Dr. John Jaquish: Reinventing Fitness (A Stern Talk #18)

In this podcast, John talks extensively about:

• Strength training and maximizing muscle growth.
• Volume training, hypertrophy and stretch-induced training.
• Nutrition, Hydration and ‘The Carnivore Diet.’
• Semaglutide, weight loss and lifestyle changes.
• Big changes coming to Testosterone Replacement Therapy. - Genetic outliers and impacts on training.

Full Transcript #

Dr. John Jaquish: Down economies are typically when people make very well, they make better personal decisions, so they drink less alcohol, they work out more, they work on themselves. A good economy is actually not good for people’s health because they eat more junk food and drink more and party more. So yeah, I think, I don’t want to say a downed economy is a good thing. It’s a good thing for people’s health.

Matthew Januszek: Welcome to this week’s Escape Gen podcast. This week sees the return of a bestselling author and inventor who challenges the efficacy of traditional weightlifting and cardio, labeling them as complete waste of time. He introduces his controversial approach to fitness, focusing on variable resistance training as a superior method for strength training and muscular development. There’s

Dr. John Jaquish: Three ways to grow a muscle. You don’t want to study a group of genetic outliers because what does that mean for the rest of us? Nothing. There is no such thing as a person who is zero carb. A breakthrough is upon us. Testosterone is about to

Matthew Januszek: Change. I’m sure We’ll enjoy this episode and regardless of your perspective, he certainly has some great insights for us to be thinking about. So to find out why your workout and diet probably suck, then please listen to this week’s episode with Dr. John Jarich. Wish. Dr. John Jare.

Dr. John Jaquish: Jake.

Matthew Januszek: There

Dr. John Jaquish: You go. There you go.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, I was practicing it all the time and then I messed it up. I, huh.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s normal. Actually, there are people who practice my last name four or five times are like, Jake Wish. And I’m like, yeah, Jake hyphen,

Matthew Januszek: Wish I actually correct people who say it, and then I’ve just messed up. So there you go. There

Dr. John Jaquish: Go. That’s all right. Two and a

Matthew Januszek: Half years since you were last in here and we had an interview and a lot of things have moved on. Yes, the world,

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t know if the world’s moved on.

Matthew Januszek: The

Dr. John Jaquish: World’s probably a little bit worse than it was. At least we’re not in the middle of a pandemic. How about that? Yeah,

Matthew Januszek: That’s good. Are you still selling lots of X3 bars now that people have gone back to the gyms?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, so apparently the gym still sucks, and I think I get people who used X3 during the pandemic and then their plan was to go back and do regular weight training. So they went and did regular weight training and they’re like, oh, I forgot I didn’t get any results from regular weight training. This sucks. And also it doesn’t even matter because all the equipment is taken up by people who are just on social media, sitting on the equipment, on social media or taking selfies. My favorite complaint is people making videos of a hamstring curl video where some females just got the pin in it 10 pounds and is doing a hamstring curl video. But it is really just about like, Hey, look at my butt. And it then guys are going into the gym and they’re like, should I get in the way? Should I say something or should I just leave? Yeah. So a lot of people are still really dissatisfied, the gym experience, so that’s good. For me,

Matthew Januszek: One of the things that wasn’t around when we met two and a half years ago because a lot of gyms were closed, but now I think people are going back into the gyms, whether it’s young, old males, females, different abilities. There’s definitely seems to be a renewed passion for strength training. So I guess that must be good for your message in some ways. I

Dr. John Jaquish: Think so. Down economies are typically when people make very well, they make better personal decisions, so they drink less alcohol, they work out more, they work on themselves. A good economy is actually not good for people’s health. They eat more junk food and drink more and party more. So yeah, I think, I don’t want to say a downed economy is a good thing. It’s a good thing for people’s health.

Matthew Januszek: I thought I’d start, you definitely get a lot of attention, but you also, you get good and bad attention. I saw a post where you were talking about some of your detractors and I thought we’d start out there really because it’s,

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re great.

Matthew Januszek: Well, you were explaining how they were doing a good job for your algorithm.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. The more people complain about me, the more typically the modern troll lies about whoever they don’t like or whoever they’re jealous of. And I’m like, what do you read about Elon? You almost never believe what you read about Elon because some haters saying some absolutely atrocious thing that’s just not true. And so you read it and you kind of go, I don’t know what that guy’s problem is. So that’s really what I’m dealing with and saying my university is somehow fake. No, nope. I really got a PhD there. Oh, my favorite thing is there are people who hands down say, Rushmore University is a false university. You can just buy a degree from there. Great. Why don’t you, there’s so many videos about how it’s somehow not a real place, but you can buy a degree from there. Great. Who bought a fake degree? I’d love to say it. Nobody.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because I’ve seen a few things. So where they say is you can just buy degrees in, what

Dr. John Jaquish: Does that, nobody’s ever done

Matthew Januszek: That. Where does that come from then that people are sort of claiming that anyone can?

Dr. John Jaquish: So the university was started in 1993 by Professor Michael Cox, and he didn’t like the Wikipedia page about the university because it was a new university and sort of like you’re not born with a driver’s license. A university is not founded with accreditation. It has to get accreditation. So the problem was before that happened, the Wikipedia page had already said some nasty things about the university and Michael Cox wrote a, I never saw the message, but I guess he wrote a very insulting message to the people who run Wikipedia. Apparently almost all Wikipedia is done by eight people and they didn’t like what he had to say, so they refused to change it despite the fact that the accreditation status has obviously changed. And that happens. But if somebody really wants to understand what I studied and why I studied it, my dissertation is available on my website so they can look at my work and nobody’s ever had a problem with it. And it was really the basis for the Osteostrong technology and we got a million people using that worldwide, and that’s never been challenged.

Matthew Januszek: It is interesting because a lot of what you put out, even if anyone follows you on Instagram, you cite a lot of research reports. And the more I’ve done podcasts and learn about research is one that I’ve learned is not all research is the same. There’s good research and there’s bad research, there’s good studies and bad studies. I was even listening to you on Gabriela’s podcast where you were talking about also some of the questions within research can be quite leading in certain cases, which can then affect it. So because it’s so much of what you do compared to other people in the fitness industry who may cite some research, but you really go to town on this whole thing, how do you come across and balance some of the new studies that have not quite got enough there to make sense, some of the existing studies that do make sense and then some of the things in between and be able to confidently make those claims and get other people to probably consider making decisions based on what’s out there?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Typically, biased studies are very easy to spot. Sometimes if you look at a nutrition study and you look in the disclaimers, you anything about the Seventh Day Adventists, it is their religious mandate that they go forth in society and force people to never eat animal protein. And the reason is I’m not a Seventh Day Adventist, but I read this, Kellogg’s was the founder, Mr. Kellogg, whatever his first name was. He was a Seventh Day Adventist, and the idea of putting sugar in the diet was to reduce sexual urges. So people were more controllable. Now, I don’t know if that was ever successful or if it’s ever been proven, but that was the idea and that’s the continued idea. So the bias is easy to pick out. Sometimes you’ll see a nutrition study. Usually nutrition studies are where the fraud is. Exercise science is pretty easy to see what they’re doing. Also, there’s the replicability. If somebody does a study and then somebody replicates a study and it’s a totally different outcome, well, one of them was done incorrectly. So you can kind of ignore them both until it’s determined what the problem was. Sometimes there’s sampling bias. I think that’s the biggest problem in fitness research. In fact, one of the people who made a nasty video about me who he was wrong, I mean, I don’t blame people for doing these insulting videos because it’s easy to find negative information about me, and so they’re just quoting someone else. So this guy, you may have interviewed him before Alexander Bromley? No. Okay. I think he’s really cool despite the fact that he has nothing nice to say about me, but I think it’s cool. And one thing about him is he did a video pretty recently, I think it was titled The Failing of Sports Performance Research for sort of the fitness practitioner. That’s definitely not the title, but that’s what

Matthew Januszek: It was getting a much better title.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I don’t know. He would probably say that sounds too research ish. But what he’s pointing out is there’s a lot of conclusions to studies that really pertain to what was tested. And I think that’s what he’s saying is, and I love the question because very often you have a test group that’s very specific if it’s beginner lifters, a lot of people say, well, this doesn’t really apply to advanced lifters. And one of my points that I make in my book all over the place is there’s almost no such thing as an advanced lifter. They’re very rare because most people quit fitness within a year. It’s something like 90 plus percent of people engage in fitness, try it for however long, and then it’s less than a year and they’re out of it probably because it didn’t work. I

Matthew Januszek: Guess on the other end of the spectrum, you could have athletes that you do a study on which are not, then

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, then they don’t reflect the population. Exactly. Yeah. You don’t want to study a group of genetic outliers because what does that mean for the rest of us? Nothing. In fact, I think that’s one of the biggest problems in the fitness industry is everybody wants to know what Chris Bumstead is doing. Well, the dude was born, if you see a picture of Chris Bumstead when he was 17 years old, he doesn’t look a whole lot different. It is like worst transformation ever. He looked amazing when he was 18. This guy was born to be muscular. If you look at me when I was 18, I was rail thin, I was a wrestler, I was lean, but there was no significant amount of muscle mass there. Just really skinny guy. So I would say don’t listen to the outliers, listen to the people who struggled in their athletic performance endeavors. But I can say that all day long and people are still going to follow whoever they follow. But the good news is when it comes to people who are, it’s generally past the age of like 27 or 28 where people, they’re going to do whatever Dorian Yates did or whatever Ronnie Coleman did, and it doesn’t work of course, and they failed for a number of years, and some of these people even did cycles of anabolic steroids, and of course it didn’t do anything because if your training’s not right, it doesn’t matter what the hormones look like. So then they find X3 and immediately they begin to succeed. So another thing I get accused of is having cult-like followers. Yeah, it works. That’s what they’re really excited about. It’s like for the first time in their life they got involved in something fitness related that had a huge response in their body for the first time. They’re seeing veins and musculature they never saw before. So that’s why anybody follows. And I do think it’s funny that after launching this brand X3, we’re now on the fifth year and it’s still growing. We have 400,000 units in circulation. Well done. So thank you. But if it were such a joke and it were a scam, why would it still be succeeding? It wouldn’t be. You don’t really see CEOs of company of failing companies get ridiculed because the company just fails and they disappear. So I don’t know what everybody’s problem is. It’s obviously successful. The

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Matthew Januszek: Now. So with the research then, I know I heard that you also peer review certain research papers as well. Is that correct?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, usually. So the journals that I do peer review for are physical medicine journals. So any sort of medical intervention that’s sort of like those type of interventions is what I do review on.

Matthew Januszek: And when you are looking at other research and your advice to people who probably don’t read it as much as you do or dunno how to read it then is it, if there is one, is there a sort of a research reading 1 0 1 where you can say, okay, well read this against the other one? Because some of the questions that we’ll go through today, there’s conflicting reports even in research. So where do you, as people listening to this that may trying to figure it out themselves, it’s like, well, who do they listen to and who are real and who are the scams? And is there anything that you can use to figure that out or have you just got to try it for yourself and see what happens?

Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, there’s no trick to reading it. The toughest part is a lot of researchers are, they just have a basic working knowledge of statistics. And so a lot of the guys who are writing the papers that I cite are sports scientists, but I’m a biomedical engineer, so I probably just by default am going to be better at the statistics side. So I can see statistical errors. The biggest error is just choosing the wrong test, like congruency in different data sets. I’ll see them doing multiple analysis of variants. An A NOVA test, you see that all,

Matthew Januszek: What’s that? I know,

Dr. John Jaquish: Analysis of variance, A-N-R-V-A, you see that acronym in research all the time. Whereas what they’re really trying to do is take a dataset here and a dataset here and see if these two things are congruent. So what they really should have done is done a Spearman Row test which says, how similar is this data to this data? Is it with a 95% confidence intervals saying are they different or are they similar? That’s not a very popular statistical test, and it really should be, especially in sports performance research. And this is not when I get together with other sports scientists, it’s usually over dinner or a drink. So I’m not going to be like, so tell me about your use of Spearman row tests. That’s not an exciting conversation. They might be like, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. They might not even be aware the tests. So those are some problems. The biggest thing though in sports performance is sampling bias. The people who volunteer for fitness studies like to exercise already. The sample is kind of tainted because it’s the exercise. People who want to volunteer for exercise studies. Most PhD students, they’ll volunteer for a number of different to be subjects in numbers of different studies because they’d like to see it from the subject side. But these people are fanatical about exercise. So you’re going to get good responses very often when you’re not really grabbing a true sample of the population. Now, I think another thing is researchers don’t really care about this because my first research citation, which was PETRELLA 2008 in my book, weightlifting is a waste of time. It shows that I think it’s 23.7% of people cannot respond from a protein synthesis standpoint. They can’t grow muscle with standard exercise no matter what they do. So where are all those people in these studies? Well, they don’t volunteer for the studies because for whatever reason in high school, they tried lifting and they’re just like, oh, I’m a non-responder, so I just don’t care about that subject. So it becomes self-selecting, but I think that’s a danger if you want to write research that’s useful for the general population.

Matthew Januszek: Well, I interviewed Jim Ani a few years ago and he was involved in this and he said, you just would not be amazed how little we know from a science perspective about strength training because agree, the funding just isn’t there to, you said nutrition, I can understand if you’re a big food company and you’re going to roll this out across the United States, you’ll find some money to do a research. But if you’ve got an X3 bar, even though you’ve sold nearly half a million, it is difficult to fund big research projects,

Dr. John Jaquish: I guess. Well, interesting you bring that up. I could fund maybe not multimillion dollars. Well, yeah, I probably could, but even if I do, is anybody going to believe it if I fund it? Because that’s another problem is what’s the source of the funding? So is somebody going to get an NIH grant to test which exercise methods are better versus No, the National Institute of Health doesn’t care about exercise. The NIH will, this is a broad statement. Broad statements are usually somewhat incorrect, but I was told recently that the NIH won’t fund anything aside from physical medicine. This is sort of a general rule to medical schools and different university groups that want to do research. You’re not allowed to look into causes only treatments. Does that bother you? Think about that. So we don’t care what causes cancer. We only care what treats cancer is. Is there a bias there? Is there a financial reason for that? I mean, I’m not a conspiracy.

Matthew Januszek: Is that definitely true then that they,

Dr. John Jaquish: Man, I don’t know. It’s not like there’s going to be a reference on that. That’s the kind of thing that if that’s the position of the NIH, they would certainly not put it in writing. That seems like, wow, do they really care about our health or do they care about something else? I’d say there’s probably a 50 50% chance there’s some truth to that. I mean, ultimately, here’s another thing. Maybe the NIH looks at behaviors and says the whole eating and exercise thing, people are just not going to do that. And statistically they’d be right. I would say in my, now, this is my bias, yet people don’t want to work out. It doesn’t do anything. For the most part. Most people who get involved in exercise, spin their wheels for a year, get nothing out of it and quit. Of course, I’m presenting a very alternative, so you don’t need to believe me, but you can look at the statistics and I sure seem like I’m right, but let’s take me out of it. Maybe they just don’t have faith that the population will decide to eat healthy food and exercise.

Matthew Januszek: Well, I think they are right. If you look at, and I’ve not got these numbers in front of me, but I did an interview with a guy that was given the breakdown on semaglutide, and I think he was saying that it was a huge percentage of the population that are overweight or obese, that’s just

Dr. John Jaquish: 70% of Americans are overweight or obese.

Matthew Januszek: And that doesn’t mean you’re a little bit chubby. That means that you

Dr. John Jaquish: Are, your clinical outcomes are poor and you’ve altered your life expectancy,

Matthew Januszek: So you’re clearly not going to the gym in that state. So I could then, if you just took figure and you say, well, look, all of those people are definitely out. They’re not prospects to go into a gym in most cases. Some of them will probably try and change their life around, but in most cases, they’re not your target audience. So I suppose in some ways, them focusing on that 70% that’s costing hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to treat probably makes more sense to deal with that than try and deal with causes because those people are probably no intention of wanting to go to the gym, I guess. So maybe it’s an innocent

Dr. John Jaquish: Decision, it might be an innocent decision,

Matthew Januszek: But still the results are not great.

Dr. John Jaquish: I would always think just because of the Hippocratic Oath, do no harm. Every doctor’s supposed to take that. You’d really try and pressure people into nutrition and exercise first before you reach for pharmaceuticals. And there’s a meme, I’ve seen it a million times, where the person goes to the doctor and the doctor says, you’re in terrible health. Your lifestyle has caused multiple chronic conditions, and it’s going to shorten your life. And the patient says, wow, doctor, what do I do? Do I need to change my lifestyle? Then the doctor responds and says, oh no, not at all. Here’s a pill. That’s the world we live in. So there’s no exaggeration in that meme, but the question is, is it that the medical community knows that people won’t change their lifestyle or is it that they’d rather be part of the movement of selling more pharmaceuticals because that’s just more profitable for the country that drives GDP? That’s what do you

Matthew Januszek: Think about semaglutide then?

Dr. John Jaquish: I think if you use it on a short-term basis, and it shows you what I like about it, what I like about all of these glue four signaling drugs, a couple others, and there’s two more coming out, they will show you that if you skip a meal, you won’t die. Because a lot of people who have a weight problem, they think if they skip a meal, they’ll die and you can skip meals for days and not die. And so I have a fraternity brother who dropped about 60 pounds with, he’s in much better shape now, and the idea is, okay, now that you know that skipping meals won’t make you die, maybe you just make that a regular part. I think it’s so funny how the way the mechanisms of this whole category of drugs is to almost nullify carbohydrates and thereby suppressing appetite, and the whole world is signed on to this yet, if you start talking about low carbohydrate and nutrition, you get thrown out of the room. It’s like you can eat in a way where you get the benefits of the ozempic drug without actually taking it. Just stop eating carbohydrates or limit them. Severely limit them, and yeah, nobody wants to talk about that again. Is it lifestyle is that they know people won’t follow the lifestyle? I think the drug category to me is exciting because it shows people what they can do without it.

Matthew Januszek: I would’ve thought it’s good for you. As I said, when we did this interview, a guy called Paul Byrne, there was two things that came out of it. One is people’s diet. They’re going to need to get in a lot more protein because they’re not eating, and what they do get in, they’ll need to consume a certain amount to

Dr. John Jaquish: Because of the appetite.

Matthew Januszek: Depression lose a lot of muscle.

Dr. John Jaquish: They eat less of everything, which means less protein, which means they lose muscle. Lose muscle

Matthew Januszek: Mass.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. Semaglutide does not make you lose muscle. Not eating protein makes you lose muscle.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. Yeah. And then if they’ve never trained before, it seems as though there’s, maybe it’s a self-confidence thing or whatever, but people feel good about themselves, maybe more inclined to exercise. And the best type of exercise to do is some form of strength training with protein, which is essentially, that’s your core business, isn’t it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You can come to the X3 clubhouse for sure. You’re eating high protein and you’re working out.

Matthew Januszek: When it comes to research studies in, I went to see us a few years ago, met the guys from Tonal when they just came out, and it was actually the founder that’s a good product. He was telling me that they’re running one of the biggest strength research studies that there’s ever been, because what they’ve got is that they have the ability to understand who’s using it, when they’re using it, what they’re doing, et cetera. And I saw your new product, and this is a bit of a opportunity to talk about it, but my guess is that once you’ve got a few hundred thousand of those out there that you’ll be able to, even though it’s technically sponsored by your research, but you’ll have a lot of data on what’s really happening in terms of males, females, white ranges.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, no different than tonals data.

Matthew Januszek: Exactly. So is that part of your master plan then to be able to have some of this that you can’t really argue

Dr. John Jaquish: About? Absolutely. Yeah. Comparing that, it’ll be an interesting conversation to having the data and then comparing it to what, because there is no consensus of what’s the best exercise program. NASA has an exercise program that they recommend their astronauts adhere to. I think that’s probably the best fully thought out exercise program. NASA’s thorough and also not biased. This is another thing I see on social media where it’s sort of a internet bottom feeder trend to criticize, to do a video that criticizes somebody famous because then you get more followers because you got that famous person’s name in there. Okay, that’s fine. But it’s like the bodybuilders who are critiquing some professional athletes. It’s basically like, oh, this guy’s an idiot, basically because he’s not training like a bodybuilder. Oh, but he’s not one. The guy plays basketball, so he might want to train a basketball player. And this is one thing, when I work with X3 and professional teams or professional athletes, I give him the tool. I explain how the tool works. We’re putting more force on the body where the body is much more capable of producing force. So it’s a more efficient movement, it’s more exhaustive. You’re going to activate more musculature and a trigger more growth. If you’re training for strength with it, it will induce a much greater strength response if you’re training for hypertrophy, variable resistance kind of tracks the same. It’s very similar. And I’m actually building a hypertrophy program right now. I’m bringing some industry experts. I never even bothered with looking into specific hypertrophy. For me it was strength is the most important thing. Hypertrophy is a far second way in the distance. Almost ridiculous to talk about. That was just my position. I played rugby. I think that’s why you don’t want to be a big rugby player. You want to be a fast rugby player that can deliver power and get your job done, move around on the pitch as quickly as possible. I think that the average person, they’re not concerned with what the circumference of their biceps are. They’re concerned with performance. When my wife asks me to cut the tree down in the backyard and hustle all that lumber out front so the trash guys can pick it up, you want to suffer while you do that, or you want to do that in half a day and have your wife be pressed, obviously the latter. So that’s the kind of thing that I was always focused. So now also in the beginning, you want to be really rigid in the programming because what I came up with was so different. It was like, there’s only one way to use this. If you don’t use it this way, you’re just wrong and you’re not going to get any results at all. Now, why did I say that? Especially because that’s not true. I said it because strategically I only wanted people who really used it in the correct manner. Any exercise, there’s lots of incorrect ways to do it and then not have an effect. So basically I had a pure sample. I had users that were getting amazing results and reporting those amazing results, and people would say, well, how do you use the product? And 100% of the time they’d be like, exactly how it says out of the box, don’t change anything. And so now that we have 400,000 users, there’s going to be some flexibility in how to apply that. Now with professional athletes, I always had ’em apply it however they saw, however their training staff saw fit. But yeah, these are all the sort of the challenges that bring us to a point where st. He’s right. There’s a lot of different ways to look at it, and depending on which researcher is involved, there can be, if a bunch of guys interested in bodybuilding or doing a study, you’re going to be sure to look at the body composition numbers because that’s really what they’re focused on. They don’t care about it, the rest of it.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, I think that’s good. I didn’t think of that. I’m sure as time goes on, there’ll be more of these connected type of devices and companies than there’ll be more data. I don’t think. Probably will just as a society will become a lot more knowledgeable about what is happening and be able to look at the numbers and interpret them. But I guess even now with everything that’s out there, it’s still fairly new, isn’t it? So I

Dr. John Jaquish: Don’t know if the audience knows what we’re talking about. So we’re talking about the X3 Force Bar. So there’s a new X3, you hook the bands to it, you connect it to your phone, it records the realtime force. So if you are doing a pressing movement and you’re using a band you probably shouldn’t be using because it’s too heavy for you. You see these people kind of do a half rep and then it snaps back at ’em. Well, that’s a really low quality repetition, and the software will know it because it’s sampling multiple times per second to see how much force you’re creating. So when I do it, I’m slowly going out holding and not in the locked out position, but just short of lockout for a couple seconds and then slowly coming back. When you control the weight, obviously you’re making the target muscle do more work. And from a progressive overload standpoint, that will be seen over time. You will keep besting your number, and it’s amazing to have that biofeedback right in front of you when you know you’re only half a repetition away from beating your best ever, you’re going to figure out a way to do it. I think that guarantees a much higher level of success.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, I think it’s smart. I’d love to have a look at it, but I think it’s definitely a very smart next step For a number of reasons. I wanted to talk a little bit about the type of training, and I probably want to start with this one. You just mentioned it earlier and you said these genetic outliers, and I think it’s important to talk about this because when I was 15 and 16, I wasn’t aware of that, and I’m sure there’s many teenagers that are not aware that that exists. And then in your example, you see these Arnold Schwarzeneggers, these Chris Steads and everybody else that’s on social media, and you’re like, okay, I think watch your video where you were talking about they’re always carrying a counter of protein. So you buy the protein and you do the workout, which in some cases is a terrible workout,

Dr. John Jaquish: But in a lot of cases it’s a terrible

Matthew Januszek: Workout. They pick up a pen and they’re going to have a great body. So the first thing then is what is a genetic outlier? How many of those do you think are in the population? And then how do you describe the rest of the people and what does that mean in terms of training to improve your physique from a visual perspective?

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay, so the genetic outlier conversation I talked about all day, every day when it comes to fitness conversations because somebody will say, how come this guy grew muscle this quickly? And it’s like, oh, well, he’s an outlier. He’s just born to build muscle. Okay, so what does that specifically mean? Yes, some people are at an amazing advantage when it comes to that, and some people are at an amazing disadvantage, and then the majority of people are in between. So when I talk about the genetic outliers, it’s not a hormone thing. In fact, the amount of males that have been barred from professional competition because they had naturally too high testosterone is zero when it comes to females two, and it was both of ’em were in the nineties. They just had genetically an incredible amount of testosterone, and it would’ve been unfair to let them compete. They were just too powerful. And I think that’s kind of fascinating because I think very often, and I say I think because I’m talking about people’s opinions here, so I’m kind of guessing a little bit, and I don’t like to do that. I like to have data. There’s an assumption made that some people are born with incredible genetics from a hormonal perspective, not a thing. And it’s very important to point that out because the second part of that is people think by taking anabolic drugs, they’re going to look just like their heroes. 6.6% of adult males in the United States over the age of 18 have used or are currently using anabolic steroids. Do 6.6% of people walking around out here in Newport Beach look like professional athletes or bodybuilders? No, probably not. Even 0.6. We could walk around, we could walk the beach all day long and maybe see one guy that’s like, wow, that guy’s in shape. One out of maybe 10,000 people. And I think that’s how common that genetic advantage is, and that genetic advantage is made possible by different attachment points of tendons in the body. So our pectoral origin is right here. This is one of the regrets for my TED talk. I simplified something and it’s actually an oversimplification. In fact, the guy said, Alexander Bromley, he called me out on that, and he was right. He was wrong about everything else, but he was right about that. Also, he made fun of me for selling something. He’s like, well, first of all, this guy’s selling something so you should never listen to him. And then the podcast cut, and then from a prerecorded video, he reads an ad from his sponsor. It’s just like, okay,

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, I did see that comment. I think he was sort of saying, the way it sounded is that, well, we’ve not got wings. It was though your pectoral attached to your elbow or something.

Dr. John Jaquish: So you have your origin of your pectoral. It’s at the center of your chest on your sternum, and then it attaches, I don’t know which camera’s going to get me. It attaches somewhere on the arm. For most people, it’s at the beginning of the humerus bone for some other people, for these genetic outliers. What I said in the TED Talk was, it’s on the other end. I should have said it’s toward the other end. Never on the other

Matthew Januszek: End is

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s other stuff going on.

Matthew Januszek: On the other. It’s connect through the

Dr. John Jaquish: Arm or something. So I tried just for brevity’s sake, just say it like that, but the further down it is, the more of a mechanical advantage somebody has in engaging their pectorals. Now, he argued at this point, and I don’t think he should have, tendons are the most elastic material on earth. So it’s almost like when you’re back here in this stretch position in a bench press, you’re almost like spring loaded to come forward. Set another way. If you’re training with variable resistance, it’s almost the same thing because it’s lighter here and heavier as you enter into a stronger range of motion. So in essence, that’s what’s going on inside of these genetic outliers, whereas their variance is managed by their longer tendons, and that recycled, it’s called recycled energy. When you have a stretched tendon and that stretch becomes not stretched, it’s almost like a bonus amount of energy going into what you’re doing. So when regular people sprint, 15% of the calf stretch is recycled energy. It’s just the foot goes into flex, and then as it springs back into position, it propels you forward. 15% of what’s going on is not calorie expenditure is not energy being used by the body, it’s just elasticity of tendon. So people with a higher calf, typically those of African descent have a higher calf, they have a longer tendon who’s winning in sprint races, people of African descent, right? I mean, when’s the last time you saw white guy Sprint? We’re really not good at that, and it’s because of these different biomechanics reasons. And I think it’s awesome to understand that because it explains so much of why variable resistance works so well, because most people just don’t have the ability to recruit muscle at the bottom. They’re useless at the bottom. And that was my problem for years and years. I went through training, I tried volume approach, I tried high intensity approach, nothing worked. And then as soon as I discovered variable resistance, well, everything worked

Matthew Januszek: Well. I think that’s good to know for a number of reasons, because I think certainly young kids are like, okay, look, we need to get onto some steroids. I want to get big. But it’s also knowing that you are based on how your body’s made up. Yes, you can make the most of it, but you’re not going to look like Chris Bumstead either. That just isn’t how you, but I think the way that fitness and nutrition and workout devices are sold, they’re like, oh yeah, I was watching something where you was talking about six packs. And it’s like, yeah, certain people have, the way their body’s constructed is even then when they’re not eating great, their six packs stick out. Other people have to just almost have hardly any body fat just to see them come out

Dr. John Jaquish: Like long-term starvation kind of diet. Yeah, exactly. Before they’ll see their ab. Sure.

Matthew Januszek: So I think that’s interesting to know. So that was the first thing I wanted to establish because I think that I guess certainly makes some people feel, alright, now focus on what you can work with and this is where things like your product comes in. Now, one of the things that I have seen online, and I wanted you to really clarify this, is the seven times stronger at the top and the bottom. And I hope I’m quoting that right. And basically you referenced the you’re stronger at the top of, let’s say a chest press. You’re stronger at the top than at the bottom. So I was watching a video, one of these videos that you were talking about where they basically just say everything that person said is wrong. But one of the things that they did say, which I was quite interested in is that in bench press, if you tend to fail, you tend to fail as you’re getting to the top of the range as opposed to at the bottom where you are the strongest, which is the opposite to that effect. So what would be

Dr. John Jaquish: Happening? No, you’re the strongest at the

Matthew Januszek: Top. Yeah, you’re strongest at the top. But a lot of times when I’ve spotted and worked out with people, you kind of get here, but it’s just trying to get that lockout is tough on the movement. Now is that because you’re sort of maybe bouncing it a little bit at the bottom to get you there? Or why do you think if you’re going to failure that a lot of times you do fail in pushing out that final bit at the top?

Dr. John Jaquish: It has a little bit to do with levers. So the humerus bone is a lever when it is even with the chest, it’s a less efficient lever than if it’s brought a little bit forward to the chest because at that point it’s hinging based on the pole and where the attachment of the tendon is. So this is just a geometry exercise. So it’s really, this is why look, power lifters will do floor presses for the people who, I don’t know how well this works, but I know they do it where it’s like you have a bench press bar and you’re laying on the floor, and so you go to where your elbows hit the ground because that’s the start. That’s really the position of least efficiency and getting from there to extended becomes that exercise. So I think some of it is just a neuromuscular effect. How do we get out of that sticking point? Now, of course, with variable resistance, it doesn’t matter because when I do a chest press, it’s 200 pounds here, maybe 300 pounds here, five 50 here. And so I can go through that range of motion still loaded at the bottom. That’s another thing we should talk about that the whole stretch position thing.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, I was going to come onto that in a minute.

Dr. John Jaquish: That seems to be the flavor of the month with everybody talking about sports performance. And it’s important we will talk about it, but I’m delivering force to the body in accordance to its capability. It’s force output curve.

Matthew Januszek: And is that when you say it’s seven times or even three times or whatever, is that something, so let’s say you can lift a hundred kilos here. Are you saying that you can or press a hundred kilos here or a hundred pounds? Are you saying that when you get here, you’ve got the ability to move 700 here

Dr. John Jaquish: Potentially?

Matthew Januszek: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Maybe move it a millimeter. Okay. Now where I got those numbers, I think that’s really the question. Someone’s like, where’s that study? It’s actually two studies. So the first study was looking at the osteostrong equipment and specifically study done in London on the previous prototype before Osteostrong was launched with its current set of equipment. What we looked at was postmenopausal population, never exercised. So no exercise background whatsoever, poor metabolic function, so not a good hemoglobin, A1C score, not necessarily diabetic. Some of ’em were diabetic, but so we wanted something that actually looked like regular people and specifically female we’re talking about bone density. So we saw that these people were dealing with after six months of treatment in their lower extremities. Now keep in mind they’re just short of lockout, so not straight legs, but 120 degree angle behind the knee. So the angle of inclusion behind the knee, 120 degree angle, they were able to create 6, 7, 8, even nine times their body weight. It averaged right around seven. And so these women who have never exercised, they’re pushing six or 700 pounds with their lower extremities. Now they’re pushing it a couple millimeters and it’s in the most efficient position. So just short of lockout is where you’re really powerful. So now the question was, well, and some of the principal investigator asked me, how does this compare to gym weight? What do people lift in the gym? And I’m like, wow, that’s a great question. So I found the answer, the N ains database,

Matthew Januszek: What

Dr. John Jaquish: Database? The N Ains database, I dunno. It’s the largest database of sort of physical, it’s sort of nutrition exercise. It’s managed by the National Institute of Health. They add about 2000 people per year to this database. They started doing caliper tests on body fat and then they moved to dexa. So about 2000 people a year go through this whole battery so we can figure out what society looks like from a health and wellness perspective. Also tracking changes over time because they add 2000 people every year. So the 2000 random samples this year, how do they compare to 10 years ago? That’s some of where we’re getting our data about how people are becoming less and less fit or weaker, all sorts of things like that. So when I look at the earnings database and looked at the average loading numbers for lower extremity exercises, so whether it’s a, I think they specified squats because you can put a whole lot of weight on a leg press and the leg press at a 45 degree angle, most of that weight is going into the ground. I think it’s only a third of it is traveling at a 45 degree angle. So you can take somebody who squats 700 pounds, but then put 2000 pounds on the leg prep. So people typically deal with anywhere from, I think it’s 1.13 to 1.73 times their body weight from beginner to advanced when it comes to squats. I might be getting those numbers. I think they’re actually lower than what I said, but

Matthew Januszek: Argue we can check that.

Dr. John Jaquish: So if you look at what that average is, and then you look at what the average is with people using the OSTEOSTRONG devices, well, it’s about a sevenfold difference. And because the OSTEOSTRONG devices are really looking at how much force can we get through the hip joint to trigger bone growth

Matthew Januszek: And the hip joint being the joint that is going to stimulate bone growth. Is that why that one’s relevant? Well,

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s the joint that if fractured is going to affect your mortality.

Matthew Januszek: Oh, okay. So you’re actually trying to, by putting resistance through a joint that builds the joint strength, does it? Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. Yeah, the pelvic bone becomes more powerful. The femur, the top of the femur becomes more powerful. And so you want to do that to keep from fracturing. So when looking at that data compared to the NA NS database data, that’s where I got that sevenfold stronger. And I mean that’s looking at the NAS, they’re talking about full range training and very specifically very small range training with osteostrong

Matthew Januszek: And is just going onto osteostrong then. So is what you found out through that osteostrong business, that really, really small range of extremely heavy weight, as much as what anyone can lift based on where they are, has a big impact on strengthening and building more bone? Yeah. Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s the whole purpose. Okay. That’s why I call it. Yeah. And it’s a fast growing business. We got 300 centers in 15 different countries right now.

Matthew Januszek: So you then took that philosophy of a small movement and went on to a full movement. Did you? And why did you, because I remember years ago, I used to do a lot of Tony Robbins stuff, and I remember him talking about the machine. I remember him on this leg press, which is probably the leg press, and he was like, yeah, one set on each exercise. I think it was even in some of his earlier books, like Unlimited Power or something like that, probably. I don’t know.

Dr. John Jaquish: So he talked about doing it on a leg press, very, very small range. It was a video series called Personal Power.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, that was it.

Dr. John Jaquish: And they were doing it for bone density. They were just doing it to see how much they could load the body with. So he did that. And then when he saw the devices later on, he was like, Hey, I was doing something so similar to that, I got to meet the inventor. So that’s how I got connected with Tony Robinson. So he actually called me. I didn’t pitch him anything.

Matthew Januszek: Is there any benefits of doing small range movements like you’re talking about for muscle growth or joint health, or is that really just for bone health?

Dr. John Jaquish: Just for bone health? I would say neurologically training the body to fire more tissue in a specific position. That’s a thing. And neurologists have used force plates for years to capture that kind of data, and that’s exciting. So who does that mean something to powerlifters gymnasts? People who need to be really explosive. NFL linemen, they got to push somebody real quick, real fast, recruit as much tissue as possible. So from a practical standpoint, strength for everybody. Now everybody does have bones, so there’s that for the average 15-year-old guy who just wants bigger pecs and triceps, no. Yeah, you don’t need that.

Matthew Januszek: Well, let’s move on to this. This definitely seems to be a new thing, and some of the research that’s out there seems to be like 2020 2023. And it’s this, right? What is it called? So there’s a few names I’ve found, but essentially one of the videos I’ve seen is that basically stretching at the bottom of the movement is optimal and it can increase your strength and hypertrophy by three times. But then I saw a similar survey on your page where it says, stretch induced muscle growth shuts off muscles, which is the opposite. And then I heard you on Gabrielle Leon saying that there’s this stretching actually split cells and it’s good to do after the workout. So there’s like three things. There’s this guy saying, those

Dr. John Jaquish: Are actually three different

Matthew Januszek: Things, stretching at the bottom. There’s you saying, well, if you stretch, it shuts off your muscle. And then there’s this cell splitting. So simplify

Dr. John Jaquish: This from, so I’ll start with the claim. Okay? The claim is you want to go full range. If I’m training biceps, I want to go all the way down. Sometimes you see people doing cheek curls where they kind of throw their body weight and get the momentum going, and then the muscle sort of catches the weight when it’s reached the end of the momentum. And then when Ronnie Coleman does it, he’s basically curling from here to here. So that’s a very small range of motion. And the idea is, well, is that good? Are we supposed to load the strong range and bypass the weak range? And what they’ve found in, I can fuck all their work up real easy and I’m going to do it right now. Does the rest of the movement matter? Now, before I get into that, I want to say that I think some people have misread the whole use the full range of motion, and they’re trying to actually stay in that stretch position and stretch the muscle. Well, if you’re doing static stretches, whether it’s at the bottom of a movement or you’re just stretching, you’re actually shutting the muscle off.

Matthew Januszek: Why is that?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a protection response. Okay. Yeah. You don’t want, your muscle is at its weakest and most compromised when it’s in the stretch position. It is. You watch any of the videos of somebody tears a pack or tears a bicep, they never do it right here for the packs or right here in the bicep. It’s at the bottom. It’s where the muscle is stretched, whereas it’s most likely to tear. So you start stretching a muscle hard, it starts shutting off. That’s why when we were kids, I’m guessing that you were told, I feel like you grew up in Northern England. Am I right about that

Matthew Januszek: Sort of central Midlands called

Dr. John Jaquish: Midlands? Yeah, you stretch before the game. No one does that anymore. This is why they actually, they tested it and people did worse when they stretch. So at first, when I first started seeing this, it’s like you don’t want to stretch in the middle of a movement. Now, that wasn’t what was being recommended, but that’s how people interpreted

Matthew Januszek: It. Yeah, because even the Frank Zane standing in the doorway and sort of stretching in between sets, like some of the bodybuilders or even years ago, used

Dr. John Jaquish: To sort talk. I’ll get to that. Okay, so that’s the thing also. Alright, so this whole stretching thing, it’s like there’s three or four things you need to know before you can really put it all together. So the full range of motion turns out to be important. There was just a study that just used the weaker range of motion, which

Matthew Januszek: Is on a chest press. You’re referring to the bottom part of the movement. Are you?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right? So from the chest to maybe here, and they induced an equal amount of growth as the people who went full range. Now does that mean there’s some magic in the stretch position? Fuck no. Because if you’re lifting a static weight, when is it relevant? Only at the bottom. This is a monument to variable resistance because you’re way too efficient out here when you’re extending your arms. This is why I can hold 500 pounds here, but not here. So let’s say we’re holding a static weight. I’d never get under 500 pounds. Can’t bench press 500 pounds. So whatever I put on the bar, I can move it from my chest all the way to full extension. However, it’s only heavy at the bottom. That last half is real easy.

Matthew Januszek: And if you had a spotter, you could probably pulse like, oh yeah,

Dr. John Jaquish: Five, we’re leaving this because a spotter’s variable resistance. So let’s leave that to the side. So when this study comes out, it’s like, whoa, we really see the power of the stretch position. No, it’s just only a relevant weight to taking cells to fatigue at the bottom. Because whenever you pick a weight, if you’re going to lift a weight full range, whenever you choose that weight, you’ve got to know that you can handle it in the weak range. And that’s the only place where the exercise is really an exercise. So what a monument to variable resistance. So now if instead we changed the weight as we moved, so it’s heavy enough here to where I’m getting tension in my stretch position, but then that tension built as my biomechanics become more capable, now we’re taking the cells to a much greater level of fatigue, thereby triggering more growth.

Matthew Januszek: So we can close off this stretching thing, and I’ll come back to the actual stretch in a minute. So from where you see things at the moment, then in general, stretching out, whether it’s on a chest press or a bicep curl at the bottom, you don’t think that that is actually what’s stimulating muscle and strength development based on what,

Dr. John Jaquish: Not specifically. However, the more blood you get to flow into a muscle, especially with volume training, the better the effect you’re going to get with strength. I don’t think the stretch position matters much, if at all with volume training, how much blood you get to flow into that target muscle is really the subject. Because what we’re trying to do is convince the body to hold more fuels. So it’s never talked about this way. And I’m going to do a whole video on this really soon, or maybe I’ll just do it right now and I’ll clip your clip your podcast. So there’s three ways. This is great because I’ll end the final stretching. Stretching for growth sort

Matthew Januszek: Of thing. Yes, we want to do that as well. So

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s probably the most important. So there’s three ways to grow a muscle. Myo fial hypertrophy.

Matthew Januszek: And what does

Dr. John Jaquish: That mean? Muscle protein synthesis. It means the growth of the actual structure of the cell. Actin myosin coming together to make a thicker cell. The actin myosin, they’re kind of like this and they come together so there’s no halfway, it’s like you have the active myosin. They’re either open or they’re closed. And the shorter a muscle becomes, then the more of those things are engaged. So by creating more of those, that’s myo fial hypertrophy. I think, and this is, I hate calling it a problem with research because I probably have sports science people really mad at me and they should be mad at me. So I’m saying this with caution. Volume training really doesn’t do much of that.

Matthew Januszek: And when you say volume training, is that training to

Dr. John Jaquish: Build your muscle? Right. So everything X3 Bar was up until recently was focused on strength. So we were focused on that type of growth. Myo fial hypertrophy, the density of a cell, the performance of a cell. So if you’re a gymnast, you really want to focus on MyFi hypertrophy. You really don’t want sarcoplasmic hypertrophy because if you focus on myo fibral, you have a high power to weight ratio. You are very powerful. Not necessarily heavy, no unnecessary weight. So sprinters, gymnasts, that’s what they are training for now, most other, and also I should say most types of resistance exercise are getting some of each of these things. So like for example, strength training when you’re really training for strength going to failure or even beyond failure like with X3 Bar. So you might have negative two reps in reserve sort of thing because you really worked the diminishing range, which remember you’ve done diminishing range sets before. You’re really just working the stretch position in diminishing range or Yeah, I mean it’s like extra work for that stretch position. That may be part of the reason that we get so much blood flow into the muscle and start to build some of the other type of muscular growth, which is sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. So think of MyFi hypertrophy as the engine. Think of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy as the gas tank. So with Sarco plasmic, you want to get as much blood flowing into the muscle as possible so that the central nervous system decides what all that fuel we need for contraction. The A TP, the glycogen and the creatine phosphate, we’re going to store more of that here and by storing more of it here, it makes the muscle bigger. So when somebody says their training is really focused on hypertrophy, basically all this stuff I ignored up until recently, I, that’s what that is. So when somebody’s doing five or six sets and they’re doing five reps in reserve, so let’s say they’re using the X3 Bar and they’re doing a chess press where normally their all out failure set is 20 repetitions with the black band on the chest press. Well instead if they’re trying to make the muscle larger, they might do that on the beginning of their workout and then they do five more sets but only do 15 repetitions, so five reps in reserve and you stop short of failure so that you’re really just compounding that blood flow in the cell, leaving that a TP and creatine phosphate behind really just glycogen. And then based on the glute four function, it splits off into these other fuels that are ready at different stages. The glycogen is, well, a TP is the most ready, then glycogen, then creatine phosphate. So the compounding of those fuels. So this is volume training. The bodybuilders are really heavy into the sarco plasmic effect. So when you see guys who are clearly not training to fatigue and they’re doing just set after set after set, that’s what they’re doing. And so a lot of times I’d show and I was totally ignorant to how bodybuilding worked or the approaches or anything like that. So I’d show these guys X3 Bar and I’d go to absolute failure and they’d go, you have to do it like that or can you just do it until you just get a pump? And I’m looking at, I’m like, why would you want to do that? Well now I know because I’ve read hypertrophy research, it’s

Matthew Januszek: Coming up next.

Dr. John Jaquish: There is no such thing as a person who is zero carb. If you really want to be disappointed by society, read the comments, vegetables give us a low grade poison called oxalates, lectins in some other plants, but oxalates and lectins are in every plant. A breakthrough is upon us. Testosterone is about to change very much.

Matthew Januszek: How long ago have you read that research? Just out of interest? Is

Dr. John Jaquish: It the last six months? Oh, okay. I ignored it my whole life

Matthew Januszek: Because last time we kind of didn’t talk about this and I think you’ve made an interesting distinction, particularly even the people that are referencing some of your stuff because I guess I’ve almost changed some of the questions I was going to ask because it sounds like it’s dependent on, well, what are you training for? You’re training for pure strength. Are you training because you want to build muscle or do you want a little bit of both?

Dr. John Jaquish: My guess is yeah, and sometimes somebody will say, well, I’m a rugby player. Well, are you a prop? Are you a lock or are you a wing? I’m going to have a different training. A wing needs to focus on strength only, like myo fiber growth. The standard X3 Bar program is for them, if you’re a prop, you’re better being bigger. So that’s a heavy guy position. You still need to be able to move pretty quick, but being 160 pounds, you’re not going to be a very good prop. So you want to volumize some of that tissue. Plus it gives the muscle endurance. So sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, it’s not really strength training. And when you say volume training, what the hell does volume mean? Does it mean just the size of the muscle or does it mean you do a lot of it? Actually both. And neither of those things necessarily matter because what the actual effect is, is you can go from contracting against a weight 12 repetitions, then to 15 repetitions, then to 17 repetitions, and then you can change the weight in. Your repetitions get lower, but it’s a different type of strength. It is an ability to sustain consistent contractions.

Matthew Januszek: If you as a mixed martial artist for example, you’d probably want that first type of strength as opposed to the second.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. You don’t want to carry around any extra weight, you don’t want your blood pumping to a larger muscle. You want your blood pumping to a smaller, more powerful muscle. So like MMA guys, they’re not doing volume training at all. They’re doing X3 Bar as standard. And coincidentally, Forrest Griffin wrote the forward of my book, the UFC guys really understood X3 Bar they, they’re like, wow, I can deliver a lot more power in my fighting by using this. Whereas then the bodybuilders are just confused, why do you only do one set and why does it look like your head’s going to pop when you do that one set? And it’s like, well, because I’m trying to stimulate the maximum amount of strength and they’re sort of like, wow, this guy really doesn’t know bodybuilding. Yeah, you’re right. I don’t, but I figured it out. And so you can use it sort of in two different ways and when it comes, so now lemme talk about the third type of muscle growth and that’s called hyperplasia. Now that’s the hardest kind to get and it really has to do with a combination of stimulating the muscle, having a lot of blood flow and then stretching after that.

Matthew Januszek: And why would you, just before you go onto that, why and who would be interested in that just to kind of help understand that it

Dr. John Jaquish: Would be an amplification of the first ability being myo fibral, but that splits muscle cells. So whenever they do a cadaver examination on somebody who is like a bodybuilder or a powerlifter and then they count the number of cells, they’re like, oh, this guy was clearly born to be a strong guy because he is like five times the amount of muscle cells that the average person has. And for a long time the idea was you only have hyperplasia in the womb after you’re born. That’s just the number of cells you have. That’s the number you’re going to die with. So it turns out that’s not true. You can force them to split.

Matthew Januszek: When do we know that? What do you mean? When do we find out about that? Is it a recent thing or

Dr. John Jaquish: I think the first, it was theorized about in the eighties, I think Professor Jose Antonio out of Florida State, he’s probably the top protein researcher on earth. He did his PhD dissertation in the stretching of muscular stretch, mediad hypertrophy is what it’s called now. So you can also have a muscle grow just by stretching it, no strength training at all. However, you got to stretch it for hours on end and it is a nine out of 10 pain that you have to go through. So much harder to get a muscle to grow. So I kind of took all this information, I just sort of split the difference and thought, okay, what are people going to do? And coincidentally, there was a program out there from, I dunno, maybe 15 years ago, there was a guy named Dante who came out with a training program and he calls it DC training or dog crap training. So he sort of made the name of his training program an insult to the training program to sort of get out in front of the trolls. So this is like, which was actually kind of brilliant. You talked to just about any strength athlete or bodybuilder and they’re like, oh, I totally read that. I remember 15 years ago. And so what he would advocate for was what I saw as the best way to leverage everything. So first you get blood flow into the muscle, you get a pump, so you’re stretching the casing of the muscle. Also, this was also called bag theory. So as in the bag of the muscle, the fascia of the muscle, that’s one of the limitations to growth because it’s very tight on the cells. If you can expand it slightly, it gives the muscle more room to grow. So how do you expand it? It’s a combination of getting blood flow. The maximum amount of blood flow is the biggest pump you can have, and then after you’re done exercising the target muscle, then you stretch the hell out of it, nine out of 10 pain, maybe hold it for a minute, maybe 30 seconds. I said 30 seconds in the book. And so that’s what I call the hyperplasia protocol. And so that’s just added growth on top of the other two types of growth depending on how you’re training

Matthew Januszek: And that doesn’t, the bit that we talked about earlier, which is then stretching at the bottom of the muscle. Those are two separate things because what you’re saying then is when you are, let’s say you’re doing a chest press again, what you really want to be doing is you want to be stimulating the muscle through the whole range, particularly at the top where you are the strongest August the

Dr. John Jaquish: Bottom. We want to make sure you go full range. So I think initially these studies came out to keep people thinking of doing strong range partials. So what they don’t want to do is every once in a while you see somebody put 2000 pounds on the leg press and then they unrack it and they bring it back an inch and then they do really short, short, I was thinking tion. Okay. Right, right. So those aren’t nearly as productive as going the full range. I mean I don’t think anybody was really surprised by that, but it’s great to know that. So you got to go full range, but there’s no real magic in the stretch portion other than by going full range, you get the maximum amount of blood flow, which is going to put the maximum amount of pressure on the casing of the muscle if you stretch then afterward, because stretching a muscle, like pressure internally pushing externally from any direction is going to make more room. So by blood volume, let’s say a muscles from here, here and the muscles in between, so imagine it looks like a football because they kind of taper off at the ends where they insert the origin versus the insertion. You can have internal pressure with the blood flow. Then by pulling it apart your you’re intensifying what’s going on on the inside and making that pressure even greater.

Matthew Januszek: Your story about your body protects itself by making sure it doesn’t overstretch. Is that only if the muscle recognizes there’re being load on there as opposed to it just kind of actually stretching out? Then do you

Dr. John Jaquish: Think, oh, you’re definitely shutting muscle cells off by doing that, but the workout’s over so it doesn’t matter. You’re doing it just to create pressure on the fascia so that you’re making more, basically just making more room for growth happen.

Matthew Januszek: I know some of this is fairly new to you as well. What impact has some of the recent discoveries on fascia had in your whole philosophy around what you do in your role, your science, your research? Is some of these newer, I know some of this stuff on the fascia is relatively new that’s coming out.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, well, like I said, and I think it was in the early nineties is when Professor Jose Antonio published his dissertation, which was about this. He did it with birds. He would stretch their wings back and I guess they didn’t mind, or at least they didn’t say anything. So yeah, he created the effect in birds. And I think from that, maybe not in that paper, maybe in his subsequent papers, I talked a lot about stretch mediated hypertrophy. We all stretch people do yoga. Do people who do yoga grow insane amounts of muscle? No,

Matthew Januszek: No. But people who do yoga general, I’ve seen some of these real serious people and they do have a very sort of lean and toned type of shape.

Dr. John Jaquish: They don’t look

Matthew Januszek: Weak. No. There’s some people who go to yoga classes, but the ones that are really seriously,

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s people who are phoning it in and then they’re, yeah,

Matthew Januszek: They have a pretty good athletic shape to

Dr. John Jaquish: Them, but they’re not developing the kind of musculature that we’re talking about with athletes. So I think stretch mediad hypertrophy is only marginally available to humans under the right circumstances. So maximizing blood flow, then stretching. So it’s like that was in the book before any of these papers came out. This is all in the last two or three years. And I think the most profound paper is the one where they just do the partials in the weaker range of motion and they get the same growth effect as the full range of motion of course, because when you’re picking up a static weight, it’s only heavy in the weak range of motion. You’re basically not doing anything in the stronger range of motion. Now I think it’s just, like I said, it’s a monument to variable resistance because why don’t we add more resistance as we enter into the more powerful ranges of motion to get a much more profound level of exhaustion. And that’s X3 Bar.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah. This third stage then, and I’m going to go back to some of the conversations that I’ve had, and I was at Gabrielle’s event a few weeks ago and there was a number of things that were being discussed there, but one of the things is the importance of building and developing muscle for women. Being aware as I am now very clearly that there’s a difference between the type of muscle that you develop, the strong muscle, the more fuller muscle that you want for aesthetics, and then a combination of both what type of training and type of muscle would be appropriate for women in their forties, fifties, sixties, for example. Knowing that muscle and strength is important as you,

Dr. John Jaquish: So it’s probably a different answer depending on the woman. I don’t know a lot of women that want anything a lot bigger.

Matthew Januszek: No, that’s right. Other

Dr. John Jaquish: Than maybe their quads and their glutes

Matthew Januszek: And sorry, just to pause on that second, and you’re right. One of the reasons that I think still even now a lot of women don’t do strength training is because they’re worried that they’ll get bigger. They don’t want to get bigger. Now that’s unfortunate. Could some of that be down to the style of strength training that you’re doing? It sounds like what you’ve explained to me, you don’t want to be it in your muscles. You don’t want to be keeping blood and stretching it. We’ve just spoke about here you probably want to be doing the

Dr. John Jaquish: More strength focus, the

Matthew Januszek: More sort of UFC style training.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, lean, high powered weight ratio, right?

Matthew Januszek: Am I right on that or am I

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, you’re a hundred percent. A hundred percent correct.

Matthew Januszek: So because I think this is another thing that, this is an important distinction that most people don’t realize, and maybe it’s an education thing and a trainer thing, but you probably want to go to someone that knows the difference and can program the difference.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s interesting getting women interested. What I’ve noticed is there’s nothing better for women than listening to other women. I could give a scientific lecture to a group of women and they’ll sort of say, oh, okay, boy, that was a lot. And then my wife can summarize it and say, well, this is what I do. Instantly they’re like, oh, let me follow you on Instagram. Yeah, it’s like it doesn’t mean much coming from a man necessarily. I get that That’s okay. And it’s part of the reason why I put my wife in a lot of that ads. They like seeing the feminine body and yeah, definitely if she does any volume training, going to be in her lower half because that’s, no girl wants little chicken legs and they want shapely legs and curves, but also they don’t want, I’ve never met a woman that’s like, I really want huge triceps. Actually that’s not true. I have met women like that, but that’s not what all of ’em want. So I would want to know what are you going for? You’re trying to win a figure competition or are you trying to look great at the beach? So there’s a difference in how you’d approach it. Terrain.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, it definitely sounds differently. Sounds like it. And I’ve learned a lot. I dunno whether everybody listening knows that. It sounds like some of this is relatively new to you as well,

Dr. John Jaquish: The volume stuff. Yeah, like I said, I focused on strength. I sat on a podcast recently when somebody would ask me about, I really focused on making a muscle larger. I don’t really care about strength. My instinctive response is, wow, you need a psychiatrist. But I also realized some guys are just born skinny. I was actually super skinny, so I don’t know how I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be super skinny, but my quest for strength sort of answered that challenge for me. But other people, they’re going to combine both the strength approach and the volume approach and they’ll be able to put on a whole lot of muscle and be very powerful.

Matthew Januszek: What do you think about the, and I’m trying to find my question here, and I’ve got so many questions, I’ve lost a couple of them, but in terms of the speed of the movement, and so say for example you do 20 reps really, really quickly or you do 10 really, really slowly and then, or you rest in between the exercises, what are your thoughts on, I know you don’t do lots of sets necessarily, but what do you think about reps speed and rest period within them? Because again, I saw you talk on this and I thought that would be an interesting one for you to explain your reasons why and how you would do that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Everybody’s in a different stage of their training. So I don’t think there’s any hard fast rule that’s like this is the one thing we never change because depending if somebody has some injury background, you want ’em to go slow in the positive and slow in the negative explosive. That may be okay for an explosive athlete. If you’re a fighter, I would have, when I was at the UFC training center with forest, very explosive up, very slowed in the eccentric, the lowering of the weight or the x-ray bar as the case was. So that’s great for a younger athletic population. So almost everybody, I say one second up three seconds down, but if we’re talking about older people, maybe even elderly people, eighties, nineties, two seconds up, two seconds down is better because you don’t want them doing anything abruptly. And with variable resistance, the chances of injury are much lower. But still, when you’re explosive, that’s not a controlled environment. Now you’ve slightly gone outside of control.

Matthew Januszek: And can you, on that point, one of the things that reduces as you get older is your ability to explode and react to different things. If you want to train to improve that, do you have to train explosively? So if you were in your sixties or your seventies, but you had been working out, would you want to put someone on a training program where they were doing that so that they could react to different things?

Dr. John Jaquish: Possibly. I would say now I wouldn’t work with an elderly person. I would want someone who’s a specialist in applying therapy to elderly people. That’s another thing. I think sometimes a guy with a PhD has asked, well, how would you treat this person? Well, I wouldn’t, however, here’s what I would do to advise the person who is qualified to treat the elderly person. So I would have them. So there’s two ways to get fast. One of them is going fast, the other one is going very, very slow. So the slower you go, the more stabilizers get enacted. Thereby you are more solid when you have to accelerate faster. So I would do everything slower, like I said, two seconds up, two seconds back is typically what works for that population, maybe a little bit higher repetitions also

Matthew Januszek: Just what sort of rep range are you

Dr. John Jaquish: Normally? I’m 15 to 40.

Matthew Januszek: 15 to 40? Yeah. Right. Wow, that’s high.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, because the weight with X3 Bar gets so high, I’m doing one leg squats with 400 pounds on one leg. I don’t want to, and I’ll do that for maybe 30 repetitions. I don’t want to find out what weight I need for 10 repetitions because if something goes wrong, that’s a catastrophic amount of force I don’t want to find out. So I’m not going to squat with 10 reps with variable resistance, I wouldn’t do it with standard resistance. I know that doesn’t really work very well. So that’s why the higher repetition. So when working with, I mean I do work out with some older people, my parents, and so I have them two seconds up two seconds down, typically 20 to 30. So I kind of truncated in the middle because I don’t want ’em going too long. I don’t want it to be a cardiovascular test.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, I was going to say, when you’re getting up into your forties as well like that, particularly if you’re doing squatting, that is going to be,

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. See that doesn’t work for larger muscles that might work for biceps. The biceps are small compared to quadriceps or glutes, so you can’t go if you’re going 40 reps with squats, it’s time to go to the next band.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah, right. So what about, how do you define high intensity and high volume then how would you describe those two

Dr. John Jaquish: Things? So high intensity is to absolute fatigue, including the diminishing range where we’re just doing repetitions in that stretch range. So you would say the reps in reserve. So volume training guys always say, how many reps do you have in reserve or is it negative reserve? Did you go past fatigue in the diminishing range? We’d call that past fatigue. That is to get the most MyFi growth, the most dense cell, the most powerful, the highest power to weight ratio, very heavy muscle protein synthesis. So that’s that strength approach. That’s traditional X3 Bar. Also, the guys who use variable resistance, like at Westside Barbell, I just did some stuff with Matt winning who has the world record squat. He did it, I think he put 700 pounds on the bar and then he added 500 pounds of bands and started training with that so that he could do the 1200 pound squat. Over time, he would replace the banding with weights so he could break that record. Now, there’s no reason for regular people to do that because we’re not in a squat contest. I mean, I’ll never be in one. You’ll probably never be in one. And if we’re ever in one, it’ll probably be like you versus me. So I’m really worried about hurting anything. But if you’re a competitive athlete, then that’s the approach to being absolutely as strong as possible.

Matthew Januszek: So the high intensity would be the higher reps. Are you saying I just No,

Dr. John Jaquish: No higher reps. Higher level of fatigue.

Matthew Januszek: Higher level of fatigue. Okay. Yeah. And what about the rest in between? Is there a difference in the rest in between? Well,

Dr. John Jaquish: The way I approach that, I only do one set. I do my chest press when I’m done with that set. I might rest for five minutes before I move on to the overhead press, but I’m not going to do another set of chest press until maybe later when I do my volume training.

Matthew Januszek: And when you do your volume, how are you different between those two Again, just so I’m

Dr. John Jaquish: Reps in reserve, so volume training can be between one and five reps in reserve.

Matthew Januszek: So if we were doing a chest press and I’m aiming for 20 reps, that’s what you recommend me doing. So in those high intensity and high volume, then where would you, we’re at 19, we’re at 20. What would be the difference this stage then?

Dr. John Jaquish: So I’d want you to say the point that you’re going to stop is where you know can do a couple more repetitions, but you’re going to stop because all you’re trying to do is really get that blood flow. You’re trying to get that pump

Matthew Januszek: And that’s on the

Dr. John Jaquish: Volume line. Jake Cutler has a great speech on this where he just talks about he wants the muscle to just swell as much as possible. Blood’s just rushing into it and the way he goes about doing his sets where he squeezes at the top of the bicep, curl, curl, all those little things, definitely full range of motion, never cut off a part of the range of motion, never just

Matthew Januszek: Posting it at the top or anything like that

Dr. John Jaquish: On those lines. Never do it. No, never do that. That’s a strength thing here. When we’re doing volume training. You’re trying to volumize the muscle. You’re trying to get as much blood. Charles Glass is.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: You probably interviewed, have you interviewed him? No, I

Matthew Januszek: Haven’t. I’m trying to get hold of him.

Dr. John Jaquish: He’s a hard guy to nail down. Actually. He doesn’t really like this kind of thing. I don’t know why, but so I think he calls it the blood volume training. I mean, I don’t think the word blood is really positive when you talk to the general population, but what we’re really trying to do is move blood around so that the contractile fuels start pooling and getting, you want to get your bicep to decide, okay, we got to hang on to more a TP glycogen and creatine phosphate,

Matthew Januszek: And that’s the volume. Whereas high intensity, you would just get to 20 and you’re like, okay, we are done.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or you get to whatever you go to fatigue at and then you do diminishing range and you work extra reps in that stretch position.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. Right. So that would be, you would almost like do a half rep you.

Dr. John Jaquish: So the way the diminishing range works, and we’ve got great video of you doing this. Yeah,

Matthew Januszek: We did it.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think you just want me to explain it for the listeners. So you’re going full range. However, 20 repetitions or whatever, let’s say I can’t get to the top anymore. So that five 50 chest press, I am close, but I can’t get there. So let’s say I’m three quarters of the way. Now I’m just going to do three quarter reps. So stretch position to three quarters to the top, then I can’t get there anymore. So now it’s half. And so I’m just working that weaker range of motion with a lower weight, which stimulates incredible amounts of growth. And I believe it’s because of the blood flow.

Matthew Januszek: But the main difference from a science perspective is that you are not doing the full reps, you are the volume. You are doing these partial reps, which is more for the strength.

Dr. John Jaquish: I got that kind of accidentally I was doing both.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, because that working the weaker range of motion, that really has nothing to do with strength. But it’s like my thought process was we still have gas in the tank, we still have the ability to contract just not to such a high level. So the idea was absolute complete exhaustion. And that’s really what’s going to show the body, okay, we’ve got to grow muscle here, we’ve got to do the myo fial type of growth. So am I combining those things, which is why we’re getting such a great result? Or is it just adding to the intensity of the stimulus for muscle protein synthesis? I don’t know. I could construct a clinical trial to figure that out. It would have to have a couple groups. That’d be an expensive study. You’d have to have a whole bunch of groups doing that.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: In different variation.

Matthew Januszek: And there’s one more thing that came up that I wanted to figure out about this. Seven times stronger at the top and the bottom. How does that apply when you’re doing a pulling movement where I guess arguably you are stronger at the beginning part and not as strong at the top. So let’s say you’re doing a bent over row. How does that

Dr. John Jaquish: Apply? So in the book, weightlifting is a waste of time. I have an entire chapter on basically the power curve of the bicep and the lat and how the actual power position in a row is in the middle. It’s not at the top or the bottom, it’s in the middle of the movement. But with diminishing range, we fatigue the muscle in every range of motion possible. So you fatigue at the top, then you fatigue in the middle, then you fatigue at the bottom in the stress position.

Matthew Januszek: Right. Okay. Well look, that’s the exercise part that we’ve gone through. I hope anyone listening is a lot more clearer about this whole thing than I have. And if anyone’s interested, we have done a workout on this together. We did it about a year ago. So you can actually see in real life how these work and how to apply it. I’d like to move on to, I’ll call it nutrition and everything. I guess related to that, and I’ll probably start like you’ve got an interesting diet, I dunno whether you still do it, but last time I spoke you kind of eat once a day and you have some meat and water. Is that still the case?

Dr. John Jaquish: Pretty much.

Matthew Januszek: And how much meat and how much water?

Dr. John Jaquish: When I’m thirsty don’t measure it. And how much meat? I only count grams of protein. So depending on whatever meat it is, if it’s a Turkey or chicken, I don’t need quite as much, but I want to get at least one gram per pound of body weight in grams of protein. Now there is no such thing as a person who is zero carb arb because I don’t care what the meat is. There’s still glycogen in the meat. We’ve been talking about glycogen in the muscle for the last two hours. So it doesn’t go away when you’re eating that. When you’re eating muscle meat, there’s still glycogen in there. It doesn’t show up on the nutrition label In a 16 ounce steak, there might be one or two grams of carbohydrates. There’s 0.4 gram, I might get this wrong 0.4 grams of carbohydrates in an egg or it might be 0.6, I’m not sure. No, it’s 0.4. Actually. Still not sure. So what is it?

Matthew Januszek: We’ll check.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s funny, I’ve probably told her 20 times. So you eat a bunch of eggs and you got a couple grams of carbohydrates. So also I don’t like necessarily the term carnivore because first of all it’s unnecessarily aggressive and I don’t think we should walk on eggshells around vegans, but I don’t want to upset them unnecessarily. So they’re already upset about everything. So just like I’d rather be polite and just say I prefer low carbohydrate nutrition. So pretty much the same protein heavy.

Matthew Januszek: And in that one meal you’ll try and get your whole day’s worth of. So in your case, probably like 250, 300 grams of protein in that

Dr. John Jaquish: One meal. Sometimes it’s three pounds of meat. Wow, we did it last night. Yeah, just a mountain of ground beef. Yeah. So I think it’s funny how the critics, I think some of these people are just looking for attention and that’s how they grow. We were talking about the internet bottom feeders, they’ll put some celebrity’s name and the title of their video really just so they get more views. And of course that doesn’t translate to followers at some point, but how did I get on this? I have so

Matthew Januszek: Well you’ll meat sort of diet. Oh

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, people criticize the carnivore diet and they say, oh, the carnivore diet’s so stupid. And then you see the nutrition program that they advocate and because I’m talking about sports performance people because they know about the one gram per pound of body weight, basically they’re consuming 10, 15 grams of carbohydrates and it’s like, why the hell is that any different? It’s called carnivore, therefore it’s stupid. But if it’s low carb then it’s great. Really it’s the same. So I think that’s just kind of odd and I see it every day with nutrition critics saying, I don’t know, you need carbohydrates or something like that. No, you really don’t, but you can’t go zero. So that whole conversation is just sort of crazy.

Matthew Januszek: How many years have you been on the one meal? A day meat? Mainly diet.

Dr. John Jaquish: There have been some variations because I tested a couple things. In fact, I mean I’ve tested sort of medium carbohydrates for six months periods. And

Matthew Januszek: Would, how did you find medium?

Dr. John Jaquish: Like 50 50 grams of carbohydrates in a day for various reasons, testing various things. I’m sure if I ran a carbohydrate experiment now with volume training, it would be because glycogen it would probably have more of an effect. But there’s a meta-analysis on glycogen replenishment and one of the authors, the lead author was Menno, another person you should interview, awesome scientist. It was really sort of like how many grams of carbohydrates do we need to replenish glycogen on a workout day? I mean it’s really between 15 and 30, you don’t really need more than that. I mean it goes into 30 if you’re a larger maybe male athlete, 15 if you’re smaller, but that’s not much. But I think it’s funny because in this conversation, especially in the comments, if you really want to be disappointed by society, read the comments. There are people who are like, oh, this is fantastic. Way better than those carnivore morons would come up with. And it’s literally the same as what the carnivore people are talking about to the gram the same. Because I also think just from a realistic perspective, are you ever going to not have a sip of anything that has a gram of carbohydrate in it? We’re going to dinner after this. I hope you have a glass of wine. I don’t want you to think like, oh, I better drink water here. I’m not going to be drinking water. Just so you know. Yeah. So I mean I think it’s got to be realistic. It’s got to be something that people are willing to follow. The CEO of Osteostrong, he always makes this joke, what’s the best diet? And people go, he says in a social environment, he’s got a joke and people are like, I don’t know. Because the one you’ll follow, because ultimately, how many nutrition recommendation books have there been thousands? How many did people follow? Very few. There’s probably some bestselling books out there where nobody even followed what the guy actually did except for maybe the author.

Matthew Januszek: Well they say, a friend of mine who’s in the book business told me that, I dunno what the percentage, but most books, people don’t even, they buy them and they don’t even open the front cover. They don’t read them.

Dr. John Jaquish: They read the description, they buy them, they leave them around their coffee table and then they tell their friends to come in about what they read on the description. Amazon, they never read the actual book.

Matthew Januszek: So not surprising. When do you prefer to time that one meal a day then? Do you do it based on, again, science, when your body can digest it? Do you based base it on convenience when you are working? I suppose if you’re eating that much meat and you’ve got a busy schedule like today, it’s not easy to fit that in your regular life or maybe it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it was more about convenience than anything. Just at the end of the day, I’m done working out, I’m done thinking if the blood leaves my brain, it goes into my digestive tract, that’s okay because at the end of the day I am not doing much anyway. So that’s I think just from a societal and social standpoint, that’s the easiest way. Also, you can go through life and never have a lunch meeting, but if you never have a dinner meeting, you’re missing out on some shit, you got to be available for dinner.

Matthew Januszek: What do you think about though the digestion of it? Because I know I was listening to you talk about a couple of the things that people will find out in the next few years that leads to a lot of cancers is poor sleep and vegetables. I think that’s what you said. If you can remember saying that when I use this aura to track my sleep and I find if I do have a big heavy meal, particularly if I had a couple of pounds of beef, I would have a terrible sleep. So does that affect you in the same way or do you leave enough time? I get

Dr. John Jaquish: Used to it.

Matthew Januszek: Okay.

Dr. John Jaquish: I can have, last night we made ground beef and I ate so much of it and I slept amazing, but when I started doing that I’d have heartburn. So you get a little used to it and we even ate kind of late. What’s

Matthew Januszek: Late for you?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I think we ate at nine o’clock and then went to bed at 10.

Matthew Januszek: What would you normally eat then a bit earlier?

Dr. John Jaquish: I’d prefer dinner at, it all depends on what’s going on the next day. Yeah, I had three or four hours before going to bed. That’d be optimal. But I mean it can’t always be optimal.

Matthew Januszek: And then you talk about dry fasting before. Do you only drink liquids when you have that meal? So you’re pretty much not drinking or eating anything all day?

Dr. John Jaquish: Pretty much. I try and almost every day for me is like a Ramadan fast. There’s so much good data for Ramadan fasting. I mean think there’s almost 2 billion people a year do it and they improve their health situation so much during Ramadan season. Of course this is not in a part of the world where they really care about health at all. So they go back to terrible habits right afterward. But I think part of the reason they don’t have worse health outcomes is because they do that. The Ramadan fasting for 20 days.

Matthew Januszek: What’s the benefit of reducing water intake?

Dr. John Jaquish: So you’ve heard that camel’s can go like a month without drinking any water. You know what a camel’s hump is made out fat, just fat. What happens is when you don’t have anything to drink, not totally regardless of electrolyte balance, but somewhat impervious to electrolyte balance, you have the ability to tap metabolic water. So what happens is you stop drinking, you feel really thirsty, and then after maybe 10 hours, but then you hit the 12th hour and all of a sudden you’re not thirsty anymore and your mouth isn’t dry anymore. So what happened was your body switched over to metabolic water, which is drawing water out of fat cells. That’s how camels do it. And they can go months without having a sip of water. They’re drawing it out of the fat cells. When you draw enough moisture out of a fat cell, it destroys the fat cell. So it’s a much more permanent type of fat loss that happens during this process. And once you try drive fasting, you’ll never go back. So I’m a huge fan of it, probably going to do it forever when I get my blood work done, my not weird or anything.

Matthew Januszek: Is there a risk that you can, if you’re working out and you don’t get it right, is there a risk that you can dehydrate and create issues? Or have you just got to have a certain amount? Do you need to have a rough idea about how much you drinking when you do have that drinking time?

Dr. John Jaquish: So I definitely break the fast before the workout. So start rehydrating. But I’ve also done on multiple occasions, five days, no food, no water. And there’s studies on this also and they show no adverse events at all. The people came out of the study so much healthier than they came into the study

Matthew Januszek: Now. But that’s a tough,

Dr. John Jaquish: Honestly, it’s not as tough as you think. I’ve done food the first, first time you do it, you think, I hope I don’t die.

Matthew Januszek: And I didn’t do it without, I just had water and coffee and that was when I got, I remember when I got to three, three and a half days, I was like, this is hard. I think they said it does get easier when you get to four and five, but I didn’t want to try that.

Dr. John Jaquish: So it depends on what you’re looking for and why you’re doing it. For me, it was more like just testing the seals, just seeing what my body could handle. I had two pieces of clinical evidence that had amazing outcomes. I didn’t seem very unlike the 20 people studied. So okay, we’ll give it a shot. Huge fan. If I were to, I’m sure this will happen at some point in the near future, I’ll have to cut for a photo shoot. I’ll probably just go five days, no food, no water. Once you rehydrate after that, you look amazing. Yeah, it is such an amazing effect. Also, I feel like dieting via calorie restriction, well, I don’t feel like this is what research tells us. You lose some muscle when this happens. Some people lose quite a bit of muscle with fasting. You don’t lose any. At least that’s not been the experience that I’ve had or any of the studies that I’ve read. Now there is one study that talks about fasting and muscle loss, but the fasting group ate 600 calories a day. I don’t know why they called it a fasting study. Yeah. So yeah, that’s the one that the sort of fasting haters say like, will these people fast? And they lost muscle. No one fasted. It was like a calorie restriction group and a super calorie restriction group. So I don’t know why that study was even written.

Matthew Januszek: What do you think about time restricted eating then in comparison to what you are doing where for those who have listening, you’re just having a small window to eat? I do 16 eight and I get on quite well with it to be honest. My next step is to do what you are doing, which I think is a bigger jump for me. But what do you think is time restricted eating any good or not? Or what are your thoughts

Dr. John Jaquish: On that? Absolutely, yeah, it is easier to skip a meal than eat a small meal and then be pissed off because you’re hungry. Especially if you’re going to have carbohydrates in that meal, you’re going to have any carbohydrates in that meal. It’s going to turn your lizard brain on and you’re going to want more of that because it’s a survival mechanism. You have fructose and your body’s like, oh, this is rare in nature fructose at least it’s supposed to be. So you’re told by your brain through just hunger hormones and the manipulation of those that your body does, you need to eat as much of that as possible. And so that’s why when you go to the party and you say, I’m just going to have one piece of pizza, and then you realize you ate an entire pizza, that’s why. Or I’m just going to have one potato chip, then you realize you spent the last 10 minutes just hovering over the bowl, one after the other, after the other. That’s how that happens. And so being low carbohydrate helps, being aware of what I just said really helps because sometimes you have two chips or something like that and your peripheral vision sees your hand moving towards the bowl and you’re like, wait a minute, what am I doing here? Yeah, because an automatic thing your brain’s telling you eat as much of that as possible. And you got to say, no, no, I’m not going to.

Matthew Januszek: What do you think about meat? Well, I know what you think about meat, but there’s a lot of people with views on meat. It was funny as I was researching this, I got this email through from this company after knowing your views on it, and it was quite funny, but it was quite a reputable company and they referenced a bunch of research, but it was basically talking about animal protein. It was on WebMD and they were references to some research, but they said a study over a hundred thousand people has shown that eating unprocessed and red meat has been linked to a shorter lifespan. Eating one additional serving of unprocessed red meat each day increases your risk of death by 13%. Eating one additional serving of processed red meat increases your risk of death by 20%. There’s a ton of things out there about why meat is bad.

Dr. John Jaquish: Those are old studies and they’ve all been disproven.

Matthew Januszek: And I know when we go back to research, I heard you talking about this meat and cancer research, which was a dubious one, but it still seems to be what’s kicking around. So where do we sit on this meat and cancer and colon cancer? What’s the

Dr. John Jaquish: Latest on that? The studies on process and unprocessed meat, the processed meat study. I know the specifics of that one. And so they looked at colorectal cancer and the likelihood of getting that in regards to how much meat you eat. So what they did was this is all survey based. So already that’s a huge problem because sometimes people answer surveys in the way they would prefer to be viewed by the researcher, not what actually is. So whatever that bias may be, and however people answer those questions, nobody really knows. However, they found people who, and by the way, this was the study was published in the nineties, so I think some of the data was perhaps gathered in the late eighties. So think about who was eating predominantly vegetables in the late eighties. Healthy people who worked out, who got a great night of sleep, who didn’t abuse drugs, who didn’t smoke, who didn’t drink too much. They found a thousand people to be the test group in this study who not only ate meat every day, seven days a week, nitrate meat. So you can’t even get nitrate meat in the United Kingdom. So that’s just a US thing.

Matthew Januszek: And what is that?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s like an Oscar Meyer hot dog, like a gas station hot dog. So preservatives, nitrates are used to keep the meat from spoiling. Somebody ate a gas station hot dog. Actually a thousand people ate gas station hot dogs every day for I believe 20 years now. If you ate a gas, if you ate a meal at a gas station more than maybe three or four times a year, I question your desire to even want to live. Right. So they didn’t control for other variables like hard drug use, smoking or alcohol. Well, is it probably safe to say that the people that ate the gas station, hot dogs might’ve been cigarette smokers, probably higher chance that they were cigarette smokers, probably. Were they drinking more alcohol? No doubt I would have to be drunk to eat at a gas station. Every gas station I’ve ever eaten at, I was hardly able to stand. I was so drunk not many times.

Matthew Januszek: So generally that type of meat was sold in places like gas

Dr. John Jaquish: Station? Yeah, they left all lifestyle variables out. They’re just like, if you ate meat, what is your health outcome look like? And this was before anybody had said that meat was actually good for you. So this is back when all the anti meat propaganda had started. So I see this as just a massive fraud on first the US population and the world population. And I know why. The reason why is because meat’s expensive and the government, who the US government now pays in some way, 76% of the population between different social programs, welfare. And though it works very differently, social security. So if you’re on social security, your budget is determined by the government mostly. I do realize people on social security do have savings, or at least they should, but a lot of ’em also don’t. So if your budget is determined by the federal government, they’re only giving you $2 a day to eat Oreo cookies and then telling you Oreo cookies are healthy, would they rather give you $20 a day because you’d be healthier by eating meat? Well, it doesn’t really matter because they can’t afford it and no world government can afford it. So this is going to be a thing that’s going to go on forever. There’s going to be all sorts of research fraud and medical dishonesty around meat consumption because nobody wants to admit that that’s the healthy thing we eat. And everything else is shades of well we don’t really know or not healthy. The most eye-opening book on the subject is Toxic Super Foods by Sally Norton. You should probably interview her. Mind blowing. When you look at the fact that we’re well aware that the number one physiological factor in the initial diagnosis of cancer is inflammation. You read that all over the place. Vegetables give us a low grade poison called oxalates. Lectins in some other plants. But oxalates and lectins are in every plant basically. It’s a low grade poison. So you eat some of it and then you don’t feel good and then you move on. A deer is 30,000 times more resistant to oxalates than humans are. So when you look at the effects that different plants are causing through the lens of Sally Norton where she writes this book, you really got to question, why the hell are we eating plants? This is not what we’re supposed to be doing. And here’s something anecdotal, but everybody can relate to try and give a little kid sprouts. They will want to fight you to the death. They hate that shit. And it might be because their instincts are telling them, don’t eat it. This crap is poison.

Matthew Januszek: Interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: And coincidentally, the highest concentration of oxalates, brussel sprouts.

Matthew Januszek: Yeah. I never used to eat them until they started covering them in bacon and Right,

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. And then you’re only eating ’em because of the taste of the bacon. You could just eat bacon,

Matthew Januszek: Right? Yeah. Are there any kind of examples where that wouldn’t, I guess countries, well, I suppose you have places where they fish, where they have meat, I suppose going back hundreds and hundreds of years, were there many places that had to live off plants or was it all meat and fish based?

Dr. John Jaquish: The best study from an anthropological perspective I’ve seen was done at Harvard and they said for about 2 million years we have been the apex predator. We have eaten exclusively meat, with the exception of carbohydrate consumption. That consists of an average of four ounces per year. So that’s maybe two apples in a year that people would eat because hey fructose, there’s nothing on earth. So fruit is a little different. There’s not a lot that’s poisoning us in fruit other than the fructose itself. But fructose is not poisonous to humans. There’s nothing that contains fructose that is poisonous to humans. So your biochemistry wants that, but it’s supposed to be rare. There’s a great book I’m not thinking about, but I think about, it was part of required reading in US high schools, but it was about this ellucian female, this young girl, Eskimo kind of tribe. And the high point of her year was when she could get an orange because they couldn’t chrome in Alaska, but a certain time of year, and I think this was written in maybe the 18 hundreds or maybe early 19 hundreds where she would wait at the dock for this boat. And this was written back then. So you’re sorry. And she just couldn’t wait to get that orange. But that was it. That was all she had the whole year. And probably the only sweet thing she ever ate in her whole life. She probably ended up dying, never having a piece of candy or anything like that. No idea what that is. But it’s interesting because these things up until recently were rare. There weren’t fruit trees everywhere. And if there were animals, we’d eat it. Animals that are design, eat that. So we never got ahold of carbohydrates. Like vegans will say, oh, there’s vegetables everywhere, really? Lemme take you to the Yosemite Forest. Go ahead, eat off the forest floor. I’ll be having a steak at the Wanni Hotel. There’s nothing edible out there. You die.

Matthew Januszek: Where do you get with just the steak though? Are you missing any vitamins? You mentioned orange, vitamin C. Are you sort of getting that? Are you having some fruit with your

Dr. John Jaquish: Vitamin C is an antioxidant. Why would I need an antioxidant if I’m not oxidizing? So why would you be oxidizing? Because you’re eating oxalates, because you’re eating sugar because you’re eating vegetables. That’s why you need vitamin C. But if you’re not eating any of that other stuff, do you need any vitamin C? I don’t think I’ve had any vitamin C in my body for maybe 10 years. I don’t have a scurvy.

Matthew Januszek: You’ve also got your own protein. How does that fit into your philosophy then? And is that more of a substitute if you are traveling and you can’t get your two pound of meat or something different?

Dr. John Jaquish: A little bit of that, but also just to make sure the bases are covered. So ironically it’s vegan protein. It’s vegan.

Matthew Januszek: Well,

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not made of vegetables actually. It’s made from vegetables, but it’s really bacteria and bacteria And bacterial fermentation is something we used to consume because food started a rot and we ate it anyway. Now because food rotting is not delicious nor healthy. We don’t do that any longer. But that’s only the last maybe 120 years before that, people ate rotten stuff all the time. In fact, there used to be, at least when I was little kid, there was a way they would a quail in France. My mother’s from Belgium, so I spent a lot of time in France and they would let it sort of sit at room temperature until the quail would start to bloat. It was actually rotting. And then they would sort of cook it in some way on the outside, but you’re basically eating, it’s rotting. And that’s the way it was served. And that gave it a very unique taste. And I didn’t even dislike it. I was just like, oh man, it’s quail. It’s so rotten. Okay, you go to find restaurants and find that there. So now where do we get fermented stuff? Hardly anywhere. Maybe if you eat kimchi or sauerkraut, but that’s pretty rare. You don’t find kimchi and sauerkraut everywhere. And the amino acid profile of rotting stuff can be, not always, can be very advantageous for us to consume the perfect balance of amino acids. And that’s what Forti gen is.

Matthew Januszek: And does that work with people that have, because I was going to ask you about that. I know some people can’t have proteins that have got lactose or whey or whatever. So how does this work for someone that has just developed some sort of digestive issues? Does that work with ’em? Because it is a plant-based one, then don’t

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh no, it doesn’t bother them at all. Right. Yeah, it’s very easy to digest. In fact, it digests very quickly, about 23 minutes. The time you ingest it, it’s fully through your system and the amino acids are ready for anabolic action.

Matthew Januszek: And does that, do you just have a scoop of, in normal protein you just put 20 or 30 grams in as normal?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, it’s 10 grams per scoop, but it becomes 50 grams of protein because it’s just the essential amino acids. So you put the essentials in your body and then your body will repurpose or manufacture the rest of the amino acids to make the complete human protein. So it stimulates autophagy because you recycling cells.

Matthew Januszek: I’ll have, I know when we met last time you mentioned it and great,

Dr. John Jaquish: Great product.

Matthew Januszek: Where do you find it? Where do you buy it?

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, just Jake Wish biomedical my website or forti gen.com. F-O-R-T-A-G-E-N.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. Yeah. Well, I’ve got my last question because we’ve gone way over time, but I wanted to talk about your new testosterone replacement company, primal

Dr. John Jaquish: Medical

Matthew Januszek: Group, primal Medical. Tell us

Dr. John Jaquish: A little bit about that. So Primal Medical Group, it’s actually a general practitioner company. So many people came to me and it was like, oh, my doctor’s telling me to be vegan, but I know that’s not good, but I’m not doing the same research you are. So I don’t really have the confidence to just tell my doctor, no, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. And that’s probably a good idea. You got to work with your doctor. He’s in charge of your health. Don’t tell me he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Even if he tells you something is wrong, just go. Okay. And so somebody was like, God, I wish I had a doctor that understood prioritizing protein and exercise and growing muscle and testosterone. And so I heard this from 500 people and I was like, okay, it’s time to take some action here. So it’s a general practitioner company. We also do hormone replacement therapy, but a breakthrough is upon us. Testosterone is about to change very much, and it was very, very fortuitous. I was running an experiment where I was looking at so many problems with standard testosterone replacement therapy. So most people take an injection of testosterone once a week or they split it. So they take two injections per week. The problem is your testosterone is high for multiple days and then it’s low for multiple days. You’re never supposed to have high testosterone. When you go to bed, your testosterone starts climbing. When you wake up, it peaks. If you wake up at eight o’clock, it peaks at around noon and then drops off sharply. So now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to be in your system all the time. It needs to attach to the receptors that were stimulated by exercise or doing all the other things. It does helping all kinds of other organs function. Now you have to think that testosterone, because it exists on circadian rhythm, meaning a day, sun up, sun down, basically. It really has nothing to do with the sun. It has to do with when you’re up and moving around and when you’re asleep. So the negative side effects of testosterone, or even people who use way more than they’re supposed to and take unhealthy dosages, which what we call steroid users, the problems that they run into really have to do, not so much with dosage. It has to do with the time. So I was like, well,

Matthew Januszek: Okay, but the time of the day they take it,

Dr. John Jaquish: You mean not the time of the day They take it, the time of the day, it’s up. It should only be up at the beginning of the day. It does its job at the beginning of the day, then it goes down and you’re fine. You have all the positives without any of the negatives when it goes down at night. And that’s the natural circadian rhythm. So what I started doing was I switched from testosterone in Anate recipient eight, which is normal. It’s the ester that’s attached to testosterone and how long it lasts. So that’ll last about a week in the body. That’s an injectable. That’s an injectable, right. And that’s really, the creams are like a thing for testosterone, but they don’t work very well. Also, they tend to rub off on your partner, and if your partner starts growing like beard hair, she’s going to be upset. And there’s a lot of stories about that. So the injections, it’s just the administration, the up and down. I don’t want to call it regulation because it’s not regulated. It’s exogenous. You’re introducing it to the body. It’s inappropriate, which is why our sex binding globulin, sex hormone binding globulin, SHBG goes up. It’s not because of any certain dose of testosterone, it’s because it’s high when it’s not supposed to be high, which is at night. So your body comes up with this binding globulin to basically, here’s the testosterone, the binding globulin grabs a hold of the testosterone and makes it inert. So people get on TRT and it only benefits ‘EM for about the first two months and their SHBG goes up and it stops benefiting them. So what we need is to up and down regulate the exogenous introductions on a daily basis. So what I did was I’ve been on TRT since I was 28 years old. I had a bad testicular injury in rugby when I was in just after I played a little bit after university. So I decided, okay, I’m going to not do these two esters I’ve been doing. I’m going to find some testosterone suspension, which is no estro attached. So just raw testosterone and I’m going to take it in very small quantities daily. So small injections, most people can’t even find testosterone suspension. You’d have to know somebody who owns a compounding pharmacy. So I was doing 10 milligrams per day. So I went from a normal dosage is like 150 milligrams per week and people take that in one shot. I was doing 10 milligrams per day, so I cut it more than half. So I went to 70 milligrams a week. By doing it once per day, everything started growing again. Everything started functioning better. And I was like, wow, this is interesting, but it’s not very useful. No one’s going to take an injection every day. It was interesting for the experiment, but wow, that’s a really tough sell. And it was totally fortuitous that primal came together. I was running this experiment and then a couple of companies introduced oral testosterone, which was, it’s testosterone, unuc, canna weight, which is different, Esther, which behaves very differently when injected, but when you take it orally, it doesn’t damage the liver. A percentage of it gets into the system and it’s only for a couple hours. So it’s phenomenal. So now through Primal Primal Medical Group, we have oral testosterone. So it’s the type of TRT which never stops working. So you start gaining muscle in the first two months and forever more. So I’ve actually now been getting better responses than I’ve ever seen because I’ve been on TRT since I was 28 and now it’s like I just started.

Matthew Januszek: How long have you been taking this new form?

Dr. John Jaquish: About six months. Well, eight months with the suspension injections, and then I switched to the oral.

Matthew Januszek: What about, I know people have concerns with cancers particularly about prostate and how testosterone can actually, well, there’s a few different things I’ve heard about it, but I know if you do have prostate issues, then they basically reduce your testosterone or get rid of it as much as possible. But I’ve got a friend locally who got very serious, almost died with it, and my father and this guy here was talking about, well actually maybe that isn’t the case. Maybe it’s not the testosterone that’s doing. I dunno if you know anything about that

Dr. John Jaquish: At all. Absolutely, yeah. That’s one of the biggest questions that people ask. There has never been a study that connected testosterone and prostate problems. It was a concern because testosterone can convert to estrogen. And one of the other byproducts of that process is dihydro testosterone, D-H-T-D-H-T attacks, your hair follicles we’re both lucky enough to have that gene and can also attach to the prostate causing prostate problems. Turns out that while the suspicion was worth looking at, it’s been looked at and it’s not a thing.

Matthew Januszek: They still reduce it though, don’t they? If you go to doctors now,

Dr. John Jaquish: They don’t need to, but doctors do a lot of things they don’t need to do. They still prescribe statins. Entire premise of statin drugs has been defeated yet they still do it.

Matthew Januszek: And what do you know with this being a new drug or well, is it a new drug? The question I was going to ask is what do you see as being any long-term potential downsides of it? Sounds great, but is it brand new and there’s not a lot of testing been done on it or has there

Dr. John Jaquish: No, there’s a lot of testing that’s been done. They’ve been running trials for years before bringing this to market. So the companies that did this, they went through the right channels with the FDA, because ultimately it’s testosterone, it’s a controlled substance. There’s going to be a lot of questions. They answered all the questions upfront there. So a lot of the side effects that are traditionally associated with TRT are non-existent with this protocol because there’s no upregulation of dihydrotestosterone, estrogen, no SHBG. So the only side effect that traditionally was seen with testosterone replacement therapy and also is associated with the oral version is if you have high blood pressure, it’ll make your blood pressure even higher. So now somebody with high blood pressure, they can solve that problem in two weeks by stopping carbohydrates. But will they? So once the patient does that, then they’re qualified, provided they have a low enough testosterone level that they need it. This is all based on need. Nobody just gets that prescription because they want it. In fact, there’s nothing beneficial about replacing something that doesn’t need to be replaced.

Matthew Januszek: How do you know then, I guess for people listening to this, it’s like, okay, well I’m going to go out and get that done, but do you want to do it? How do you know whether you are ready for it or you should do it or not?

Dr. John Jaquish: Lack of libido, lack of energy, lack of focus, loss of strength now, because the western diet is the way it is, and especially with a lot of soy-based preservatives, almost every male over the age of 30 has very low testosterone and it tends to go down by generation. I don’t think there’s anything atmospherically, wrong or wrong with the way that we’re reproducing. A lot of people have suggested some really crazy ideas. I think we just eat garbage. That’s the problem. And that’s in a way going to be fixed. I think part of the reason I’m connected with Robert Kennedy and I did that interview, is he’s very concerned with our food. He knows that a lot of diseases are on a sharp rise, and there’s only one explanation. Processed foods, preservatives, chemicals that are going in our foods that we need to just get out of our diets, but it doesn’t matter. We’re going to need testosterone replacement therapy because the damage has already been done to most of us. So I think this option is so much better. No needles. You can travel with ease traveling on testosterone replacement therapy. I don’t dunno if you know anybody who has to deal with that, but you have no idea. When you land in Dubai and you have needles with you, you’re having a three hour conversation with the immigration people because it doesn’t matter what you say, they don’t really want to believe you and they’re not incentivized to be helpful. So yeah, I hated traveling with that stuff. Now it’s pills and the prescription’s right on the bottle, and they’re like, okay, here you go.

Matthew Januszek: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a very interesting conversation. John.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, one thing I want to add for the people interested in the test, oral testosterone primal medical.net.

Matthew Januszek: Okay. Yeah. And we’ll put that in the emails and on the notes as well, so people can see that. But yeah, you’ve been a busy guy. I appreciate the updates and looking forward to going to have some two pound of steak now. I think that’s right. Awesome. Thank you very much.

Dr. John Jaquish: Appreciate it. Thanks.

Matthew Januszek: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you’ve got any value from it whatsoever, then please do us a favor, like, subscribe, tell somebody, and that will help us to be able to continue to do more of these and help you escape your own personal limits. Thanks for listening.