Shaking Up Exercise Science

Could fitness be a failed endeavor?

Host Gayle Guyardo of Bloom for Fitness Friday, WFLA meets with Dr. John Jaquish, scientist, inventor, and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of “Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time : So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want” to discuss how exercise science has missed obvious principles.

Dr. John Jaquish shares tips from his book and also demonstrates how to use his variable resistance training program, the X3 .

Full Transcript

Gayle Guyardo: It’s time to get moving and in today’s Fitness Friday, we are shaking up exercise science. Joining us now is a scientist, inventor, and best selling author of Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. Welcome to Bloom, Dr. John Jaquish.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks so much for having me. This is fun.

Gayle Guyardo: I know myself personally. I’ve been in a phase of my life where I was doing so much cardio and burning myself out and not seeing the needle move at all and you are shaking up everything we know about exercise

Dr. John Jaquish: The book is called Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want and it’s more like a metaphor for like there’s a better approach however I picked an inflammatory title because I wanted to get people’s attention that weightlifting has a lot of problems with it and so does cardio unless you are doing it in bursts, like HIT training.

When it came to what I developed, (this is my second invention,) the idea is that we need greater force on certain parts of our body and lesser force on other parts of our body. So for example, let’s say we are doing a chest press, I am seven times stronger here than back here, so knowing that, why would anyone ever lift a weight?

It doesn’t make sense. You’re placing inappropriate loads on your body. In fact, you choose a weight that is low enough so that you can handle it in your weaker range motion which is back here so why don’t we change it, so that the weight up-regulates as we get into more efficient positions.

So that was the idea and I’ll just demonstrate a little.

Gayle Guyardo: Sure!

Gayle Guyardo: So, you do believe in weightlifting but this is more extreme?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, there’s no weights here. I believe in resistance training.

Gayle Guyardo: Gotcha

Dr. John Jaquish: Particularly variable resistance. Solving the variable resistance training problem was easy because of band training, except no, because if I try to do a push-up by throwing this band around my back and pushing like this I could probably break my wrist due to the 300 or 350 to 400 lb at extension.

So I put this around myself and I’m now ready to do the chest press. I go to push away from myself and it might be about a hundred pounds right here and maybe 200 right here and 350 right there and you go through slow and controlled repetitions. This will exhaust a muscle much faster than regular weight training. And while it exhausts me much quicker and also to a much higher degree, what you’re really trying to show the central nervous system in the musculature is that you don’t have enough.

You have to show a real deficit of strength in all positions to fatigue the maximum amount of muscle so that you can show the body that you need growth. Because what happens most times is people fatigue back here, where they are fatiguing the least amount of muscle and injuring the joint the most.

Gayle Guyardo: And you look the way you look right now using only this?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. Using only this. I’m 45 years old. I do nothing other than this. I take one supplement. A protein supplement.

Gayle Guyardo: Can we see the abs?

Gayle Guyardo: There they are! Come scrub something on those abs.

Gayle Guyardo: For me, I’m doing a deadlift over here and you say that depending upon where I’m lifting is the weight distribution.

Dr. John Jaquish: Depending on high you go. So you’re going to start, it’s very low weight at the bottom so it’s maybe 50 lb there and now you’re closer to 100 pounds and again, it’s slow and controlled and this will exhaust ranges of motions almost independently but in one experiment so you only do one set with this.

Gayle Guyardo: With all of your exercises?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. You want to pinch the shoulder blades together a little bit.

Gayle Guyardo: It gets heavier, heavier, and heavier.

Dr. John Jaquish: No one said this easy. But it is the absolute, efficient way. No longer than 10 minutes a day.

Gayle Guyardo: Do you do back, chest..

Dr. John Jaquish: Everything is hit with this. We do a two-way split. We do pulling muscles one day, pushing muscles the other day. The Miami Heat uses this for strength training. They do it and their basketball drills. They need to make sure they are not pre-exhausted from one drill, so they can rearrange stuff but the rest of us don’t need to do that.

Gayle Guyardo: Well, I gotta tell you. I totally subscribe to what you are saying. I do extreme weight lifting and it’s only the thing that moves the needle. For me, I’ve got a decade on you, I’m 55. I think this is really cool. Everything packed up in a little container. I loved it!

Hey Dr. Jaquish, this has been awesome meeting you, and I hope you’ll join us in one way or another on Bloom coming up.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. Absolutely. Anything you need me to do.

Gayle Guyardo: To find out more about Dr. Jaquish and his book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want.