In this podcast, Dr. John Jaquish discusses variable resistance training, nutrition, motivation, and the cultural shifts in the US that are impeding individuals from maximizing themselves.
Full Transcript
Lucas Klein: Hey folks, welcome back to the Thinking Kind podcast. Today, I'm joined by Dr. John Jaquish, who is the founder of Jaquish Biomedical and the inventor of the X3 Fitness program which I use and we'll talk about today, as well as the Osteo Loading programs that he's invented, which are used and endorsed by such figures as Tony Robbins and others. Dr. Jaquish works with NFL teams and numerous professional athletes. He's very well known in the field.
Dr. John Jaquish: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm the inventor, the company is much larger. The company is Jaquish Biomedical and it has many products. And some we've talked about in the past, the bone density, medical devices, and then the X3 Bar as a fitness physical therapy type intervention.
Lucas Klein: And I'm interested in all those things. I came across your company, or at least the company you founded as well as some of the products a few months ago. And I thought it would be interesting to have you on. It's unorthodox for my podcast to venture into this direction. I'm usually talking about things, philosophical things, psychological, et cetera. But I am also a fitness enthusiast, have been for a long time in my life, really since age, I don't know when I hit puberty, I started working out, go figure. And the first workout machine that I used was one of those old weeder benches, multifunction benches. And my parents got that for me because they didn't want me to hurt myself with free weights. And they knew I was too young to be hoisting up free weights and I think they were quite wise.
Lucas Klein: But it was one of those old resistance band machines where you put extra bands on it, on different areas and different joints on the machine. None of it worked great, but it was my first introduction and I became very involved in free weights through college and throughout my twenties.
And the reason I wanted to have you on today, Dr. Jaquish, is because you invented X3 and you have been on the ground for a lot of interesting research regarding weightlifting and fitness devices that which you'll explain. And your invention of X3 Bar is the first product that I have been able to use that has been effective and that I've been able to sustain and that I've seen growth with. And I was so inspired by it that I wanted to reach out and see if you'd come on and talk with me and you were gracious enough to do so.
Lucas Klein: And I'll tell all the listeners here, I have no stock or any kind of secondary benefit in X3 Bar. This is just a random podcast that I'm having because I'm a fitness enthusiast. And I think at this time, everyone is looking for a way to reverse what happened during the pandemic and so tools like this are essential for everybody.
So tell us a bit about everything, yourself, X3 Bar, your fitness philosophies, and the science behind what you're trying to provide the American public, would you?
Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Yeah. I got started in life sciences because my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis and she felt like It was a very young diagnosis for her. And she read about the statistics in regards to fragility fracture. If you're over 50 and you have a hip fracture, you have a 50% chance of death within one year.
Lucas Klein: Mm.
Dr. John Jaquish: And you know, 50 is young. And I think a lot of people think osteoporosis, they think elderly, frail people. No, no, it's pretty much, most women get to the point where they have some risk factors after menopause. And then some men, especially with basically how weak our society has become, are physically weak. Men are having problems and more women are even having problems with it. So I wanted to address it without pharmaceuticals. So I told my mom, I think I have an idea, but I got to test a bunch of stuff first. I don't know how comforting I was back then. I was a student. So she shrugged her shoulders. And she said, "Well, anything you can find out would be great." And so I decided I was going to regenerate her bone mass with the emulation of high impact forces because that's how we built bone in the first place.
Dr. John Jaquish: Little kids are always getting high impact absorbed into bone mass. And so like you're in a house with little kids, a house with hardwood floors, and the little kids sound like elephants. They're just pounding their feet against the ground. And you look at him and you're thinking this kid weighs 50 pounds. He sounds like he weighs 500 when he is running down the hallway. Well, little kids welcome high impact. Their biomechanics are such that they get the highest impact through the most bone mass. And as we age and become physically larger, we cushion the impact. So like a little kid when they run, the heel strike, an adult when running, and I mean actual running, not jogging or just cardio, when you're sprinting your weight's always on the balls of your feet.
Dr. John Jaquish: Your heels never touch the ground. So I looked at where we build bone density in the first place and I thought if I can take the risk out of high impact and just get the benefit, well, I could solve this problem for everybody. And so that's what I did and created a series of medical devices that compressed bone in the positions one would normally absorb high impact. And by doing so it's very low risk and you can address bone loss provided it's the right candidate, so you have to have the right nutrients in your body after you have the right building blocks. 20 out of 20 studies on vegans show that vegans rapidly lose bone density and so you can't do it as a vegan, as a vegan you're just falling apart. I think veganism is going to go down in history like anorexia and bulimia. I'm serious. It's just such malnutrition.
Lucas Klein: We just lost about 0.1% of our listenership.
Dr. John Jaquish: I'm okay with it. Actually I help vegans all the time. I created a product, another product called Fortagen, which helps them get the essential amino acids that they cannot get from plants. But this is made with bacterial fermentation. So it still doesn't harm any animals, bacteria lives as full life and then it's byproduct is the essential amino acids. And so that can really help vegans gain muscle and build bone. But the problem is, the building blocks just aren't in vegetables.
Lucas Klein: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. John Jaquish: Like, no matter how much kicking and screaming vegans want to do, no matter how they keep screaming, meat is murder or whatever it's like, yeah, but you're dying of malnutrition if you don't have animal protein.
Lucas Klein: And we're also killing off a large swath of toilable soil in the world by doing mono crop, death to the planet.
Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, oh, how about this one? 7 billion animals are killed every year for the sake of vegetable farming.
Lucas Klein: Mm.
Dr. John Jaquish: And they're ground squirrels, they're gophers, birds are poisoned by the thousands when they fly into a cornfield, they have poison seeds in little cups above the stalks. So they eat those and then they rake them up the next morning, just piles and piles of dead birds. And here's the ultimate problem. I know we had a segue on veganism or logic of vegetables. Like any species that is growing is going to be taking resources, whether it be just plain real estate. I mean like literally acres or water or something, you're taking it away from something else.
Dr. John Jaquish: So if you have a population explosion of mice, well, the next year you have a population explosion of snakes because snakes eat the mice and all of a sudden there's an abundance of snakes. So it's like nature has a way of balancing itself out. But when it comes to people, those rules don't necessarily apply to us. And as long as we keep growing humanity, as long as we keep making more people, we're going to need more fields and destroy more habitats, we're going to need to kill more animals. And the idea, veganism is for the sake of saving animals, is just like living in California and driving an electric car and thinking you're doing something, because your electricity is probably coming from the coal burning power plant.
Lucas Klein: Which we only have because we've closed down almost all of our nuclear plants in California. And we want to rely on electrical-
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. We won't have nuclear here. And so we have coal. But because people don't see smoke coming out of their tailpipe, they think, aha, I'm saving the world. No. When you plug it in, you're still getting energy that was derived from a petroleum based product, whether it's coal shale or whatever-
Lucas Klein: Doctor, I said, I wouldn't take you down the political realm, but you are surely tempting me.
Dr. John Jaquish: But it's one of those things where out of sight out of mind. If I don't see anything coming out of my tailpipe, I must be saving the world and that's just pure ignorance. Now, if you live in France, you are actually making an impact because in France, 100% of electricity is nuclear.
Lucas Klein: Yeah. So one thing that comes to mind for me as you're describing this is that you're painting a context for some of the health problems that you've been trying to help the country remediate.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yep.
Lucas Klein: You know, and so you had mentioned earlier that really men are becoming much weaker and the stats, I'm only in a cursory way, familiar with these statistics, but from my recollection, they're rather stunning. Could you say a bit about the weakness in men that's growing.
Dr. John Jaquish: Well, men with each generation there's less and less testosterone. I think we have something like 35% less testosterone than the men in World War II. Now that will yield greater heart problems. I know there's probably some know nothing idiot that thinks less testosterone is a good thing. But I mean, shocking news, testosterone doesn't really make you aggressive at all. That's a myth. It's more like, it's your ability for your cardiac muscle to function correctly. Your heart's a muscle and when you have a testosterone deficiency-
Lucas Klein: And most people don't recognize that-
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You could have some serious cardiovascular problems when you're in your thirties. So yeah, that's a little bit being ignored, but it's a thing if you keep up on it. We're getting-
Lucas Klein: When it comes to the capacity for people to avoid metabolic syndrome, which then sprouts a host of, it's a botanical garden for other health problems. I mean, testosterone seems like it's maybe not the first factor, but at least a second or a third factor, wouldn't you say?
Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, it's the first factor for sure.
Lucas Klein: A first factor.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. Because if you can't gain muscle, it's hard to have an efficient metabolism as a man or a woman. And the problem is that the nutrition's so bad, we have so many nutritional choices that drive higher estrogen, which then can suppress testosterone. Like soy, men shouldn't eat anything with soy. There have been argument women should mainly, but it's just very damaging. And I think when we react to news about nutrition, it goes through the woke filter to determine should we care about this? Is this a problem? Or is this better? And I think men getting weaker is generally seen by the, I mean, never mind the fact it's going to make every man live a shorter life. The two greatest drivers of long life are being lean and being strong, which is uncontested in clinical literature.
Lucas Klein: That's so interesting because I've run into so many people who believe that the longevity key for men is mild muscle mass and leanness.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. There's just false. I mean, it's been disproven in pretty much every piece of research on the subject. But every once in a while, there's some self-appointed guru who is a male but weighs 90 pounds. And he says that and everybody's like, well, look at him. And yeah, well look at him, it's not a scientific analysis. There are NFL players that ended up in the Hall of Fame that were alcoholics in their entire career. They didn't get in the Hall of Fame because they drank a lot. They got in the Hall of Fame despite drinking a lot. So just because someone goes out and does something doesn't mean that's part of their success.
Lucas Klein: Yeah. People often confuse correlation with causation, of course. And you're putting your finger on that one-
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, especially when it comes to what they want politically or what they want emotionally, which really in the clown world where we live today, people's attitudes are really driven by their emotions. There's no intelligence towards any decision making. It's just beyond me what's happening. I tell people not to pay attention to politics because you can only do something about it when it's time to vote. So I actually just did put a video on Instagram where I told people, create something, do better at your job, work on self improvement. And when the election comes along, if you don't like what's been happening, you've got to let everybody know, who's part of that group, that they suck and they shouldn't be in office and vote for the other guy. I don't care who the other guy is.
Lucas Klein: I'm trying so hard not to jump head first into what-
Dr. John Jaquish: I'm sure the listeners are on the same page.
Lucas Klein: Who knows. Who knows.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, I can always say people are a product of their environment. A lot of people who end up on one side of politics or the other, lots to do with their parents, what their parents taught them. What their parents told them was true, whether that's true or not. It remains to be seen depending on what it is. But I think ultimately not a lot of people switch sides in their life. They tend to be on one side or the other. I really see the two sides as really optimistic opportunity takers versus a victimhood mentality.
Lucas Klein: So this really is germane to the major thrust of the conversation here, because you have produced a product, you've invented a product that requires immense momentary bursts of committed energy. And I mean, God, I used to weight lift so hard, 120-pound dumbbells and climb press all that kind of thing. I could still probably throw that kind of weight up. But with my age, I'm just about 40 here, which does real havoc on my rotator cuff and other things. And so when I found X3 Bar, I was skeptical. Resistance bands. And I'm like, no way. Okay. But then I started researching Jaquish Biomedical, and I look into the fact that you've been a professor. Are you still doing research in a professorial position?
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.
Lucas Klein: Okay. And which university are you associated with? Dr. John Jaquish: Rushmore university. I'm a research professor at Rushmore University.
Lucas Klein: At Rushmore. Okay. And so I started to look at some of the research that you had originated and produced behind this, and I decided to go for it. And my experience was A, it was the most intensive workout I'd ever had. Period. Going from, I'll let you describe how this works, but in summary, to proceed with your description, X3 Bar is a resistance band exercise plate and bar that is essentially an entire gym in a bag. And you can upgrade it with growth hormone stimulator plates, which I've done. And you've got a few other features that people can upgrade with. And there are multiple sizes of bands like four or five sizes of bands, depending on your strength level. You do one set to complete failure for each muscle group. And let me tell you anyone listening, if you have enough dedication and drive, if you've got enough ambition to master adversity in your life, this is an unbelievable tool. I'll tell you a few things that I've been interested in talking with you about.
Dr. John Jaquish: I like the way you worded that, by the way. You're right. It's the hardest workout of your life. It just only takes 10 minutes. And you will grow, you will see development, you will see your body changing from an average body, or let's say you're out of shape, from an out of shape body to an athlete's body very, very quickly, far quicker than with standard weights or standard fitness approaches.
Lucas Klein: I was skeptical, but I saw changes after two months. And I've got a weight lifter's body and core so I advanced may be quicker than many people, enhancing things that have been a to some extent subterranean for a little while. But I'll tell you what I noticed and I wanted to ask you about these things. I noticed that if I wasn't well hydrated, I knew instantly as soon as I started doing sets on X3 Bar. And unlike any other exercise, I was almost after rep 10, I was parched and needed to hydrate and I've never experienced anything like that with another workout regimen. It's unique to X3 Bar, at least for me, I can go on and do a set of barbell deadlifts, or cetera, et cetera, and go for a jog and if I'm not perfectly hydrated, maybe I noticed it a little bit, but with, with X3 Bar, it was like a fluid pump instantly. And I didn't know if that was something other people described to you.
Dr. John Jaquish: Oh Yeah. Definitely. People have noticed that. Yeah. I mean, you're demanding incredible forces go through the body and the body got to be ready for it.
Lucas Klein: Mm-hmm. Well, I'm glad to know it's not just me. I don't have some sort of sodium imbalance.
Dr. John Jaquish: No.
Lucas Klein: Now the other thing that I noticed is, you go into complete failure. And for all the folks listening, you know that this means until you cannot move, your muscles are quivering. You are at place zero. You can't go even to level 0.5 and then that's the failure for a muscle group for that one set. I don't tend to notice that I'm incredibly sore the next day like traditional weightlifting.
Dr. John Jaquish: No soreness is inversely related to growth.
Lucas Klein: Now that's a total reversal of what most people hold to be true.
Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely.
Lucas Klein: Can you explain to the audience why that is?
Dr. John Jaquish: Well, so I mean, most of what is in fitness didn't come from a sports performance research, came from some guy who was fit, who said something and put it in an article or a book. Old Schwarzenegger used to say, there's a certain type of exercise you can do which will stretch out your rib cage and make your pectorals and all upper body muscles larger because you're making your rib cage bigger. Now, that is so laughable. But when he said it back in the 1970s, I don't think there was enough research to refute it, and also bodybuilding was considered so weird and out there. Nobody said that's ludicrous and wrong. And I think we continued not calling the question so many of the things in standard fitness. The idea is that when you lift weights, you are tearing the muscle fibers, and then when you recover, you rebuild them stronger. That is not how it works at all. That is nonsensical.
Dr. John Jaquish: What happens is you fatigue the muscle cells and they are signaled to grow in one or two of two ways, either myofibril growth, meaning the density of the cell or sarcoplasmic growth, meaning the contractile fuel, which is held within the cell. X3 Bar stimulates both to the absolute highest degree. So when I come across these silly comments like tearing your muscle fibers, there's a lot of research on it. And it shows that if you have any muscular damage at all, the protein synthesis you go through repairs the damage and brings you right back to where you were.
Lucas Klein: Hmm.
Dr. John Jaquish: It's only when you're not sore. You know sometimes you do first workout after taking a long break from working out and everything's sore? It's really, that's just your body kind of like it took on some damage, because it wasn't accustomed to that. It's once you stop being sore. Now, because these foolish people were chasing soreness, this is where another stupid theory came from, muscle confusion theory. Meaning, and this is a direct quote from another point of just terrible, terrible science from Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he said, you have to shock the muscle into growing. So you need to always be changing your workout and giving it something different so it can respond. Oh God, it's nonsense. And there's a position stand paper done by the American College of Sports Medicine showing that if you stick to the same workout, month after month, year after year, you will grow much faster than if you change your workout all the time. So many of these things, which are maybe some of the most prolific, or at least in practice, prolific things that are said about fitness are all wrong.
Lucas Klein: The old adage, you've got to keep your body guessing, is nonsense.
Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yeah. It's like, sorry, physiology doesn't work that way. When your central nervous system decides to create growth in a muscle, it's not because your body's confused. It's quite the opposite. It's because your body notices a habitual environment that is challenging to survive in therefore changes are made, that's the whole process of adaptation. So consistent, challenging environments create adaptations. Just random haphazard environments trigger changes in nothing.
Lucas Klein: It follows a general principle in life, which extends beyond weight lifting, which is that consistency and practice lead to results.
Dr. John Jaquish: Right. You're not going to be a better musician if one day you play the violin, the next day you play a piano. The other day, you're on drums, electric guitar, it's on Thursday, you know what I mean?
Lucas Klein: Right.
Dr. John Jaquish: But if you just sit down at the piano, get a piano instructor, get a couple of books of music, learn how to read music. You can probably get good at that.
Lucas Klein: Okay. And you've compiled and originated research in this field. So for the listers to be reminded, you're coming at this from a scientific standpoint, these are not just opinions.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Every single thing I say is backed up by sometimes hundreds of references. And I wrote a bestselling book called Weightlifting Is A Waste Of Time. It's a Wall Street Journal bestseller. That's the bestseller list that actually has to do with book sales. The New York Times, you'll love this, the New York Times list is hand picked. So you'll notice-
Lucas Klein: It's political-
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It's political. Every book is on some sort of woke subject. And my publisher told me, "You're a white, straight male. You're not going to get on that list no matter how many books you sell."
Lucas Klein: Well, you know how your statement there is going to be spun, is that you're claiming oppression.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, of course. Society today is really the victimhood Olympics. It's just like, who can be justified in bitching and complaining the most. And whoever can claim that title or appoint themselves champion and feel comfortable about it, seems to win the day. And at some point it's... We've already changed back, I think, because certain people are being picked because of the status for certain jobs. And then, the White House Press Secretary, for example, she doesn't know what inflation is. She was asked a few different direct questions. Now, she's also a press secretary so she's reading off the talking points, but it's beyond concern. It's just like, what have we done? we have-
Lucas Klein: Again, this is germane to X3 Bar-
Dr. John Jaquish: We have entire white house staff that actually thinks that taxes will somehow fix inflation.
Lucas Klein: Let me add to that. I don't know if you remember the economist, Ocasio Cortez, Senator. When Amazon was planning to move to New York city and-
Dr. John Jaquish: Oh Right. Oh, that's a perfect example. I'm so glad you're bringing this up.
Lucas Klein: Yeah, and she has an undergraduate degree in Economics. And she said that they could take those revenues and put them elsewhere.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. She said, well, with the money that was, I think she said, with the Amazon money instead, we're going to invest it in parks.
Lucas Klein: The Amazon money doesn't exist without the capital investment.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. If Amazon doesn't move there, you don't have any money.
Lucas Klein: Right. Exactly.
Dr. John Jaquish: There is no money. What money are you talking about? It's Amazon's money and they're going to pay taxes if they're in New York. But if you tell them you don't want them in New York, because you're tired of greedy corporations being in New York, great New York can go back to being a slum and everybody can locate their company somewhere else.
Lucas Klein: Mm. So this, again, is I think you're painting a picture more of a credo, which is a taking of responsibility that is woven into taking control of your fitness.
Dr. John Jaquish: So fitness is a metaphor in life for your life. If you can control your body, you can control outcomes in your professional life and your personal life because it's a challenge. It requires willpower. It requires dedication. It requires paying attention. If you want all your abs to be visible, you can't just tune out for a day and eat potato chips. You just can't.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, no. It's okay. If you knew what was in potato chips, you wouldn't want to eat them anyway. I noticed that as people get fit, they tend to get promoted at work or their company let's say, or they start a company. It's the discipline, it gives you the mental focus. You can do anything if you can get in shape. And I think, now we're talking about the woke people, they're lost, souls. I don't think you can help most of them because they're so conditioned in making excuses. But for the rest of us, which is the vast majority, by the way, just because the woke people are the loudest doesn't mean they're the majority at all.
Dr. John Jaquish: Most people just want to live a happy life. And so if they're paying attention and we give them the right tools, the right information to get in shape, and you're going to see mental shifts all over the place towards entrepreneurship, towards just excelling. Yeah. Whatever happened to wanting to be better? It's almost like you're an asshole if you want to be better than everybody else or better than you were yesterday. But I miss the days when people would compete at work. Where are the salespeople that are all trying to break your record? And they're out there, but it's the environments that we've created, professionally and even in relationships that've become so challenging.
Lucas Klein: I'll tell you what comes to mind for me as you described this. I think there's truth in what you're saying, there's wisdom in it. Is there has been this cultural shift in this country where optimization and being the best you can have somehow been paired with shame? And...
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. Or greed, like you're greedy because you want to... If somebody asked me how much money would I need, have I felt... Where would I feel like I'm done, I can live the rest of my life how I want to live it and I can just walk away from everything. And I'm like, yeah, I've heard that question before and I don't know if I agree with the premise because the premise is based on the idea that you're supposed to get sick of being productive.
Lucas Klein: Hmm.
Dr. John Jaquish: Why is that a problem? We should want to be productive. Statistically, when you stop being productive in life, like when you get closer to retirement or you retired, a lot of people die because they have no purpose.
Lucas Klein: Right. That's true
Dr. John Jaquish: And they're retiring and two weeks later, they're found dead in a rocking chair on their porch. And I actually, I know a few of my dad's friends, that happened and they were really, my dad's a scientist and an engineer and he worked for NASA and did a bunch of awesome things. But he worked with a lot of guys whose work was the majority of their brain, and was dedicated to what they did, their engineering projects. My father was one of the guys that put the Lunar Rover on the moon and it worked. But a lot of these guys retired and then they just died because they had no purpose. You have to have a purpose.
Lucas Klein: You know, I used to work in a California prison when I was a prison psychologist for about a year and half used to do a lot of forensic-
Dr. John Jaquish: I thought that was fascinating.
Lucas Klein: It was, I've got some stories and I talked about a few of them with J Meloy in a previous episode, he's an eminent forensics psychologist, and colleague. But what comes to mind for me now is that the custody officers would die on average two years after retirement. We have to stay active and in terms of things like dementia and so forth, you have to be cardiovascularly in shape and you have to challenge your mind. Well, you can't challenge your mind by drifting into mediocrity perpetually. And so there's the cultural problem, is that to the extent that we are inhibiting ourselves from ascending to the fullest extent that we're able to ascend to as individuals, then you're not optimizing your brain or your body by definition because you're inhibiting those things by the use of deferential shame.
Lucas Klein: And so when you step onto the plate for X3 Bar and other workout regimens, you better be ready to go for it. I think that's the tie-in, is that workout, and I've known this from a very young age because athletics frankly was lifesaving for me. I mean, before I could reflect on my emotional states, before I ever was in therapy, before I ever became a psychologist, the way that I was processing the happenings of life was through fitness frankly, and reaching as far as I could go and going as hard as I could go was religious. And I feel so terrible for the young people today and for the adults who have somehow endeavored to retard that most essential of human strivings, you know what I'm saying?
Dr. John Jaquish: Mm-hmm.
Lucas Klein: So what you're saying is, it's relevant. Fitness is almost a weather van for other more tectonic cultural shifts. Wouldn't you say?
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, yeah. Yes. What's so great about fitness is, that everyone who has it earns it, you can't inherit fitness. Even the genetic differences from athlete to nonathlete. I go through that in about 10 pages of my book. All of them can be defeated, all of the genetic differences. And athletes have a more aggressive tendon and ligament layout in their bodies. The guy who started working out for six months in high school, put on 50 pounds of muscle and now that was in the NFL and you're like, "How come I didn't gain?"
Dr. John Jaquish: In that same period of time, most of the guys in the gym put on like a pound of muscle, they're just looking at this guy, like, "What did he do?" And the answer is, he did the same thing you did, but he has longer levers in the inside of his body where his tendons are hooked to bone. So when he bench presses, he uses more of his pectoral tissue and takes more tissue to fatigue. That fatigue will yield growth. Whereas most people, the only point of fatigue you get to is really irritating their joints because they don't have any leverage. Of course, this is all defeated with variable resistance.
Lucas Klein: Variable resistance is what now?
Dr. John Jaquish: That's what X3 is.
Lucas Klein: X3 Bar is variable resistance training.
Dr. John Jaquish: Changing the resistance as you move. So the resistance gets higher when you get to more powerful positions, lower when you get to weaker positions. But then when you use diminishing range, like you were saying in the very beginning, going through the set of exercises so that by the... Your last repetition may only be one inch because you can just barely move.
Lucas Klein: Now, is that related to the curve of the muscles?
Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. They all have a strength curve. Some pulling muscles are a little different. And I detail that in the book too, like a bent row has a very different power curve than a bench press. But you can still attenuate that very easily with the X3 and with other approaches to variable resistance. So I want to give people, I suppose, my goal is wanting to give people the ability to control their body. Most people look at their health and they see it as chaos, totally out of control, no matter what they do, no matter how much they work out, they don't get better or they get worse. And they just don't understand why, they're told to eat the wrong stuff. They're given bad exercise advice. I know women that have done cardio for 10 years, they started overweight and they're still overweight. And they haven't changed at all. And there's 40 years of research explaining how cardiovascular exercise will keep you as fat as possible, as long as possible. But it will sacrifice muscle.
Lucas Klein: Really? Huh.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Cardio is, to me, there's no such thing as cardio. It's just really awful strength training that doesn't make you any stronger. It's ineffective strength training. It's not like your body has another gear it puts itself in when you do strength-type exercise versus endurance-type exercise, you're still contracting muscle. You're still moving. It's just by stressing blood flow, you have an upregulation of cortisol that stays upregulated.
Dr. John Jaquish: In a downregulation, now, by the way, there's no such thing as bad hormone, I just want to make that clear for the listener, because a lot of people think cortisol is bad. Cortisol's great unless it goes up and stays up. And growth hormone cancels out its effects. So when somebody's fasting, their cortisol goes up, but their growth hormone goes up even higher. So it really doesn't tend to have that effect. But what cortisol does, when you do cardiovascular exercises, it gets rid of muscle tissue and it preserves your body fat as long as it possibly can, so does the exact opposite what people think it does. Which is why you probably know a ton of cardio people who have very little muscle mass and they're still not really lean. They're what we call, skinny fat.
Lucas Klein: Yeah. I have. Sure. Yeah.
Dr. John Jaquish: They're flabby, but they don't weigh a lot.
Lucas Klein: Now again, conventional wisdom is, a ton of cardio helps your cardiovascular system, helps your veins be free of cholesterol and other plaque-forming things and so forth.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. That's true of strength training. That's not particularly true of cardiovascular or endurance type exercise at all. In fact, there's a meta analysis that I refer to in the book that has a hundred different reference points that are factored into the systematic review. So there's like a hundred papers that'll say that strength training is either equal to or superior than endurance type exercise for cardiac health. Now here's where people get confused. I'm a very muscular person. I have 7% body fat. I'm six feet tall and I weigh 240 pounds.
Lucas Klein: And your age?
Dr. John Jaquish: And I'm 45. So I'm at the size of a lot of NFL players. So if I run up three flights of stairs, I'm sucking wind because my legs are thick, they're giant. When blood has to flow to those legs, that's like a 1970s Formula 1 engine, like an 8 litre V12, it's sucking a lot of gas. And for the purposes of what we're talking about, it's blood, my quadriceps need an incredible amount of blood. So I seem like I'm out of breath. And I was with a guy that I used to work with in the Munich airport. I don't know if you've ever been to Munich, but the airport is like the airport of stairs. You run up and down the stairs like three times when you're changing flights in Munich because I used to do a lot of business in Moscow and United doesn't fly to Moscow.
Dr. John Jaquish: So I'd have to switch to a different airline, Austrian air, or something to get the Moscow. So I'd always switch in Munich. And it was always in the same airport, always with the same guy. And this guy he's traveled, he's really slim, British guy. And he says to me, he's like, "Your cardio is terrible. You're always out of breath when you're running up and down the stairs here at the Munich airport." And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. My cardio is amazing. It just looks like it's bad because my body is designed for explosiveness." Every muscle's big. It's designed to deliver a lot of power for a short period of time.
Lucas Klein: Now, in terms of your blood panels, what do they look like? Can I ask?
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, they're perfect.
Lucas Klein: You're not just joking.
Dr. John Jaquish: I mean, now, my physician says to me, I have a traditional Western doctor as my regular general practitioner. It's never a guy I take any advice from, because he's so backwards. But I like his feedback because it shows me where the medical community is. So he says to me, first of all, he tells me I'm obese. You can see, visibly, you can see veins in my abdominals. And he is like, "Oh, you're obese, 240 pounds, 6 ft tall. That's that's too heavy." And I'm like, "Can you point to where the body fat is?" And he just looks confused. He doesn't know what to say.
Lucas Klein: Well, I have that all the time, but if you look in on certain charts for me I'm-
Dr. John Jaquish: But he knows I'm different. Here's another one, he says, wow, he does an echocardiogram on me and he says, "You have the heart of a marathon runner. Do you run marathons?" And I look at him and I'm like, "I'm 240 pounds. What do you think?"
Lucas Klein: So really this is, and your cholesterol is fine, but you may have some different views on cholesterol.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. The higher your "bad cholesterol" is, the longer you live. So everything you were told about cholesterol is bull.
Lucas Klein: You're kidding.
Dr. John Jaquish: Nope.
Lucas Klein: What about, say, the complex lipid profiles you're looking at like the density of lipids and so forth. Does that hold any weight?
Dr. John Jaquish: No. Think about it this way. Your LDL, your low-density lipoprotein, this is considered bad cholesterol, is highest when you fast. When you eat nothing, it's at it's absolute peak, higher than if you were just eating fried eggs with butter. And the reason is, you are ingesting your own body fat. So of course it goes up, but saying LDL is bad, I mean, in this context, saying LDL is bad as like saying weight loss is bad for you. So if your LDL skyrockets, when you're doing something that makes you healthier, then is LDL good or bad?
Lucas Klein: Hmm. In terms of traditional blood panels, is there anything on there that you do view as instrumental, that is conventional wisdom?
Dr. John Jaquish: Repeat that question.
Lucas Klein: Yeah. It's a little confusing there. Is there anything that is straightforward on conventional blood panels that people can trust.
Dr. John Jaquish: Triglycerides. You do not want high triglycerides. Because it's the inflammation within the arteries that collects the LDL, the low-density lipoprotein, the LDL stick to those points and become blood clots.
Lucas Klein: Ah, okay. Now let's create a little bit of a summary for people here. If you were to tell the average American and let's speak to men first. If you were to tell the average American man, what he could do to turn around his mindset on fitness, what he could do for fitness and health and lifestyle, what would it be?
Dr. John Jaquish: I just, I got one suggestion. I can only say one thing-
Lucas Klein: You can say anything you'd like, but if you've got, say a top collection of things, maybe a little summary, maybe a bullet point for men.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I would say, I would say nutrition comes from animal protein and anything else is a garnish. The whole idea, like vegetables, is so good for you, no study proves that. Antioxidants are not needed if you're not oxidizing.
Lucas Klein: Oh, I'm going to have to have a different type of nutritionist and expert on here for balance so that people won't accuse me of collusion.
Dr. John Jaquish: You know, who you should have on is Dr. Sean Baker.
Lucas Klein: Okay.
Dr. John Jaquish: Wrote the carnivore diet. Just meat and water. That's all the guy consumes.
Lucas Klein: Can that be healthy?
Dr. John Jaquish: Say again?
Lucas Klein: Can that be healthy? Just meat and water.
Dr. John Jaquish: The most healthy thing you can do. Absolutely.
Lucas Klein: I'm I'm not versed in this research. I'm in the group of people who are intrigued by that and has a curious eyebrow raised and want to learn more. Look at it this way, if I could eat rib-eyes the rest of my life, hallelujah. Okay.
Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right. But okay. Let's look at some of our instincts. When's the last time you saw a kid that liked vegetables?
Lucas Klein: Well, hardly ever. That's true.
Dr. John Jaquish: Never. You've never seen that. Kids want to immediately spit vegetables out. They have no trouble eating their meat though. Why is that? We have an instinct for nutrition. Plants have phytotoxins. The way a plant keeps you from eating it is, that it gives you a low-grade poison. So you don't eat much of it. Now a deer, for example, is 30,000 times more resistant to phytotoxins than humans are, which is why they can eat plants all the time. But ultimately plants are defended with these phytotoxins. And the reason we think we need antioxidants is that some of these poisons have antidotes that are other poisons. That's what an antioxidant is. So you can balance out poisoning yourself in one way, by poisoning yourself differently. And by the way, we don't have the balancing mastered so basically everybody's just messingthat up, High, Wide and Handsome, and all day, every day, unless you're not bothering with anything with phytotoxins like me, for example.
Lucas Klein: And you eat just beef.
Dr. John Jaquish: I eat animal protein and that's it.
Lucas Klein: No kidding. That's all you eat?
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. I had some salmon this morning. I'm going to have probably half a pound of duck at about noon. And then I got two lamb shanks for dinner.
Lucas Klein: Are you not suffering, I'll tell you that.
Dr. John Jaquish: Nope.
Lucas Klein: Well, I'm intrigued by this. I mean, if I could eat delicious cuts of meat all day, what a delight. Is there some canon of literature that the listeners could turn to if they wanted to verify your claim there?
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. The Carnivore Diet or the Carnivore Code. That's Dr. Paul Saladino and Dr. Sean Baker. Those are their two books. Saladino's a little more extreme. He likes fruit. He adds fruit into carnivore nutrition, but I don't think he has those ratios quite right. There is a small benefit to having a little bit of carbohydrates. I'm talking 20 to 50 grams. And just so people understand the small Snickers bar is 30 grams of carbohydrates. So my carbohydrates are done pre-workout, immediately pre-workout and I take them in the form of glucose tablets.
Lucas Klein: Mm-hmm. Okay.
Dr. John Jaquish: So I get immediate usage, which goes back into rehydrating the musculature.
Lucas Klein: So your bullet points for men, basically animal protein and what else?
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You want to get one gram per pound of body weight. And once you eat that, even if you supplement with something like the product I developed Fortagen, there's no room in your intestines for other stuff once you realize how much animal protein you need, there's not room for anything else. Very low carbohydrates. I used to be a zero carbohydrate guy, but I realized that's pretty unrealistic. People, they can do low carbohydrate. They can eat one sweet thing a day. They have a couple of apples before their workout or something like that. They can do that. You want to do it right before your workout or right after your workout, because that's really when your body is taking those carbohydrates and using them. But if you're sedentary, if you don't do hard strength training, you should have zero carbohydrates. You have no use for them at all. The only thing they will do is get your ass fatter. That's it. Lucas Klein: Okay. Is there a third bullet point for men?
Dr. John Jaquish: People should probably write that down.
Lucas Klein: Yeah. Carbs get your ass fatter so you need to be able to work out hard. And is there a third bullet point for men?
Dr. John Jaquish: Just trying not to plug my own product here, but it works really well. Just focus on strength training.
Lucas Klein: I think it's fine. Plug in your own product. I mean, that's really why I had you on is that I think people can't spend three hours a day getting ready, driving to the gym, going to the gym showering after, getting dressed, packing your stuff up and going back to work, is a three hour process.
Dr. John Jaquish: So there are 10,000 times more viruses, bacteria and pathogens on the typical dumbbell in a gym versus the average public toilet seat.
Lucas Klein: No way.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Yeah. Gyms are filthy I'm not one of these people who overreacted to COVID, the masks never worked and that's what the research said. And every time some politician would say, "We're going by the science," that's how they're lying. Because then you'd read the science and be like, wow, you did the exact opposite of what the science said to do. Interesting.
Lucas Klein: But you are wanting people to know here-
Dr. John Jaquish: Say it again.
Lucas Klein: I mean, you are wanting people to know that if they are concerned about viruses and they're interested in virology and so forth, that gyms are disgusting. And that's been a long-standing knowledge.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. Stay the hell out of a gym. I just don't particularly care for gym culture. I think it's a great way to exchange bad advice with people who know nothing.
Lucas Klein: The CrossFit culture.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. You go to the gym and people walk up to you and volunteer some advice and just like, Wow, you don't even know the definition of the words you're using. It's like watching Joe Biden talk. Unreal. You don't even know what those words mean and it's obvious by hearing you stumble over them.
Lucas Klein: So we're trying to give people teleprompters here, in other words, teleprompters that have the facts on them. And what about women? Is there separate advice you'd give women? Dr. John Jaquish: No?
Lucas Klein: It's pretty much the same?
Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It's the same.
Lucas Klein: Okay. And-
Dr. John Jaquish: The expectations with women are a little different. Women are going to carry a little more body fat because they need breast tissue. A lot of protective places in their body, places that need to be protected are covered by extra layers of body fat, just in case of impact or something like that. So I don't think women should feel like they're in competition with men, but the strongest women are the most feminine looking women. And I'm not talking about the drug induced female bodybuilder look, that comes from a hypodermic needle, that doesn't come from just lifting weights. Everybody needs to know that. Now there are some genetic anomalies, I suppose. And I'm really only saying that, because I have to, but really that's bull too. You're not going to look like a man if you lift weights.
Dr. John Jaquish: And what happens a lot of times is when people start engaging in strength training, their appetite goes up. And so often where some woman will tell me, oh, I get bigger when I lift weights. Okay, men have trouble "getting bigger" or at least noticeably very quickly. So if you notice a size change, it's body fat and what's really going on, and I'm not nice when I hear this comment, I'm like, what's really going on is your appetite's going up and you're eating cupcakes. And so the reason you think you're "getting bigger" is really because you're just getting fatter and that's not the fault of the weights. It's the fault of your nutritional judgment.
Lucas Klein: So people in those moments would do better to choose a larger portion of lower carbohydrate foods, keep themselves plied with better nutrition.
Dr. John Jaquish: Yep. So nothing satiates you more than fat. So I'm a huge fan of butter. I get the fattiest cuts of meat and that keeps me satiated. I'm full. I don't feel like I'm suffering at all. And I'm in incredible shape and that can happen for everybody. My fiance does the same thing. She's pretty much all meat nutrition. And she looks absolutely incredible.
Lucas Klein: Now. And you're not on any kind of anabolic help?
Dr. John Jaquish: No. I have testosterone replacement therapy. I have, since I was 28, because of bad rugby hit. Just get hit in the crotch, things aren't working like they're supposed to be. So yeah, I got that prescription, but this is another myth that is always present on the internet. Testosterone replacement therapy is replacement. The R means replacement, as in, you're brought to a natural level.
Lucas Klein: Right. So for listeners-
Dr. John Jaquish: You're not given a superhuman level. And so sometimes somebody will post a picture and some jealous doorknob will say like, "Oh yeah, there's a lot of TRT in this picture." You can't have a lot of replacements. Replacement is a set number. It's between 600 and 1000 nanograms per deciliter in this case. So you can't have a lot of specific numbers. If you need five gallons of gas that's going to fill your tank, it's like, you can't have a lot of five gallons. It's five gallons, it's five gallons.
Lucas Klein: For the listeners to understand this, every man has a blood to testosterone ratio and there's a normal limit for it. So what Dr. Jaquish referencing here is that he's got a replacement, like many men do, that keeps that level at a normal level. It's not an amplification, it's not steroids. It certainly is a fact. Okay. So I've seen you on X3 Bar and you're in outrageous shape. So you're walking the walk. This was great advice, I think, for the listeners. And at this moment, my little black lab Maverick is plying at my door, telling us our time is up. So Dr. Jaquish. Is there anything else that you wish to say that would help the listeners that they haven't heard already?
Dr. John Jaquish: Well, some of these ideas are... My first invention was for bone density. And if somebody wants to find out that it's called Osteostrong, there are 106 clinics in 10 different countries. I think there are a few of them in San Diego. That was the first thing. The second thing was X3 Bar. And whereas I applied some similar logic, a much more strategic approach, a much better look at how muscle functions. And by looking at how it functions, treating it so that we want it to grow in respect of how it functions.
Dr. John Jaquish: So it functions differently in different positions. So why would you ever work out with a static weight if you know that its out output capacity is variable, that doesn't make any sense at all. And so people need to absorb the idea that weight lifting is an awful stimulus. Awful. And there's just an absolute better way. People don't need to buy my product. You can go to the gym and use chains and bands hooked on bars. You never want to use a band by itself. It'll break your wrist if you're using anything relevant to strength or your ankles. But you need to train with variable resistance and you'll see that your body is capable of so much that people just never knew.
Lucas Klein: That's a good message of hope that there is potential inside of all of us waiting to be activated. Dr. John Jaquish, thank you for joining the Thinking Kind podcast. You're welcome anytime.Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely. I hope you'll want me back. We'll discuss some of the other things we can talk about at a later day. That's great. Thanks for having me.
Lucas Klein: Let's do that. Bye for now.