Building Strength Isn’t About Weight Lifting Anymore – John Jaquish, Ph.D., with Dave Asprey, Part 1 : 862

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's guest has been on the show about three years ago where he launched a product that has since been something you've probably seen online. He spent years developing and researching ways you can improve muscle, cardiovascular, bone density. And he's a really qualified biohacker and walks around looking like that. I saw an article, they called him like the. The Tony Stark of bodybuilding, which was kind of a. Kind of a cool thing. Although I wouldn't call him a bodybuilder by.

I think it was Tony Stark of the fitness industry.

Fitness industry. There you go. Because you're not really a bodybuilder, you kind of look like one, but that's not what you do. The fitness industry.

There you go. So.

So who was that anyway? Was that like Men's Health or something?

No, Chicago Tribune.

Chicago Tribune.

There you go.

It was pretty cool.

Yeah.

And so his name is John Jaquish, his PhD, and he first came on the show because he had this bone density building device, one that I've tested out in the labs down in la. But most interestingly, he developed a way to put on muscle three times faster than you can do by picking up rocks, which is pretty much all of weightlifting. And he launched it on the show three years ago. And since then I've seen dozens of pro athletes talking about it, using it, and it's really done quite well. So I wanted to share with our listeners what are the things that it takes in order to not waste time lifting weights or doing cardio. And even to talk about your book, because you just wrote a book about all this kind of stuff. So, John, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me, Dave. I'm excited.

Let's talk about your mom. What do you think?

Yeah, yeah. So I got down this path because my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis and built a series of medical devices to emulate high impact forces. So in the emulation of high impact force, we get the benefit of the high impact with the bone mass and without any of the downsides, which would be potential injuries. So like gymnastics, for example, very powerful bone density. They also retire at an average age of 19 because they're so injured. So the challenge was how do we get the benefits without the drawbacks? So building impact emulation devices is what I did and filed patents on those.

And there's the biodensity device as well, which is the one that you.

That's my first pioneered.

Yeah. That's, that's the one that people have probably seen on videos at Upgrade labs. And it's, it's interesting because when you talk about mimicking high impact, Okay, I used to weigh 300 pounds and I'm still whatever today around 230 with the amount of muscle I'm carrying. So high impact for me as a 48 year old who's had three knee surgeries seems stupid beyond. Am I right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. You're. We're great with impact when we're kids. Well, and coincidentally, peak bone mass is at 30 years of age. So people grow bone and then they reach 30 and then it starts to, starts to diminish. And I have an iPhone app called Fracture Proof. And when you look at the way that works, like you enter your body weight, you hold it on your hip and you jump up in the air and land and see how many multiples of body weight you can create. If you are beneath 4.2 multiples of body weight, you're doing nothing for bone. Nothing. That's the minimum dose response. So it's challenging. I meet postmenopausal people all the time who are like, oh yeah, I go for walks every day for my bone health and nothing. Yep. I give them the grim reality. Yeah, that's not doing shit.

I mean, it'll probably help with lymphatic drainage.

Of course.

Yeah.

Circulating mitochondrial is better than doing nothing. Yeah. But don't think you're going to keep from getting osteoporosis by doing that.

What about supplements like K2 and vitamin D3 and taking enough magnesium and possibly calcium if you're deficient? Those seem to be pretty important for maintaining muscle mass.

I've seen studies. Right, Right. They're building blocks. So like when I'm speaking at conferences and somebody asks that question, I give them an example. Like somebody who lifts weights and takes extra protein or makes sure their protein intake is higher, they can turn that into muscle. Well, if you just ate the protein and didn't work out, would you grow muscle? And everybody seems to know the answer to this question, which is no.

Right.

So why would you expect to take the building blocks for bone but then do nothing to stimulate the growth of bone and expect a change? You get nothing.

I mean, if you take testosterone and, and you eat more protein and you don't start lifting, you are going to put on muscle and lose fat because of hormonal things. I'm thinking with vitamin D, you probably can get a tiny change, but it's not enough to matter. So why don't you give it a signal from the environment? And you're saying the signal needs to be 4.2 times your body weight.

Right.

Which basically is jumping a couple feet off the ground because 9.8 meters per second squared is the acceleration of gravity as you jump up. If you jump high enough and then you land, you could do it. Otherwise you couldn't do it. And it's Y 4.2. Is this your original research? Did you find that somewhere?

No, there have been a few studies that showed that. One out of Yuvalska, Finland, and another one out of Bristol, United Kingdom. Two out of Bristol, United Kingdom. So we're, we're right. They're all right there at four plus multiples of body weight to stimulate any bone growth at all.

Okay. All right. So I'm a relatively young, relatively fit guy. I've had my bone density measured. It's pretty darn strong. I do all sorts of weird stuff, including the X3 and whole body vibration and God knows what else.

Right.

So what are the benefits if you're not 85 like your mom, to increasing bone density? What do you get out of it?

Oh, I mean, you're avoiding the potential for fragility fracture later in life. The bone you build through the osteogenic loading process, through this heavy loading, you're getting bone built that's going to last in your body for 30 years. So it doesn't go away. Like muscle detraining of a muscle starts in 10 days. So you stop working out, you lose your muscle in 10 days. Takes you 30 years to lose the bone.

So you can put that bone density on and keep it on for long periods of time.

That's right. And it can benefit you. You're, you know, huge percentage of your life. Yeah.

There's something else that's going on with this as well. And when people have more bone morphogenic protein and higher bone density, they better regulate their blood sugar. So you get less diabetes when you have more bone density. Can you walk me through whatever we know about that? Or at least whatever you know about that?

Yeah, yeah. The more bone density you have, the more muscular tissue you have that's active, that's participating in glute 4 signaling, so pulling in, you know, insulin and glucose and using it correctly. So we, we have a clinical trial on bone density and we have a clinical trial on type 2 diabetics showing tremendous outcomes, but also the outcomes are stackable. So somebody takes, you know, metformin and.

The diabetes anti aging drug, Right?

Yeah. And then yeah, it's very low side effect, Very, very high benefit. If you have a lousy hemoglobin, A1C score and then it assists you because it's really doing something curative to the muscular tissue. It's looking at glue for signaling. It's increasing the level of glue for signaling. So the activity in muscle, not so much hypertrophy, but just the efficiency of having it be active and functioning and using its receptors for glucose and insulin, which, for somebody who's got metabolic syndrome, they're not using those things.

Yep, it, it does appear to make a really big difference. Even if your bone, if your bone density is higher, even if you don't add a bunch of muscle, you just have better bones and ligaments. There seems to be some correlation there.

Well, this, this would be theoretical. There's just no, there's just no study that's, that's going to look at similar populations, one with low bone density, one with higher bone density, because they're not going to be similar. That's not going to be the only incongruency between the two populations. So you can't study it. But what I would say is somebody who has a stronger chassis, has stronger bone mass, are they going to be able to build more muscle? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Like, you know, like from an engineering perspective, there's limitations within the body governed by neural inhibition. So the more force you put through bone mass, the more likely you are to be triggering at some point the muscles to shut off. Sort of like you can't break your own finger by squeezing a fist. No matter how hard you try, you have a neural inhibitory process that is stopping you. But the more, the stronger you get, the more force you can create. So I've got some sort of force measurement device in my hand. I can. That force can continue to go up and up and up, and that limitation is still there, but it's at a different place every time.

It is at a different place. And this, again, there's no study about this. We know that there's mitochondria in bone. We know there's mitochondria and even mitochondrial production in bone marrow. So there's something going on around higher levels of bone morphogenic protein where there's crosstalk between mitochondria from different types of tissues. So what I do know, 100%, is people with high bone density have healthy metabolisms the vast majority of the time. And people with low bone density, even if they have strong muscles, don't have as good of a metabolic profile. So we're like, okay, even if you're a 22 year old dude, you want to make sure your bone density is where it ought to be. Especially if you're experimenting with some sort of weird plant based diet. Because you're not going to like where your bone density ends up when you're 30.

If you're doing that 20 out of 20 studies show you lose bone density very fast when you go on a vegan diet.

Yeah.

Yeah. Very damaging to bone. Also very high indications you're going to die pretty young. Is it as a fragility fracture after the age of 50, you have a 50 chance of death within one year based on the complications of that fracture.

So does the bone density drop faster than IQ when you go on that diet or no?

Yeah. Vegan nutrition also lowers your iq. So I, we're bad people for saying that. You're really, I mean, hey, you're, you're, you're pointing at what, holes to dig. I'm just digging them.

I was, I was a raw vegan for a while and it actually does affect your cognition, especially your working memory that there are noticeable differences. I'm sorry, I wish I could eat gravel. It doesn't work.

Doesn't work. Yeah. All right. Yeah. And, and I, and I, and I also wish plant farming didn't kill 7 billion animals a year.

But I know, right?

No, no matter. I, I say this, of course, like, I say that like at a cocktail party. And there's always some vegan that's upset. I live in California, so they're everywhere. And so I say, look like any species that is expanding is taking resources away from another type of species and that's going to equal death. End of story. It does not get more complicated than that. So we're like, I love the image that you posted the other day. You responded to it when I sent you a comment that the scorched earth looking at the monocrop farming. Yeah, it's what it does. It just just ruins the habitat for anything that would have been there. So this is killing billions of ground squirrels and rats and mice and birds. And birds are being poisoned by the tens of thousands every day.

Oh yeah. And bunnies and cornflums.

Yeah.

Turtles and salamanders. You got to name the cute ones because that really triggers people care.

It's true. Nobody cares about the rats. But when you're like, oh yeah, they're killing the, they're killing the birds.

Like, and that's not counting bug like butterflies and things like that. So now that I've, I'm running a farm with pigs and sheep and now cows. And you can see the biodiversity when you have an ecosystem. So yeah, I'm looking at that. And you know, we're talking about in terms of bone density. I think what's happening in your metabolism reflects what's happening in the world of your food supply. So if you're eating, you know, plant based corn and potato and God knows what else based fake meat, you know, it's going to reflect in your bone density, in your cognitive function and your cell metabolism and you can't break it. Well, so what do you eat? I mean, I know some things about what you eat, but tell me about your nutritional thoughts because you're.

Great question. Yeah, I mean since the last time we hung out, I probably have adjusted a little bit to just more, more animal protein, keeping the fats kind of moderate. So I'm, I'm regularly at a caloric deficit. I'm doing one meal a day consistently now. I'm trying to also experiment with some things that, that are a little bit easier. Like a lot of people will just not do multiple day fasting. Yeah, they just won't do it. You know, like I hear a lot. I can't, you know, like I managed.

To do the fasting challenge. I taught all sorts. Like 70, 000 people have done my fasting challenge.

Anyone who says they can't, like, you know, my instinct is to be like, well, put that in a sentence. Like, you know, I can't be attractive, you know, because like if you stay an obese person, you're not attractive. You're well aware of this. So you know, I can't keep from dying before 50. Put that, say that to yourself.

I'm not saying anything with a can't word.

Yeah, just don't use the word can't. Like of course you can. Like people dry, fast and eat one meal a day during Ramadan. Yeah, yeah. Like a, more than a billion people a year do this. Like if they can do it, I promise you you can do it. So yeah, I mean I, I kind of give the tough love to a lot of people who just whine about the fasting. But anyway, so I'm, I'm sick into this one meal a day program. I, I do bacterial fermentation product called Fortagen. That, that is, it's essential amino acids. Very high concentration of essential amino acids.

Let's explain that for, for a minute. For, for people. So, so guys, amino acids are the building blocks of protein and you probably suck at breaking down the proteins you eat into amino acids. So you can take free amino acids that are 100 bioavailable. That's what your Fortogen product is. Right? Okay.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, perfect. And so yeah like and your body makes a certain amount of amino acids and then, and then the ones that are called essential are the ones your body can't make. So you got to take them in. So that's really what this, this amino acid product is. It's made from bacterial fermentation. We are supposed to eat things that are spoiling. That's kind of the natural way we're supposed to be eating. But for sanitation reasons we obviously don't nor do I recommend that. But Foragen gets the, the amino acids from the fermentation without a, you know, fermentation itself. So so then it just has all upside and no down. And so that's a significant portion of my protein. And then I'm just eating one meal a day and at a consistent caloric deficit until I'm going to keep doing this. This is not sustainable by the way.

I was going to say I'm a little worried about this Omad for long periods of time. Most people break themselves on a regimen like that.

Yeah. So you know like let's say 2000 calories a day, you know, whereas my basal metabolic rate plus activity is more like 3,000. I'm gonna do this until I get to a level of body fat that I feel that I can maintain. And then so like I just want to see where like previously many had said their bot their body starts to fight them at a certain level of body fat. So I've heard this at you know, 10 body fat but is that really where. So I know with the essential amino acids I have an advantage with X3 as a grossly superior workout that I'm able to build and maintain a lot more muscle than anybody else would be able to who's not using X3. So like I'm in our uncharted territory right now. So how lean can I get? How, how, how much can I keep it? How easy is it is to, to maintain? So that's the current experiment.

So you're happy to get into like 6% or you're looking at fitness competitor kind of levels or if that's where.

The road takes me. Yeah, I'm at a little over 7% right now, like 7.3.

So it seems like the studies I've seen when you get under about 10 your all cause mortality starts to Go up and there's issues, especially under seven, where you get lung adhesions and tearing of lungs and.

Yeah, but you gotta ask. Those people studied, they weren't getting, you know, a surplus of protein, like they were starving.

Fair point. It's a fair point.

So they had a lot of other. So I got a huge advantage where I get to basically go around the limitations of a lot of protein because I get to have, you know, in 16 calories, I can have the equivalent of 200 grams of protein. I know that doesn't even make mathematical sense, but because amino acids aren't complete proteins and really count as calories.

Well, some of them raise insulin and they sure act like calories. Some of them don't, though.

They do act like calories. But, you know, according to the fda, you can't call them calories.

Yeah, but according to the fda, glyphosate is safe.

This is true.

If you say, According to the FDA, it has a 90% chance of being financially derived. Bullshit. I'm tired of. You cannot trust them to do anything truthful. Anything.

Did you know, hey, half of their revenue comes from companies they're supposed to be regulating.

Oh, yeah.

In this. In form of fees.

I've had enough of those guys.

Yeah, well, still, I have to comply with the FDA when putting nutritional information on my product.

We all do. But the fact that you can't say there's calories and amino acids that get metabolized in the mitochondria to make electrons. That's because the FDA is lying like you guys there.

Yeah, well, this is why I put my forgen consumption with my eating window or about half an hour apart.

Smart.

Yeah.

And there are some amino acids you can take probably during a fast that aren't going to raise insulin. Like if you take a little glycine before bed, I don't think that's going to break a fast. But if you take, you know, 20 grams of it, it might. But I don't. I know the BCAAs will generally break a fast because of what they do.

Insulin. Well, BCAAs are not really what your body needs, and they don't do anything. Like, there's a couple studies that show that they don't. They don't even outperform the placebo. Yeah, yeah.

The only plus I've seen for BCAAs is for endurance athletes. By the way, that's not good for your biology. But for endurance athletes, they tend to get sick more often. And if they take BCAAs, it reduces their likelihood of Getting respiratory infections.

Right.

So there's some kind of a benefit there. But generally I think they're way overhyped and all that. Well, let's talk a bit about the X3. So I'm going to explain what this thing is and then you can explain it better. But you sent me probably the first two prototypes ever in existence.

That's right.

When you were first launching, you and.

Me were the first guys to use X3.

So actually you sent me three. And I gave two of them to people at my company. A woman and a guy who's about 10 years older than me. And I had one. And this was before they were fully packaged. And I'm like, this thing works. And guys, what it is, it's a giant latex rubber band. There's actually three of them, and a special bar so it doesn't tweak on your joints. It's very different than like a TRX thing. Oh, there you go. Oh, actually, that one's all silver. The one I have is still black. I probably still have the prototype you sent me. Huh?

Oh, you still have the prototype?

I think so. I still use the prototype.

No, no, it's made out of anodized aluminum.

Look at that sexy thing.

Quality.

You never sent me a new one. I help you launch your product and. Oh, John, my feelings are hurt now.

Anyway, I didn't know you didn't have a new one, but now that you said that, I'll get you a new one.

How would you know? But here's the interesting thing. So the two people I gave it to in my company, neither one is an athlete or interested in muscles at all. Both of them, at the end of the month or two, like, can I keep this? They actually liked it, even though they weren't into this. And what I do now for my muscle stuff is I will do electrical stimulation, I'll do x3, and occasionally I'll do some of the devices. At Upgrade Labs, we've got a machine called the Cheat Machine, but they're all based on a similar principle. But the most portable thing, I actually extra my luggage on some trips because it's small enough to. Sometimes I don't bring the bar, even though the bar is way superior. Just because I don't want to carry it. But I'll bring the. The band.

Yeah, that'll hurt your joints. You don't want to do that.

It does, yeah. My joints don't like it.

But hey, you gotta have the bar.

The bar changes everything.

Just, just, just put in your check luggage. I I go like, I, you know, I used to fly 200,000 miles a year.

Yep.

Speaking at bone density and osteoporosis type conferences. And I was all over the world and I, there were trips where I went from San Francisco to Chicago to London to Moscow to Osaka, Japan back to San Francisco, like literally around the world for like three weeks. Like, you know, you wake up and like, you like walk into the wall because you have no idea. Right? You do too. Yeah.

All hotels look the same. People like, oh, how lucky. You get to travel. Like, no, I'm in a four star hotel. It doesn't matter. You're there to, to, you're there to, to help people, to teach people and to show something that matters. You're not there to be a tourist. I, I get it.

And so how my X3 comes everywhere with me. Like, I, I mean, my current X3 probably has 600,000 miles on it. Okay.

Now there are a variety of tubing things you can buy on Amazon and all that. And when you first reached out to me, I'm like, is this really substantially different than, you know, the, the common brands out there? And what I found out was, yeah, like there's the alignment from the bar, but I think you're using different strength of bands. What's, what's the difference?

Quality of polymer is the difference. So like a lot of things have come out since X3 in the last three years to look like X3. So it's just like surgical tubing. You know, it's like five pounds of resistance. And I do realize there is a market in what I call fake fitness. Like, so people will buy a product knowing it's a product or suspecting it's a product, you know, and their budget's like anywhere from 30 to $100. And it's so they can say they work out at home and they're not really even planning on using it. It's like, you know, somebody's overweight and they're lazy and they don't want to do anything. And you know, it's just like, oh, I work out at home. I have a perfect push up.

I don't think it's that they're lazy, man. You're talking to a guy who was fat and not lazy at all. I worked my ass off and I just couldn't lose the weight. Right? So it, it, it's not because they're lazy. That's what people who easily lose weight think, right? Because the people who buy the perfect.

Push up, they know they're not going to get a real workout from that.

Yeah, that's a fair point.

I'm just saying that there is a market out there for that.

There is.

Yeah.

And doesn't it feel great when people take your great idea and make a crappy knockoff so then other people say it doesn't work? No one's ever done that to me with the stuff I make.

Right. Yeah, actually, I. I frequently say to my employees, like, well, what would Dave do in this situation because of that? Like, just cheap, crummy, knockoff type stuff. And you know the funny thing? The customers, our customers, they. They don't. Like, some of them accidentally bought the wrong thing because they thought it was X3. And then they're like, hey, look at this piece of crap that I bought. But then I went and bought an X3, and here are the results I got from the X3. So, yeah, it all come, like, sort of the truth comes out.

I guess it does come out over time. Like, that's why I'm doing the. The line of upgrade lab supplements totally separate from Bulletproof. I'm not. I don't. I have no idea what's going on at Bulletproof. I'm not involved anymore. So for me to have transparency and visibility, I'm like, no, I'm doing my. My own coffee and all that stuff. And I think that's, that's the right thing to do because if I'm not willing to put my name behind it, just like you with the X3 bar, you got to put your name behind it.

Yeah.

So what's. What happened when you took the X3 to the Miami Heat?

They got rid of their weightlifting program, and they're 100x3. They even. I mean, here's the book. Weightlifting is a waste of time. They even endorse the book. It's right on the back. There you go.

That's so solid.

Pro teams, everybody think, when's the last time you saw a pro team put their brand on something? Never. They never do that because their brand is so valuable. But the, the strength coaching team and Bill Foreign, he's the. He's the strength coach of the team, and he's in the strength coach coaching hall of fame. Like, guy's an amazing guy. He's done so many great things. Like the, the teams he has done programming for are like the least injured, like, throughout history. And he's been doing this for a long time. And when he discovered X3, we had a great phone conversation. And like, I was. I was on a plane, like, the next day.

That's.

Yeah.

So cool.

Yeah.

By the way, your book, your book hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, which is more credible than the New York Times list. Like the New York Times list.

Oh, the New York Times, dude, it has nothing to do with sales. No, they hand pick those books. It's the books they would like to see the most sales in, not the ones that actually had the most sales. And right now my. I'll just say it was a consultant, someone you know very well. And like a lot, he's like, look, you're a straight white male. You're not getting on the New York Times list. Like they're straight up bigots.

Yep. The New York Times is, is not a trustworthy list anymore. In fact, Dr. Mercola, who's been on the show lots of times and is speaking at the biohacking conference September 17th.

Nice.

He's sold enough books to dominate the New York Times list. But he's blacklisted. So if the New York Times can blacklist anyone from their list, it's not a list anymore. So yeah, I've been on there four times. If they put me on the fifth time, I don't care because the Wall Street Journal is more credible. And you hit the Wall Street Journal list, which is really cool. And you write something that just makes my heart warm. Your weightlifting is a waste of time. The whole point around upgrade labs is, guys, you can recover faster than you're supposed to. You do all sorts of stuff and if you, if you look at your results, you, you're kind of ripped like, like what you're doing works. And you don't pick up heavy things. Your phone screen is aging your skin and wrecking your sleep at the same time. Artificial blue light goes from your phone screen straight into your eyes and deep into your skin. That light makes messes with your melatonin levels, interrupts your deep sleep, and speeds up skin aging by breaking down collagen. The bodyguard's red light converter fixes this at the source. It's a first of its kind screen protector with real tech that converts blue light into beneficial red light before it hits your face. It turns your scrolling into a skincare routine. It supports healthier skin, reduced eye strain, improved sleep quality, and fewer screen related headaches. Third party testing showed a 50% increase in red light exposure within the optimal range of 620-770nm. And this comes with zero compromise on your screen. The red light converter preserves your screen's true colors and full Touch sensitivity. Beyond its wellness benefits, the Red light converter provides ultra thin edge to edge protection for your device and bodyguard stands by their quality. Enjoy peace of mind with lifetime replacements, ensuring your red light converter continues to protect and support your biology for the long haul. Visit bodyguards.com and use code Dave for 25% off. That's bodyguardswithaz.com for 25% off.

Right.

Except for maybe you pick up your car which isn't that heavy because it's all carbon fiber or something. This is true.

Uh, yeah. I, I, I don't. So the X3 workout is a hard workout.

Oh, yeah.

Like, I, I don't want to like sugarcoat and be like, oh, it's so easy to be, you know, like everybody. Like when I go to the grocery store, people ask me if I play in the NFL. They ask for my autograph and I'm like, who do you think I am? Like, you, you think, do I look like an NFL player? I, I don't know. Maybe, maybe there is one out there that looks like me. But I think they just think, you know, they see a 6 foot, 240 pound, really lean guy and they're like, huh, like that guy doesn't, like, he's not a librarian. He's something else.

I'm totally laughing right now because I would be one of those guys who would probably say that. I once is. In the early days of Bulletproof, I got invited to a celebrity poker tournament and I was supposed to just be like a audience and a friend was like, dave, I just put 25 grand in so you can play. It was all for charity. So I'm sitting there and I'm sitting next to this guy just like you described your wall of muscle. And I was about to be like, hey, like, obviously you work out. Like, who the heck are you? And then the guy next to him, Larry David, is the guy next to him, says, so, Tebow, what's up? And I'm like, oh shit, that's Tim Tebow. But I had no idea who he was because I don't recognize any football player except for Nick Foles because he's a buddy. Otherwise I'm like, I'm clueless. So I would hit you up in the grocery store and be like, you must be famous. So that's, that's awesome. And you're getting that because you look, I mean, you're, look at the COVID of the book. It's, it's kind of ridiculous. How old are you?

I'm 44.

You're 44?

And I put on this muscle after turning 40. Yeah, like, I got to point that out because that. That's very rare.

You're more muscular than you were even when I. When we first hung out.

Well, of course.

Yeah.

Like £40 more. Yeah.

How much. How many times a week or how many minutes a week do you use the X3?

The workout's 10 minutes. I mean, if you're moving at a clip, like. Yeah, you can get it done in 10 minutes. I tend to catch my breath a little bit more, so it might be 15, but six days a week. So I basically work out like an hour a week.

Got it.

Yeah.

Life is tough.

Yeah. Well, it's. Like I said, it's. It's a hard workout. It's exhaustion beyond level. So, like. Like the way I explain the Technology is you x3 allows you to train with greater force, which gets you to a greater level of fatigue, and then triggers more growth, more growth than you've ever seen. And, you know, when. Now. Now here's. Here's something Dr. Baker helped me out with. You know Sean Baker? Yeah. Yeah. So he's. He's a world record weightlifter and an X3 user. And he really liked the title, Weightlifting is a waste of time.

And it's a great title.

Yeah. And he says, and I lift weights, like. And I read this, and it's just like, I see it. And he goes, my initial response, I got to know what this guy's saying, because I don't think weightlifting is a waste of time. And this is his words. When I read the book, I realize what you're trying to say. You're saying that there's just a much, much more strategic approach to reducing the chances of injury and really upregulating your opportunity for growth. Because the point of working out isn't getting your workout done. You can do a shitty workout that'll never yield you progress, and you can do that every day and pat yourself on the back, but at some point, you're going to get injured, you're going to quit, and you're never going to have made any progress. And nobody looking at you will ever know you ever worked out. But he says your programming is for absolute maximum results. And yeah, I mean, he sees it like, he sees it in his own. In his own experiences, and he really liked that name and approach. Another thing he said was, you really gotta point out to people, and I put this right on the back of the book, that the fitness, like fitness as a concept, is probably the most failed human endeavor I mean, humans have screwed up a lot of stuff, but nothing more than our health. And we butchered our health. And we know that being lean and being strong are the two greatest drivers of long life. Yet weak and fat is how you would describe the majority of the world's population. And so then there's people who work out. And we all know. I mean, you probably know 100 people like this. Most people probably know 10 people like this. People who go to the gym couple days a week and have been doing so for years and they have never seen anything change. Nothing. There's a. There's one of the first references in the. So in the book, there's 250 studies that are summarized, by the way I get criticized of. The book is like an ad for, like, my products. No, I described the rationale.

Look, man.

Yeah, you got that same kind of crap, too. Like, oh, go away.

You gotta just tell the critics to kiss your ass. And people say the same thing. For me, I'm like, guys, no one knows about collagen. No one knows about MCT oil or the benefits of butter. So, yeah, I'm going to write about all that. And of course I make them because I couldn't buy them. And now they're all billion dollar categories. So if you want to complain that an author cares enough to write a book and launch products about it, then don't read the books like you're. You're kind of an idiot.

Just go and live in a cave. Go and live in a cave. Lift weights.

Don't learn new things.

Go fat and weak and post on Instagram about how loud you can grunt and throw your weights against the ground. Because these are the kind of losers I'm dealing with. You get kind of nutrition trolls. I get gym people.

Look, there's a bunch of angry. There's the angry calorie people, and you mentioned angry calorie people. They're mostly angry because they're in a calorie deficit. You get the angry vegans, you get the angry ketos, right? And then you get the angry gym people. And all of them have something wrong biologically, and that's what drives their anger. And it's like, you can't.

Yeah, the gym people are in chronic pain, if they even go to the gym at all. A lot of them are in such chronic pain, they quit going to the gym. So they've got, like, string bean arms and a double chin, and yet they're, like, going around on the Internet acting like they're the world's foremost Experts. It's great.

Now, I want to ask you about these three aspects of strength that a lot of people don't think about. And okay, muscle size and strength. Everyone thinks about that. So that's one of them. The other one is ligaments and tendons. Those things as growing at different rates. And the other thing is called.

They require different stimuli.

They do. And then there's wong, or interstitial tissue, which no one really thinks about in the West. But if you look at like a Shaolin guy, like that guy's no muscle, but they can stand on one finger and do all this stuff, it's because there's a different kind of interstitial strength. When you're dealing with x3, talk to me about not just muscles, but talk to me about ligaments and tendons and that interstitial strength without bulk. How does all that work?

So there's a great study from 1996 by Benjamin and Ralphs that talks about fibrocartilage uptake. And they're very careful the way they worded that so that they didn't say you're growing back your cartilage or you're growing tendons and ligaments. You're thickening your tendons and ligaments, which makes them not only more powerful, but the discharge when, like, let's say you trip and fall and you've got to protect yourself, put your arms up in front of you. A discharge over a larva, larger surface area means that there's less concentration of force, thereby avoiding a tendonous rupture. So to stimulate tendon ligament growth, it takes very high levels of force axially. So meaning training in the strongest range with very heavy weight weights that are far beyond what we could get in a gym. That's exactly how X3 works, because you're able to grow your tendons and ligaments. And this is why, like so many people who use X3, you know, we have over a hundred thousand customers now, and they're saying, like, this is like the weirdest thing. I've had chronic tendonitis in my elbow. And, you know, I never even messaged your company about it because I just thought I was just gonna have to live with that forever. That was a permanent injury. And I've been like, pain free since the second week of using X3. And I just thought it was a fluke. But now six months have gone by and it's just like, nothing, no pain. And so that. That's the reason why, because we're actually building the thickness of the tendons and the ligaments based on that loading in that, in that higher, more capable range of motion. So remember. Yeah, and we said this on, on the first, first podcast, which I urge everybody to listen to, especially listen to both of them because there's a big change in, in what's happened since then. You're seven times stronger in your impact ready range of motion. So when you trip and fall, you go to protect yourself. The back of the hand is in line with the clavicle, right, you know, right here. And there's 120 degree angle between upper and lower arm. So when that happens, you can either absorb in a fall or create the greatest amount of force only in that very specific position. And it is not a linear relationship downward to where you, where you would start the movement. So it's a curve and it's a very aggressive curve. And I put, put that two chapters in the book about those curves and the strength capacity. So you kind of go from, you know, x you can hold at the bottom and then in the middle you might be like 2x, but at the top you're more like 5x.

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And it has to do too, with the stretchiness of the band. Just happens to work out nicely with that.

We did have some engineering there, but.

Yeah, I can imagine. I had a thing about maybe four years ago when SARMs were something I was working to bring into biohacking. I put on 29 pounds of muscle in six weeks without changing my workout or, or my nutrition. And I ended up giving myself a shoulder injury because like, my strength grew dramatically, but my ligaments and tendons didn't.

They didn't. That. That's a problem with anabolic steroids too. Yeah, it, it is.

And I did heal it. I used stem cells and all that sort of stuff. So my range of motion and pain and all is. Is gone. When people are doing SARMs or anabolic steroids, they're putting on muscle rapidly, but they're doing the X3. Are they less likely in your experience? There may not be a study, but just from what you've seen, are they less likely to experience an injury compared to weightlifting?

Speaking from experience and MRIs that people have sent me, the answer is yes.

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