s not like there’s a study on people who do this. Anyway. I mean, that’s a small segue, and I was just like-

Erin Power: Yeah. I mean, as we talk, you talked about genetic outliers before, but I think about, bodybuilders, outliers, don’t really, they’re going to do what they’re going to do. Even powerlifters. I want to talk about gym pop, just humans trying to get fitter, better, and healthier.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Erin Power: That’s why, when I was listening to your, I was telling you before we pressed record that I came across you through Ben Greenfield’s podcast because it was titled Lifting Weights is a Waste of Time. I was like, it feels like it’s a waste of time. Now that I hear it in my ears-

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of people agree. They actually, like when they saw this title, they were like, I had to read that book.

Erin Power: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because, I trained for years, and didn’t get anything out of it.

Erin Power: Exactly. I can tell you, the point of diminishing returns, I think I hit it probably 20 years ago. I still go and lift. My weight haven’t increased. I certainly haven’t put on any additional muscle mass. It’s like it stopped working 20 years ago, the way I’m doing it now. Why there’s nothing else in my life that I would keep doing if it stopped working 20 years ago.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Erin Power: Like, it’s just-

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. You wouldn’t stay in a marriage that was dysfunctional for 20 years.

Erin Power: Correct. Or a job, anything. Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Why would you keep lifting? The reason people keep lifting is they’re like, well I know I’m supposed to lift.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Laura Rupsis: And if I don’t use it, I’ll lose it, is the rationale.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. I don’t want to lose what I gained, but I’m not gaining anything else. So, it’s just kind of, just banging my head against the wall here. So, let me let everybody in on the big difference between the people who respond to weights and the people, and the 99.9% of people who don’t. Now, keep in mind, there’s some confusion in there, because there are some people who are just really lean, and they never really build any muscle. Those are people with just responsible nutrition because there is no gene for being lean. Right?

Erin Power: Oh, okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of overweight people imagine there is, but there isn’t. Also, on the other side, I don’t believe that the reason for obesity is pure gluttony, as some sports science people would say. There are different hormonal impacts on different things, insulin being one of them. There’s a great study that came out two days ago, about carbohydrates. It’s called Carbohydrate Insulin Model, CIM.

Erin Power: Yeah. Just two days ago?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Two, my last Instagram post, has the citation-

Laura Rupsis: Link. Cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Just go to my Instagram, and it’s right there. So, the biggest issue with the differences and this is like, this is why standard fitness gets defended because somebody looks at an outlier and says, “Well, if I keep training, I’m going to be just like that guy. So, I’m going to do exactly what that guy does,” but the problem is, they don’t have the genetics of that guy.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, you can do what that guy does, and God knows if what he does is really what he does. He might just be lying. Like when Dwayne Johnson says he eats 10,000 calories a day, no he doesn’t. Nobody eats that. That’s ridiculous. Maybe he did it once. But like he says, like when I’m trying to put on muscle, he has a stack of pancakes, like a foot tall. That’s just stupid. He would be as fat as a couch.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Would look like a couch if he ate like that. That is so just ludicrous, and he probably didn’t even write that. It was probably from his PR agency, and I’m guessing he read that and he’s like, “Like, I eat what?” Okay. So, the difference is, and it’s not hormonal. So, there’s, I think there have been three people in modern history that have had such an abnormal level of testosterone that they were disallowed from sports. Two of them were in this past Olympics, and one of them was in the ’90s. I write about the one in the ’90s in my book, because I wrote the book before the Olympics. So, before that, it’d only been one person who was an outlier. So, everybody else just kind of has a normal level of testosterone or a depressed level.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Some athletes have a depressed level and they still win. The real difference has to do with where the tendons attach. So, I’m going to use my pectoral as an example, if you’re watching this on video, you can see it, but I’ll try and describe it. So, my pectoralis attached to my sternum. That’s the origin. Here’s the pectoral muscle, my chest. Then, it’s attached in here, like right under the beginning of the bicep. I’m kind of going in between my two bicep heads.

So, it’s right on the humerus bone, underneath the bicep, is where 99% of the population has that attachment point. So, it attaches here and here and pulls the two points together. Right? So, if I’m pressing, it’s pulling those points together. If I’m moving my arm, like in sort of a fly- type motion, some people have a mutation so that their insertion point is under the bicep at the other end of the bone.

Laura Rupsis: Is there a way you can tell by visually looking at it?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, no. You’d you’d need to do like a CT scan-

Laura Rupsis: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: … to understand. Like, this is why this was kind of elusive, also, kind of pointless to study, because there’s nothing you can do about it.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Like, if you have a disadvantageous tendon layout, it’s not like training is going to fix that. So, it was kind of ignored, but it’s been written about, and they can do different animal models. So, basically, when you have that insertion point out here, you have a longer lever on the muscle. So, what do we know about longer levers? Well, longer levers can displace power massively.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Also, keep in mind, that tendons are elastic. They are like rubber bands themselves. The longer it is, the more tendon you have, the more elastic it is. So, when people who were born to be athletes train, they’re doing variable resistance inside their body, and they don’t even know it.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, when somebody has a problem with variable resistance, it’s like, but this is how the strongest people in the world are genetically built.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, how could you deny that?

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re denying it. They’re usually just, like it’s the people who are selling a program that’s based on the standard weightlifting that hate me the most, that are trying to discredit me, because obviously, like I’m proving them wrong and okay, so you’re wrong. Don’t cry about it. Come to up with a better program. So, anyway, but that’s the difference. So, now, when we look at variable resistance, that genetic, the whole concept of people being genetically different is out the window, because now everybody can load where they’re strongest.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: … and de-load where they’re weakest. So, they can go in all positions to fatigue. Fatigue the entire muscle, and it stimulates far more growth. So, now everybody can grow like an NFL player, everybody.

Erin Power: Yeah. This makes me think, this has been shared widely, and I’d love to know what you think of it, but this idea of like how the femur inserts into the hip socket and the orientation of one’s pelvis, and how that affects squat depth. Do you know what I mean? I’m not sure if I’m articulating it well. But, and the way, I guess the way I guess, ligaments and tendons are oriented around the joint, is there something to that as well? So, I’ve got long femurs, I’m leggy, so I can’t get ass to grass. I’ve tried. I can’t do it. So, does variable resistance work with skeletal anatomy too, in that regard?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. I mean, it’s going to make up for a lot of biomechanical inefficiencies. But I mean, it works like that, like a flame- thrower works for killing ants. Just make sure the ants aren’t on your grand piano.

Laura Rupsis: Okay. So, let’s talk about this from the point of view of the people listening here. So, we’re going to have a subset of coaches that have a fitness aspect to their practice, that I would love to drill down on. But then also, at some point in this conversation, those health coaches listening, that aren’t fitness people, how can they learn some of what we’re, use some of what we’re talking about? Because, all health coaches should be addressing movement to some capacity in their coaching practice, what can they take away from this conversation?

Laura Rupsis: But starting with fitness professionals, who might kind of get their back up a little bit. “Well, this is the way I’ve always done it, and I disagree. I’ve seen what have you.” How can they take what you’re saying to heart without getting their panties in a bunch here, and just do better for their clients, because I’m sure, like everybody else, they’ve got clients that can put in various categories, as far as like those that respond well to training, like you just mentioned, those that just don’t seem to get the same results?

I don’t think anybody would deny that. Can you speak a little bit about how your book, and the device or the tool that you put together could be helpful for someone that might have a fitness practice, and how they can use that? Then we’ll transition into maybe those that don’t, and what aspects of this conversation could be of benefit to them.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Some of these health coaches, remember like the way everybody gets pulled into fitness is vanity.

Erin Power: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s just a reality of it. So, like those health coaches with female clients, they probably want to grow glute muscles, quad muscles. They want more defined calves, and any muscle you want to reshape … Now, women always call it reshaping. Men call it making it bigger. It’s the same thing.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Which is just kind of irritating, but whatever. If women need to hear reshaping-

Laura Rupsis: Tomato, tomato.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Just call it that. So, but, I just wanted to clear the same thing. So, talking about reshaping the legs and some butt, like there’s no getting away from heavy.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You need to go heavy. That’s the only way a muscle’s going to grow. If you’re going to do that, the problem is, that’s a risk.

Laura Rupsis: Right .

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of times it’s a risk someone will tolerate. Maybe if you have, maybe if your client is a 19-year old female, she’s like, “Yeah, I’ll go through some pain,” but maybe 25-year old females like, “No, I have a job. I can’t, I can’t screw up my back and then have to stay at home for three days. I just can’t do that.” Or how about a mom chasing around a little kid? If you’re a mother, can you have a bad back day? No, you really can’t. Even when you do, you still can’t. You’re still running around chasing your kid. You have no choice. So, yeah. Kids are kind of like little suicide machines.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re trying to figure out any way they can off themselves, and you have to constantly make sure that no, you can’t put that fork in that outlet. So, yeah. I would approach it from that place, and with variable resistance, with X3, they’re going to be able to stimulate a lot more growth without the risks, without the risks of injury, and they’re going to be able to continue to do that. My mother does it, and she’s in her … God, she’s going to be mad if she sees this. I think she’s 86.

Laura Rupsis: Wow.

Erin Power: Whoa.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. She still does it. It’s funny. She deadlifts. That’s her best. Her best thing is a deadlift. She deadlifts more than a lot of the guys.

Erin Power: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Who are in her twenties? She is really strong. She can carry a … She weighs 120 pounds, maybe a little … yeah, maybe about 120 pounds. She’s 5'2”, and she can carry a 50-pound bag of soil in each hand when she’s in the garden. So, she’s walking out to the garden with 100 pounds of dirt.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: In her mid-eighties.

Erin Power: That’s amazing.

Laura Rupsis: That’s awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and like, she doesn’t think a thing of it. She doesn’t think she can do that because she’s strong. She’s like, “Oh, I just need the soil out there,” and she just picks it up and carries it.

Erin Power: When did she start?

Dr. John Jaquish: When did she start X3?

Erin Power: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: When I had my prototype, about four years ago.

Erin Power: Oh. So, she was in her eighties when she started.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh yeah, yeah. In her eighties. Yeah. She built this strength. Now, she did OsteoStrong also.

Erin Power: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: You might have seen me on Fox News with her.

Laura Rupsis: So, is OsteoStrong a program, and then X3 is equipment?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. OsteoStrong is a medical device.

Laura Rupsis: It is a medical device.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it’s a clinic-

Laura Rupsis: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: That has my proprietary medical devices in it.

Laura Rupsis: Got it.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, they have the worldwide exclusive on that technology.

Erin Power: Are there any in Canada?

Dr. John Jaquish: Not yet.

Laura Rupsis: You might be the first, Erin.

Dr. John Jaquish: Where in Canada are you?

Erin Power: Oh, Calgary area.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. I’ve heard of it.

Erin Power: Okay.

Laura Rupsis: Heard of it. Okay. So, for health coaches. Okay. So, the reason I’m asking these questions is that my role at the school that Erin and I work for or work with is admissions director. So, I’m talking to people all day long that have an interest in becoming a health coach, many of which, have a fitness background. They’re like, “Clearly, fitness alone is not the answer.

I need to start talking about nutrition. I need to start talking about other things.” So, that’s that subset. I would argue … I 100% believe you, that, believe exactly what you believe, that from a fitness perspective, many fitness professionals need to be doing something better, something different. But I also have a whole other subset who’s like, “That’s just not my bag. I don’t feel as though I’m a fitness-minded person. I want to come to this from the point of nutrition and mindset, and what have you.”

Laura Rupsis: I try to explain to people that, at the very least, the movement has got to be a part of the story, because it filters, humans were meant to move. So, if you were talking to me, and I’m someone who’s a health coach, and I’m intimidated about adding the idea of fitness to my coaching program or talking about it because I don’t feel I know very much, can you tell me a little bit about what your book might provide, or what advice you might give someone like me to feel , like where I can, maybe even just refer somebody to a fitness program. Because, if I’m, as a health coach, like believes what you believe and how the fitness industry’s kind of nonsense.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I wrote the book. I mean, it cites a lot of research, but it summarizes what it says in the studies in total layman’s terms. So, I wrote it so that a person who knows nothing about fitness could get an incredible, could get all the information they need to be successful. So, I would say to somebody who’s a health coach who isn’t like a fitness person, they’d enjoy the book. They’d also really enjoy the product, because the workout’s 10 minutes. You cannot make it longer if you wanted to. You do it four to six days a week, depending on where you are in your development. But 10 minutes, like 10 minutes for a day, is really not a big commitment.

Erin Power: Also-

Dr. John Jaquish: People spend as much time brushing their teeth.

Erin Power: Also, it’s like a perceived exertion thing. It’s like, it doesn’t really matter how, when we get into the gym and we have barbells, we’re putting the plates on. We’re doing the math. We’re like, I guess this is the amount I’m supposed to be moving around this bar. But like, with the variable resistance, it’s like, you just, you put a band on and work it until you can’t anymore. You’re not going to run the risk of overdoing it or picking the wrong weight or something.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Erin Power: It’s pretty idiot-proof in a way.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you’d be surprised what some people do. So, nothing’s idiot-proof. Yeah. Some people use the product and they’ll send me a video and I’m like, “What are you doing? Don’t ever do that again.” They’ll do it with like speed or something like that. It’s like, there are different tools to train for speed if you want speed. Like, if you’re training for speed, X3 is not your thing. It will make you faster but use it correctly. So, we go very slow and controlled when you use X3. Like, when I was emulating the repetition cadence, it’s like this. The slower you go, the more stabilization firing you have, which means functionally, you become faster.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: But that doesn’t mean that’s the way you’re training. So, if you do want to harness that speed, you probably have to do some speed training with like plyometrics or something else, or just speed drills and things like that. But I mean, we’re talking about something obscure that almost nobody’s looking for. I don’t know any adults that are looking to have a good 40-yard time.

Erin Power: Right.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Erin Power: So, for the health coach that is uninitiated in fitness, this is a pretty good entry point. It’s a solid entry point because it’s not time-consuming. It’s not complex. There’s only a handful of moves, right, in the X3 program?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Eight.

Erin Power: Eight moves. How much sort of exercise physiology or biomechanics knowledge would a health coach need to have to maybe put somebody into this program?

Dr. John Jaquish: None.

Erin Power: None

Dr. John Jaquish: None. In fact, we’re going to have a certified trainer program coming online, pretty soon.

Laura Rupsis: That was going to be my next question is, do you have a program for trainers?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. So, somebody, like you don’t need to be a trainer of any other kind to be an X3 bar trainer. I think the people who are coming at it from a fresh perspective will probably be better because they haven’t already convinced themselves of false truths that the fitness industry is full of.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Laura Rupsis: Look, and if you think about this from a health coaching perspective, the number one, I’m going to use the term excuse, but in air quotes, many coaches got from their clients as to why they don’t exercise is lack of time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yes.

Laura Rupsis: Number one excuse. Right? So, this is kind of BS. You can’t find 10 minutes, which is when I’m going to call BS with my client and be like, “Then you’re probably prioritizing something else. It’s not that you don’t have time. You’re prioritizing something else.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yeah. I tell people like it’s only 10 minutes. You’ll find the time or you’ll find an excuse. Either way. You’re looking hard for one or the other.

Laura Rupsis: Absolutely. I mean, I think every health coach and look, our program, the thesis we live by is that the average American probably just needs to move more. Right? We need to, we need just more movement throughout the day. We’re advocates of what we would call lifting heavy things. That can mean a lot of things, and to your point, it doesn’t have to mean weights. Then every once in a while you need that sprint burst. We get into the adaptive hormone response to something like that, and again, that could take many different frames. But all in all, other than just moving more, which I could do right now, if my headset wasn’t attached to my stinking laptop, I could be walking around right now, just moving more.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, sure.

Laura Rupsis: Right? So, from the standpoint of the aspect of this, none of those things, lifting heavy things, or sprinting, does not have to take a long time. You do not have to be in the gym for two hours. You don’t. That’s a colossal waste of time. I try to build the most efficient workout I can. This one sounds exceptionally efficient. Can you give us an example of what a typical 10- minute workout might be, and what that might look like maybe weekly?

Dr. John Jaquish: So, like my workout later, I’m going to do … oh, I’m filming some things, so my workout later will not be the standard. So, normally what I would do is like, let’s say I start with chest press. One set, no warmup or anything. The first few repetitions are the warmup, because that it’s very easy on joints. So, things come online over the first five or six repetitions.

Then you, in fact, sometimes it starts hard like the first four repetitions are a little difficult, and then it gets easier, because you’re potentiating. You’re switching on more muscle, and so it’s taking on, it’s dividing the load between all the cells. Then you do the chest press, and so you might, we go higher repetitions because we’re dealing with staggeringly high weight like I told you. My chest press is 500 plus pounds.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I don’t, I’m not going to do more than one set. That is devastating and like Erin’s squats. Yeah. Just devastatingly exhausting. Then, so I’ll do triceps, overhead press, and then squats. So, that’s the push day. So, four movements.

Also, supplementary movement. I do a crossover also, where I don’t use the bar. I just take a band and kind of squeeze, because, the pectorals are kind of a funny muscle group. They’re a little different than anything. You want to get the most weight through them because that activates the most testosterone receptors. So, that’s weight-dependent. As I said, there’s no escaping heavy, but the pectoral, when you’re here, is not fully contracted. It’s fully contracted when you’re here.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah. When you’ve crossed over.

Erin Power: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. That’s why we add in a crossover, so you can fatigue it in two ways, so we have to fatigue in 25-minute ways. So, that’s the whole workout, and it takes about 10 minutes, and then I’m done.

Erin Power: You said there were eight moves. So, we have a chest press, an overhead press

Dr. John Jaquish: The crossover is kind of supplementary. It’s for people who want the size in their chest. So, women typically don’t do the crossover, but they’ll do the rest of the movements.

Erin Power: Okay.

Laura Rupsis: So, what would your next workout then be? Are they pull movements?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Laura Rupsis: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, like a deadlift, bent over row.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Bicep curl, and then we do a calf raise. I know that’s kind of a pushing movement, but it gives you four and four.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah. So, are you typically just alternating those two types of sets?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. Yeah. So, one day is one and the other day is the other, so we give 48 hours rest. We know from muscle biopsy studies, it takes 36 hours to complete protein synthesis. So, we hit every muscle group three times in a week. You ensure the most amount of growth, and never overtraining.

Erin Power: Gosh, this just sounds so good. Every time I hear it, I’m like, yeah, I got to start doing … I got to get one of these things, because it’s 10 minutes every three days. Like, come on.

Laura Rupsis: I will sell all my other gym equipment so that I could go buy that. Make up room upstairs.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, some people do it like Erin. So, I do it six days a week.

Erin Power: Oh, okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Erin Power: Oh, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, I split the body, and that’s why I hit each muscle three times.

Erin Power: Got you.

Dr. John Jaquish: But some people do it four times a week, so they hit every muscle twice. Or, some people do all the movements in one day. So, it’s like, maybe like when you do that, you got to need a little more rest, so it might be a 25- minute workout, but you only have to do it three times a week. So, Monday, Wednesday, Friday kind of thing,

Erin Power: Wild. If you did this, you would make put on three times the muscle, in just that-

Dr. John Jaquish: So many people argue to me about that point, even though it does say that in the research. It actually says three times the strength. Now, of course, you only get stronger by growing the muscle. Nobody ever got stronger by shrinking the muscle.

Erin Power: True.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, yeah. Yeah. There was some bozo who was just rattling my cage on his Instagram, not, on his YouTube

Laura Rupsis: So, could you, I would love for you to kind of make the pitch, and make the argument to, and again, I’m sorry guys, because I’ll ask a guy-related question next. I’ll think of one. But to you your point, so many women are like, “I don’t want to get bulky.” You can get stronger, without looking like a she-man.

Laura Rupsis: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Looking masculine, like the people that, the women that end up looking masculine from lifting, they’re taking male hormones to look like that.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, that’s, it’s unfortunate. They shouldn’t do that. There’s, you can be strong and feminine.

Laura Rupsis: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: There are two things that are not, counter each other. It’s funny because almost any time that a woman who does a lot of strength training is seen in public, like my fiance, for example, super strong and people ask me, they’ll be like, as a group of girls will ask me when I go to like the restroom. They’ll be like, “That girl you’re with, her body’s incredible.”

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: What is she, what’s her workout like, and I’m like, I don’t want to get in X3. I’m like, “Strength training only. No cardio.” They’re like, “What?” I’m thinking, I’ve got to be like the hundredth person that said this to you.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because anybody that’s in an all-cardio workout, they look like a melted ice cream cone. They’re a skinny thing. They look awful. Sorry. No, I mean, hey, if somebody wants to be a marathon runner, that’s like, that’s what makes them happy-

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s great. It’s certainly a better habit than heroin. So, good for you. It doesn’t mean like it’s not going to create the aesthetic you want, I promise.

Laura Rupsis: All you have to do is, so just taking a look back to your point where you were talking about the Olympics, the difference between the female long-distance marathon runners and the female sprinters, I don’t know about you, but those female sprinters, I was like, “Damn, girl, you look good.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Perfect body. Yeah.

Laura Rupsis: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: They look young, like forever. They look like sprinters look like they’re in their mid-twenties when they’re 50.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah, and how many of them do you think are training-

Dr. John Jaquish: They clue in everyone.

Laura Rupsis: … by running 10 miles? They’re not training that way. No doubt, they’re sprinting. They’re, I’m not going to pretend to know how they, but I know that they strength train, because I’ve met them before.

Dr. John Jaquish: You want, so a sprinter want to make their, they want to make their arm heavier.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: The reason why is when you throw your arm back, you want a lot of mass here when you throw your arm back, because that helps the locomotion. It pivots your pelvis slightly, and gets you a longer stride with the next foot, on the opposite foot.

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, you want a very balanced muscular body when you’re sprinting.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: You never see a sprinter with skinny arms.

Erin Power: No.

Laura Rupsis: It doesn’t happen. This question though, of women who want to get strong, but not bulky, there’s a funny meme that went around that was, worrying about getting too bulky by lifting weights is like worrying about accidentally becoming an F1 driver, just be cause you know, not driving because you don’t want to accidentally become an F1 driver or something like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Perfect.

Erin Power: It’s not going to happen. You’re going to have to work at it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It’s not like you run three stoplights, and somebody pulls you over and they’re like, “We need you to drive for Mercedes next year.”

Erin Power: Right? Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: And you have no choice.

Erin Power: It takes a lot of effort to get super, super bulky and strong like that, or some kind of enhancement

Dr. John Jaquish: It takes, and then some women will say like, “Every time I lift, I get big.” I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no.”

Laura Rupsis: No.

Dr. John Jaquish: “Every time you lift, you stimulated your appetite, and instead of eating responsibly, you ate cupcakes.”

Erin Power: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, bigger was not muscle. You just got fatter.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah. Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: So, a lot of them were like, “Wow, like that’s a big accusation.” I’m like, “You know I’m right.” They’re like, “Maybe.”

Erin Power: Yeah, that’s a mental game. It’s like, I made a hole. I had this hard workout. First of all, there’s a mental game. Like, oh, I made a workout, or I made a hole. I earned, earned and burned calories, and the ravenous hunger that’s inherent when you used start ramping up strength program. Those two things combined, totally play havoc with folks and their nutrition. They’re not even realizing it, because we’ve been culturally conditioned to, oh man, gains right? Got to fill the hole that I just made.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Erin Power: And neither one can learn why. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Oh, like people have trouble understanding why I work out fasting.

Laura Rupsis: Oh, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: But, you gain muscles. You grow in your sleep. Nobody ever … there’s studies where people have five meals and people have two meals and they have the same exact nutrients, makes no difference whatsoever.

Laura Rupsis: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Nothing.

Laura Rupsis: I love that. So, there’s a gym in my community that put out these nutritional like myth-busting things.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Laura Rupsis: Half of them, I agreed with. Half I disagreed with, but whatever, who am I? I’m just a health coach. But one of the things, the myth-buster that they recommended against was fasted workouts, and why that’s bad. Which she didn’t go into any detail, by the way.

Dr. John Jaquish: A fasted workout-

Laura Rupsis: It’s just sort of how your body needs fuel to move, kind of thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: You want your blood to be going to muscle. You don’t want it to be going to your intestines.

Laura Rupsis: Thank you. Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Fasted workouts are like, they were one of those things that to me was obvious.

Erin Power: So, are you a proponent then of, because I got this question from a client the other day. I got a question from a new client I took on. I randomly ended up with a lot of triathletes in my client rosters. It’s a long story, but, so I’m having to unwind a lot of conventional wisdom around training and nutrition with these folks. So, one of my clients is pushing back hard on the anabolic window.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. No such thing.

Erin Power: Okay, good. I was like, “We’re having you eat a ton of protein all day long. You’re good. You don’t have to time it within 30 minutes or whatever of your strength session. You’re getting ample, as long as you’re getting ample protein, you’re good.” So, are you a proponent of that line of thinking?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Erin Power: Good.

Dr. John Jaquish: You grow at night. You grow when you sleep. Now, your body has no mechanism to store protein, but it can stay digesting for a long time. Also, there is muscle protein synthesis that goes on during the day. So, I shouldn’t say you do all of your growth at night. You do most of it at night.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: But, and there was just a very odd study that came out. Don’t know what to make of it, but it showed that people that consume more protein in the morning grew a little bit more muscle-

Erin Power: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish:… than the people who consumed it at night. I still consume mine at night, just because, I don’t have big breakfast meetings. I do have big dinner meetings though.

Erin Power: Yeah. That tracks for me though, from a circadian biology perspective, a little bit. Like, this whole idea that we’re more insulin-sensitive in the morning, and in a manner of speaking, the body’s ready to take up and put fuel to work, because the sun rose. I don’t know. I geek out on that stuff, so, that makes sense to me.

Dr. John Jaquish: See, I try and be depleted all day. Another thing I do is, and I’ve been running this experiment for a little over six months. I dry fast every day. So, sort of like Ramadan fasting, and the only reason I mention Ramadan fasting is there are more than a billion people who do this per year, every year, for the last 800 years, and there haven’t been any health complications.

So, it’s a great point of reference. Now, some Muslim athletes do this as well. Their performance does not suffer. So, do you constantly need to be drinking water? Well, not, because I go 20 hours a day drinking no fluids at all. But here’s the weird thing. When I go into my hydration window, where I consume my food in also, I still drink about the same amount of liquid that a normal person does.

Erin Power: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Two liters minimum, sometimes three. So, I’m thirsty, and I drink. So, it’s like, I’m getting it all at once and then flushing it all out for the next day, so I can take advantage of the dry fast. Is it? Do you guys know? I bet your listeners don’t know why people would dry fast.

Erin Power: I haven’t heard of it, and I’m so curious, because-

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. It’s awesome. Now, I mean, people started noticing this via Ramadan fasting, so not have like a performance origin, but what they realized was, you actually can’t get so dehydrated normally, that you’ll hurt yourself, because what happens is you get dehydrated, your mouth gets dry. You feel like you can’t sweat. Then all of a sudden, it all comes back.

Then, sort of like regular fasting, like you’re hungry, you’re hungry, and then all of a sudden you’re not hungry. So, what happens is your body switches to tapping into metabolic water, which is the water in the only nonvascular tissue we have, which is fat. So, it starts pulling water out of fat cells, which, if you pull enough water out of fat cells, destroys them permanently. So, you get very lean by doing this, and I’m like, now that I’ve done dry fasting, I’ll never do water fasting again. Dry fasting is-

**Erin Power: **Interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish:… awesome. So, I go 20 hours a day, no liquids, and then I get into my hydration window, do my workout, then eat. Then usually, I’m just up for another couple of hours and then go to bed.

Laura Rupsis: So, how would you-

Erin Power: I’m sorry.

Laura Rupsis: Go ahead, Erin.

Erin Power: Do you do electrolytes when you drink your water or are you just getting all

Dr. John Jaquish: I used to. Great question. So, I used to, but I’m so used to it now, I don’t need them. I’m not dehydrated, and my body knows how to manage it.

Laura Rupsis: So, our little school and the people that sort of is part of our little ancestral health community, nobody is, nobody finds the idea of fasting alien, or all that controversial at all. I’m sure other people listening to that aren’t part of our little ancestral world might. But, those that graduated from our school or identify or kind of, sort of buy into the whole ancestral model, fasting is a very normal part of the human experience, but dry fasting, probably not as much. So, if one, if somebody wanted to try that, do you recommend they jump into a 20-hour dry fast, baby steps your way into something like that? Like what would your-

Dr. John Jaquish: Definitely, baby steps first.

Laura Rupsis: Yeah. So, how would you sort of recommend somebody give that a try?

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, first, the first step is just skipping breakfast. Because most people eat three meals a day, just skip breakfast. Just start skipping breakfast for a week. Don’t eat breakfast for a week.

Laura Rupsis: And all fluids as well?

Dr. John Jaquish: oh yeah. Drink fluids.

Laura Rupsis: Everything.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So, that’s step one. Now, that’s not going to give you great results, like the short fasted periods. It’s more than a caloric deficit that is happening when you’re in a fast period because there are some hormonal implications. How important those are like you have scientists like Lane Norton who just completely denies that any hormonal change makes any difference whatsoever, and it’s only about calories. That’s been ascribed for the last 70 years, and Americans are fatter and sicker than ever. So, I do think it’s a little more complicated than just calorie restriction. Also, calorie restriction is very unrealistic for people who eat addictive foods.

Erin Power: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: So, if you eat carbohydrates, you want to eat all the time. He just, he denies that. I like that guy. I mean, like I know he’s like a professional troll, all-