Ep. 186 - Dr. John Jaquish - Is Lifting Weights a Waste of Time?

Brian Sanders from Peak Human Podcast sits down with Dr. John Jaquish, the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book Weight Lifting Is A Waste Of Time, So Is Cardio, And There’s A Better Way To Have The Body You Want!.

Dr. Jaquish’s methods have been used to train the world’s most elite athletes, such as the entire Miami Heat organization, various NFL and NBA players, as well as Olympians.

Full Transcript

Brian Sanders: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Peak Human. I’m Brian Sanders. I want to talk about my guest today, John Jaquish. He’s a scientist, inventor, and author. Dr. Jaquish has spent years researching ways to improve health and well-being. As a principal of Jaquish Biomedical, he created a bone density building medical technology, osteostrong, and a variable resistance machine, the X3 for skyrocketing lean muscle growth.

The X3 is very cool. I got one now at the Sapien Center, and I’ve been using it, and it does what I want it to do. Variable resistance. This is how I’ve designed my workouts forever. I talked about my workouts before. Its drop sets to failure using dumbbells, using compound movements. This is a way to try to fatigue your muscles, especially at the furthest point in your lift. This is a very efficient way to work out and build muscle.

Dr. Jaquish is great. He’s a hilarious guy. He’s trolling people. I just want to warn people, he uses some foul language. He likes to troll weightlifters and say that bodybuilding is a waste of time. And he says that weights are a waste of time. And at the end of the show he is like, yeah, yeah, I do it as a bit. I troll people.

So he understands that lifting weights is good, but he also understands that X3 is super efficient and it’s a super good product and I believe that.

Enjoy this one with Dr. Jaquish, and I hope you have a good week, and I’ll see you next time. Hey, we’re live with Dr. Jaquish. How’s it going?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, it’s great. It’s pronounced Jake Wish, like Jake-Wish.

Brian Sanders: Jake Wish.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it’s okay. You only read it. You rarely ever hear me say my name.

Brian Sanders: I was so close. So Dr. J, what is your Ph.D. in?

Dr. John Jaquish: Biomedical engineering.

Brian Sanders: Awesome. So I guess we’ve been following each other on Instagram for a while and we finally connected here.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. Years.

Brian Sanders: Yeah. No, I love some of your posts and some of your comments on my posts. It’s great that we’re on the same page here on a lot of things.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, same with you. We’re both seeing the same meltdown of science, and I suppose it’s always been going on where snack food companies have been manipulating outcomes and studies for a long time and people get the bad advice, the wrong advice. Probably one of the best examples of that is boy, for, I don’t know, my entire childhood, I heard people tell me breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And we all know that was written by Kellogg’s Marketing Department, but we are surrounded by bad advice to sell products and most of it harms us.

Brian Sanders: Well, yeah, it’s almost like someone needs to make a documentary about this all. Now, yeah, it’s been a long journey. People know my story. Six years have been making this film. It’s going to come out this year. Working on a lot. But yeah, it’s great to talk to you today about some of this foodstuff and some of the strength stuff. People probably know you from the X3 and yeah, that you’re a biomedical engineer and you’ve developed some products over the years, including this one. So yeah, maybe we should just start with just your story, your background. You weren’t always a large muscle-bound dude.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, no. I put on pretty much all the muscle I have after turning 40 years old. Now, I’ll start with, I got into life sciences because of my mother. My mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis and I wanted to help her. And so she read the side effects of the pharmaceutical solutions and wanted nothing to do with that. I read them too, and I didn’t blame her. So I went for a different approach. I went to develop a physical medicine approach.

Triggering the body to fix itself. And that, to me, should always seem like the default. But one of the problems is you can’t patent the human body, but you can patent a drug well.

So that’s why the solution, by modern medicine, is always one that’s profit-driven, unfortunately. So now I did figure out a way to patent a physical medicine device, and it was just a very unorthodox approach. And when I did my Ph.D., some years later, my Ph.D. advisor said to me, you would have talked yourself out of this invention if you had gotten your education first, because it’s so different, such a completely different way of thinking from modern medicine.

And it was a series of devices that would put axial force, so this is the axis of a bone. So running from my elbow to my shoulder, the length of the bone. I took axial loading, which is what we go through when we absorb high-impact force. So I want to emulate high impact and then take out the risk. So make it safe, but get the loading of high impact. So it was very slow and controlled loading in just the positions we would normally absorb high-impact forces.

So when I did that, created some prototypes, opened an office, and started working with people that had osteoporosis. There was no FDA approval or anything at this point. I had to disclose that, but I did get quite a few people to volunteer to check it out for me. And I reversed my mother’s osteoporosis. Within six months she was at the normal bone and just a little under the normal bone.

And another year after that, which is when she got her next scan, she was bones of a 30-year-old, and she was in her seventies. So she went from having bad bone density to having superhuman bone density. And so then I filed all the patents and started to develop the business, and now there are 260 clinics in 12 different countries.

Brian Sanders: I love it. My story starts with my mom too. My mom and dad and their health problems. That’s so cool that you took it upon yourself and rejected modern medicine. I’m glad that she was open to that too. So your first advice, so I have your book here. Yeah, it’s funny that it’s called Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time, which I kind of get because I say cardio is a huge waste of time, which is the subheading of your book.

Dr. John Jaquish: Cardio does not give you what you think you’re getting. It does something for you.

Brian Sanders: Oh yeah, it’s fine. I’m not going to tell people to not go run if they want to run, but-

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, I do.

Brian Sanders: Well, I sprint or I walk.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, we are creatures that are good at sprinting. We’re good at walking. That in between is not something we would ever really do.

Brian Sanders: I agree. I agree. We’ll have to go into that later. I want to start from the beginning a little bit because the device I read about at the beginning of the book talks about your mom and the osteostrong. Is that what it’s called? The invention? Just go a little bit more about that and how she did reverse that osteoporosis.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Started using the device. It worked well. Now it doesn’t work for everyone because it requires effort. It’s not like radiation therapy, where you’re getting the radiation whether you accept it or not. It’s still something that someone needs to apply to themselves and it’s voluntary force.

So basically you’re in a fixture and the upper extremities are a little easier to show on video. So here’s my arm, and I’ve got a 120-degree angle right here between my upper and lower arm, back of the hand in line with the clavicle. And I go and push away from myself. In this position, I can create seven times the amount of force that I can back here. So when looking at that, how we are super capable in that impact-ready range of motion, and how we are hardly capable at all when we’re in our weaker range of motion, I was like, wow. This probably explains why I’ve been lifting weights for 20 years and haven’t got anything out of it.

This is so symbolic of how inefficient and therefore ineffective weight training is. So it was in the development of the bone density device that I concluded that weightlifting is a waste of time. Now it’s not a waste of time compared to nothing. I would never tell somebody who’s lifting weights, it is not going to do much for you. Just sit on the couch and rot away.

Brian Sanders: Well, yeah, millions of people developed a lot of muscle on weightlifting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Really? Millions. I don’t think so. Because everybody that I know that has an impressive physique or visible abdominals has a supplement contract. Everyone I know that’s in good shape is sponsored by the industry. I don’t think there are really that many people in great shape.

I think 99% of people who go to gyms, can work out for 10 years straight and they look the same, just maybe a little older by about 10 years. The reason for that, and that’s probably the most interesting thing that X3, my next product, shines the light on.

I went to high school with this guy named Mark, and when we started freshman year, he was about 10 pounds heavier and about two inches shorter than me. So he was a little stockier, but we were roughly similar and started working out together. I think through the course of high school, he might have put on 50 pounds of muscle.

And I put on 10 pounds because I got a little taller, and maybe a little musculature. Not much though. So I looked at Mark and the guy was, by our senior year, he was benching 405 for six or seven repetitions, absolute mutant strength. And he was a friend of mine.

So I’m asking him what else are you doing? We eat the same because we eat together sometimes. I know what he eats. We work out the same intensity, the same amount of sets, and the same amount of reps. I get a decent amount of sleep, so that can’t be it. And the guy says, honestly, I don’t know. I eat worse when I’m not around you. I just can’t explain it. I just grow. And so that always bothered me.

These are the people who end up in the NFL, the people who effortlessly put on muscle when they’re super young. And so they can do things that even compromise their muscular growth and it doesn’t matter because they’re just machines that build muscle.

It was a spare time project, just something I always wondered about would always, there was no Google back then, but I was just like, someday I’m going to figure out why the hell that guy could put on muscles so easily. I figured it out. It’s the last chapter of the book .

Talks about the genetic differences between very athletic people, elite athletes, and non-athletes, or people who try to be athletic and don’t get anything out of it. Turns out that some people, less than 1% of the population, are born with a mutation in which their tendons attach to the bone structure.

So for example, if I stick my arm out, the origin of my pectoral is on the sternum, in the middle of my body, and right in the middle of my chest. The insertion is typically right underneath the bicep, so right in here. And so it’s connected to the humerus bone, and the pectoral brings the humerus bone toward the body, toward the midline of the body.

So whether I’m pressing or whether I’m doing a crossover type movement, that’s how you make it contract, and the more intense the contraction, the shorter the muscle becomes, which is why I’m always encouraging people to go close grip with a bench press. I mean shoulder width. I don’t mean together like this and more narrow spread. Because the people who are just out here, they’re just shortening their range of motion.

So they think they’re stronger, but it’s more like a trick so that you can use more weight or at least thank you for using more weight. So anyway, in the whole process of understanding these tendon layouts, I came across some examples of specifically NFL players who, instead of having their insertion be at the top of the bicep, it was on the other side, down here, which means they’ve got a lever inside their body. So when they go to engage their pectoral, they can engage it to a much greater degree than I can, whenever they train.

So every time they train, oh, also this lever is elastic because it’s the tendon. And so tendons are very elastic, the most elastic thing in the body. So in essence, people with this genetic mutation, they’re doing variable resistance. They’re training with bands inside their body, they don’t even know it.

Everything they do is variable resistance as their musculature perceives it. But that’s just the perception of the muscle because of where the tendon is attached. So okay, this makes it very easy for them to gain muscle and become elite athletes. Whereas the rest of us, as I said, 99.5 or 99.9% of the population, work out constantly.

And if they’re skinny guys, they just stay skinny, and they’re fat guys, they just stay fat, or they can lose the fat, but still, no muscles coming on. And so this is what I find to be so bizarre. This is one of the points I make that Dr. Baker likes. He says, yeah, you are right, the majority of people who commit themselves to fitness, the vast majority, they’ll work out and it’s good for them, but they don’t develop anything.

So now that I had that information when looking at variable resistance, variable resistance was just obvious. There were two points. One is, because of the research that I had been doing with my medical device, I knew I was seven times stronger at full extension than I am back here.

On top of that, knowing that it’s the variance applied inside of the body to these more athletically inclined people, it was just absolutely obvious, well, we need to be training with variable resistance. We can get all the benefits of the most gifted people, whereas with weights we can’t do anything.

And that was the thesis of the book, and all my other work was just looking at how some can apply incredible forces to the body by varying the resistance and they grow so much faster.

Brian Sanders: Yeah, so just to explain to people, variable resistance training is a general concept that the X3 uses, and it’s a different style of resistance training that is almost the opposite because if you’re doing regular weightlifting, it’s easiest. The weight is the easiest at the end of the motion. And with variable resistance training, it’s the hardest. Maybe you can explain it a little better how that works.

Dr. John Jaquish: So with variable resistance, you want to try to have the resistance change so that you are dealing with more weight in positions where you’re stronger, and you’re dealing with less weight in positions where you are biomechanically inefficient. This leads you to a much greater level of muscular fatigue because you’re just using more of the muscle. Greater fatigue will yield a greater growth response.

Brian Sanders: And weightlifting, you’re limited by your weakest range of motion.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s what I’m saying. You pick a weight that you can handle in your weakest range. So really the only growth you’re stimulating is the small amount of muscle that you’re engaging in the weaker range, which is hardly anything. And this is why so many people lift, and all those people don’t get anything out of it because they’re not firing very much.

Brian Sanders: So what about the people who are getting a decent amount? Are they just using some of these resistance training techniques throughout their lifting? Do you know what I mean? If cables-

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t think anybody accidentally applies variable resistance.

Brian Sanders: Well, I’ve seen people, some people, they’ll do different versions of it, I guess not a lot, but they even hang chains from the bench. They’ll put on bands. There are some things, cables. Do cables help a little bit?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, cables are just the same as you’re lifting the weight. Just because it’s going through a pulley doesn’t change the resistance in different positions unless one of those pulleys happens to be a cam instead of a pulley like with Nautilus equipment. Nautilus equipment did apply variable resistance, except they’d have X amount of force at the bottom and 1.2X at the top, whereas with my product, with X3, it’s X amount at the bottom and five X at the top. So it’s a much, much steeper curve.

Brian Sanders: What about those machines? In Austin, they have the company ARX and it is a variable resistant strength machine that pushes back on you. What do you think about those?

Dr. John Jaquish: Very cool. I’ve used it. Do you want to spend $400,000 for an X3? It’s great.

Brian Sanders: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. They went to solve the same problem that I had solved in the most expensive way possible. I haven’t checked in with the company in a while, I think to get the upper body and the lower body machine, each of them is $10,000 a month and you can only rent them. They don’t sell their equipment. So you’re paying $20,000 a month, that’s like a helicopter. Just a staggering amount of money. And X3 does the same, which is 550 bucks. Now it’s not computerized. There is computer feedback with the ARX. If you can have an X3, they could give you computerized feedback. I might be able to pull that off for a thousand dollars, not $20,000 a month.

Brian Sanders: Oh, yeah. No, X3 is a very elegant solution.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s elegant.

Brian Sanders: Yeah, yeah. Well I love it even though I don’t own one yet. Maybe we can get some for the Sapien Center. I got an outdoor workout area.

Dr. John Jaquish: Don’t worry, I had a plan of sending you one.

Brian Sanders: Okay, good. Yeah, no, because your Chief marketing officer, Brennan, came over to the Sapien Center, he happened to be in Austin and let me try it. Well, I’ve seen him for years. I know Sean Baker. He had one. All the guys I know seem to be using them and find great effectiveness with them. I love it.

Just the concept in general, not that I’ve used it a lot yet, but because I’m all about effectiveness and efficiency and I come just from the engineering perspective, that translates into the foodstuff that we could probably talk about for a second.

Nutrient density is the key to health because it’s so efficient. Sprinting is efficient. It’s the fastest way to get results. Using variable resistance training is, the fastest, most efficient way to get results. Food is, the fastest way to get results. It’s even more than just the fastest way to get results.

Your body wants nutrients and protein and vitamins and minerals. And if you don’t give it nutrient-dense, basically efficient food, you’re just going to eat too much extra energy, extra trash, which is basically all foods out there and you’re just going to gain weight.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Brian Sanders: I guess we can transition to foodstuff. What is your diet philosophy?

Dr. John Jaquish: I primarily eat only meat. I noticed about six months after I had launched X3, that everyone who used it right was succeeding, which you could never say about weight training. As I said, with weight training, 99% of people get nothing. And it’s funny, I get so much hate for that statement, but then you look at the picture of the angry guy and it’s like, okay, you’re a perfect example.

Nobody would ever know you work out and you’re all about it. Your whole social media is like, no, I’m at the gym today. Then they post that every day, and you are like, yeah, well if you weren’t posting about it, nobody would ever know. It’s just a sad situation.

And I think people, they’re just confused as to where their results are going to come from. It’s like if I keep repeating the thing that doesn’t work for years and years and years, eventually one day I’m going to wake up and I’ll look just like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And it’s just like, that does not work that way. But that’s the attitude that they have. It’s so funny, the angriest people who troll me for the title weightlifting are a waste of time, they’re all people who never really got any results.

Every once in a while, there was some fat guy, a couple of days ago, that’s like, my arms are 20 inches in diameter. It’s all from weights. The guy had a 75-inch waist. And I’m like, what? You got to be polite to a guy like that. So all I did was just took a screenshot of his profile picture so everybody could see it big. And then I posted that as a response. No words. Just a picture of himself as he’s bragging that he has 20-inch arms. Yeah, okay. Yeah, you got 20 inches of fat.

Brian Sanders: Okay, well, so back to the foodstuff. Yeah, tell me more.

Dr. John Jaquish: The reason people were failing was, I’d be like, how much protein are you getting? And they’d all have the same response. Oh, I get tons of protein, like 50 grams a day. And then you’re like, okay, yeah, you might want to multiply that by five. That’d be good. So when I start telling people one gram per pound of body weight, we have, I think, a slightly better number now, which is 0.82 grams per pound of body weight, because it’s just been a newer meta-analysis as of a few months ago. B

ut still roughly one gram per pound. Having it be 18% less with the newer recommendation, that’s helpful. But when I was telling 200-pound guys they needed 200 pounds of protein, they were really upset by that. Well, how the hell can I get that amount of protein? That’s crazy. Now, I had always been eating a lot of meat. I’ve been on a low-carb diet.

The problem is, when you eat carbs, they take up space in your intestines. And especially if you want to get a fasted benefit. So you’re eating fewer meals, there’s no room. You need so much protein in your system, there’s no room for anything else unless you just want to be eating all day long. That’s just going to make you fat. So I developed Fortagen to address part of this issue.

So bacterial fermentation sourced essential amino acids. So you take a dose of this and it becomes 50 grams of complete protein. That’s a hundred percent usable when it enters the body because the body takes the essential amino acids and then it manufactures itself via autophagy. It pushes you into autophagy faster. It makes the balance of the other 12 amino acids that are needed to make a complete human protein. So very little goes a long way when you have this bacterial fermentation product, Fortagen .

So I get 150 grams of protein value per day by consuming three doses of Fortagen. And then so now I only have another hundred, which I get a pound of chicken or steak. I don’t like pork because it takes a long, long time to digest. But pork’s not a bad source of protein at all. I just eat less of it because it just feels like a bowling ball in my stomach. And if you eat a pound of it, it’s like you like the first eight ounces, but the second eight ounces. Not as good.

Brian Sanders: So are you still doing OMAD? I know you were doing that at least for some point.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. Most days, yes. I got married recently. My wife’s in fantastic shape, but she is a saboteur of OMAD. Yeah, she definitely, she’ll say I’m doing one meal today, but then right around one o’clock, got to eat something. I think guys are better at one meal a day than women. I think women are a little more driven now. She doesn’t eat carbs, so it’ll be an all-protein meal.

I think the quality of the food that you eat is much more important than the quantity. I never got anybody who knew anything about nutrition to disagree with that. Just keep everything high quality. And she takes Fortagen too. So it allows you to, more efficiently, be at a calorie deficit through your fasting or just counting calories. But then, at the same time, because you got 150 grams covered with a very low-calorie impact and amino acids, they’re not complete proteins. So they don’t have a caloric value at all.

So it’s one of those things where the FDA says you cannot label it. You can’t label the fragments of protein as having a calorie value because they’re not energy, they’re components of energy. So really you take Fortagen, it’s a negative calorie impact because it’s forcing your body to make the rest of the amino acids to complete the protein chain. So you’re taking more away from the body, and more energy by digesting Fortagen than the Fortagen is.

Brian Sanders: Yeah, protein’s almost like that, but not really. But yeah, you take calories just to digest protein. There are studies on it. It doesn’t contribute to weight gain.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. The thermogenic effect of food.

Brian Sanders: Yeah. And then tell me about the studies about fasting. I’ve been in and out of fasting or just intermittent fasting. I don’t do extended fasts, but there’s a muscle-sparing effect. And you actually, I remember in the book talking about how there is some muscle growth associated with fasting. Some of these could trigger more muscle-

Dr. John Jaquish: Anabolic rebound. That’s right. Yeah. You come off of a fast and it’s almost like your body says, all right, it took a long time to get this meal, but we’re going to help you extra and make you stronger so you can catch your next meal easier. It sure seems like that because looking at a study and one of my key guys, his name is Henry, he’s the second author on the book , brilliant guy, you never see him publicly, doesn’t care for public speaking.

But I called him one day and I said, the more I fast, the faster I grow. I got an idea. And he says, what is it? I said I want you to read every study you can find on fasting versus calorie restriction. So they have to have two cohorts. If it’s a facet group versus another facet group, you’re just trying to figure out which style is more efficient. I don’t care about that. But see if you can find one of these studies, and I want you to read the discussion section. So do a literature review. You probably get a hundred studies, do a word search as soon as you identify these studies in the discussion section about the unexplained gain of muscle. And he says, wow, that’s specific.

Okay, so the chances of me finding that are pretty close to zero. I said you’re right. But what I’m noticing is I grow faster the more I fast. Doesn’t make sense. Why would eating less make me grow more muscle? And about 15 minutes later, he’s like, this is the first study I grabbed and I read the discussion section. It said exactly what you predicted. And I’m like, all right. He sent it to me. And then we read it together over the phone. And what it said was the fasting group versus the non-fasting group, the fasting group lost a little bit more weight and kept it off versus the calorie restriction group. So what’s to be expected? That’s one of those studies that will pretend didn’t happen.

Brian Sanders: And this is isocaloric. So with the same calories, if you’re just eating them in a smaller window, it’s more-

Dr. John Jaquish: Same calories.

Brian Sanders: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So what then was said was that the individuals who were fasting gained an extra six pounds of muscle during the study. Of course, the calorie restriction group lost a little bit, like a pound, but nothing to cry about. You get that back, but gaining new muscle. And these were just untrained people, who by the way did not work out at all. Nobody worked out, neither the control nor the test group. Six pounds of muscle from not working out, I’m thinking I worked out for 20 years with regular weights and I never gained six pounds.

And these guys did it in 20 weeks. Really? So my theory was correct in that when the body comes out of a fasted period, you’re much more anabolic. So if you want to be anabolic, you got to be catabolic first. And it was an interesting discovery. All the details are in the book. I spent about 11 pages talking about it, and many different quotes from that study that I pulled out of there.

It was just an important one. I don’t like the nutrition trend where people want all their advice summarized in a meme. They get a meme and it just says, eat less, move more. And they’re like, all right, I’m all set. Mr. Olympia, I’ll enter the contest in six weeks. And you’re just like, okay. Just saying calorie restriction, that’s not it. That’s so oversimplified. Oversimplification is another word for wrong. Do calories matter? Yeah, they matter. But that’s not the whole story at all.

Brian Sanders Well, not at all. So it doesn’t account for protein for one thing. It doesn’t account for real life. People don’t want to overeat calories. No one wants to, but they all do. So why?

Dr. John Jaquish: Because they choose addictive foods.

Brian Sanders: Yeah. You’re choosing the wrong foods. So all calories aren’t the same. It’s almost obvious. It’s by default what we see in the world they aren’t the same or else everyone would-

Dr. John Jaquish: Remember we live in the clown world.

Brian Sanders: Oh yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s not like obvious means anything anymore. We were lied to about Covid, yet some people would light themselves on fire and die to show their commitment to believing in all of the bullshit we were told. I was at a hospital, last night, checking on a friend, it was a Kaiser location in California and they were like, oh sir, you need to wear a mask. And it wasn’t like it was a busy time in the hospital. It was like seven o’clock at night. And I go, you know these don’t do anything, right?

And the guy looks at me and he goes? I said, yeah, the research has been out for a long time. I’m like, you can prove it to yourself. Because he was wearing a mask. I said, just hold your cell phone screen up to your mouth and breathe through the mask on the cell phone screen. If you see steam on the cell phone screen, you know Covid is going right through it because the Covid particle is smaller than a water particle.

The guy’s like, wow. And then I showed him on… I wasn’t in a hurry. I showed him the warnings on a lot of the boxes that say, these masks do not provide any protection from airborne pathogens and viruses, including, but not limited to Covid 19. Says it on the box. Now, they must have protected these mask companies in some way because now they’re taking it off. They’re taking the warning off. This is just another point of the criminality of the medical establishment just outright lying.

But all of this was just fear theater. It was just meant to scare people, scare people into compliance, and scare people into doing what they’re told. Obedient little citizens. That’s great if you live in China and that’s what you were born with. You do what the government says, or you disappear. People in China, don’t care. They’re like, eh, that’s life. But growing up in America, no, that’s not life. That’s tyranny. And we are taught to fight that, which is why we have a Second Amendment.

So it’s a rotten situation we’re in. But back to the people who want to hear what they want to hear way more than they’re willing to accept the hard truth, you should eat fewer carbohydrates. But when I launched X3, it was the first time I was going direct to the consumer because Osteostrong was sold to entrepreneurs and medical professionals in form of a franchise. So they build the franchise and attract clients or ask the physicians in their area to refer patients. I need to be an example. I need to be the out-of-shape 40-year-old guy who gets in shape while using this outrageously superior strength training device.

And I did that, but I got death threats pretty much every day in the beginning. And people were like, how dare you attack weightlifting? They acted like it was their religion. And I thought, shouldn’t you be open-minded about something better? Is the point of working out just that you like working out, just so you can talk about it, or are you trying to get a result? Because if you’re trying to get results, you should probably read what I’m writing. And the answer is, they didn’t want an answer. They just wanted to protect what they believed was right. People like to be right. They like to be right more than they like to understand, even if it’s at the expense of their health. So as soon as I started, I went about six months before giving any nutrition recommendations, I started saying, you need to eliminate or severely limit carbohydrates. I started getting death threats again.

And guess what everybody looked like, who’s giving me death threats? They’re all obese. You’re going to kill people with your advice. You don’t need carbohydrates to survive at all. I think this is a direct quote from the FDA’s nutrition guidelines from their last handbook in 2005. The guys at Kellogg’s didn’t proofread this part, but it said the amount of carbohydrates required for a human to live is zero. Nothing essential about it. I’m sure you’ve read that same line of text.

Brian Sanders: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’ve taken it out since, but they never said that it was wrong. They just took it out. Which is, again, even more suspect. I’m sure one of their sponsors, their sponsors being Nabisco, Kellogg’s, General Mills, and everybody who creates snack food and cookies and candy, is trying to get them to give these falsified recommendations that help their business.

There was just a study that came out the other day saying, I think it was in JAMA, I think it was in Journal of the American Medical Association. It said that one meal a day, people who eat one meal a day have higher all-cause mortality. So you eat one meal a day and you’re going to die younger. And then you look into the details of these, you’re like already laughing. It’s just like, wait, what? We can go without food. All the studies on fasting show healthier people with better insulin secretion, and better insulin sensitivity. That’s a construct. Nonetheless, there are hard numbers. You secrete less insulin the fewer meals you have and with fewer carbohydrates.

So I look at this study, the one meal a day people, over half of them were regular smokers, yet the people in the other cohort weren’t smokers at all. Now, why would they not control for that variable? They put it in the study because it’s criminal to leave it out. So they put it in the study, but it’s like, well, maybe their all-cause mortality was affected negatively because half of them were smoking cigarettes all the time. I’m not even going to read the rest of the study here. It’s just fraud. It’s just a lie. And I see more examples of that than just about anything with nutrition research.

Brian Sanders: Well, yeah. I think most people know that. All these studies are controlled. I’ve gone down some rabbit holes and looked at, over the years, so many things that we think are right because of these studies that were designed to fail by the powers that be.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Brian Sanders: It’s crazy. Powers that could just be the food company sponsoring them. It could be just a big interest. It gets crazy. So really, you’re saying until you were 40, you were not putting on muscle?

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Brian Sanders: Well, the X3, the variable resistance was when that turned.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. Yeah. First-year experimentation with the X3 prototype, I gained 30 pounds of muscle.

Brian Sanders: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: People saw me a year later, fraternity brothers who see me every couple years, all of a sudden, I’m about to turn 41, and they see me walking down the street and they’re like, I almost just thought, oh, that guy looks a little bit like John. I didn’t even know it was you.

Brian Sanders: I think you talk about this story too, about the testosterone, that’s part of your journey, is the replacement therapy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. I got replacement therapy at 28 because I just got a bad rugby hit, shoulder to the crotch, and I ended up with 168 nanograms to the deciliter of testosterone. And it was causing cardiac problems. I was having heart palpitations. And so they prescribed me testosterone to rebuild my cardiac muscle.

And I was like, okay, testosterone, steroids, and steroids are supposed to kill you via heart attack. Yet you’re saying, if I want to live a long and healthy life, I need to take this testosterone. And they were like, yeah, only people that massively abuse testosterone put their hearts at risk. Your heart needs testosterone. It has a higher density of testosterone receptors in the heart than in any muscle in the body. So a healthy heart is highly dependent on testosterone, which should make people worry because testosterone is going down by about 30% per generation. Why is everybody low in testosterone? Well, garbage food, soy.

Brian Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. Plastics everywhere.

Dr. John Jaquish: People are excited about soy. You have no clue what you’re talking about. I’m sure I consume some soy, especially last night I went to a Vietnamese restaurant and you get the pho, the noodles, and then the meat, so I just eat the meat and leave the noodles there. But a couple of the other things, a couple of the appetizers, come with a soy-based sauce.

Brian Sanders: Well, at least it’s fermented. That helps a lot. At least it’s fermented. So tell me more. So you started the testosterone at 28 but didn’t make the muscle improvements until later.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yeah, I don’t think testosterone replacement itself is going to give you muscle. You have to have all three. You got to have the right hormones, which means they can’t be screwed up. You got to treat that. You need the right nutrition. You need a gram per pound of body weight and protein. Vegetable protein sources don’t count because they’re only 9% usable by the body. Garbage. These are the studies that vegans ignore because they don’t like the answer. So it’s like, all right, we’ll make sure nobody posts about that on our website, which is, here we are again in the clown world. Wow, I figured you guys would want the truth. But no, they want their religious eating pattern to be promoted.

Brian Sanders: So yeah, there’s a protein side. You’re saying the three sides, there’s the protein.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So it’s the protein, it’s the hormonal, and then it’s the stimulation. What’s the stimulation? If you’re one of those people who just walk into the gym for the first time, and you put on 10 pounds of muscle a month for six months or something like that, like an NFL player. Okay, well then we don’t need to talk about variable resistance.

But if you’re not one of those people, I think the fact that fitness is such a popularly discussed subject is a monument to the fact that it doesn’t work for hardly anyone. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be such incredible interest in it. It would just feel like a thing. There’s not a big demand for websites about how to boil an egg and make a hard-boiled egg. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s not like 99% of people get that wrong. This is why there are not hundreds of blogs about boiling eggs.

Brian Sanders: So you’re saying there’s a certain gifted people like the NFL athletes and Arnold Schwarzenegger, these famous bodybuilders, these people using weights, the ones that we hear about and have success are the genetically gifted very, very few?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I mean to the point where drugs… Well, even with the drugs still nobody has looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And the guys doing bodybuilding now take way more drugs than Arnold’s generation did, because they didn’t know what would happen if they took too much of it. So they just stuck to the recommended doctor’s dosage.

Brian Sanders: Well, they look different than him.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, they got huge guts. And that has to do with a combination of insulin and human growth hormone that grows their intestines because they’re growing the tissues that are taxed, that are doing work. Well, if you’re eating 5,000 calories a day because you’re trying to maintain a 300-pound body weight, guess what’s taxed even more than your muscles, and your intestines? So they’re going to grow too. And that’s why these guys look like they swallowed a sea turtle because they have abdominals, but then they have this huge bulge just sticking out of their abdomen. That’s what that is.

Brian Sanders: You’re talking about Liver King?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, probably a little bit with the Liver King.

Brian Sanders: Okay, so we got that part. Yeah. So after 40, you were still doing the same sort of regimen with the TRT?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So I had the protein and I had the hormones. And so as soon as I got my prototype, I could see growth. Every couple of days I’d look in the mirror and I’m like, I’m more muscular. I’m leaner and I’m bigger.

Brian Sanders: So how do people use it? What’s the protocol? I believe it’s only 10 minutes per day.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s 10 minutes per day if you need very low rest times between exercises. So you’re supposed to catch your breath completely. So when a slim guy does bicep curls, he puts a bar down after he is done. And he might have to breathe hard for 15 seconds and then he’s good.

The problem is when you take a guy like me and I put my hand around my bicep and it’s that big around, it takes a lot more blood and resources to engage that muscle and take it to fatigue. So when I do a set of bicep curls, I’m gasping for air for minutes. So you just need to do it right. If you’re not that muscular, you can get through it in 10 minutes. If you are, it might take you 15 or 20. But in taking those breaks, I’m at my office today, I’ll do a workout later, and I’ll let five minutes go in between exercises because you only do one set per exercise. But that full five minutes, I’m completely recovered and then I can go to the next movement. It’s just because of where I am. I don’t know anybody else that needs five minutes.

Brian Sanders: I’ve interviewed some other muscle scientists on this. Keith Stu Phillips comes to mind. They’re talking about this same type of concept of you just need to get to failure in this one movement and you’re done. That kind of concept. Which is what I believe in, and it’s super efficient. Get it to failure, you’re done.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Brian Sanders: That’s what your muscle needs. It needs to be told to get stronger. It’s like you’re demanding as much as you can from it. I guess what I took from the variable resistance training is that it’s just a way more efficient way to get to failure as one of the main things would be to just get there very, very efficiently. Is that part of it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. The reason people do multiple sets with weight training is that the stimulus sucks. How many sets do you need to do in the sunlight to get a suntan? I ask people that question and they go like, what? One. You just go out, right? Same thing with building a callous. If you want to build a callous, a hard abrasion on the hand that’s brief, but very intense is going to give you the best result for building a callous.

So when it comes to training a muscle, why would we do multiple sets? Well, people start doing multiple sets because they weren’t getting much out of one set. Well, guess what? They’re not getting much out of three or five or 10 either, but they are creating muscle damage, which is inversely related to growth. So when people are saying, you just need to stimulate and then stop and let the body respond, they’re right. But it’s a harder thing to see when you’re looking at something that has such a poor stimulus like weightlifting.

Brian Sanders: Well, let’s touch cardio too because it’s that same concept. I’ve seen these people. I was in the same apartment complex for years, in LA, looking at the same people who come in the gym and do the same worthless cardio and they gained weight.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep.

Brian Sanders: So yeah, just tell me more about cardio and why it’s a waste of time.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, when you look at what cardio is, there’s no such thing. Now, yes, we have aerobic versus anaerobic, but the question is why would you do aerobic? What do you think you’re getting out of it? You get more cardiovascular health out of resistance training and variable resistance is even more efficient. But that’s just health.

So for example, there’s this slim guy I used to travel with for business. We did a lot of business in Moscow and we fly out of London because we had an office together there, London to Munich and then Munich to Moscow. And this guy, he was like a marathon runner, and he is skinny, just emaciated. And when you’re in Munich and you’re switching flights, it’s the worst-designed airport ever. You have to run up and down the stairs six times. You go downstairs, you got to get your bags, got to come upstairs, you got to go through immigration. Then you go downstairs and check your bags again, and then you go upstairs and they need to examine your passport one more time. Then you got to run downstairs. So it was all staying with stairs. So we’re running usually because the connection’s tight, or walking fast and I’m covered in sweat. I’m out of breath, covered in sweat and the guy’s like, wow, you look like you’re in really good shape, but maybe you’re not. Your cardio’s pretty bad. And I’m like, no dumb ass, my quads are four times bigger than yours are.

It’s a bigger engine. A V12 burns more fuel than whatever you would be, a one-cylinder lawnmower engine. I was trying to give him some shit. It’s like yeah, you’re weak as hell and you’re a third of my body weight. You can float up and down the stairs all you want, but we’re training for very different purposes. I’m training for power, for speed. You’re training to be as light of a waif as possible so you can go incredible distances on a low-calorie number, and the body adapts.

If you want to be an economy car. The car’s a really good example because the engine is the muscle, and the frame of the car is the bone density. By the way, people who do incredible amounts of cardio, lose bone density very quickly, and they usually don’t get it until they stop that habit. So it has been a weird journey with some of these people because they’re very convinced that you can only get cardiovascular health through cardiovascular exercise. No, you get better cardiovascular health through strength training. So what’s the benefit of doing specifically cardio? Well, if you want to be a distance athlete, that’s really the only way to be a good one, is by doing the thing that you’re trying to perfect. But you’re stimulating the body to up-regulate cortisol in a chronic manner. So cortisol does two things, gets rid of muscle and protects and preserves body fat for as long as possible. So it keeps you as fat as possible for as long as possible, and then it gets rid of your muscle. So when you lose weight from doing cardio, you’re losing muscle only.

Brian Sanders: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Distance runners, don’t realize, yeah, they might be skinny, but they’re skinny fat. They have cellulite all over their legs, but their legs are thin. So yeah, you got to understand what you’re going for. You’re trying to be a distance runner. If you’re trying to be a distance runner, then you’re going to look like a stick. I mean, great. Yeah, you might be great at that. I don’t know what benefit that’s going to be to you other than just ego, but good for you, I guess. But if you want to be strong and lean, with heavy resistance, there’s no getting away from heavy. Now you can have a better strategy at getting heavy with X3, so you get much better results, but you’re not going to get around heavy.

Brian Sanders: I believe it. I had terrible body composition when I was doing cardio and I was still trying to lift too. And yeah, also, you have a lot of visceral fat too. Yes. Skinny fat means yes, you could have all this fat on your insides. And also all the people do marathons and they gain weight. It’s like, oh, I trained for a marathon and I did it. Three months later, they do the marathon, they’re the same weight or a little heavier. Also, that’s just the food. They’re just eating a whole bunch of… They’re thinking they need to carb load for it. But yeah. Anyway, I think we’ve offended enough people for one podcast.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s okay. I accept the haters. Well, Dave Asprey told me before launching X3, he said, what’s your market? What’s your target market? And I was like, oh, fitness people. He goes, it’s going to fail. Don’t do that. He says you’re trying to make a scientific argument to fitness people. He says, now more bodybuilding than fitness. But when you look at fitness information, about half is bodybuilding. He said these are the stupidest people on earth. They are so dumb. They will never understand what you’re trying to tell them. You show them a study on something and all they see is spaghetti on a page. They can’t. Not that they’re lazy. They don’t have the mental horsepower to be able to absorb that message.

And I was like, Dave, I think you’re overreacting. He was so right. So right. So immediately we pivoted and made the target market busy professionals. Made a lot of talking points about time and efficiency. Sales went through the roof. I appreciate Dave to this day because it was just a hard thing for him to tell me. He and I are friends, and he told me that, and I took it to heart but didn’t want it to be true because, I don’t know, I remember when I was in high school and I thought bodybuilding was cool, just treating your body like it’s a piece of sculpture. I like that. I like that part of pumping iron where Arnold gives that speech and I was like, ah, that’s cool. I want to be a piece of sculpture.

There are very smart people in the fitness industry. They’re just drowned out. Sports scientists, we’re going to look at some of the sports scientists out there, there’s profound research. Most of it I cite all the time. I got 260 citations, and research citations in the book.

The problem is the fitness industry is not capable of understanding what any of those studies are saying because they’re written academically. The American College of Sports Medicine has several journals that they own and maintain. And they even came up with one that was more layman’s terms, I don’t want to say dumbed down because it was still good stuff. They just really wanted to go light on the statistics and report on what the statistics mean, as opposed to explaining how they ran whatever analysis of variance or a Spearman rho test. I know what a Spearman rho test is, but that’s probably one in a hundred thousand people who know what a Spearman rho test is.

So they tried to do that and it completely fell flat. Nobody read this journal. And it’s just because the level of intelligence just isn’t there. I think most people treat the fitness industry as very transient. So they graduated from college, but they don’t want an adult job because they don’t want to get up too early. So I’ll be a personal trainer for a couple of years. But it’s not like they’re really into it. It’s not their career and it doesn’t pay very well either. So I don’t blame people for not taking it seriously.

Now, there are also great trainers out there, but they are the few. The majority are just there to sell gym memberships and hang out and make the building look like it’s more occupied than not. I think the fitness industry, as it is now, is a grotesque failure of human effort. Bizarre how much it’s failed. And it needs to be reinvented, which is what I’m doing.

Brian Sanders: Yeah, well it seems to be like the food industry where it’s just a way to make money.

Brian Sanders: Yeah. I’m not saying that the whole fitness industry is bogus, but if it worked, it would work. Do you know what I mean? And people would see the results and it wouldn’t need it. But anyway, I think we just offended more people in this last little segment.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure did. As soon as you said that, I was like, wait a minute, I’m going to

Brian Sanders: I think I’m going to get one more.

Dr. John Jaquish:… pour some more gasoline on this fire.

Brian Sanders: All right. Well, hopefully, people don’t be offended by this. I hope my audience isn’t offended by strong language or this type of stuff. I appreciate it.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t think they will because I see your fans’ comments. Your fans are pretty smart because you’re presenting science. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you present intelligent information, you get intelligent customers. And guess what, those are not the people that are on bodybuilding.com.

Brian Sanders: Well, I love my audience. They’re awake. They’re not woke. They’re not woke, but they’re awake. They know what’s going on in the world and-

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s good.

Brian Sanders: And you’ve been great enough to give us a code for the X3, we got for Sapien. If you use the code Sapien, people can get $50 off the X3 bar. So that’s going to be cool. I’m going to get one myself, I guess. And I look forward to it. I believe in variable resistance training. I guess I’ve never had one. I’ve never had an X3 bar, so excited about that. Yeah. Where do people find you? I know you’re on Instagram with a bunch of people.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I spend the most time on Instagram. Instagram’s my favorite platform. I just think it’s simple. Facebook, they’re changing it all the time, but it’s full of bugs sometimes. It’ll tell you your video file is too big and it’s 500k. And you’re like, I’ve uploaded images that were

Brian Sanders:Yeah, something up with Facebook. It never works for me. It’s always weird. But yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. A lot of bugs. Oh, when you get into the advertising end, if you advertise to Facebook, the ad manager software, it’s great, except it’s just bristling with so many features, it becomes very hard to use.

Brian Sanders: Instagram.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So I focus on Instagram more, just cleaner. So my last name’s tough, as we discussed at the beginning of the podcast. So my website is the best place to connect with me. It’s doctorj.com , D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter j.com. And there are links to all my social, my YouTube. I’m going to start doing more on YouTube in the next few months.

Brian Sanders: Yeah, YouTube is good. Until I get strikes. I almost got kicked off, but yeah, YouTube’s okay.

Brian Sanders: All right, well thanks for coming on, and let me know when you’re in Austin next good stuff.

Dr. John Jaquish: Awesome.