October 11, 2018

The Story Behind X3

Typically, when you see a muscular guy promoting a fitness product, they’re just a model who has been hired to read a script.

Or maybe someone who is already in excellent physical condition decides to monetize their fitness. They white label a supplement or start selling some weight training equipment, because they realize they can be their own advertisement. Through hard work and grueling hours at the gym, they built an aesthetic and now they want to leverage it to sell some arbitrary product.

The situation with Dr. Jaquish is a little bit different.

Who Is Dr. John Jaquish?

Dr. Jaquish isn’t being paid by someone else to rep X3 bar. And Dr. Jaquish didn’t have his physique prior to inventing X3 bar.

Rather, he is able to represent X3 bar precisely because of the benefits that he personally received from his own use of X3 bar.

The story here isn’t about a man who had endless time to spend at the gym, or who had some natural aptitude for building muscle. This is about American ingenuity and invention.

Dr. Jaquish wasn’t pleased with the minimal returns he saw from working out for long periods of time with conventional strength training equipment. And as a medical device engineer it seemed odd to him that weight lifting options haven’t really changed in 50 years, despite lots of new scientific findings.

The Scientific Quest for Efficiency With Results

When he looked at existing literature, Dr. Jaquish became convinced that the key to exercise that is faster and more effective than weight lifting would be variable resistance.

That is, the amount of force the exercise device applies to muscles must change as you move through the workout. In fact, it should change a lot. A 7X difference between the lowest force applied to the muscle and the highest force applied to the muscle appears about optimal.

Upon consideration of the challenge, it seemed that band training could have been the solution. As you stretch a band, the force can go from 1X to 7X or more. At this point, Dr. Jaquish was already imagining that he would write a book about band training as an alternative to weight lifting. But when he finally found bands that offered the right amount of elasticity, force production, and resistance to snapping, he also found that they were totally unusable.

Dr. Jaquish tried to perform exercises by gripping the bands directly or standing on them, but when the bands were this powerful, he got injuries rather than gains. Lighter weight bands weren’t an option, because they provided far less muscular stimulus even than weight lifting, which Dr. Jaquish hoped to improve upon.

Discovering and Prototyping the X3 Bar Design

Then it dawned on him. You wouldn’t perform a bench press by grabbing a handful of plates and lying on the ground. Just like regular iron plates need a bench and barbells to be useful for regular weight lifting, the ultra-heavy bands were useless without supporting equipment.

Fortunately for him, Dr. Jaquish already directed a medical device company. He brought the problem to the biomedical engineers and within weeks the needed resistance band bar assembly and ground plate had been designed and a prototype was built.

After using that prototype for a year, Dr. Jaquish had gained 30lbs of muscle and decreased his body fat percentage. A level of improvement that had never been possible in the years he previously spent weight lifting.

Having seen such great benefits personally, Dr. Jaquish decided to diverge slightly from his area of expertise in the medical field, and bring this invention to market himself as the product X3 Bar variable resistance system.

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