Staying Fit After the Holidays

For many, January is a time to refocus on fitness. Cyndi Edwards and Maggie Rodriguez of WFLA Daytime TV show talk with Dr. John Jaquish for simple ways to get back on track. Dr. John Jaquish is a scientist, inventor, and author of WSJ bestseller Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. Dr. Jaquish has spent years researching and developing improved approaches to health.

Full Transcript

Cyndi Edwards: Well there are some people that are able to refocus in January while others never regain the fitness ground they’ve lost or drop the pounds that they’ve added, luckily our next guest says there are some simple strategies to get you right back on track. He is the author of Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want and there’s a better way to have the body you want. I like it! Dr. John Jaquish, welcome, thanks for joining us it’s a pleasure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me.

Cyndi Edwards: I love that title and I do weight lift, is that a waste of time?

Dr. John Jaquish: The book is really about variable resistance. I developed a medical device a few years ago that compresses bone density and the observation that I made has been echoed in a number of different places, we are about seven times stronger here than we are here, so why would you ever lift with a static weight? The weight needs to change as you move.

So this is unbelievably important. Think about a squat, if you bent your knees a little, you can stand there all day. But if you make your thighs parallel to the ground as you squat, you can stay there for maybe for a few seconds

Also, push-ups, you see where kids cheat and don’t go all the way to the ground, because when your nose is against the ground, that’s the hard part

Cyndi Edwards: So just go deeper on everything, is that what you are saying?

Dr. John Jaquish: Train with variable resistance like band training. A lot of which is in that book. By having the weight change as you move. Have you ever seen chain training? It’s where they put a chain on the ground and as they lift, the weight goes up as they move into a stronger biomechanical position.

Cyndi Edwards:: So this is the ideal workout?

Dr. John Jaquish: Ideal.

Cyndi Edwards: What about making the time for this workout? This is the problem a lot of people have.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely. The number one reason is that people are not consistent with going to the gym, it’s time. When everyone is in their twenties, they don’t have kids yet or big work responsibilities, they can go to the gym. We can’t do that. We are busy. I find that people are not lazy at all they just don’t have time and that’s a huge part of what I covered in the book.

My number one piece of advice for this is to work out at home. So imagine if you had to go to the gym every time you want to brush your teeth. You would not brush your teeth as often as you need to brush your teeth.

Cyndi Edwards: I’d want to live right close to the gym.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Do I have to go all the way to the gym to brush my teeth? The problem is, to get a proper stimulus of the body, to become stronger which trigger events to make you become leaner, you have to have that stimulus on a regular basis.

Cyndi Edwards: You have to schedule it. I work out while I’m watching TV.

Dr. John Jaquish: But it’s at home. You don’t skip it. That’s why.

Cyndi Edwards: Now I’ve heard sitting is the new smoking.

Dr. John Jaquish Inactivity is a huge problem. I don’t want to scare people into believing they are doing something wrong by sitting down, it’s as long as you get up and really do something. Now the high intensity of the exercise, now there’s a meta-analysis that combines research that shows that strength training is as beneficial to your cardiovascular health, the health of your heart, and the health of your lungs than cardiovascular training. What’s the difference from a practical standpoint, maybe 10% of the time commitment.

Cyndi Edwards: You don’t need to do it as long.

Dr. John Jaquish: Another thing is that you can really reshape your body with strength training, Now you got a lower commitment time and if you’re working at home then you can really kind of out of excuses. You just got to do it

Cyndi Edwards: I like this. I’m all in. Less cardio and working with more weights while watching T.V.

Dr. John Jaquish: Cardio is not what people think it is. When you chronically engage cardio, you raise cortisol levels. Now more so than being stressed, cortisol levels go up and gets rid of muscle and it preserves body fat as in keeps you as fat as possible as long as possible. Because think about it, you are showing your body you want to be a long-distance machine, what’s it going to do, it’s going to store more energy and shrink your engine, like an economy car. It’s 40 years of research.

Cyndi Edwards: Got it. Must read your book. Dr. John Jaquish, thank you for joining us today!