August 6, 2018

Introduction to the X3 12-week program

This is your introduction to X3 and to the 12-week program. I realize some of you won’t watch all of the videos, and there are individual exercise videos, but I want you to watch this intro to tell you what’s really in there.

Also take notice of my fitness, what I look like. I’m a lot thinner, a lot leaner, and a lot bigger then I was when I started. So when you watch this video, I’m filming this after the fact. And then you watch the first, I’m never gonna redo that video, by the way, because you can see week-by-week I’m losing body fat. I’m gaining muscle, my face looks leaner, everything on me looks leaner and that’s the expected objective, expected effect of X3.

What Are Your Goals?

Now, I’m gonna start by addressing some of the questions that we get on a regular basis. So everyone’s goals are different. Some people really wanna be lean and they don’t wanna be bulky. A lot more males say, “I wanna be bulky.” Even some females say, “I wanna put on some serious size with this.” Obviously, women and men have different endocrinology, different hormones.

So if you use X3 and you’re female, you aren’t gonna look like me with a wig, thankfully. Though, if you do wanna look like me with a wig, you’re gonna have to eat for it. So bulky muscle comes with consuming large volumes of food, and I address that in the nutrition videos in that part of the program. You gotta eat big to get big. And women, you don’t have anything to worry about. Now, if your goal is to be fatter, then X3 is probably not for you.

Recruiting the Body’s Stabilizers

As people move through a range of motion with the X3 bar, as you push away from yourself just mimicking like a chest press motion, your hands are kinda shivering. That’s because you’re dealing with a much larger weight at extension than you are when you’re in the weaker range of motion.

So you see the shivering through all ranges of motion through all the exercises. This means stabilizers are recruited, especially when handling very high levels of weight, which X3 exercise bar system allows for, way beyond what you’d handle in regular weights and in more repetitions.

Why You Get Leaner and Recover Faster With X3 Bar

So in the meta-analysis, which was published last summer, it shows that people, as they recruit more stabilization firing, they dramatically increase the level of growth hormone that they have in their body. They’re also increasing it at the same time they’re opening up receptor sites.

So this isn’t like some supplement that just raises your growth hormone level and then your growth hormone goes to your intestines and makes your intestines bigger, nobody wants that.

This is up-regulation while also up-regulating the receptors in the body. So you get leaner, you recover muscle much faster, it’s much more natural. Stabilization firing and functional movement go hand in hand. So you’re gonna get great results.

We have one guy, David Fish, who took pre- and post-DEXA scans, so full X-ray body composition changes, which showed he lost 17 pounds body fat and gained eight pounds of muscle in the 12 week program, and he’s 55 years old. So total transformation in 12 weeks. All he added was the X3. He was already lifting weights beforehand, for years by the way.

How Do You Use the X3 Bar?

So connecting the band to the bar, this is how that works. It’s a hook, you hook the band on, hook it onto the other side. Now, some exercises like the chest press, the band is doubled up, so it’s more of a shorter stroke. So this goes around your back like this.

This is how you put it on for the chest press, by the way. Now, push away from yourself. So that’s how you do it for the chest press. But for like a bicep curl, which you probably wouldn’t be using this type of band, it’s singled. And then it goes with the ground plate on top of it. So you’re pulling it like a longer stroke. So two different ways to set up each band depending on the exercise.

Picking the Right Band

Now, how do you pick the right band? Very common question. You wanna shoot for 15 to 40 repetitions. I know that seems like a lot, but don’t compare this to regular weight training. Remember, in that stronger range, in a bicep curl when you’re right here, you’re holding maybe triple the weight that you are in the lower range of motion. So you’re using more weight where you have more power available.

Remember, you’re seven times stronger in your stronger range than your weaker range. So you actually will fatigue that strong range of motion with a higher weight than you would normally ever use, and at more repetitions. So that’s the way you wanna handle it, 15 to 40 repetitions.

If you can’t do 15 repetitions, you might wanna go down a band. If you can do close to 40 or 40 repetitions, then go for the heavy one.

So your height is also an issue. Ultimately, the taller you are, you end up picking a lighter band because as you go to further extension, you still get the higher weight.

We tell people not to get too wrapped up in weight, though there are weight ratings on this, on each one of the bands. Don’t get too wrapped up in it, because most of those weight ratings are applied via six foot tall individuals (me), standing on a measurement device, stretching the band, and calculating what those are for myself. But people are different heights.

So like, for example, somebody may use this in a chest press. They may have somebody they work out with who’s not as strong and a foot shorter, and they may use the same band and the same amount of repetitions. Doesn’t mean it’s the same weight. So don’t get too wrapped up in that, but we have people that are under five feet tall, 4'11. Some people use the bands with great proficiency.

I got an email just the other day from the head strength conditioning coach of an NBA team. He said he just put somebody through an X3 session who had a 7'1 wingspan. The guy just used lighter bands than some of the other shorter guys with a little shorter extremities. It went absolutely perfect, and the guy was completely exhausted. So that’s how you pick the right band.

When you’re doing this, if you’re a little bit shorter, you may have a little less of a range of motion. So you’re going halfway to full extension, and repeating that.

Objective: Fatiguing a Strong Range of Motion

Remember, fatiguing a strong range of motion is the objective. That’s where you have the most muscle working for you. So if you don’t get as much of the weak range in one particular movement because you have shorter arms, or something like that, it doesn’t matter. You’re still gonna get tremendous benefit over standard training with this.

Speed Is Slow and Controlled

Now for speed, pay very close attention. If you watch any of the programming, you’ll see I’m moving really slow and with controlled repetitions. You also see the slower I go, the more shivering there is. That is recruiting stabilization firing which up-regulates growth hormone.

Sometimes I see videos of people who tag us online, hey, I just did my X3 session, and you see them throwing the bar back and forth – you’re not getting stabilization firing. It’s not the experience you want.

Yes, there’s an argument that is fast twitch vs slow twitch—that is mostly a myth. There is published academic research showing that when you do conventional resistance training, or the type of thing we’re doing, you’re really recruiting everything. So that other stuff is just fake news. Don’t pay any attention to slow twitch vs fast twitch argument.

Can You Do More Than One Set?

So I mention frequently in the 12 Week Program that I recommend one set: just one set to complete fatigue. I’ll talk fatigue in a second, but the reason we talk about one set is you really stimulate the body one time.

My research background started with bone density. What we know about bone density is you need one loading cycle of the appropriate level, at minimum, to trigger bone growth. Muscle is the same.

The reason people do set after set is because when you lift weights, you’re really just training your weak range. Where you have discomfort in joints, which is shutting the muscle off (called neural inhibition), you’ve only got the smallest amount of muscle firing in the weak range of motion. So it’s really just a lousy stimulus. Hence people do set after set after set, compromise joints. And the stronger you get, the harder it is on joints, and thereby people end up getting to plateaus and unable to grow.

Because of the drastic variance in resistance that we have with X3, we don’t have to worry about any of that. We’re getting a deeper level of fatigue in one experience. The greatest results we’ve seen are with the people who are doing just one set to absolute fatigue.

What Do You Mean by Fatigue?

So, I don’t like the word failure. Because we talk about muscular failure, failure makes it seem like it’s wrong. With fatigue, there are interchangeable words, you wanna go to a point where you can’t go anymore.

With regular weightlifting you fatigue in a weaker range of motion, hence we call it the weaker range of motion. With X3, we fatigue in all ranges of motion.

So what it looks like is: you do your repetitions with your chest press, or whatever it is, and eventually you can’t get to the top. So then you do half repetitions; you don’t just arbitrarily go to half repetitions. It’s done when you cannot get to the top. Then you start doing the halfway ones.

Then when you cannot do that, you get one or two that are very weaker range repetitions. You’ve exhausted most of the muscle, yet the joint is not being compromised at that point, so you’re completely fatiguing. But you want to keep going until the reps get short, to the point where you cannot move anymore.

You need one experience of that, and you’ll have the most massive growth trigger you’ve ever experienced.

Can You Do Cardio, Too?

Now, I wear a t-shirt in some of the videos that says no weights, no cardio, just X3. Now that’s what I do, that’s what a lot of our fans do, but that has to do with the typical goal of most of the X3 fans, which is to be lean and strong. Be as lean and as strong as possible, that’s my goal.

So cardiovascular exercise is fantastic if you want to be a great distance runner or a long-distance swimmer, or be able to sustain a certain level of exercise for a long period of time. If you like doing 20 mile hikes in the mountains, you gotta train to do that: very specific adaptations with lungs and heart and everything like that.

Now you get a huge cardiovascular benefit from strength training. So they’re almost the same, and there’s a lot of research on cardiovascular health. So for the heart and lungs, resistance training is great too, so we’re covering that. So no one’s against cardiovascular exercise.

Understanding Cardio and Cortisol

But if you want to be lean, you need to know this. Cardiovascular exercise up-regulates cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that happens naturally in your body. One of cortisol’s objectives is to protect body fat, as in keep you fatter longer, which makes sense because it’s a storage system. So you wanna store more energy for a longer period of time if you’re a cardiovascular athlete.

So doing cardio is no gateway to being lean. This, however, is because we’re dealing with growth hormone up-regulation. So again, we’re not against cardiovascular exercise, but if your goal is to be strong and lean, you don’t necessarily need it.

I think that covers just about everything with the introduction. Please watch the 12 Week Program. I know it takes a lot of time. You can watch maybe a couple of weeks at the same time in one run. And you’ll get probably tired of my voice, which I’m okay with. But ultimately there’s a lot of great information in there and some nuances that are beyond what we talked about in this intro video. Thanks.

Optimize Your Health Through Science

Sign up for our newsletter to get a regular dose of science-backed tips, tricks, biohacks, and more.

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy & to receive emails/texts with updates.

Comments