X3 Inventor John Jaquish: a Revolutionary Approach to Bone Health & Muscle Growth #134

Full Transcript

Jack Heald: I will confess, I really liked this guy that appeared on this episode of the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. Dr. John Jaquih is blunt, he’s opinionated, he speaks his mind. Now, all of those things are, well, they can be a plus or a minus, but he also knows what he’s talking about and that combination is rare and refreshing. He’s got some completely different ideas about both bone development, bone strengthening, and muscle growth, and he put those ideas into practice. In fact, he’s demonstrated that they work. I’ll let you learn all about it in this episode. Thanks for joining.

Announcer: He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table in an early death. Now he’s a Rebel MD who is fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is stay off my operating table with Dr. Philip Veda.

Jack Heald: Hey folks. As you know, it’s the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia and we’ve got a muscle head here with us today. I love it when we have these guys, frankly, because I feel like I’m probably more amongst my people, even though nobody would ever accuse me of being one of those, but I didn’t go to medical school. So it’s nice to have somebody who’s over on my side of the fence introduce our guests, Phil, our guest.

Dr. Ovadia: Sure thing. We got, I think what is probably one of the most intelligent muscle heads I think out there. And really,

Dr. John Jaquish: I was going to say, I don’t think Jack realizes I have a PhD in biomedical engineering.

Dr. Ovadia: Exactly. We got Dr. John. I knew it was a PhD,

Jack Heald: But it’s not an md.

Dr. John Jaquish: I just have better handwriting.

Dr. Ovadia: Exactly. They won’t let

Jack Heald: You in med school if you can read your handwriting Right,

Dr. Ovadia: And just hasn’t been brainwashed in the same way that most MDs have these days. I’m really excited to have Dr. Jake Haw. John’s book, weightlifting is a waste of time, I think is a real eye opening read for anyone that’s not familiar with it and his scientific approach to muscle building. Really excited to get into today. But before we do that, Dr. Jaquish, why don’t you give a little bit of your background to our audience and maybe explain how you got so interested in the science of building muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. It actually had nothing to do with muscle. It started about 15 years ago when my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. She was very upset. I was in the middle of getting my MBA at the time, so I wasn’t medical focused at all. And so she was very upset and she told me about the side effects of the medications that are typically prescribed for osteoporosis. And she read ’em out loud and I was like, yeah, I wouldn’t want to take those drugs either. But she said, I’m worried about a fragility fracture. And I was like, let me just read about this. This might not be the only option. And I also just intuitively thought like osteoporosis is a lack of mechanical loading on bone. I knew that already. So why would we be solving a mechanical problem with a chemical solution? Why would it not be a mechanical solution to a mechanical problem? And so it was like, okay, exercise. Why does exercise not do what really doesn’t do anything for bone density? And the reason is the minimum dose of force required in the hip joint, which is the joint that counts when looking at your mortality, it’s the minimum dose is 4.2 multiples of body weight to trigger any bone growth at all. I happen to know the guy that holds the world record in the squat and when breaking the world record does not exceed 4.2 multiples body weight. He weighs 300 pounds and his squat is 1,200 pounds. So that’s four multiples, not 4.2. So when somebody says, there’s no way I’ll get osteoporosis, I work out, it’s just like, all right, you’re just uninformed. That’s not the proper level of force that’s required and you’re not going to get that through strength training. So where do you get it? You get it through high impact. So like gymnasts, when they do a dismount from the uneven bars, they’ll get 10 times their body weight. So high impact gives us incredible forces way beyond what we get with weightlifting. It’s just delivered in a different way and it’s high risk. So gymnasts have the highest bone density, but they also retire at an average age of 19 because of injuries. So what is creating the greater bone density also creates fractures. So to me it was like, okay, all I need to do is solve, it’s an engineering problem. How do I get the benefit of high impact? Get the forces associated with high impact through the bone without doing actual impact or at least lowering the risk of exposing bone mass to this type of force. So we just isolated the positions that I say it was really just me at the time, but I did grow a big company out of this. So we took fixtures where we put people in an optimized position, so like 120 degree angle from upper to lower arm and then back of the hand in line with the clavicle that’s from the upper body. That’s where you’re either going to absorb or produce the greatest amount of force. And there’s four other positions in the body where we naturally absorb high impact force and were to trip and fall or just have to basically brace for impact. So isolated those positions and allowed people to self create force, but the only movement was from the compression of your actual bone maps. So the machines were just, they were controlled by robotic arms to get into the right spot because you want everybody to have a very repeatable process, so you eliminate the positioning variables. And so the load exposure is the same every time. So I made it robotic and standardized. So somebody walks in and the devices all move in accordance to what the person’s biomechanics are, and this is what you see when you walk into an osteostrong location. So that’s the bone density treatment. And so once we made it repeatable by adding the robotics, people could expose tremendous forces. So the first clinical trial was in London, university of East London. It was where the principal investigator came from. And then the rest of the researchers were physicians at the Stratford Village surgery, which is in East London. And they ran through 40 people all postmenopausal, all either pre osteoporosis, what’s called osteopenia or fully osteo product. All of these individuals grew a huge amount of bone mass density and completely reversed their condition. And what blew my mind was when the researchers would say to me, these people are holding 6, 7, 8, 9 times their body weight, but what do people use in a gym? And it’s okay, so I know the gym, the forces in a gym are inadequate for bone, but what really are the differences? I looked at the N Ains database. For those that are listening that don’t know what the N Ains database is, it’s a database that is compiled and maintained by the National Institute of Health. And what they’re trying to do is just track health and fitness metrics. They add 2000 people every year to this, and there’s a huge battery test, body fad, blood draws or lipids like every single metric for 2000 people and including gym data, their workout data. And it turns out that beginners in exercise are typically using 1.3 times their body weight to train their lower extremities. And of course the lower extremities, the hip joint, this is what counts when it comes to osteo product fractures, those are the ones that are associated with mortality. So beginners 1.3 advanced athletes, 1.53, which is a long way from 4.2, whereas the people who were using the OSTEOSTRONG ultimately ended up becoming called Osteostrong, and now we have 300 clinics in 15 different countries for this. Those people were using over seven times their body weight, so they’re way past the minimum minimum threshold for triggering bone growth. And it worked incredibly well. And so that business is growing and it’s very exciting. It’s all over the world. And then I spent a couple years just sort of traveling and lecturing. I went to the World Congress on osteoporosis a number of times and presented some of the early data. They called it preliminary data, which I was like, it’s not preliminary, come on. But very high standards when it comes to osteoporosis and data because they’re accustomed to looking at pharmaceutical trials, which might have a hundred thousand participants when you’re testing a physical medicine intervention that its basis is on the principles of what is taught or the basics of bone metabolism like compressive force at the proper level will cause the bone to retain and assimilate minerals. You learn this day one in medical schools, every time they would say there’s really not enough data on it. And I’m like, all data on bone is data that proves this works. All of it, like every single study, we’re still doing larger trials, but it is hard to compete with pharma type studies. And this is how I think this is part of the problem, why physical medicine interventions have kind of disappeared. We only have pharmaceutical interventions now because basically from an exercise science perspective, exercise scientists can’t pull together the same size data samples, the same size studies that pharmaceutical companies can because there’s no profit margin there. That was a challenge. Now, I managed to really get by that challenge and show enough physicians enough data where they, at the very least they would say, I’ll send a few patients over and see how they do. And every time that happened, absolutely incredible results. Then they send all their patients who have osteopenia or osteoporosis. That was really the start. And then the second thing was like, wow, if humans are capable of so much creating so much force in that impact ready range of motion, if I’m seven times stronger here than I am here and I wrote the study, I proved it to myself and everybody else. Oh wow, that really means weightlifting sucks as far as triggering muscle to respond. In fact, there’s a new area of research that just talks about using range partials or what’s called lengthened partials. I don’t know if you guys have paid any attention. This is like the last six months. A lot of research has come out on regular weightlifting and just working the stretched sort of portion. So short repetition is really focusing on the stretch portion. Anybody who’s a student of variable resistance will go, yeah, right. That’s painfully obvious because that’s the only place that you’re actually doing any work. When you pick up a weight, let’s say it’s a chest press, it’s difficult from here to here, it’s easy going the rest of the range of motion because you’re so much stronger out here. So it really just isn’t work. And yeah, obviously. Okay, so you concentrated on the hard part. What if we changed the weight as we moved so that it was relevant in all positions? And that brought me to my second invention, which is X3. So massive variable resistance, very high ratio, so super heavy at the top of the movement and sort of a normal weight at the bottom.

Jack Heald: I’m thinking about you’re approaching a health macro health problem from a different angle talking about bone density rather than muscle growth. I’m going to ask, what’s a medically ignorant question? Does this grow muscle as well?

Dr. John Jaquish: The bone density device? Yeah. No, it will teach you how to recruit more muscle, which can help you grow muscle of your training muscle. And there’s some arguments that there might be some myo fial growth, so some just muscle protein synthesis with no sort of extra storage of a TP glycogen or creatine phosphate, which is sort of the other kind of muscle growth called sarco, plasmic muscle growth. So there’s none of that. But yeah, you can produce more force, but like I said, it’s more neurological than anything. Osteostrong is really focused on. Bone X3 was sort of the same version. There was a version of the similar logic, but really focusing on what muscle needs to grow the most

Jack Heald: Does this X3. And it’s kind of funny that when I found out it was you that we were having on the show, gosh, three, four years ago, Phil and I met in a men’s group and the story of the X3 kind of circled underground in the group, and I was like, oh, here’s the X3 guy. Does the X three work have the same effect on bone? Clearly you can build that way, but does it have the same effect on bone?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, the weight isn’t high enough. The weight you use to train bone is ridiculously high. My upper extremities, when I’m compressing my upper extremities in an osteostrong device, I’ll put 2000 pounds through my arms, whereas I’m not trying to bench press 2000 pounds.

Jack Heald: Right, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: So

Jack Heald: When I was being taught to squat, one of the things I remember being told was first time I put a lot more weight on the bar than I’d ever imagined squatting. My son was training me. He said, just stand up. You don’t have to squat it, just stand up under the bar and get used to the feel. And I remember there was this, I don’t know how to describe the feeling, but I know you’re probably familiar with it. All of a sudden I had on my significantly more weight than I’d ever imagined I could hold. I made no attempt to squat it. I just simply stood there with a whole lot more weight on my back. I believed I could than I’d ever imagined I could handle. Is that, of course, that’s not four times my body weight. I was going to ask, am I building bone by doing that? But if I understand, no, we’re not.

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Dr. Ovadia: So I guess with that being said, how do any of us avoid osteoporosis? Because ultimately no one’s really putting those forces on their bones

Dr. John Jaquish: Two ways. Either find an osteostrong location or high impact jumping off of stuff. You know how people, they hop up onto a box and then step down. You’ve seen people do box jump training. They should be doing the opposite. They should be jumping off of the box and stepping back up onto it. Yeah. Now there’s more risk associated with high impact. Obviously people turn like 25 and it’s, oh, you should do low impact. I mean, everybody acts like they should be bubble wrapped now. I mean, that’s a shame, but if you are fully ambulatory and not in any sort of chronic pain, getting good at landing and getting force absorbed through the bone mass. In fact, there was an iPhone app that where you could just enter, you log in, you enter your body weight, and you hold your phone on your thigh and you jump and land and it’ll tell you how many multiples body weight you’re capable of creating. Now I built it as a tool to show people that no matter what they’re doing, they’re not even getting close. But then I let some marginally athletic people use it and they could do it. They could definitely, especially if they were standing on something like a park bench two feet off the ground. Yeah, you’re getting it. I’m in the middle of a redesign on the app, but it’s called fracture proof. It’ll probably be out a couple months again.

Dr. Ovadia: Great. So I wanted to go back just a little bit earlier when we were talking about bone and you said kind of day one in medical school, you learn about the importance of these mechanical forces to help bone recruit the minerals. And I think you’re given maybe a little too much credit to medical schools. I certainly don’t remember learning that. What I learned about bone and osteoporosis prevention was take your calcium and maybe there was a little mention of vitamin D. And along the way, I’ve now learned that actually the majority of bone or the biggest portion of bone is actually protein and how important protein is to bone bone testing. Also,

Dr. John Jaquish: The idea that you take calcium and you grow bone would be as stupid as saying, I’m just going to eat extra protein and not work out and I’ll grow all the muscle because all you need is protein. So nobody would say that. But then we have these just completely ignorant physician saying, oh, just take calcium. That’s all you need really. So building block with no stimulus, huh? It won’t do anything. In fact, it’ll give you kidney stones

Dr. Ovadia: And calcification in your arteries of your heart, by the way too.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Then you have cardiac problems. Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Ovadia: Yeah, just very interesting. We always like to kind of go behind the thought process here. So why was it do you think that you were able to figure this out when kind of no one else had?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s a good question. I got a good answer for it. My PhD advisor told me, so I invented the device and then I went to do my PhD. Part of the reason I went to Rushmore University, they were the only ones that were willing to let me fund my own dissertation project because I went to universities and I was like, okay, I could give you guys a grant, a research grant, and then you do a research project that I sort of loosely designed, create the methods section for, and then you’ll get a PhD student to make it either a project or a dissertation project. No problem. And I had some good friends that were professors at the time at Berkeley, and I’m like, okay, so you match my project up with a random student, and that’s usually how it works. And they’re like, Hey, you have to approve of the student, but generally there’s a meeting here and there. What if I want to be the student? And they were like, oh, no, can’t do that. Why? What’s the difference? They laugh, they’re like, because they’re not administrators, so they’re just saying how it is and they’re like, you know what? It’s just never been done. It is just unorthodox. And you don’t ever ask a university for permission. The answer will always be no, Because I mean, they just don’t want to upset anything. They’re bureaucrats they show up at, they’re probably supposed to show up at eight, but they show up at nine and then they’re supposed to leave at five and they leave at four. But as long as they don’t, you’re a bureaucrat. As long as you don’t rape anybody at work, you’re probably never going to be fired. So They’re just going through, I had the say Myers-Briggs personality as Donald Trump. I just said how it is. I’m better on Twitter though, so I’m listening to these guys and I’m like, do you see this is totally stupid? And they’re like, yeah, but we could build a spreadsheet for you of all the stupid things that universities do and keep mind. These guys were at Berkeley. My friends were in the material science area of civil engineering, and they’re just kind of telling me, yeah, you’re going to have really a lot of trouble finding this because my goal, I was like, I want to be able to author papers, academic papers, but I also want to study my own invention, and why the hell would I trust somebody else to study it? What if they did it wrong? What if they half-assed it? I should be the guy because I’m going to pay attention at a completely different level than somebody who’s just assigned the project. And they were like, yeah, we totally get it, but that’s just not the way things are done. So finally I found a university that was willing to let me do it, and that’s why I picked that one. Rushmore University. So I did my dissertation, published my dissertation that’s available on my website if somebody wants to read that. By the way, I don’t recommend reading that. Very boring. It is for free on my website. It is worth every penny just, I mean, it’s a dissertation. It sucks. We’ll

Jack Heald: Get Grace Price to read it. We’ve had an 18-year-old on who’s already learned how to read the medical research studies, so we’ll get her to do it. It’s

Dr. John Jaquish: Just exhaustive is the problem. It’s one of those things, it’s like every little detail. Yeah, we wrote 20 pages about it. Anything how to capture the load and get the loading into computer system. There’s 40 pages on who the hell would even want to know that, but exhaustive, that’s kind of a thing in dissertation authoring. What was the question anyway? I’m not exactly sure. Yeah,

Dr. Ovadia: It was really just was your mindset in solving this problem that had never been solved before?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah. I started going down, basically my PhD advisor told me, if you, that’s why I went through the order of things. So I invented it before I did my PhD. And here’s the issue. It’s like he said, if you had done it the other way around, if you had had maybe a vague idea of what you were going to do and then you wanted to do a PhD in biomedical engineering, you would’ve talked yourself out of this. And I was like, why do you say that? And he says, it’s so unorthodox. Your approach to bone density is absolutely the opposite of anyone else in the field. Except when I ended up showing it to the experts in the field, they were like, this is so refreshing. This is great. I know the pharmaceutical industry gets beat up on a lot, probably rightly so for some of the bias data, maybe some of the lack of quality clinical trials, putting maybe profits over safety. We can debate that endlessly. But I was pleasantly surprised that these guys who had spent their entire lives developing drugs and testing drugs for pharmaceutical company were like, wow, this is a great solution for the majority of the population. Some people just can’t physically engage their body because of biomechanics problems or chronic pain. Also, there’s a percentage of the population, not a big percentage, maybe 5%, just absolutely unwilling to do anything that requires effort. Some people are just, this is like maybe call them, I don’t want to misuse this term, so I got to put a caveat on it, but pretty much like the fibromyalgia crowd. So fibromyalgia is the definition is sort of unexplained pain. People who perceive pain and they might actually have real pain. It’s not for a reason that’s easily diagnosed. It might be an impinged nerve that is just showing inflammation in a different place. Or it could be somebody who’s just a massive pussy who just doesn’t want to do anything and therefore they claim, and I remember some of the first people I put on the osteostrong devices, I remember this one woman, she’s ow, ow, ow. And I’m like, it hasn’t started yet. You just sat in a seat. Oh, I mean, she’s complaining about how much it hurts before it even started. And you can imagine how this went. Everything hurt. Did it really hurt? No, she loves playing the victim. If she’s not an invalid, then she loses her identity. Just get out of here. So for those people, the pharmaceuticals are, but question that’s only 5% of the population.

Jack Heald: A question occurred to me as you were talking about impact. I’ve heard, I can’t remember who it was we had on the show, but they were talking about the benefits of jumping off of things rather than onto things

Dr. John Jaquish: Off of is what you need to do.

Jack Heald: And so the thought occurs to me a couple of things. Are there any common fields of human endeavor that generate these kinds of forces regularly? If so, what are they?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, gymnastics

Jack Heald: Common,

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s the problem. No, I mean common. No. And also you’re not going to take a post-menopausal population and say, okay, we’re all doing gymnastics today. That’s not going to happen. We’re

Jack Heald: Going to do the parallel bars now. Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So I think there’s an area where maybe women are just starting menopause or maybe before where they can really build their bone mass to a significant degree by doing high impact, but trying to control for the variable. So just landing from another surface so you can go out to the curb and hop off the curb and use the software to see how much force that’s getting through your lower extremities. And now also when you can and The monitoring and then the practice. If you practice something, you can get pretty good at it. You can rebuild your balance. And one of the things with the postmenopausal population, and I mean we can say the same thing for men in their fifth decade of life, are they really challenging their balance, making their activities daily living? No, not at all. But if they start doing this protocol, they’ll maintain a lot of balance and then they’ll be able to induce enough force through the bone mass to maintain bone mass, and if they get past 4.2 multiples body weight, they can grow and make it more dense.

Jack Heald: I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole with the biochemistry of bone growth, but I’m fascinated. Have there been any studies, do you have any evidence, clinical or otherwise of the other benefits of focusing on bone density rather than muscle growth?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, but because I’m the scientist of the company, I try not to say things like that, like what we’ve seen. Okay, what we’ve seen, but it has not been proven in research. So as long as,

Jack Heald: Well, I don’t care if it’s clinical or not, we’re

Dr. John Jaquish: A massive pain relief like joint. There are people who are, like my high school principal is one of ’em. He’s had back pain since, I mean, I knew him as a little kid in high school and in junior high I lived in the Napa Valley and I went to the Catholic high school in the Napa Valley. So I knew him even before going to high school because he was a college basketball referee. And whenever you go to St. Mary’s games, Catholic college, he was the ref and just involved in sort of the Catholic church in Napa Valley. And so I got to know him and he was always in pain. As soon as I developed the prototype, I called him. I still call him Mr. Schmitz because it’s really weird to call him by his first name. He’s my principal, right? Hey, Mr. Schmitz, can you come and try this thing? I think it’ll really help your back and is it going to hurt because I’m already in enough pain? Just trust me, I think you’ll be fine. And it completely fix his problem. He’s 30 years of back pain gone in weeks because you’re forcing the musculature. Remember I said neurological changes gauging more tissue in the surrounding area, so the muscles more readily firing to support the joint. Another thing, in 1996, there was a study by Benjamin and Ralph’s that showed if you compress a joint on its axis, so this is the axis of a joint, so this is not the axis. So end to end loading. This way, you can force the tendons and ligaments, the joint capsule to thicken with fibro cartilage. Not to be confused with cartilage, but basically, and

Jack Heald: What are the implications of the thickened,

Dr. John Jaquish: Better support of the joint? You’re making a thicker, more powerful joint capsule by compressing the joint on its axis. And so that’s a very curative approach to bone on bone. If you have a knee that’s bone on bone, it’s always going to be bone on bone, but you can certainly engage the musculature, the tendons, and the ligaments to grow and take some of the stress off of that joint, pull that apart just a little bit so that the contact is not so painful. So what’ll happen is somebody who’s bone on bone in their knee scheduled for a joint replacement, they do osteostrong for six months and they cut their pain in half. Then they’re like, I don’t need joint replacement anymore. Six more months, they cut their pain in half again. Now they’ve got 25% of the pain they started with. The pain they started with was debilitating. They couldn’t walk up or down stairs. They have to sidestep on stairs or something like they’re in severe pain. Once you cut your pain by 75%, they’re like, yeah, I still feel it, but it’s not limiting. I can do whatever I want. That is a side benefit to osteo stro. I want to go back to the

Dr. Ovadia: Muscle building and dig into that a little bit more. Talk about the concept of variable resistance and what it is and what advantages it has. You kind of touched on it a little bit, but let’s go a little deeper on that.

Dr. John Jaquish: You want the entire movement to be relevant. And like I was saying, this phenomena with a lengthened partial, so just doing repetitions in the weak range of motion gives you the same result as training with a full range of motion, right? But in that lengthened partial range, that’s the only place if you’re lifting a regular weight, that’s the only place you’re really working hard anyway. So it makes obvious sense to me. I think this whole length and partial argument is a monument to why you would want to do variable resistance. Because with regular weights, the weight is only relevant when you’re at the bottom. It’s easy up here, so it’s like you’re doing nothing.

Jack Heald: Okay, because I’m the dummy here, I want to make sure I’m clear on that it’s relevant at the bottom because you are forcing the muscle to do what the muscle is not up to handling yet. And as you get closer to your maximum strength, not quite,

Dr. John Jaquish: No. The bottom of the movement is just the limiting factor. It’s where you are weakest. It’s where you’re biomechanically just from a leverage perspective. At the greatest disadvantage, it’s also where you have the least amount of muscle tissue engaged. So it’s always going to be weaker. So with the bottom of the squat, you are doing a squat and your butt’s almost touching your ankles. Your heels, yeah, you’re not powerful in that position at all. In fact, there’s a lot of people who can’t do a body weight squat where they go all the way down and all the way up, they got to grab onto something and help themselves up. So that’s the position where you’re doing work. If you’re lifting a regular weight, it’s only hard at the weak points. And then the rest of it’s easy. Like I said, most people can’t squat their own body weight if they go all the way down. But if you tell somebody, even somebody who’s out of shape, bend your knees and just stand there letting your quadriceps hold you up as opposed to just your bone ass. Yeah, stand there with your knees slightly bent for hours, not hard work at all, but you get somebody and say, squat down and leave your femurs or your thigh. Thigh bones parallel to the ground, how long can you be there? Most people like half a second, maybe two seconds, maybe athletic people like 20 seconds. But you are massively weak in that position. So the idea of variable resistance is change the force so that it’s relevant in all positions. So when I do a chest press, I have 200 pounds at the bottom, halfway up, it becomes 300 pounds, then all the way up becomes 550 pounds. But I would never get under a bar with 550 pounds on it. I mean, first of all, I’d never get it off my chest. And also there’s probably no spotter who could lift it off my chest if I couldn’t lift it myself, so I’d probably die. So I’m getting the benefit of that 550 pound bench press, but the risk is very low.

Jack Heald: That makes sense. We had to mark Rito on, and then we had Ben, Bo,

Dr. John Jaquish: Ben cio,

Jack Heald: Yeah, here in the last couple of months. It was fascinating to hear two guys who’ve been in it for 50 years and with different approaches. Mark is very clear. He’s about building strength. It’s that simple. He doesn’t care what your body looks like. It is strictly about getting stronger. Ben is more, although they both have similar looking bodies from 50 years of working out, Ben is a little more focused on the overall fitness aspect of it. Both of them are, it’s weights that they’re recommending slightly different approaches. I think for the average Joe, like me, any of these programs that I picked up would help me. The differences in the details and for the folks who are probably the top 20% would see difference. And that leads me to my question for the average Joe, like me, let’s talk about the X3 and the types of results that could be expected and the type of work that can be done. And specifically, I’m thinking about time spent working out weekly.

Dr. John Jaquish: I want you to think about the people. This is a very fun question you asked. I got a great answer for it. Think about all the people who engage on a regular basis in fitness, some type of strength training or whatever. Let’s say it’s 20 people. Out of those 20, how many of them year after year look exactly the same? I’m guessing 20.

Jack Heald: Yeah, I would,

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. The vast majority of people, whether it’s 99% or 99.9% of people who attempt to be involved in strength training, other than maybe the gains they get in the first couple of weeks end up with nothing. Nothing at all. They look the same, feel the same strength. And there’s some huge reasons that nobody’s really willing to talk about because they’re genetic, as in there’s nothing you can do about it. Almost nothing you can do about it. My TED talk is very controversial. This is why I covered this in my TED talk, that the difference is, the funny thing is it shouldn’t be controversial.

Jack Heald: I thought that was fascinating. Obvious. I watched your TED talk and this fascinated me and our audience to hear this. This is,

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, the tend,

Jack Heald: I’ve heard this before,

Dr. John Jaquish: Tendon insertion. So my pectoral muscles, the origin is on the sternum. Everybody’s the same, but where it connects to the humerus bone is usually right at the top right here. And so as I’m doing chest exercises, I’m basically moving the humerus bone towards the midline of my body, shortening my pectoral. So whether I’m doing a pressing movement or a flying type movement, basically, same thing. Now, some people have this insertion point, which I know exactly where mine is. I can actually physically feel like when I go to make my pec jump like this, I can feel dig in underneath my bicep and I can feel that where that tendon is. Some people have it way down the bone almost on the other side. And when you have that, you’re probably going to be in the NFL because when you pick up weights, or one of my favorite NFL players spent a summer mowing lawns when he was 14. I think he gained like 50 pounds of muscle

Jack Heald: Lawns,

Dr. John Jaquish: Mowing lawns. Yeah, I mean, just the old kid from, where was he? Middle Tennessee, A lot of people have big lawns, so he should and mowed lawns. And at the end it was like he’s a freshman in high school over there, everybody, you should probably go out for football especially. Wow, what do you bench? And he is all, I, no, never even seen a bench press. Okay, so you got to go see the coach. And so these guys, because of the fact that they have a lever built into their body that is made of the most elastic material on earth tendon, it’s almost like they’re training with rubber bands on the inside of their bodies. And those rubber bands are forcing incredible muscular engagement. So these are the people and everybody went to high school with a guy like this, I feel at least I did, where everybody starts lifting weights freshman year. And then by the beginning of sophomore year, one guy, everybody looked like they were 14 freshman year. And then sophomore year everybody still looks like they’re 14 except one guy who all of a sudden looks like he’s 25. And it’s because of this advantageous tend to lay. And some of these people, like I said, they tend to be in the NFL. Another really easy one to spot is really high calf muscles. So people of African descent have higher calves and a longer tendon, that longer tendon is going to give ’em more recycled energy with every tow strike and engage more musculature as they contract that calf. So us European descent people, we have longer calf muscles, but are we ever going to be as fast as people with higher calf muscles? Nope. Which is why not a lot of white sprinters, but it’s a perfect example where it’s like, oh, I mean, that’s kind of obvious. Now those, it’s easy to see the tendon insertions and the distance of a muscle compared to where the ankle is on the calf. Most people, you can’t really see where that’s going on. But the similar geometry can be echoed throughout the body. And that’s why, I mean, it’s just, like I said, it’s 1% of the population. They pick up weights and they just grow and everybody else, they can do all the same stuff and nothing. And so with variable resistance, you bypass this because in that weaker range of motion, you’re handling a smaller amount of weight. And as so you’re basically taking your internal leverage off the table because as you begin to shorten the muscle and gain a mechanical advantage on it, it’s starting to fire anyway because that long lever arm effect that those genetically gifted people have just becomes less relevant and everybody can engage in the same way, which is why when people got X3 a couple years ago, they were putting on 20 pounds of muscle in six months, and now that’s a really good result. That’s not absolutely everybody, but that was common. We have thousands of people who have written reviews to that tune, and you think 20 pounds of muscle. There’s people who’ve been working out 20 years and they haven’t been able to gain five pounds of muscle, or they think they’ve gained five pounds of muscle in 20 years, but it was really just fat.

Dr. Ovadia: And talk about the role that one of the things that the X3 does is it really allows you to push your muscles to failure safely. And what are those advantages of really getting the muscle to failure?

Dr. John Jaquish: Two things. You’re getting the muscle to fatigue where it’s in its strongest position, which is something you can never do with weights. And this is why variable resistance has been traditionally associated with strength training. So the strongest people in the world, in fact, I’m in the middle of doing some filming. I’m making a documentary. I filmed with two former West side barbell athletes now West Side Barbell Club was a private gym in Ohio, in Cleveland, Ohio. Oh

Jack Heald: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: They have more world records out of that gym than any country on earth. It’s just one gym. They do it. They break all these strength records, had to get a bunch of strong people to sign up and be members there, but first they just started breaking all the world records and they did it with variable resistance. So they realized that you can engage the human body much more, build a lot more muscle, get the body accustomed, this is what your son was trying to do to you, get the weight on your back, just get used to feeling that weight and then you can work on your range of motion. So that’s a very smart approach, but variable resistance sort of does that for you. When you’re in that stronger range of motion, you’re handling way more force than you otherwise would be able to put on your body in a gym type environment. But as you back off that position, it becomes a more normal weight, the fatigue in the strong range. So when I go to fatigue and I’ve got five 50 and then I can’t do those reps anymore, then I do shorter range repetitions or lengthened partials, and that’s with two or 300 pounds, which is much more like fatiguing in a standard sense, but I’ve already fatigued so much more musculature in that stronger range of motion. So it’s just massive superior stimulus.

Jack Heald: I know you’ve been doing this for a while, and this is probably an impossible question to answer, but what is the experience subjectively of doing a bench press with the X3 compared to a barbell or doing a squat or a deadlift? How is it different other than

Dr. John Jaquish: Massively more work done? You can continue to engage past fatigue and you’re dealing with much more weight because it’s a strategic approach to get as much force through that muscle as possible. So if I were to do a regular bench press, let’s say I would do 2 25 for repetitions, but with variable resistance, I might hit 550 pounds at the peak 20 times and then be training with 300 pounds for the next four or five repetitions and then 200 pounds for the next four or five repetitions. So it’s just a massive, massively incredible amount of work you can get done in one set. And that’s why the stimulus is so much more powerful.

Jack Heald: Is the recovery longer?

Dr. John Jaquish: No. Same.

Jack Heald: Why?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it’s the way the body works. I mean, recovery is recovery. What most people are recovering from after a workout is damage, and it’s sort of a myth that you create like little micro tears in your muscle and then when the body repairs those, the muscle becomes stronger. It’s actually the opposite of that. As you damage the muscle while you’re training, that repair is actually what’s taken away from growth only when you don’t damage anything and just stimulate. Do you have peer growth?

Jack Heald: Wow, you’re in over now. Help me out, Phil.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a lot of research on it. I got

Jack Heald: The limits of my understanding now.

Dr. Ovadia: Yeah, I mean, basically what you’re saying is if I understand correctly, you can’t repair and grow at the same time

Dr. John Jaquish: When people damage. It’s just the damage that repairs itself and you don’t grow at all.

Dr. Ovadia: Right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Dr. Ovadia: Yeah. And again, that kind of, as you said, that’s a very common misconception that you hear out there that you got to do the damage muscle to stimulate it to grow. That kind of brings us into talk about the role of nutrition and the building blocks that you then need to get muscle to grow. And I guess it really is the same to get bone stronger. What’s involved in that

Dr. John Jaquish: High quality protein? That’s really the answer. Almost everything I eat is animal protein. The only exception is I’m not going to be the difficult guy that sends the steak back because they put some chimichurri sauce on it and just kind of scrape it off and eat it. Pretty much just meat and water is my diet.

Dr. Ovadia: And what do you think the right amount of protein is for people?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, a lot of literature on this one gram per pound of body weight is the most common finding. Now that’s total body weight, not lean body weight, but also most of it was tested on people who are around 20% body fat. So if somebody’s really obese, I would tell ’em to adjust that number to imagine they had 20%, so they’re 500 pounds. You don’t need to need 500 grams of protein, but you might need 250 grams.

Dr. Ovadia: And what’s your take on? There’s a lot of debate around can you do this basically in one meal? Do you have to divide it up into six meals a day?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s not a debate anymore. Well, it might be people who don’t understand how things work, but the amount, this is a direct quote from a study that came out a couple of weeks ago. The amount of protein that can be used for nib animalism, meaning growth of tissue is unlimited. I eat one meal a day usually, and it’s usually two or three pounds of steak, just the one sitting. It’s really convenient, only eating a day. I don’t have to horse around. Also, my wife knows not to get in my way when I’m preparing dinner. It’s just like, Hey, just don’t get in my way. That’s it. That’s all you got to worry about. Yeah.

Jack Heald: You’re probably not the guy to ask for the official scientific medical answer to this, but because you eat that way, you may or may not have had this experience. Do you have any mineral problems? Do you have to supplement with?

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s a great question and no, I got a great answer for that. I was worried in the beginning. There’s got to be like we’ve been told all kinds of micronutrients that we need and vitamins and all kinds of stuff, the lowest quality recommendation in medicine and by quality, when you have multiple randomized control trials that came to similar conclusions. So that would be an example of strong or quality evidence when it comes to vitamins and minerals, the A MA doesn’t have anything better than what they came up with in the 1950s, which was based on expert opinion, which is bullshit expert opinion based on who are the experts in the 1950s, because nothing was measured back then. They didn’t even have normative data. I have a problem with normative data in general because saying, you’re outside of normative data. Yeah, great. 75% of people are overweight or obese. So why would I want to be like them? The normative data just throw in the trash. I don’t want to be like everybody else. That’s a stupid recommendation. But when it comes to vitamins and minerals, the recommendations are wildly outdated and easily provably wrong. So here’s a question, and I want both of you to answer this separately. Imagine you couldn’t have any supplements, but you could source your foods from anywhere you wanted in the world, which by the way, people never did until now. I mean, I love the vegans who are like, you need, it’s essentially you have your nut butter from Madagascar and it’s just you fucking idiot. What are you talking about? Nobody ever had that. You think you need that to survive. Literally nobody had that, including the people in Madagascar, by the way, they’ve only been doing this the last 10 years, and they wonder who’s buying their stuff. Who’s the sucker that’s buying this stuff? That’s unbelievable. Anyway, if you were to just eat Whole Foods to get to the recommended allowances of vitamins and minerals ascribed by the American Medical Association, how many calories would you need to take in? So just take a guess. How many calories to get all your vitamins and minerals in one day with no supplements?

Jack Heald: I wouldn’t have any earthly idea how to answer that question.

Dr. Ovadia: I’m going to guess 3000.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay, Jack, really?

Jack Heald: I’m old enough and have dealt with enough different health issues. I’ve learned how to eat for myself to make myself feel good. And the way you just described three pounds of steak a day. That sounds like nirvana to me. I had steak last night. In fact, Phil, I ate a steak that you sent me last night. Thank you. That was just spectacular. Made that for Valentine’s for my wife and I. That’s a nirvana for me, for my meal. Before the podcast, I had a mixture of hamburger and scrambled eggs with some homemade yogurt that, oh God, so good. Yeah,

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s amazing. So take a guess. I need a calorie number. How many calories to get all your vitamins and minerals ascribed by the American Medical Association?

Jack Heald: 1500.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. 1500.

Jack Heald: I don’t think about calories.

Dr. John Jaquish: The answer is 25,000 calories.

Jack Heald: 25,000?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So you need to eat 25,000 calories of Whole Foods to get to the minimum amount of vitamins and minerals. So now, aside from the fact that if any human tried to eat that, They would die way before 25,000 calories. Also, a rhino does not eat 25,000 calories in a day. That’s just a crazy number. Obviously these recommendations are just ridiculous and they don’t mean anything. And probably all of us have, according to the data, massive vitamin deficiencies. But guess what? We’re not sick. There’s nothing wrong with us. So the recommendations are just dumb. So my advice is don’t pay any attention to them. They are just as stupid as the whole 25,000 calorie thing. So unless you clown in and going buy a thousand calories and no one can just forget it, the whole argument’s dumb. Also, there’s another study that they did on women. I don’t think it’s gender specific. I think it just happened to pick women. People who take a multivitamin actually die younger now. Is it because the vitamin is bad for them? No. It might have something to do with placing false hope in something that you think is going to help you, but in actuality does nothing. Yeah, I know people who they take some sort of thermogenic supplement to lose body fat or lose weight, as they call it, and it’s they’re obese and they’re taking this every day and they’re eating garbage thinking that it’s their fat burner that’s going to save the day. Of course it never happens, but they don’t ever convince themselves that it’s not working because they want to believe it’s working. And I mean now we have ozempic, which is the latest like, oh, this will solve all my problems. Yeah. Cause a bunch of other ones. But

Dr. Ovadia: Yeah. So you kind of touched on protein quality there. Just again, your take on it. Animal proteins versus plant proteins. Can you do it with plant proteins? Is there any role for plant proteins in your mind?

Dr. John Jaquish: No plant protein. If you try and do it with just plant protein, you’ll die of malnutrition. You have to supplements. Now, some of, I make a product called for degen, and that’s essential amino acids. That is the byproduct of bacterial fermentation. Now, if somebody’s willing to go down the fermentation road, and I mean a vegan could eat kimchi or sauerkraut, which are fermented vegetables, and so they can get some of that, but it’s like you got to eat so much of that stuff to make that much of a difference. So I would just say in vegetable protein as far as usability, based on the prevalence of essential amino acids, most plant proteins are lower than 9% usable by the body, and it’s just because they have the wrong amino acids. We don’t have maybe said another way because our appendix no longer functions, and whereas in other primates, the appendix does function, the appendix is involved in extracting amino acids out of fibrous plant mass. So gorillas and monkeys can do it, but we don’t have a functioning appendix, so we can’t. It just goes right through us. That’s why plant protein is just, this is a waste of time. It’s not garbage, but you have to eat so much of it. It would kill you before you would even get to the minimum usable amount by the body. And it is refined like pea protein is what we find in pea protein is a lot of heavy metals because they’re grinding all these vegetables up with metal blades, which are putting basically powdered metal because the blades are shearing each other. So there’s a little bit of powdered metal that gets into your pea protein and gives you mineral poisoning. So why don’t you just have a stake and not do any of that other stuff?

Jack Heald: Oh gosh, yeah.

Dr. Ovadia: That question solves I think a lot of the world’s problems. Why don’t you just have a stake? Yeah, I think that’s a great way to sum it up.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I mean, 2 million years, that’s all we ate and we thrived somehow. Didn’t even have healthcare. Exactly. People still thrived.

Jack Heald: How has your physiology changed? I’m assuming that you are your own best customer. So how has your physiology changed since you’ve gone down this path? I’m not going to limit it to the X3. Let’s take it as far back as you want.

Dr. John Jaquish: I wish I were my own best customer. I’d have a lot nicer shit. I always get the broken X3 bars. I get the bands that are defective. Yeah, my tigen cans are all crushed. Oh, yeah. Somebody drove over a pallet of tigen, so you can have all the broken ones. The cobbler’s kit has no shoes, so that’s what I get, but it doesn’t matter because it works really well. How’s my physiology changed? I was probably a really average looking guy on my 40th birthday. I mean, I was 20% body fat. I weighed 190 pounds, a little chubby, not strong, despite the fact that I’d worked out for 20 years, I got nothing out of it. Also, had been on testosterone replacement therapy for 12 of those years.

Jack Heald: At 40?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I had a bad accident at 28, testicular damage from a rugby hit. So I was playing club rugby, semi-pro rugby after college, and I just got a bad hit. And you’re supposed to wear a cup, but nobody does. You can’t really sprint. And I was an outside center, which is a wide receiver. You need a lot of speed, and the last thing you want is a cup Until you get hit. And then all of a sudden, oh yeah. That’s why that I had some significant testicular damage in it. It lowered my testosterone to the point where my was like, your heart is super weak. And I’m like, I play rugby. How is that possible? Rugby is 80 minutes of sprinting and stopping. I should have the most powerful heart ever. And fortunately, the guy was like, you need to see an endocrinologist. I think you have that testicular damage that you had that affected your testosterone. And so I did my blood work. I got 167 nanograms to the deciliter of testosterone. So normal is between 800 and 1200 for maybe like African-Americans and 600 to a thousand for white Hispanic and Asian people. I was horribly low, and I was to the point where my cardiologist said, you might actually have an adverse event before through your mid and middle adulthood because of this, you need to make your heart stronger. We need to get you testosterone replacement therapy. And of course, back when I was 28, so this is a while ago, that’s 19 years ago, as I’m 47 now, I was like, wow, I thought testosterone was steroids and steroids are bad. And fortunately my endocrinologist says, yeah, what you see on the news is stupid. That’s not at all how it works. In fact, there’s more testosterone receptors in the, I am actually curious if this is true. He told me there’s more testosterone receptors in the heart versus all the other muscles combined. Have you ever heard that?

Dr. Ovadia: I’ve not cell, not mine. Yeah. I actually haven’t heard that. But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn. That’s true, I guess, right? Because

Dr. John Jaquish: People

Dr. Ovadia: Who have using steroids,

Dr. John Jaquish: They have enlarged hearts.

Dr. Ovadia: They get heart failure and enlarged hearts. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Dr. Ovadia: So I was confused. The heart, the muscle your body wants to,

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah,

Dr. Ovadia: I was just going to say the heart’s, the muscle your body wants to protect most, so absolutely. It would make sense.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So once I got on testone replacement therapy, my heart started working perfectly and I didn’t have any other issue, but that didn’t, even a decent dosage of testosterone did not help me grow any skeletal muscle. So I turned 40 and my birthday present to myself was I had a prototype of a device built that I had an idea about. I said, I think this is going to change everything. I think we’re going to train with very heavy variable resistance, and this should solve the tendon insertion problem. And boy did it ever. I put on 30 pounds of muscle in the first year and I was unrecognizable. I would go back to a fraternity reunion and they would do a double and not recognize me, and they’re like, oh my god. John Jake was like, what happened to you? I looked like a completely different human being, and to this day, I have a shadow under my pecs and never had that before. I visible abs. Never. I had that, but I was like, that was in high school when I was 130 pounds. That doesn’t really count for anything much stronger, much leaner, better performance

Jack Heald: Is the only variable that has changed the X3?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. Only so my nutrition didn’t change. I was carnivore before. Yeah, just X3.

Jack Heald: How tall are you?

Dr. John Jaquish: Interesting. I have grown and some wellness experts think it’s because of the fasting that I do, but I was six feet tall from the time I graduated high school to up until recently, and now all of a sudden I’m six one for whatever reason.

Jack Heald: That’s fascinating.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Wow. In my forties, I’ve gotten taller. I don’t know why a fast does increase growth hormone, but I mean, growth hormone makes you grow when you’re a kid. Yeah. Not now.

Jack Heald: You don’t do any other biohacking

Dr. John Jaquish: Fasting. I like that, but I mean red light therapy or

Jack Heald: Is this a hardcore fasting like those Harvard students did this last week where they fasted for 12 hours to protest, I don’t know, whatever it was, or

Dr. John Jaquish: Harvard students are usually protesting something. No, this is 72 hours

Jack Heald: Fast

Dr. John Jaquish: Drive that, so it 72 hours, no food, no water.

Jack Heald: Is that frequent? How often do you do that?

Dr. John Jaquish: I used to do it every week, but then I started losing the fat around my eyes and it was like this, a shadow surrounding my eyes started showing up and I just started looking really skeletal.

Jack Heald: Yeah, that’s me. That’s, I’m actually only 27, but

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I mean, ultimately when you get a certain level of lean, especially with natural athletes, I think because anabolic steroids keep your blood pressure higher. You don’t see that in steroid users, but you watch an actual tested natural bodybuilding competition, the faces look really sunken in and I think it is look a little scary. It’s just not a good look. It’s also not sustainable, so who cares? You only look like that for a day and then you have a couple of sips of water and it’s okay. That’s gone on. Yeah. Your body doesn’t like it.

Jack Heald: Everything puffs back up. Any limits in terms of, I’ve got one more question, Phil. Any limits? I’m going to go straight to the X3. Any limits in terms of the big muscle building movements? Mark OSE says there’s only five exercises you need squat, deadlift, bench, overhead, and row, and that’ll hit all the big muscles that are supported by all the smaller muscles. Are there any limits with the X3, and if so, what are,

Dr. John Jaquish: In fact, all those movements you just mentioned are like the core movements of X3 I, so Mark’s a smart guy. He’s right now, I mean, will you get a bodybuilder would have a lot of problems with this conversation

Jack Heald: Because this is not a bodybuilder.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Are there some accessory things you can do for the posterior deltoid? If you want a bulge right here. Yeah, sure. But most people will never get lean enough to even find that muscle, so, right. Yeah.

Jack Heald: Okay. Sorry, Phil. I just think

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s good

Jack Heald: Question. This device.

Dr. Ovadia: No, great questions. Yeah. This has really been a fascinating discussion. We’ve touched on bone muscle and we’ve even touched on primate appendixes. I think people will learn a lot from this one. Where can people find out more?

Dr. John Jaquish: Because my last name is so difficult to spell and pronounce. My website is dr j.com. Julius Irvings just phishing right now, so he didn’t need it. So it’s doctorj.com, and there’s links there for superior exercise, takes you to X3 superior bone density, takes you to Osteostrong Superior Nutrition. It takes you to Tigen. Yeah, and I’m just, I would say if you’re going to follow me on, there’s links to all my social media on dr j.com, but I prefer Instagram. I just like the platform. I think because it requires you to type on your phone. A lot of people are a little bit lazier, and so you don’t have the same amount of sort of jealous rage tantrums out of the trolls. It’s just sort just one sentence complaints.

Jack Heald: That may be the best explanation of why you could do one platform rather than another, because it’s too much effort to be a troll on Instagram.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, Instagram, there’s really not a lot of, there’s people who just say you’ll post 10 studies to support a thing, and then someone’s response is bullshit. Yeah. Okay, so study. Which of the 10 studies did you have a problem with? They don’t want to believe it, so it’s okay. They’ve got a place for people like you. It’s the Democratic party. You can have 62 different genders go there.

Jack Heald: I’m going to ask you a question about your Myers-Briggs after we’ve stopped recording. Cool. This has been John Jaquish on the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. I’ve loved just getting to hear you talk and getting to ask these questions, and I know a bunch of my buddies are going to be interested in this as well. Thanks for being with us, everybody. For Dr. Philip Veda, this has been the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast and we will talk to you guys next time. Oh, you know what? doctorj.com. Everything will be in the show notes now. We’ll see you next time.

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