Interview with Dr. John Jaquish

Dr. John Jaquish, PhD. has spent years researching and developing improved approaches to health. He is the inventor of the most effective bone density building medical technology which is now partnered with Tony Robbins and OsteoStrong for rapid clinic deployment. Inventor of X3, a technology that is proven to develop muscle faster than conventional weight lifting, all with the lowest risk of joint injury, Dr. Jaquish’s methods are used in training the world’s most elite athletes and associations.

Full Transcript

Michael Levitt: Welcome back. I’ve got Dr. John Jaquish on the line. John, how are you?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m fantastic. How are you?

Michael Levitt: I am awesome. Looking forward to this conversation and even in the pre-show, we talked about some things and I think this is going to be one of those episodes that people are going to go back and listen to again and again because your story is awesome. The stuff that you do is great.

But when we dive into the conversation, we’re going to talk about how damn hard it is to be an entrepreneur and how to launch something that quite frankly doesn’t exist or hasn’t existed before. So I want to share a little bit about you with the audience and then we’ll dive right in.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, let’s see, I’m a doctor of biomedical engineering. The start of the story is how I got started in life sciences. I had finished undergrad and my MBA and I was doing enterprise software sales. And let’s see, my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. I read about osteoporosis. I had always had an interest in medicine and physical performance. I played Division 1 rugby.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, while I was working out and that whole background, I realized most of the stuff in the fitness industry was just absolute bullshit. Like wrong information given to the wrong people, just some basic examples. There are morons out there that say you need carbohydrates to grow muscle. False.

Carbohydrates play no role in muscle protein synthesis or protein synthesis at all, ever in the human body. They’re completely not required. Now, I get death threats for saying that, seriously. It’s just guys who just want their Twinkies. It’s like, okay, go ahead and eat your Twinkies, I’m not going to try and make them illegal. But I’m just saying you don’t want them. That’s kind of those things.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I had all this bad information that I knew was bad and I didn’t do anything about it. My mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. I decided I was going to go a different road. She was afraid of taking the medications because there are some pretty serious side effects. I didn’t blame her.

I developed a series of medical devices that are now called OsteoStrong devices. And you can find those in the OsteoStrong clinics. There are 160 of them in 10 different countries around the world now. But when I developed it, it was just for my mother.

Dr. John Jaquish: And the idea was we compress bones. So, this is the axis of a bone, we’re going to compress it this way. And then along its axis, and then as it springs back into position, it’s going to be stimulated to pull in minerals and re-calcify. That’s the same way we build bones kits, high impact. So it was the benefit of a high impact without the risk.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, as I prototyped this device and put it in the first clinical trial, I realized that placing a load on the body and how the body is optimized to receive force in an impact-ready position. And so profoundly not prepared to receive force in other positions. So what I realized is we’re seven times stronger at extension than we are when joints are bent in a weaker range of motion.

Now, everybody knows we have a stronger and weaker range. Nobody knew what the magnitude of maximum force output was, that hadn’t been studied yet.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when I published this, some of the physicians at the hospital we were doing this at were like, “God, we’re putting tremendous forces through our lower extremities. What do people normally work their legs with?” Well, it turned out it was, when you start off exercising, you’re usually about 1.3 multiples of bodyweight you can load your lower limbs with. And then advanced is 1.53. So people don’t gain very much strength.

Dr. John Jaquish: But if you look at a typical gym-goer, a typical gym-goer doesn’t look a whole lot different than the typical person you find at Round Table Pizza. Because most people make no progress at all whatsoever. Or they just do in the first couple weeks they start exercising and then that tapers off and goes away. So now all of a sudden, I started to understand, wow, if we have sevenfold different capacities depending on our positioning, weightlifting is awful as a stimulus.

Dr. John Jaquish: So I wrote the book, Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. And sorry, I got a mold allergy problem. It’s damp in Northern California right now and cold. But then people turn the heater on in the building and then mold grows. So having made these observations, I realized I need to come up with a solution so that we could deliver force appropriately in different positions. So like I’ll hold X here and maybe 5X here and I’ll do slow and controlled repetitions until I can no longer do them. But then I diminish the range. So I end up fatiguing the entire muscle to the absolute maximum, which is a much more powerful stimulus than regular weightlifting, thereby stimulating.

Dr. John Jaquish: I used to say triple the growth. There was a study that said that, but it’s infinitely greater growth because most people don’t grow at all from lifting weights. There’s the odd athlete, who’s a genetic outlier. And then some people take performance-enhancing drugs. But even among most people who take performance-enhancing drugs, 6.6% of males in the United States over the age of 18 have taken or are taking performance-enhancing drugs. Are 6.5% of the people that you see super fit and look like bodybuilders? Not even close. Maybe one out of 6,000 or probably more like one out of 60,000 people is actually in that kind of condition.

Dr. John Jaquish: So even the drugs aren’t delivering what people think and they’re not safe anyway. So I tell people don’t bother with it and it’s because the training is just wrong. Science has known about how wrong the training is. Here’s an example. People think cardiovascular exercise is great for weight loss. It’s probably the worst thing for weight loss because you’re showing your body you want to be an endurance machine. So it tries to get more things done with less fuel. So cortisol is up-regulated every time you do cardio and if you get a benefit out of the cardio, you have to do it regularly.

Dr. John Jaquish: This chronically elevates cortisol. Cortisol does two things. It gets rid of muscle and it keeps you as fat as possible, as long as it’s a storage system for fuel. That’s what fat is. So you’re encouraging your body to give you the exact opposite of what you want when you do cardiovascular exercise.

Dr. John Jaquish: 40 years of research show this, yet that’s not where the fitness industry has ever gone. And why would they? Because they sell access to equipment that is not going to give people results, but it’s what they think they want. So what do they care? They’re not there for results. They’re there to collect membership fees.

Michael Levitt: And we see it every January, where everybody signs up for their memberships. And by Valentine’s Day, maybe a week after, the gym is back to what it normally is. And they’ve got people signed up and a lot of people forget to cancel their memberships, especially if it was a low price and they just don’t even bother. And of course, those people not only are not doing anything, but they’re also losing money as well.

Michael Levitt: I see it in a lot of different sectors, healthcare specifically and you know this. There are so many things that are prescribed and kudos to your mom and you for not wanting to take those medications that had a laundry list of side effects. It’s like, I’d rather deal with the osteo than deal with the side effects of massive this, or extreme this. And every commercial you see is like, okay, here’s what this medication does. And then 45 seconds later of everything that’s going to make your life miserable. And like, wow, yeah, I’m going to rush to my doctor’s office right now and say, “I need that.” No.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a great ad that was out there about 10 years ago that it was for toenail fungus? It was a pill you’re supposed to take to treat your toenail fungus, and among the side effects was sudden death. It’s like, I think I’d just rather have toenail fungus.

Michael Levitt: Sign me up. I want sudden death. At least my toes are, well, the toes won’t be because then they start deteriorating even more. After all, usually, we die our body tends to…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you disintegrate.

Michael Levitt: Yeah, disintegrate. Who cares what the toes look like. Usually, that part of the casket’s closed anyway. It’s amazing what we see.

Michael Levitt: With all the studies and things like that, and like you said, with gyms and all that, there’s no interest. But what I find amazing is the type of work that you highlight in your book and all that stuff for people to get the weight loss or to get in better shape or whatever the case may be, is so simple. And that’s one of the things I see and again, in a lot of things. We overcomplicate things and we say, “Okay, this is all the things you got to do to do this.” It’s like, no, actually, you know what, you just do these things, you’re going to get better results.

Michael Levitt: For some reason, I think our society has conditioned us to think we have to do it the hard way. No, we don’t have to do things the hard way. .

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. There’s a little bit of that. I think also when you’re told your whole life strong training will make you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and then cardio will make you lean. If you’re here long enough like Frederick Goble said, you say a lie a thousand times it becomes the truth. And I think Anthony Fauci is trying to prove that true again. But yeah, you’re conditioned to believe something.

Dr. John Jaquish: But then my question is, and this is the thrust of the book. It’s like if that standard approach is so great, why isn’t everybody fit? Where are all these super fit people? Well, they’re nowhere. Why is it that everybody I know that’s in relatively decent shape has a supplement advertising contract? The majority of males should have visible abdominals. That’s the way it is. And the food is addictive. It’s designed to be addictive, packaged foods.

Dr. John Jaquish: And we have the wrong principles that we follow. Somebody said to me the other day, “An apple a day keeps a doctor away.” I wanted to punch this guy, like you idiot. What do you think is in an apple? Fructose? That’ll make you fat. Other than that, a couple of vitamins you don’t need. If somebody hands me an apple, I’ll just throw it out the window. I’m not going to eat an apple. There’s nothing there.

Dr. John Jaquish: Just nonsensical things. And actually, I feel a little bit, maybe this is what you’re talking about. Maybe it’s the opposite of what you’re talking about. But one of the problems I see, which is big is people want to simplify their understanding to like a meme. Like a sentence fragment, like two words. Like, “Oh, you want to lose weight? Calorie restriction.” Okay, that’s about one-tenth of the story. And if you believe it’s that simple people have been trying to eat less and move more for 75 years and it’s completely failed.

Dr. John Jaquish: It doesn’t say anything about how do you reduce your appetite? Because eating less and moving more is a lot easier when you’re not daydreaming about pizza because you’re still carb addicted. You haven’t done any of the things to set yourself up for success, you’re just miserable. This is why even some athletes, might diet down for a photoshoot or something like that. But they’re closet eaters. They just can’t wait to eat it all again.

Dr. John Jaquish: So yeah. Yeah. It’s tough. Probably the hardest thing, we talked about this in the pre-show is I ended up launching two things that have never been seen by the world before. And there are entrepreneurs out there who start an understandable business, they’re making cookies or sweat socks or something. And nobody calls those guys and says, “What’s a sock?” People know what that is. But when it came to the osteoporosis treatment devices, I had to put together the argument presented to physicians so they would start referring their patients.

Dr. John Jaquish: That was difficult because they’re very discriminatory. And also they’re accustomed to seeing pharma trials, which can have hundreds of thousands of people. Well, no physical medicine intervention can afford to do that. But part of the problem there is that when it comes to pharmaceuticals, testing a chemical is not found in nature. When it comes to something that’s physical medicine, you’re triggering the body to fix itself. So there shouldn’t be as much safety concern when the body is doing to itself the intervention in question. So typically we don’t have self-destruct systems in the body, like our own processes won’t kill us.

Dr. John Jaquish: So that was a challenge. And it was difficult to be able to get physicians a short enough message, which was still accurate. Because you want to simplify it, but oversimplification is another word for wrong. And physicians smell that. You don’t do that. You don’t oversimplify. So once I got that messaging right, physicians just started to prescribe it and it became outrageously successful.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then my next idea based on the observations I had made was to develop a fitness device, which it’s discussed in this book and all the principles as to why you wouldn’t want to lift weights and how there is a better way with variable resistance training. So I built the X3, the variable resistanceproduct. And yeah, sure, some people wanted to argue with me. They were like, “No, no, there’s no way that can work.”

Dr. John Jaquish: I realized all of a sudden that it was just so different because physicians, when you present science to them, they’ll say, “Oh, okay, this is fantastic. I get it.” You make a scientific presentation to the typical person in fitness, and they don’t know if you’re telling the truth or not. They can’t tell because they don’t understand research. They don’t understand how to read the research. They don’t understand statistical tests. So that was a little more challenging.

Dr. John Jaquish: What we did is we launched and aimed at fitness people and then immediately stopped all those advertisements and pivoted towards busy professionals. Because busy professionals are smarter and they’ll read the science. And they’re the ones who went out and bought the book. So that’s the market. And the biohacker community, people who want to be able to look like a professional athlete, but want to work out at home and want a piece of gym equipment that goes into a drawer instead of it takes their garage or their spare bedroom.

Dr. John Jaquish: So those are all the problems that the product solved. But it’s very interesting because I brought two things to market that the world had never seen before. And man, there were some challenges.

Michael Levitt: Well obviously too, and you recognize that changing the direction of where you were marketing to the busy professional was a stroke of genius because you recognized, okay, these people are going to get it. I’m not going to be going into this uphill battle, arguing with people that aren’t comprehending. And even though you’re like, “Here are the results, here’s what we’ve seen.” And sometimes that just flies right over their head.

Michael Levitt: Where the busy professional’s going to go, “Okay, I understand that. That’s good. It doesn’t take up a lot of space. I can do it in the time that I can allocate right now to do this. I’m going to see the results that I want to see,” which of course has a positive ripple effect on every other aspect of them. Because when you are in good physical health, all the other parts of your body, including your brain and awareness and cognitive ability and all those things improve, which makes them better professional, see better opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Michael Levitt: As I hammer home in the conversations that I have on the shows, people we are connected. I mean, we are connected. There are a lot of things going on in these things that we call our bodies and the sooner you can figure out how to connect all the dots within your body and how to feel better, be optimal, healthy, and all of that, it’s going to pay dividends for you. And not just from a health standpoint, but a wealth standpoint, because you’re going to be able to be more creative and see better things, more business opportunities, more energy. You don’t need to do that 2:00 run to get the energy drink or whatever. You’re going to have it because you’ve figured out how to optimize yourself. And when you do that, the sky’s the limit on what you can do.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right.

Michael Levitt: So what’s your favorite part of your book? Well obviously, I mean, it’s like asking if you have children, “Who’s your favorite kid?” It’s a lot of, “I don’t have one.” Publicly, you don’t want to say it, maybe privately you don’t want to. But in the book and in the stuff that you’ve created and all of that, what are you most proud of? I always like asking entrepreneurs who have launched great things, what are you thrilled about?

Dr. John Jaquish: So scattered throughout the book, there’s a lot of talk about like how the Miami Heat uses the product. They gave up on weight training. They just use X3, just for resistance, not weights. That was big. An entire team. Now, I have about 40 other individual athletes that have grabbed hold of X3 and done it. But they don’t have their whole team doing it. Because a lot of athletes have the opportunity to say, I’m going to do my strength training on my own and then go in for drills. When you’re a basketball player, you still got to practice shooting and blocking and everything. So the athletes added a lot of credibility for those people who didn’t understand the science. And some people think science is not everything in fitness. That’s kind of tragic, but kind of understandable. And I’ll tell you why. So

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of studies are done on just regular people or you don’t see them. I mean, it’s superficial and stupid, but people want to know if this worked for a pro athlete whose already highly developed, then it’ll work for them. That’s kind of sound logic. Now, some studies are done on professional rugby teams, because the ones I reference all the time, one was a college football team, a pro rugby team, and a couple of studies on Cornell basketball. Those are great, but also remember people aren’t reading them. So when they see that pro athletes are using the product and most of them exclusively, other than drills are specific for their sport, that helps.

Dr. John Jaquish: Another thing I did in the book, which has never really been done well in a book designed for consumers, I’ve read it in a few textbooks, but I mean who buys a physiology textbook unless you’re taking a physiology class, you don’t. So talk about what the limitations are. Why do people fail when they lift? It’s not because they don’t have enough testosterone. Maybe 30% of the time it’s because they’re just not getting the nutrients. So they think they’re eating a lot.

Dr. John Jaquish: Also, there’s a stupid rumor out there that calories will grow muscle. No. Grams of protein will grow muscle. Calories of fat will not grow muscle, though you need them. Calories of carbohydrates won’t do anything. Carbohydrates are there to make you fat. They can also replenish muscle glycogen. But that is very specific. And we do use carbohydrates in that manner. But other than that, the whole, you need carbs to grow. No, you don’t. And there’s so much research on it. It’s ridiculous that we’re trying to keep pushing that. But of course, we are continuing to push it as a society because carbohydrates are cheap.

Dr. John Jaquish: Government likes people eating cheap food because all of a sudden the government has to step in and feed a bunch of people, it does not want to buy them steaks. It wants to buy the cereal. So the contents of a bowl, cost of manufacturing, couple pennies, versus $10. So pretty easy decision from their perspective, but facilitating nutritional dishonesty in that effort, I think is criminal. And we do see that quite a bit.

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of journals let it go by when Nabisco funds a study that says you should be eating seven servings of carbohydrates and one of animal protein. It should be the other way around, but they get away with it. And now we even have Congress talking about forcing everybody to go vegan, making meat illegal, or putting huge taxes on meat. But that’s the most nutritious thing we eat. And there are no links to cancer or anything like that. There have been some that didn’t remove some of the other variables like when they don’t screen for who uses hard drugs, and who’s an alcoholic.

Dr. John Jaquish: There was a study about colorectal cancer and it showed a 2% increase. This is a very famous study. 2% increase in your chances of getting colorectal cancer by eating what they … And the title Meat. But if you read the description, it’s nitrate meat, which is mostly illegal now. So nitrates are a preservative. And not only were people eating nitrate meat, they were eating it every day for 40 years. So this is like a gas station hot dog. So if you found a thousand people, this test group was a thousand. If you found a thousand people that ate a gas station hot dog every day for 40 years. Did they make that decision because of their health? Probably not. Do they make other decisions because of their health? Probably none.

Dr. John Jaquish: Are they more likely to smoke cigarettes? Probably. The study didn’t control for that. Are they more likely to excessively consume alcohol? Way more likely. The study didn’t control for that. Are they more likely to do hard drugs and get minimal, nominal amounts of sleep? Probably. But the study didn’t control for that. So you take a terrible behavior of a voluntarily irresponsible person and then don’t control for any other variable? Awful study.

Michael Levitt: Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s everything that we see, the studies and all the news reports and all of that, they don’t go deep enough and they don’t test everything and weed out things that would have a direct impact on it. And then, unfortunately, the masses buy into that and they think, okay, that’s the situation and it’s frustrating as hell for sure.

Michael Levitt: So John, love this conversation. Could talk to you for hours on this. But where can people find out more about you, the book, and everything else you’re doing?

Dr. John Jaquish: My last name’s hard to spell. So I got a landing page that’s a lot easier. It’s doctorj.com, D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter j.com. That links to everything. I put most of my content… I have some majority on Instagram, I just like the platform. So if you’re going to follow me to one place, follow me there. But we also have a Facebook forum and you can find links to the bone density product OsteoStrong X3. So it says, “Superior muscle growth,” and then “Superior nutrition.” And that has to do with my style of eating. I take one supplement also. Just one. I find that pretty easy to follow when you need to take one thing.

Michael Levitt: Yeah. When you don’t need the pill dispenser of all the different vitamins and stuff, because you’re not eating right. It saves you a lot of effort. So awesome. I’ll have that information in the show notes.

Michael Levitt: So John, thank you again for all the work you’re doing to make people healthier the right way and not the way that society seems to be shoving down our throat. So really appreciate you. And thank you so much for being on the show.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks, Michael. Too soon.