Revolutionizing Fitness with Dr. John Jaquish: Unveiling the Power of Variable Resistance Training

Full Transcript

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a shame to me that vegans have a voice.

Dr. Khan: Believe in the freedom of speech.

Dr. John Jaquish: What vegans are recommending is something that causes diabetes reserve is not going to get results with weights. It’s just not going to happen. You’re over 30 and you’re lifting weights. It’s probably too late for that to have.

Dr. Khan: So we’ve all heard that regular exercise and building muscle is the key to preventing diseases such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes, and that’s what we are all worried about, right? My guest today, Dr. John Jaquish, is saying that he has a faster, more efficient way to build muscle and combat these and more health issues, a way that can defy conventional gym wisdom.

And today we will look into discussing the potential and groundbreaking insights, of how we can train smarter, not just harder. And we will look to talk more about a concept in exercise called variable resistance to build muscle and what it could mean for you. Hi, I am Dr. Marcan and welcome to the Dr. Khan Show where we bring experts from around the world to share actionable insights to improve our health and more. We do like to state that this content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or the treatment of such. So always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health providers with any questions you may have regarding a medical question.

My guest today is Dr. John Jaquish, who obtained his PhD from Rushmore University. His fields of interest include bone health, biomechanics, and optimal musculoskeletal stimulation. He has numerous patents products and books to his name. Dr. Jaquish, how are you doing today?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m fantastic, thanks, Dr. Kahn. I’m happy to be here.

Dr. Khan: So we will start with actually showing your book because this is the name of the game when you are talking about variable resistance and your book suggests that weightlifting is a waste of time. So is cardio and there’s a better way to have the body that you want. Can you talk about this?

Dr. John Jaquish: So there are so many problems with what it’s been recommended in standard fitness and it’s pretty easy to figure out what I’m talking about. And when I ask people, Hey, the majority of people that work out, they look the same like year after year and I asked this to an audience of people and all the hands go up like yeah, it’s like everybody’s working out but nobody’s getting results. And it was frustrating to me what I ended up doing. I was in the process of developing a medical device to treat osteoporosis and that’s now called osteostrong. We have 300 clinics in 15 different countries. While I was studying bone mass I was looking at what triggers the growth of bone, it was an emulation of high impact. So that’s the purpose of the devices I created that are found at the Osteostrong locations.

But there was more profound. So if I’m in a position like this, I’m seven times stronger here than I am here. So through the process of looking at the bone density devices and how people would load the body and then what human capability was when it came to exercise, we’re robbing ourselves because when you’re in a gym environment, you pick the weight that you can handle in the weak part of the movement. You don’t pick the weight and the strong part of the movement is so much stronger here. So instead we’re training for weakness and stimulating very little because where you go to fatigue, you have almost no muscle firing and you also have the greatest risk of joint damage. That’s just with standard training. So I thought, okay, we need to weigh the changes as we move so that it’s exhaustive in all positions to the absolute maximum.

So I did a literature review on something that was called variable resistance, meaning the weight changes by what your capability is. So I didn’t come up with this idea. There are already applications of this in sort of sports performance literature and great peer-reviewed studies on it, but there was no way to use it conveniently. So just throwing a band around your back and trying to do a pushup, the problem is your hands start to twist, your wrists start to twist. So that caused an injury. So that’s not practical. So what I needed was something to protect the wrists, which is a bar, specifically an Olympic bar with rotation, and then a plate to stand on so that heavy latex banding can run underneath and run through the bar so that you’re not dealing with any of the twisting of joints and you’re just delivering the most powerful force in each position.

Dr. Khan: No, so that is interesting to note because I mean you go to the gym, people are using free weights and free weights, although there may be a lot of people who have not benefited from that type of exercise, but there are people who look big on just the free weights. Ted talks about this. Some people are strong. I mean I’ve been trying, I mean believe I’m a hard gainer, but there certainly are people who do very well in the gym. And what do you say about that?

Dr. John Jaquish: So when somebody picks up weights they adapt to it very quickly and they grow muscle very easily. So we got to look at the biomechanics. So I’m just going to sit back for a second and let’s see, I want to make sure I’m on camera here. So this my pectoral, it starts, here’s the origin, and then the insertion is typically, and it is on me at the very top of the humerus bone. But some people have it further down closer to the other end. And when you have that, you’ve got a lever built inside your body because the humerus bone moves towards the midline to the body and that’s how the pectoral functions. It is bringing this bone. So whether I’m pressing or moving in sort of a fly motion if I have an insertion point that’s further down the bone, now I have a mechanical advantage, and that lever is made out of the most elastic material on earth, that being tendon.

So some people that have this genetic anomaly, it might be 1% of the population and you can see it in sprinters with higher calves, like when the calves are high, the tendon is long. That means when they do a tow strike, there’s more of what’s called recycled energy. So pulling on the tendon and putting tension on it so that the foot springs back and pushes that might give for the average person, it might be 17% of the energy when you sprint is from just the elasticity of the tendon. But with those people, it’s even more so they have an advantage. It’s almost like they’re doing band training inside their body. And so these are the people who very easily put on muscle. These are the people who are in the NFL, they’re the gifted strength athletes, but it’s so rare for the rest of us instead we can’t change where our tendons attach to the bone inside of our body, but we can train with variable resistance, which brings us closer to the effect that the genetic outliers get and we can gain muscle just like they do.

Dr. Khan: Alright, so you are suggesting that there are a couple of people who are built with longer tendons perhaps, or insertion points that lead to bigger muscle mass. And of course, we all know the bigger your tendon is, the more mass, the more position that it has on the bone, and you can naturally develop a bit more muscle. The muscle mass increases, how much percentage of the population is actually like that, and how much may benefit from variable resistance training?

Dr. John Jaquish: It is hard to say. Now everybody will benefit from variable resistance training including those genetic outliers. I just got done interviewing a week ago guy named Matt Wining who has the world record in the squat heavyweight division. So he can squat 1200 pounds. This is the strongest guy in the world and he did it by using variable resistance. Now he’s already a genetic outlier, but for the rest of us also the same thing. If we can offload some of the weight onto a specific positioning. So when I bench press, for example, I’m holding 175 pounds here, which is very nominal for me, 300 pounds in the middle and then 550 at the top. Well, as I go, let’s say I’m doing repetitions. As I go to fatigue at 550, well then I can’t get there anymore. So then I shorten up the range and I’m doing 300 pounds and then I can’t do that anymore. Then I’m doing 175 pounds at the bottom. So it’s complete exhaustion with variable resistance of the musculature, which is going to give us a better growth effect. It’s going to stimulate more.

Dr. Khan: Okay. And I do believe you have studies to back this up, is that correct?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, there are about 16 high-quality studies. They’re all in the book. Weightlifting is a waste of time. Wall Street Journal bestseller, I published that book and talked about the genetic differences in strength athletes and talked about the research done with variable resistance. Yeah, the research is glowing. It shows better results in every single study. There’s one exception where they use TheraBand, so five to 15 pounds of resistance, and then they allowed the weightlifting group to lift whatever amount of weight that they could lift.

So obviously it was sort of designed for variable resistance to fail because nobody in the variable resistance group could train with more than 15 pounds. But other than that, all of the studies on variable resistance are very crystal clear. You get a lot stronger, you grow more musculature. Even some studies talk about using more muscle glycogen, which is going to be on a short-term basis helpful for those with type two diabetes and metabolic syndrome. And then long-term as they create protein synthesis, it’ll be curative for the condition because they have new receptors, new glute four receptors, so they’re going to be better off metabolically long-term. They’re going to lower their hemoglobin A1C score.

Dr. Khan: So in a way, the liver is losing its glucose stores much quicker with variable resistance training instead of lifting free weights. And normally when people lift free weights, they stop and pause for emitters. So between the exercises. And is that a difference between variable resistance training and regular exercise, especially considering that people with diabetes heart disease, or high blood pressure, they’re generally older people.

Dr. John Jaquish: Very little happens with weight training in elderly people. They don’t stimulate much. They’re unable to go to any relevant level of fatigue beyond nominal strength. And there are a couple of great studies that show muscle growth in the first few weeks for untrained people who never trained before and then they never grow any muscle again. And this is because of the inefficiencies within biomechanics that I’m talking about. And so just telling somebody to go out and do resistance exercise, I think it’s just sort of an irresponsible recommendation because 99% of the population will never respond beyond just the first few weeks. So they’re just wasting their time. Variable resistance allows people to grow almost in perpetuity. There is a limit to how much muscle the human body can hold. We even have a protein in our body that’s designed to limit us called myostatin, but most older adults in, I’m not just talking about the fifties and sixties with diabetes, I’m talking about over 30, you’re over 30 and you lifting weights, it’s probably too late for that to have any real effect at all.

And it’s a shame I get a lot of angry people telling me it’s terrible. I say stop weightlifting. But there’s a reason that insurance companies and health insurance companies don’t cover your gym membership. And it’s not because they don’t care about you, it’s because they have actuarial data that shows that for the most part, people who engage in strength training only get injured. There’s no positive health outcome that comes out of it with rare exceptions or with very controlled environments or when they start, when they’re a lot younger, or if they select a population that’s already into exercise so they can be affected.

Dr. Khan: I have a question related to this. People who are elderly and getting injured and insurance companies of course not paying for the gym memberships. So a lot of people who have high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease, are more than 40 years of age or 50 years of age. So how can you suggest, or what would you let them know that, hey, this form of exercise is better than the regular weightlifting exercise or machines that people are using? Why would this be a better route for them?

Dr. John Jaquish: Why this be better, they’re not going to get results with weights, it’s just not going to happen.

Dr. Khan: What about joints? How does it happen about joint health?

Dr. John Jaquish: So with variable resistance, the weight drops off when the joint is in the sort of at-risk position. So at the bottom, and I mean I could demonstrate this with squat also, but I’m sitting down, so this is the part of the chest press that’s going to hurt somebody, but it’s a light here. So they don’t have much to deal with. Very few people are injured at the top of the movement, and that’s where it’s the heaviest. So we’re just strategically loading the body so that the more powerful forces come on where the musculature is more powerful also so greater level of exhaustion, and we far diminish the risk because they’re dealing with something nominal at the bottom.

Dr. Khan: And you do need exhaustion to build muscle. You need to get the muscle to the limit. You have to break those muscle fibers and let it recover and build more muscle and give the body stimulus to, oh, I need to build more muscle. You need to take it to the limit. You mentioned that people don’t have success with regular rates or any studies done on if two people are twins perhaps, and they are the same exercise schedule, but one is doing variable resistance and one is doing regular weights. Who’s going to, and how sooner or how much quicker is that person going to gain the muscle with the variable resistance?

Dr. John Jaquish: So there’s a great study that Anderson, I want to say no, Anderson maybe 1999.

Dr. Khan: And I’m going to try to look to have these links for these studies in the show notes. Yeah, sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: They took Cornell Athletes strength athletes and they split ’em into two categories. One of ’em, no, college athletes are great because they’re still growing. I mean, they’re maturing still, but they’re already athletic. So there’s no question of do they know what training to fatigue is. Because sometimes when you get beginners, they do 10 repetitions with a weight that they could probably do 50 repetitions with, so they’re not doing anything. So this study was great for developing athletes. They split ’em into two groups. One did regular training and they tracked their strength performance gains. Then they looked at the gain in strength with a variable resistance group. So very similar groups right from the same sports teams. Cornell University, the other group used variable resistance, and the difference in their strength gains versus the control group’s strength gains was triple. That’s actually why I called the product X3.

Dr. Khan: Okay, interesting. So X3 is, I didn’t know that I looked at the product, but I didn’t have a clue why it’s X3, three times the effort or three times the results. That’s good. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So they got stronger three times faster, but with a regular population, not a highly selected genetic outlier. College athletes, most people get zero out of weight beginner gains. And there are a lot of studies on this. There’s one I just posted about, where they had people training for a year and they got a certain result out of it, and these were adults and then they had ’em continue training multiple years. And only in that first year were there any differences at all. And I would argue it’s probably in the first two months because, at some point when the muscular strength matches the limits of the tendons and ligaments, you’re done. You can’t go any further, but you actually can if you strategically load the body with variable resistance. If you look at how people when we approach exercise, we tend to do what we’re told.

And that’s a problem because if you look at people who are professional movers, guys who move pianos and heavy equipment, they’re not using the full range of motion. They’re just trying to optimize the load exposure and their stronger range of motion so they don’t injure anything. And so that’s logical. That makes sense. Now, that’s not necessarily the way we should exercise. You do need a full range of motion. You need to amplify the blood flow as much as possible. But if we can change the weight as we move, we can strategically use force to trigger far more growth and just all because of a deeper level of fatigue and any other adaptation, whether it’s like a suntan or building a callous on your hand, the most intense stimuli are going to yield the greatest adaptation.

Dr. Khan: So I mean, we got a few things out of the way. What is variable resistance and why do we think that is better than regular weight training? Right? But how did you get into this? Was there an aha moment that said, okay, this thing I got to try, I got to market this, I got to work on this. Was there any turning point in your life, something that just ticked off that, hey, this is working or this is good?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it was when I was doing the clinical trial for the first clinical trial for the medical device, for the Osteostrong devices, I was in the University of East London where this, was just outside of the university, a place called Stratford Village Surgery. We had the whole device set up there and we had the test subjects come and use the device and the physicians that were in administration, the hospital, or who worked at the hospital, they all wanted to use the device also. They weren’t subjects in the study, they didn’t qualify for the test criteria, but they just wanted to use it. And we said, yeah, sure, you can check it out. They all increased their bone density. So they were huge fans of it. But they said, so some of the postmenopausal females was like, we’re using six times our body weight, sometimes seven, sometimes eight, depending on how long you’ve been doing it and putting these huge forces through the hip joints.

So is that dangerous or not? Because they said it doesn’t feel like painful or anything. No, we’re optimizing the range of motion to specifically impose force through a joint where it would normally brace for impact. So if you were to jump off of a high surface, you would stand up on a table and jump off. That’s what your biomechanics, the position of your biomechanics would assume to absorb those kinds of forces. So I realized that humans are incredibly capable when it comes to force production or force absorption in those impact-ready positions. So why don’t we just leverage this for strength training? And that was when I was on my way to do my second invention, which ended up being X3. It just became so obvious. Weightlifting is an awful stimulus and I know what’s better. I had already been reading the variable resistance research and I just sort of pieced it all together. Okay, we need to focus on variance, not heavyweight, but a difference in force that is by our biomechanics. As soon as we did that, I did the design of the product and all the programming so you could work each muscle to its absolute maximum. And then I launched the product and wrote the book, weightlifting is a Waste of Time.

Dr. Khan: So it’s very interesting because this upends, everything else that has been taught in the fitness industry and even physical therapy.

Dr. John Jaquish: Whatever ever taught in the fitness industry is good for the trash, just terrible advice, stupidity, complete lack of understanding of even basic human physiology.

Dr. Khan: And of course, you have bigger muscle, better muscle, your bone is going to be stronger and in the long run, you need muscles. When you are getting older, you need strong bones, you fall, but you don’t break a hip on your first fall.

Dr. John Jaquish: The two greatest drivers of long life are high levels of muscularity and low levels of body fat. Those are the two greatest drivers of long life. When I went to look at what nutrition should be paired with this because I didn’t even really know what the best nutrition path was, but once I realized that first bone density, there’s a great meta-analysis, 20 out of 20 studies indicate that the more vegetables you eat, the lower your bone density gets. And that’s of course because of oxalates, there’s chronic inflammation with vegetable consumption.

So you want protein-heavy nutrition, especially when you get older, just so the protein synthesis can happen within the bone. You want to be building more bone structure and you don’t want to deny your number one, if you have a plant-based diet, you’re denying your body the building blocks it needs, and at the same time, you’re poisoning the body with chronic inflammation so that even if you get some protein, the inflammation is going to stop that protein synthesis from happening. But just I could answer the nutrition question by looking at longevity research and trying to understand what features of human life are associated with

Dr. Khan: Longest. Yeah. I’m going to ask you the nutritional questions, but just stepping back just a little to your point about the importance of having good muscle mass. So can you talk to the viewers? Why is building good and quick muscle? Well, not just quick muscle, but muscle for the long run is healthier for chronic disease prevention and actual management.

Dr. John Jaquish: So every organ in your body has a symbiotic relationship with muscle. The reason the organs function is to supply musculature with what it needs. So if you lose muscle, if you’re weak, your organs have a smaller reason to function properly. And when you look at some cancer patients, and muscle wasting, mostly chemotherapy and radiation, the biggest risk is not the cancer. The biggest risk is that they get so weak that organs start to fail. The organs don’t have a reason to function. They stop functioning.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. And building muscle, muscle helps out in numerous ways. Not only does it give you a better appearance and help your joints stay strong, and stronger throughout your life, but as you get older, you need your muscles because you still need to be able to open doors. You still need to be able to twist around and make sure that you have the right proprioception.

Dr. John Jaquish: Driven tall. You need to be able to protect yourself and not break it. If you trip and fall, how do you decelerate? How do you catch yourself and absorb that force with the musculature without creating a fracture?

Dr. Khan: Exactly. And when the elderly fall, and since I work in the hospital, we see people coming in all the time and having a joint break. When you are older, that is one of the telltale signs that you have a very poor prognosis down the line and your joints start to fail and your joints break. That’s a problem. Not only that, but before you go into your 70, 70, and 80 years old, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure, are all chronic disease diseases of the common era because of insulin sensitivity issues and insulin resistance. Now, when you have muscle, you have muscle on, your muscle acts as a sponge and it doesn’t let your sugar levels drive higher and go up and cause you all types of damage.

Dr. John Jaquish: Management of blood

Dr. Khan: Sugar stroke issues. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: People with metabolic syndrome need to realize that glucose is used by muscles. It’s used by the brain too, but just for simplicity, argument’s sake, if you can be a better-performing machine if you can have more muscle and use it, you’re going to be so much better off. You can be curative. So from a temporary standpoint, you’re using what’s in your bloodstream and that’s good. But from a curative standpoint, when you build muscle mass, that’s an engine that’s running all the time. And also when you create new myofibrils and new cells, which are both a thing that heavy strength training can do for you, now you have new receptors. So the reason that we have type two diabetes is the receptors have been damaged because of an oversaturation of basic glucose, but eating too many carbohydrates, and I recommend very low carbohydrate nutrition. I’d say zero is kind of unrealistic, just living in the world we live in.

And even people who say they’re zero. It’s like when you eat animal protein, there’s still glycogen in muscle meat. Nobody talks about it. There are carbohydrates in eggs. If you have a burn and you want to heal twice as fast minimum of 36 eggs a day, you’ll double your healing rate. So are eggs bad for you? No, they’re awesome. They’re wonderful, they’re perfect. However, there are still carbohydrates in that. So I think it’s like 0.4 grams per egg and no one eats one egg.

Dr. Khan: Right? I’m going to talk about the nutritional aspects, but stepping back with muscle gain and muscle mass, there have been studies not just that your heart disease risk decreases, your blood pressure and diabetes go down, but your cancer risk also goes down. And so this is all part of a puzzle.

Dr. John Jaquish: We’re going to find out later, that heart disease is just almost a symptom of diabetes. It all boils down to metabolic dysfunction. The glycation of the brain. With dementia, it’s the same thing. It’s just the glucose receptors in the brain become less responsive. They’ve been overused because people keep eating carbohydrates. It is a shame to me that vegans have a voice because right now the Western world is eating 70%.

Dr. Khan: I believe in the freedom of speech. I believe in freedom of speech.

Dr. John Jaquish: I believe in freedom of speech too. But it needs to be crystal clear that like, Hey, these guys can say whatever. They’re the same for wrong. That’s kind of what I mean. Mean, hey, they’re trying to get people who actually, people who promote low carbohydrate nutrition get kicked off of social media for saying things like what I’m saying right now.

Some people have been thrown out of social media for saying things that offended vegans, but it’s like what vegans are recommending is something that causes diabetes and cancer. I think between carbohydrates, it oxalates is a big future prediction. I think in about 15 years we’re going to know exactly where cancer comes from. It’s vegetables.

Dr. Khan: : So it seems you are a strong proponent of low carb, and I’ll go into more detail about what you eat, but somebody would say that humans are very flexible. They can be a vegan, they can be a vegetarian, they can be a Presbyterian, they can be a carnivore, they can do keto. Why would you suggest that one size sort of fits all?

Dr. John Jaquish: Because in the long term, we’re not really that flexible In the short term we are. We can get away with surviving from eating plants or whatever, but ultimately, if ate a diet of only plants within seven years, you’ll probably be dead now mostly because you can’t even get the nutrient density with just stuff.

Dr. Khan: That’s found. But you would have vegans who would say, oh, I have been vegan for 30 years, 50 50 years.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re eating processed foods that are fortified with different chemicals and very frequently still have. There is protein in plants though it’s about 9% usable by the body. So you have to eat a whole lot more protein as a vegan.

Dr. Khan: Are B12? Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, a B12 injection is really important. You’re not getting it through their food. Sometimes iron supplementation, but the essential amino acid B12, and that’s of course what we know about. What do we not know about? It’s arrogant to assume We know absolutely everything that the human body needs, but I’m pretty sure that we’re getting it all through vegetables in concentration, which is called meat. The herbivore concentrates all those nutrients for us.

Dr. Khan: So yeah, I mean, I do give people a little bit of benefit of the doubt that okay, you’ve lived for a certain while, and in a way you can find studies for sort of everything in a way, and you could talk about it. You can say the vegan diet helps heart disease in a different way, and certainly the keto diet and paleo and perhaps the carnivore diet.

They all have their means and ways to improve certain aspects of health and a lot of aspects for health, especially with chronic diseases such as diabetes, the original Atkins diet was a sort of precursor to this way of living and more of the carnivore-type diet. All of these have benefits. I think all the stuck with the point that it makes all sources make a world, and there could be enough examples to suggest that, okay, it’s still okay to be like that. What do you think?

Dr. John Jaquish: Hey, a lot of it’s preference also. So the ultimate diet is the one that people are willing to eat because if they’re not willing to, what I do is a lot of people just won’t do it, and that’s okay. I’m also trying to be the absolute most optimal athletic person. And with strength sports, you need a lot of protein. That’s just the way it is. Maybe if somebody doesn’t care about muscle mass, but remember that is the biggest driver of long life. And then every once in a while you see somebody who’s muscular and claims to be a vegan for 20 years, and yeah, they’re not being honest

Dr. Khan: Muscle protein versus plant protein, muscle protein versus plant protein.

Dr. John Jaquish: What’s the difference? So 38% of what you eat with steak is usable by the body, and this is seen in net nitrogen usage tests. So how much of the protein that you’re eating converts to nitrogen and goes out to waste? Now, the reason that that happens has mostly to do with the matching of the different amino acids to make a complete protein. So like 38% when it comes to steak or chicken or Turkey or fish, they’re all 38%. Eggs are, I believe 48%, but most vegetables are less than 9%. So very inefficient. I think I did a calculation once if I wanted to get my protein from broccoli.

This is a common vegan lie where broccoli is more dense in protein than steak is. Well, what they’re talking about is one gram of steak versus one gram of broccoli. But one gram of broccoli is a much bigger piece of broccoli than it is steak because it’s a lighter-weight material. I would have to get to my protein requirement, one gram per pound of body weight per day. I think I’d need to eat 15 pounds of broccoli per day. Now obviously nobody can eat 15 pounds of a fibrous vegetable.

Dr. Khan: How about lentils, chickpeas perhaps, and the things that suggest that, okay, vegans may have some smell coming out from the bottom, but those are reasonable sources. And I’ve had vegan friends who suggest it does require a lot more for them to gain muscle mass compared to somebody else a lot.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. So I mean, if they’re dedicated, if they’re trying to understand everything and taking a whole bunch of supplements, yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t say they thrive. I can say they can limp along, but ultimately, are they going to be strong, not even close, even just to keep from looking weak and frail? They have a tough time.

And then of course, bone frailty is a bigger issue because you’re flooding the body with oxalates, with chronic cellular inflammatories. Like I said, that’s the greatest cause of all cancers. And then on top of that, the lack of nutrition from animal protein. Yeah, I mean they can live but not Well. Also, keep in mind, I think it’s 60% of them eat meat when they’re drinking alcohol. That’s a huge statistic that tells you something.

Dr. Khan: Instincts, natural human instincts. Because we up hunting, we grew up hunting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, maybe I’ll just have a bite of this cheeseburger. And they’re like, oh my God. It’s something in me that just says this is good for me. Right? It is. That’s why these are anecdotal examples, but I think science starts with anecdotes. So also when you look at how upset children get when they have to eat vegetables, they’re never upset when they have to eat a Stig just vegetables.

Why? Well, because it’s poison. That’s why it has oxalates in it. A deer is 30,000 times more resistant to oxalate poisoning than we are. So the kid tastes it and they’re like this, I don’t want this. This isn’t good. And you keep forcing on the kid and tell ’em it’s good for ’em, and then just shrug their shoulders and they’re like, all right, well, I guess I have to. It’s good for me. But why is it that the instinct of the child is to say, I don’t want this?

Dr. Khan: Right. I do agree with that. When there’s a choice, a kid will. On the other hand, I have seen vegan families as such, and their kids are fine with it, but I do agree with you that if a kid, you

Dr. John Jaquish: Weren’t there on day one. Also, a kid with a political opinion is like a vegan cat. We all know who’s calling the shots.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. No, it exactly depends on the parents’ feed.

Dr. John Jaquish: If you have parents that are indoctrinating their kids and then they’re like, look at my kid and how much he or she loves vegetables, like, shut up. You forced ’em to do that. You rehearsed this a hundred times.

Dr. Khan: What does Dr. John Jake wish to eat?

Dr. John Jaquish: Pretty much all steak.

Dr. Khan: All steak?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dr. Khan: Did that say steak?

Dr. John Jaquish: Seven days a week?

Dr. Khan: Sorry, just steak.

Dr. John Jaquish: Just steak. I like fasting also. So on non-training days, sometimes I’ll go four days with eating absolutely nothing. I might be water fasting. Sometimes I even dry fast. So that allows regeneration of the cells in the digestive tract. It’s fantastic. Also, when you get off of carbohydrates, you’re never hungry. You only eat because have to fuel basically for your training and refreshing cells in your body. So yeah, I’ve always been a huge fan of fasting, and it’s so most people would see me walking down the street. I mean, I don’t point at myself and say, oh, I’m the perfect example. I kind of have reddish skin to burn a little easily, and I get too much sun. I try to get out in the sun quite a bit, but I don’t put any vegetable oil on my food, so I rarely get a sunburn. I was in Mexico with a wellness group and everybody’s putting sunblock all over themselves. I put a hat on because I don’t have hair on the top of my head just to keep the burn from the top of my head, but the rest of me, I’m like, no, I don’t use sunblock.

So either not eating anything or eating red meat on training days primarily.

Dr. Khan: Right. So I believe you also ate fat. Yeah. So are you a hype responder? Of course, there’s a big debate and there’s a lot of back and forth on it. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Do you mean the high levels of cholesterol?

Dr. Khan: Exactly. Not is cholesterol LDLC. Yeah. So it’s a huge debate and some people can do very well with it. The thing with this is that in some metabolic situations you say that, okay, a higher level of LDLC perhaps is injurious to your health. And there have been studies to suggest that the cumulative amount that you have over your lifetime sets up to increase your risk. However, that’s in the setting of possibly the American standard American diet and the way that people see you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Was just getting ready. You’re like, yeah,

Dr. Khan: Yeah,

Dr. John Jaquish: It is low-density lipoprotein LDL cholesterol, formerly referred to as bad cholesterol. It is not unless you have high triglycerides. If you have high triglycerides and high.

Dr. Khan: And that comes from carbohydrates and refined carbohydrates and that it plays into the picture.

Dr. John Jaquish: So sometimes when people say, oh, you should eat a lot of animal protein, but then your carbohydrates don’t matter. You can eat fruit and honey. No, you cannot. When you want to go down the low carbohydrate path, stay there. Don’t mess with it. Don’t every once in a while just add a ton of sugar because that’s a recipe for a cardiac event, for a stroke. Primarily when you have high triglycerides and high LDL, you never want to do that. So that’s the one caution when doing this. And like you said, does one size fit all for nutrition? Probably not because what are people willing to do?

Dr. Khan: Exactly, and yeah, there’s so much, humans have grown up with everything. They have grown up through evolution and the ages of thousands of years. You could potentially find people who were largely vegetable eaters, but they probably definitely had a lot of, they had 2 million meat sources.

Dr. John Jaquish: For 2 million years, we have been the apex predator, and there’s a great study. On average, humans eat four ounces of carbohydrates per year. So carbohydrates are like the last couple hundred years. That’s it.

Dr. Khan: When farming was

Dr. John Jaquish: Most fruits and vegetables were selectively pollinated. They didn’t exist. An original strawberry is smaller than my thumbnail. If you see what an actual strawberry looked like before they start genetically messing with it or cross-pollinating different types of strawberries to make ’em bigger and sweeter. So all our fruits and vegetables are just some sort of Frankenstein creation that botanists have been working on for a long time. When cities first started to become a thing and people lived in close quarters, especially in high militarization areas like in Europe, they couldn’t slaughter the animals and get the meat into the cities quickly enough before it would spoil.

So the kings would say to the farmers, Hey, can you come up with some kind of plant that’ll last a long time so we can hand it out to the people in the village and we will tell ’em it’s healthy. They don’t know. And so ultimately it was supposed to be cheap crap food, and it continues to be cheap crap food. One of the reasons you’ll never hear a government endorsing high protein, low carbohydrate nutrition is because a lot of governments feed their people, or at least they’re in control of the budget.

Dr. Khan: Very al matters. There are economic matters in play here.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely,

Dr. Khan: Definitely. And the FDA has to look at, they need to look at that, okay, how are we going to feed 300 million people? So this sort of all plays into the pictures changing a bit.

Dr. John Jaquish: Just us Forget about everywhere else. We’re a wealthy country. At least we were, we’re a wealthy country and 76% of the people in this country right now have their budget, their monthly budget determined by the federal government. They either get social security or they’re on welfare or some type of government assistance. I realize there’s a huge difference between welfare and social security. Everybody gets all upset when I put the two next to each other, but from a budgeting standpoint, it’s the same. So let’s say the government budgets maybe two or $3 a day for people to have salads and Twinkies, and they want to tell ’em it’s healthy. Well, they’re going to keep telling ’em it’s healthy because they don’t want to come up with $25 a day for ground beef and steaks. They can’t afford it. No government can afford that. If the United States can’t afford it, I promise you nobody can.

Dr. Khan: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Recommendation’s never going to change.

Dr. Khan: Right? Yeah, there are going to be improvements. It’s not going to be a touch cereal diet or a cereal diet. I hope that we go away from the cereals, at least the breakfast cereals that we have right now. It’s horrible. It’s all sugar in a way. It’s all sugar.

Dr. John Jaquish: Candy bars. Yeah. Would you give your kid candy bars for breakfast? No. No one would do that. Cereals know better. Oh, orange juice. How about that? It’s like you took all the fiber. The only good thing, I mean, I don’t have any fiber in my diet because I don’t need to slow down the digestion of carbohydrates, but it’s the only thing good about an orange.

It’s like at least there’s some fiber in there to slow down the carbohydrates, which you’re going to cause all kinds of problems at that rate. So you take the fiber out of it. And some studies look at cancer and juice versus Coca-Cola. Same result. Both of ’em are carcinogenic.

Dr. Khan: The sugar spikes that happen after you drink orange juice. Yeah, it’s the same as eating sugar in a way.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah. And what do they give you in the hospital?

Dr. Khan: The hospital, the problem in the hospital is it’s patient satisfaction. So patients want to relish and the hospital, the worst food you’ll find is in the hospital. I agree with that. And I work in the hospital, the worst food.

Dr. John Jaquish: I knew you would agree with this.

Dr. Khan: Yeah, I agree with that. And the worst food, and I order a cardiac diet and I put my specifications in there. What they do, is they get ice cream, cola, all these things that should not be on a plate with a cardiac patient or a diabetic patient perhaps. But in the hospital setting, it’s more about patient satisfaction. We have to make people happy.

Dr. John Jaquish: S like I said, they have to be willing to do it.

Dr. Khan: Yeah, exactly. But in one sense, as you were mentioning, it’s difficult for the government to just say, okay, just be all meat-based. And maybe in the future where we will be getting these artificial ways of creating meat, and that is a different topic to discuss altogether. But when the last stone is finished, and that’s what we are talking about it that okay, civilization started 12,000 years ago when they were able to do some farming in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East area, and they were able to build canals and agriculture grew from such, and that led to civilization in a way.

That was the point where civilization in a way grew. And that’s the same thing happening today, that you need a bit of carbohydrates to get in, and everybody can’t be on a meat diet. I think that’s what people may also suggest, that you just can’t be on a total meat diet.

Dr. John Jaquish: I would argue it. I’ve tried to go like an absolute purists and just let gluconeogenesis run its course. And the best shape I’ve ever been in was when I was absolutely a hundred percent. The only thing that crossed my lips was a snake. And yeah, that’s the best. But yeah, I mean, is it practical? Probably not. If you have a labor job and you’re moving all the time, it’s not optimal. You’d have to go through gluconeogenesis constantly.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. And I believe there was a study out of China that suggested that, okay, how many calories go into making rice and how much is the output? So if a person puts in let’s say, a thousand calories into getting rice ready from beginning to end, rice can give you 10 times the return in calories that it produces. So from the whole civilization perspective.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dr. Khan: So from the civilization perspective, that still doesn’t mean what is optimal and what is not optimal and what you have to do to keep the people alive in a way, and maybe in the future, this thing improves. Numerous historical evidence and archeological evidence have shown that when wheat came into the mix, people started to have dental cavities and caries, and they seem to develop all of these types of medical problems that we know as chronic diseases.

And now in the last hundred years, with so much carbohydrate and pastry, cakes, biscuits, everything else that’s out there, I mean humans, okay, fine in the middle ages maybe perhaps you didn’t have enough carbohydrates and you lived okay. And even the aristocrats, they were the only people who were fat and unhealthy. Nowadays, it’s flipped. You can eat 20 times a day. You used to have one meal a day back in the day, but now you can have 10 meals a day. So it is tough. And in our situation, we have to think and who can afford it and who can get it. I think you should think about low low-carbohydrate diet as much as possible because it’s so easy to get carbs into you. Right. Now,

Coming back to exercise and building muscle, do you suggest all variable resistance training or do you want some cardio in the middle?

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. The best thing for the human heart is strength training. There’s a meta-analysis that looks at a hundred different studies and comes to the conclusion that strength training will give you a better cardiovascular situation. You’re going to live longer if you strength train. The problem with cardio is it’s very damaging in joints, just repetitive action joints. And so a lot of people end up wearing out the mileage on the joint is the problem. So they end up wearing out their joints by the time, let’s say 40 or 50, and then they can’t do anything, and they can’t do strength training either because of destroyed joints.

So then they end up dying much earlier because they lack muscle mass. So cardio for the sake of cardiac health is nonsense because strength training is superior. Now, if you like running and that’s just the thing you’re going to stick to, well then forget what I’m saying right now. If that’s just how you’d rather exercise, it’s certainly better than doing nothing. But you got to keep in mind, you got to keep the joints healthy as you’re doing it. But if it were a perfect world, we’d all be strength training and we wouldn’t need to bother with it.

Dr. Khan: So I think one reason why you want to do cardio would be to develop collaterals in your heart because when you stress out the heart, your body suggests that, okay, hey, you need to build more blood vessels around the heart to take on this.

Dr. John Jaquish: Does a better job of that.

Dr. Khan: Yes. And strength training can do an appropriate job for this, especially. I’ll let you talk about this more hit-type training. Are you able to incorporate it, is that what you also recommend people do?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s absolutely what strength training is. I mean, it’s high-intention exposure to force. You train the absolute fatigue, then catch your breath for three or four minutes depending on your musculature, and then you do it again.

Dr. Khan: So for an individual, for an individual who is let’s say 45 to 50 years old, right? Let’s say around 50 years of old, let’s say 50 years of age, and their joints are fine, they have no other problems. Give us an exercise program that you think will be beneficial for them.

Dr. John Jaquish: As long as the joints are healthy, they strategically impose high forces. The high is relative to that individual. You’re talking about a female or a male. The forces are going to be different, but you expose high forces strategically by using variable resistance to force the musculature to grow. It is going to put a huge stress on the heart for a short period, which is going to enhance the capabilities of the heart and the longevity of the heart. But then the heart also has to keep up with the musculature. So you think about a 250-pound muscular person, that heart is working hard to pump blood to all that muscle, but for a 250-pound obese person, that tissue is not vascular. So it’s almost like they have a lack of cardiac activity.

And then usually they have high triglycerides and high LDLs also. So they’re at risk of cardiac events. So strength training sort of double protects you because you have a lower level of adipose tissue, everything’s vascular, blood’s pumping everything, so it’s efficient. And then on top of that, you’re not dealing with the things that cause obesity, like the inflammatory diet, like the high triglycerides. So the problem with cardiac events, just so I know you understand this, but the reason that we thought LDL was bad for us is that when arteries become inflamed, they’re almost sticky on the inside. And so then the LDL would come down the artery and it’d stick, and then another one would stick and another one would stick cause a blockage. However, the LDL is the transport mechanism in the blood. And this is sort of a newer understanding. It transports fatty acids all over. It’s the boat. If you know who Dave Feldman is, if you haven’t interviewed him, you need to, he explains this in a very understandable and accurate way.

So the LDL is a transport mechanism, but because it kept getting stuck in people’s arteries that have high triglycerides, which is why they have inflammation in the arteries, that’s what causes these cardiac events. Well, if you just take the inflammation out of it, then you’re fine, but you certainly don’t want to stop your body’s ability to transport fatty acids. DL, when LDL is highest, this is an interesting cocktail party piece of trivia when it’s highest

Dr. Khan: After alcohol.

Dr. John Jaquish: After a fast while fasting.

Dr. Khan: Yeah, because your fast is released, your fast stores start to release all of this from the stores. Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. That’s right. So if LDL is something that goes up when you’re burning your body fat, saying LDL is bad for you is like saying weight loss is bad for you.

Dr. Khan: And just LDL is probably not the best marker in the spectrum of a regular American diet. It’s not the best marker. Applebee is normally more in a way considered, yeah, it’s more of a transportation mechanism.

Dr. John Jaquish: 70% of the LDL in our body our liver makes. Is it because our livers trying to kill us? No, it’s because it’s a transport mechanism. That’s it. And so when someone takes a statin and they’re lowering the amount of transportation of fatty acids, that’s seriously limiting for all organs in the body. You are choking off something you need.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. And I mean see this every single day in a way people could have a very low LDL below 50, and I’ve seen people still coming with heart attacks and strokes. So there’s much to this picture, to be honest. I’ve seen patients with an A1C that’s less than five and they’re having these issues. It’s a lot more complicated, just much to pin it just on one or two variables. That’s tough.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a calcium score. I tell people, to look at their calcium score for cardiac health over the LDL. You want your triglycerides to be low. That’s an absolute must.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. And so on the A website, there is, I’ll probably try to pull that up, but on the American Heart associating website that if you’re metabolically healthy, you have a good exercise capacity, then a lot of things can be covered up. A lot of things can be covered up. You are not fat, you’re not obese, you maintain yourself well. You exercise and exercise again, which ties into muscle building, and with how much muscle you can build efficiently, you’ll be in good hands.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. And I like that you said it is not just one or two variables. That’s true. You need to monitor a bunch of things. And also healthy people think they don’t need blood work because they look healthy in the mirror and they feel healthy, but nothing hides in blood work. If you’re getting the right blood work done, you gas for the wrong tests. But I do think that’s important. I have blood work regularly. Fortunately, I’ve been pretty much carnivore-ish for 15 years. About five of those were less than 10 grams of carbohydrates per day. Now I’m at about 30 grams per day.

Dr. Khan: Okay, so what tests do you get done for yourself?

Dr. John Jaquish: Calcium? That’s going to determine how, if there’s calcification going on, then there’s a problem.

Dr. Khan: Exactly, that is an early sign of whether is there a problem. I mean, you could have cholesterol through the roof, but if you are not at a higher heart risk by these tests, if you have coronary calcium or you do interval scans and they’re fine, means you’re not at that at-risk individual as such.

Dr. John Jaquish: That and triglycerides, just make sure my triglycerides are low, now I know what I eat. So it’s no surprise that both of ’em are very low and the calcium is going to be very dependent on oxalates. And I know I have a low oxalate nutrition. I know genetically I’m low in vitamin D. So like I said, sunlight, try and get a lot of sunlight. But not always. It just kind of depends on where I am and what the weather is. But yeah, those are the only things I’m looking at.

Dr. Khan: Do you supplement vitamin D?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, especially in the wintertime. I’ll take it via injection.

Dr. Khan: Alright. Okay. Biggest myths. I know we talked about some biggest myths about building muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, here’s a point of confusion and I think it’s just a point of confusion, not necessarily a myth, but so the approach that I take is a high-intensity approach. So we train for strength. You want to be stronger every workout you want, and your total force is created to be a greater number than ever before. And only when it is a greater number than ever before produced by you. That’s the only time you grow. So I would estimate most people in their workouts, they might grow one out of every 500 workouts because they just don’t know where that fatigue point is and they stop short of it Very frequently, the newest version of X3 tracks your performance in a way where it’s looking at an aggregate of what you’re creating total force in a set. Therefore, with every workout, I get stronger in every movement. So that’s critical. But some people don’t follow them, we need to get stronger with every workout. It’s called progressive overload theory instead. This is more of like a bodybuilder thing, but bodybuilding is the forerunner to what’s been taught in fitness.

So a lot of people take a volume approach, so they’re going to do 10 sets per muscle per week, and so they divide that up however, and they’re in the gym hours and hours and hours just constantly forcing blood into one muscle, forcing blood into another muscle.

I think that method of training has a lot of myths around it because the people who are proponents of this are using performance-enhancing drugs. It works well when you’re taking performance-enhancing drugs that force you to have high blood pressure. So high levels of testosterone, high blood pressure. Well, that’s of a benefit if you’re trying to constantly get blood flowing into one muscle and enlarging that muscle, training that muscle to hold more glycogen and a TP and creatine phosphate, the three energy systems of the musculature. So your muscle is just getting sort of a long-term strength endurance stimulus and adaptive response, but it doesn’t work that well for most people. It works well if you’re taking enhancing drugs, but that’s certainly no gateway to health. That’s the opposite. So I don’t think anybody should be doing that. So that’s why I focus on all the almost half a million people who are using X3, focusing on getting stronger with every workout. So complete exhaustion and then stay away from it until you’ve recovered and then you stimulate again

Dr. Khan: You are not in favor of longer sets, but just shorter, stronger ones. No

Dr. John Jaquish: We do one set per exercise and it’s all out of absolute fatigue. And that is the style of training that is more focused on strength and a stronger muscle is a larger muscle, but the volume training people, bodybuilders, really though there are a lot of bodybuilders who either do both types of training. A certain days of the week they’re focused on strength and on other days of the week, they’re just trying to get that blood flow benefit. As far as bodybuilding goes, that’s probably the right way to go though. I don’t see much sense in just trying to make a muscle bigger. If it doesn’t perform better, then what are you doing? And by contrast, there are no performance athletes that do volume training, not zero, because they’d be carrying around extra weight that doesn’t do anything. So what they’re trying to do is be as absolutely as powerful as possible and as light as possible.

Dr. Khan: Great. How much protein do you need for muscle growth? For people who are looking to grow muscle, how much protein do you recommend?

Dr. John Jaquish: So there’s a lot of argument there. Most of the studies say one gram of protein per pound of body weight.

Dr. Khan: So let’s say for example, that is a 70-year-old man, or let’s say 70 kg man or a 60 kg female, how much protein, let’s say in chicken legs or steak, how much would that be for the whole day?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I’ll use a New York steak, which is a leaner cut of meat. It’s a hundred grams per pound. I weigh about a little over a hundred kilos, so like 230 pounds. So I’m going to try and get 230 grams of protein or 2.3 pounds of red meat per day that I’m training.

Dr. Khan: Okay, interesting. Yeah, sometimes it’s difficult for people to visualize, okay, how much do you need to eat?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a lot more protein than you think. Here’s another reason I don’t bother with fruits or vegetables. Once you get one gram per pound of body weight in protein, there’s no room in your digestive system for anything else. You’re full, you don’t want to eat anymore. Now there are some newer studies, a newer meta-analysis that puts people at about, I don’t quite remember the formula, but I know it would have me, instead of 230 grams, it would have me more like at 170. So there’s another meta-analysis that says beyond that level, you’re just going into thermogenesis and you’re not using that amount of protein. But I just sort of err on the side of caution and get one gram per pound.

Dr. Khan: Right. Yeah. I believe I did a little bit of research. And if you eat chicken for example, perhaps, then you have to eat chicken thighs every meal. They’ll probably get most people there who are in their 60 to 70 kg range.

Dr. John Jaquish: So a chicken thigh typically has 25 grams. So if you’re getting 50 grams per meal for the average 150-pound person, that’s perfect.

Dr. Khan: Right? Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: That includes breakfast.

Dr. Khan: Three meals. Yes, yes. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right, exactly. Okay, so I’m going to ask you a few questions, rapid-fire questions more than a few. Alright. If you were made the president of the United States for four years, what change that you bring about?

Dr. John Jaquish: There’d be a lot of different safety standard testing for FDA approval, FDA approval right now, doesn’t look towards efficacy. It’s more like will this kill people? And that’s great. I mean, they’re looking out for our safety, however, we need to make sure it works. I think that a lot of the time we’re recommended things that are recommended because it’s under patent and there’s a margin to be made there. It’s like when you go into the hospital and you’re having an allergic reaction, and unless you’re in anaphylactic shock and your throat has closed, if you can still swallow, do they give you Allegra or Claritin or any of the newer drugs that are under patent? No, they give you the one that works, which is Benadryl, no screwing around. If you have an allergic reaction, take two Benadryl, they’ll give it to you immediately. And it’s like, well, why not? Any of the newer ones that are advertised on TV because they don’t work as well. So we’ve got a sort of patent bias. The drugs that are making money, they’re the ones that get recommended. Well, but what if that’s not the best option? Well, you’d never know it because continuing education for physicians is having physicians watch commercials. That sucks.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. That’s how it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I would make it illegal for anybody who is legislating medication to have any ownership position in any pharmaceutical company. If you’re a member of Congress, you cannot have a financial interest in what you’re regulating. I do the same thing for defense contractors. If you’re voting on whether we should go to war, you should not be profiting off of war.

Dr. Khan: This is a separate topic. And a huge topic is, and I agree with you on this and I completely agree with you on this, that people who are making decisions, should not be leveraged by anything else. They should not be profiteering for their own decisions because their decisions affect the general population.

Dr. John Jaquish: Talk about life.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. So the best quote or phrase that inspires you and keeps you going

Dr. John Jaquish: Tough to keep this clean. Elon said something the other day that was hilarious, but it’s very profane. I can’t say it on

Dr. Khan: Oh,

Dr. John Jaquish: (01:09:12): It had to do with what we’re talking about. It was like somebody was threatening to pull advertising.

Dr. Khan: : No, he motioned like this. He motioned like this. Something like this.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s sort of like the new strapline for Twitter is, I’ll just say it. You can beep it out. If some advertiser is threatening to pull their ads because they don’t like whatever, the fact that he’s not censoring conservatives, he’s like, well, we have freedom of speech in this country, so you can’t tell me what I can and can’t have as an advertiser. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. You cannot sponsor Twitter, that’s fine, but don’t threaten me. So I like that attitude. We live in a time where for some reason, blackmail seems to be okay all of a sudden and it never was before. And yeah, I don’t think the politics of medicine should ever, I mean, there shouldn’t be any politics in medicine. Politics should have nothing to do with medical care ever.

Dr. Khan: It should all be evidence-based and apply to science. Absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: (01:10:32): And how many times during the pandemic did we say, well, you need to trust the science? Well, that’s funny because I read the scientific studies, and almost all of the time we were doing the opposite of what the science said. The science said lockdowns don’t work. It was ubiquitous. They’re not going to do anything. They’re causing depression and suicide in children. I mean, I never even heard of child suicide until the pandemic. It’s been a very, very tiny problem up until when the pandemic happened. But yeah, the whole trust, the experts, well, the experts lied, so don’t trust

Dr. Khan: Yet. And initially, everybody was scared. Okay, yeah, fine. Until you figure out what’s happening. Yeah, okay. Maybe then continuing it on for years and months was atrocious. That was atrocious

Dr. John Jaquish: And damaging to people. It’s so manipulative. I think the whole reason is to scare everybody around election time so that they could vote from home. And it’s a lot easier to cheat at elections when everything comes in an envelope and nobody has to check in at a live center. So I don’t think that politics and medicine should be so separated. The people who approve drugs should never, I mean, how about this one, the fact that Anthony Fauci made money, he had ownership positions in all of the companies that he was regulating.

Dr. Khan: Yeah. Doesn’t work like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Never paid him more than $120,000 a year. And somehow he’s worth a hundred million dollars.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. So the way it should work and works for people who are regular physicians or clinicians or even any sort of a researcher, they have to, before any speech, any talk that they give at a presentation and all about this, of course, you have to disclose your conflicts of interest. But nobody else, other than us physicians or Ph.D. individuals or any postdoc, they’re made to disclose their conflicts of interest. Nobody else has to do that.

Dr. John Jaquish :That’s right.

Dr. Khan: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: : Yeah. And I mean, it just should be hard laws if you have any ownership in, and I think the weapons thing is crystal clear, and once I make that parallel, I don’t know if you follow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He’s running for president. I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago and I was with him last week at a party. The situation we’re looking at is why is the US involved in so many wars. Because of our standards of what we deem, the spec that NATO has to adhere to is only specifications of weapons that are made by our country. So they have to buy hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of equipment from Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and all our defense contractors. I mean, hey, that’s great for business, but why are we trying to get war started so we can sell weapons? And also,

Dr. Khan: How does this, Eisenhower, Eisenhower had a lot to say about this, right? I believe Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, is something similar.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s right. He coined the term and it is stronger than ever today, and that’s why we’re in all the wars were in, is because the members of Congress and the president are profiting off of this. And that should

Dr. Khan: Never, as a physician, I mean, my basic instinct is, okay, let’s avoid any of this. You can talk things out, you can discuss things out, you can debate, you can argue, but don’t let it go down this path. And it’s just misery. And we see it, we see it in different respects, but it’s horrible. But yeah, I think it’s an important topic. Yeah, definitely. I see you’re very passionate about this as well. Definitely. So which is better and which order? Free weights, variable resistance, and machines, which are better for muscle gain.

Dr. John Jaquish: So variable resistance is better than anything. And all the research points at that. Some machines provide a low level of variable resistance. So one thing I noticed, is that Arthur Jones, he’s the developer of Nautilus machines. He died a few years ago, but they were really popular in the seventies. And so they didn’t have the same research that I got to benefit from because it was just done so long ago. But a Nautilus machine, just to use a chest press as an example, they’re having X at the bottom and maybe 1.2 x at the top.

So a little bit of variable resistance. Now really what we want from a muscular stimulation standpoint, especially because doing multiple repetitions, we want X at the bottom at about five x at the top. So that was a pretty big difference. That wasn’t, it wasn’t clear in the beginning, but now in that tradition, people are more satisfied with variable resistance exercise, even if they don’t know it’s variable resistance exercise because it just feels better. It feels like they did more work because they did. So the other companies that are now popular, like Hammer Strength, have continued with some lighter approaches to variable resistance and they can make some progress. The only drawback to machines is that you’re denying the body, the self-stabilization firing that upregulates growth hormone

Dr. Khan: That’s important for proprioception. That is assessing joint stability and where’s your foot actually on the ground.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s a difference between creating muscle mass and being athletic. Two are not the same thing.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. As you age, that’s why you need to have not just singular exercises when you age when you’re doing muscle exercises because you need to be able to pivot, twist, turn, and move sideways to prevent that fall. That’s going to lead to breaking your hip.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So what you do as an older adult, you got to do your strength training and then you have to do some type of agility training now, different than what they do in the NFL for agility training, but you need to be able to stand on one foot because if you lose your balance, maybe that’s all you got. That’s the only difference. You’re balancing yourself on one foot is the only difference between a normal day or an injury falling.

Dr. Khan: Exactly. So combined whole body exercises versus limited body region exercises, what do you suggest on that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Multi-joint exercises are always superior. So like a deadlift, you’re moving at the knees and you’re moving at the hips and you’re moving at the arms. So the more joints involved, the deadlift is absolutely, if there’s one exercise for wellness, that is it. And then squat would probably be second place to that because you have two joints involved in that. The hip, joint, knee, joint, oh, and the ankles. So actually three. So it’s the more the musculature in the entire body involved. You have a potentiation going on. So basically you’re teaching the body to fire those muscles together, which even without building muscle before building muscle makes you stronger because you’re able to use more of your muscle. So that would be called skill building or a neurological effect. But the multi-joint exercises do great at that. And so the movements in X3, they’re all the multi-joint movements that we can use.

Dr. Khan: Okay. Protein shakes versus whole foods, protein foods. What do you suggest foods? Is there a role for protein shakes?

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of protein shakes are made of whey and weigh only 18% usable by the body. So when somebody’s chugging down a 50 50 gram protein shake, they think, oh, I got a third of my protein right here. Let’s say they weigh 150 pounds. Now they’re only getting nine grams of protein out of that because it’s just an inefficient and inappropriate ratio of amino acids. Now, if by protein shakes, you’re talking about essential amino acids, that’s different. Essential amino acids are awesome.

Dr. Khan: How about branch-chain amino acids? There’s a huge debate regarding branch-chain amino acids and

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, branch-chain amino acids don’t perform as well as the placebo. So they’re trash. Yeah, it’s the wrong ratio. It was an interesting theory when people first thought, oh, workout recovery, just grab the amino acid. The logic was wonderful. It was, let’s find the amino acids that aid in the recovery from workout. The problem is that’s not how your body needs them to do what it needs to do after you gain your breath again and it tries to build muscle, the brain chain amino acids are worthless. As I said, outperformed by placebo, which was a sugar pill. So yeah, essential amino acids are the other

Dr. Khan: : Right? Losing lysine, you’re in favor of taking them in

Dr. John Jaquish: As long as they’re coming with the other essential amino acids in the correct ratio. So there are only a few companies that do it right and do it with fermentation. That’s the best way to create these amino acids. Conflict of interest notification here, I do manufacture one of those amino acid products, but it’s me. So obviously I’m going to tell you it works. But I would urge anybody to read about Forti gen, which is the name of the product, and see some of the reviews.

Dr. Khan: And we’re going to have the links in the description so that if you are interested, you can read up on yourself and see if they’re good for you. Yeah, right. Okay. So I know you’re against cardio, but

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t want to say I’m against it. It’s not an efficient path to what you want. Even if somebody’s trying to lose weight, hit cardio, where it’s like you’re exercising hard for three minutes, and then you catch your breath like sprinting, that’s awesome because the variable heart rate is very important. But if you just elevate your heart rate to the target heart rate and keep it there for longer than 20 minutes, you upregulate cortisol and you downregulate growth hormone. So basically you’re sacrificing muscle. So when you lose weight from doing cardio, you’re losing muscle and you’re preserving body fat. So you stay as fat as possible as long as possible. This is not what anybody wants. Nobody wants that. And so I think a lot of people are just confused as to what cardio does and what they’re going to get out of it.

Dr. Khan: So I know you do recommend that full-body training is better. Then that brings into question consistency. How often in the week do you think people should train?

Dr. John Jaquish: Boy, that’s a hot topic right now.

Dr. Khan: That’s why I’m asking that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. In our workouts, we split the body sort of pushing and pulling muscles on different days. So give every muscle group 48 hours of rest. But there was just a meta-analysis that shows whether you train a muscle 1, 2, 3, or four times per week the same growth happens. Same. So that tells you that for the most part, worries about over-training we’re overblown because the idea if you overtrain, you go backward and you lose strength, no, but you’re not growing from every workout because if one workout in four workouts gives you the same result, you’re only growing from one. And then the rest of the time, maybe you don’t have enough metabolites to trigger growth. We don’t understand the refresh rate of the metabolites that are required to trigger growth. So does that mean we should be training each muscle one time per week with high intensity?

I’m only talking about high-intensity, not volume training here. It sure seems that way. Now you would need to be guaranteed that in that one workout, you are going to a much greater level of fatigue. So like what I talked about earlier, the progressive overload, you need to make sure that every workout is the best workout of your life that you’re doing if you’re going to work each muscle only one time per week. And so now we have a measurement tool that captures that. It’s a slightly different X3 bar called the force bar and a Bluetooth to your phone, and it captures the exercise record and shows exactly how much total force you’ve created over the entire workout. So now I’m working each muscle just one time per week and getting to a level of fatigue I’ve never gotten to before, getting to a level of performance I’ve never gotten to before in every workout. I’ll show you the data right here. I have it in the calendar year of 2023, and we are in November. So nearing the end of the year. If I look at my statistics year to date, I have worked out 13 hours in six minutes this year.

And then the only reason my curve drops off over here is because I had to skip the deadlift last week.

Dr. Khan: You’re pretty consistent on that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely.

Dr. Khan: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah,

Dr. Khan: Exactly. Exactly. So we talked about variable resistance, and you have this program three times that you have said that it improves your muscle building efficiency by three times, not percent, not 30%. Three times 300%. And can you walk us through your program?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, there are pushing muscles one day pulling muscles the next, so pushing chest press, tricep, press squat, and then the pulling days is like a deadlift, row bicep curls, and a couple of other movements. But in both of them, you’re training with one set per exercise and you’re trying to get the greatest amount of force created in every one of those workouts. And you do that. You grow every single time.

Dr. Khan: Is this the device? Is this the invention?

Dr. John Jaquish: It. And that’s Tarot Owens NFL, Hall of Famer using it. He’s in his fifth, no, I think he’s 49 and he just ran a 40 in 4.3 seconds.

Dr. Khan: Alright. So we are seeing these exercises being performed here. I mean this is of course a B curl still A still, yeah. And so basically you use these bands as such? Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Very heavy bands. And they run through a ground plate, so they run under your feet, but they can move freely so they don’t twist your ankles. Here’s a group of professional athletes. You roll over each picture and you can see the name of the person. And these are all professional athletes who have given me a free endorsement. So I don’t think it’s worth anything if you pay for somebody to endorse you, because it doesn’t mean your thing works, it means they got paid. So yeah, these guys are all at the top of their game. Most of them are NFL and do a lot with the Miami Heat. The Miami Heat primarily uses X3 , but I just don’t have one, it’s a whole team that I work with, so I didn’t want to put a whole bunch of pictures of guys on one team.

Dr. Khan: So

Dr. John Jaquish: You can see in this graphic right here that I’m pushing 550 pounds

Dr. Khan: In 550 pounds. That’s a lot.

Dr. John Jaquish: It is a lot.

Dr. Khan: Is that possible with this? Okay, interesting. Wow, interesting. It’s a pretty strong band. It’s a pretty strong band.

Dr. John Jaquish: It is a very strong band. Yeah. That’s the elite band that’s not for beginners.

Dr. Khan: So for people who may be not as strong as you, I believe I saw your image earlier, but for people who are not as strong as you are, you have options for them and not a 500-pound band. Of course,

Dr. John Jaquish: That band right there is an accessory that doesn’t even come with the regular unit. Just so people know half the people in the NFL can’t even use that band.

Dr. Khan: Right? I certainly can’t. Okay, let me go back here. Let me just scroll through this. So you are showing here, lemme just bring this up. You are showing a couple of images and exercises that people can perform, right? So this is a deadlift, this is a front squat, right? Lemme just go this way. Overhead press, triceps press, and chest press that we just saw previously. And to go this way, there are a couple of exercises we can do with this. Benra biceps curl cough raises. Okay, interesting. So it comes, alright. There is a base, there’s a base that you can use.

Dr. John Jaquish: Platform stand

Dr. Khan: On platform.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s important.

Dr. Khan: Split squats. Okay, excellent. So where can people find you?

Dr. John Jaquish: I prefer Instagram. I just like the platform. I think it’s just more pleasant to use. So I’m like D-R-J-A-Q-U-I-S-H on Dr. Jaquish on Instagram. But probably the easiest place to find me is my website, Dr. J. It’s D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter j.com. And then there’s links to everything, YouTube and Facebook and everything

Dr. Khan: From there. Excellent, excellent. Alright, thanks for watching. If you like this, consider sharing it with your family, your friends, and people who may benefit from this information. And you can also check this other video out. I’m sure that you will find this interesting. It has been an honor having you here

Dr. John Jaquish: I think it’s an honor for me to be here. I love this. You ask great questions.

Dr. Khan: Alright. No, no. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you as a valuable viewer and thanks for watching till the very end.