Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time (So Is Cardio & There’s a Better Way to Have The Body You Want).

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, if your goal is to show off and throw weights on the floor like a child or a crossfitter, okay, then go for it. The development of the product brought me to a conclusion that strength training is a lot more simple than it really has been presented to us. But we're just doing the wrong thing. When you look at how the fitness industry has done the leanest 1% of males are 11% body fat. That's not impressive.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield.

Welcome to the show. Are you sick of lifting weights? Well, guess what? I've got another controversial guest on today because he thinks weightlifting is a total waste of time. And you're gonna find out why. Alright folks, it's been a while, it's been a while since I interviewed today's guest, but a while ago, I guess maybe like two years ago, we talked about how to work out in 10 minutes a day, how to increase bone density, how to gain muscle, not just maintain muscle, but gain muscle with 10 minutes of exercise every day. And it was a really interesting episode in which we talked about this concept of variable resistance training and gave some really cool tips. And I will link to that original episode in the podcast show Notes, which you're going to find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com WasteOfTime that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com WasteofTime why waste of time? Because this guy just wrote a new book called Weightlifting is a Waste of Time. So is cardio and there's a better way to have the body that you want. Quite compelling title and I kind of thought it was going to be gimmicky when I got this book and then I read it and it's actually really good. So I think I read it in like one night in bed, couldn't put it down and then texted him the next day and was like, all right dude, let's do a show. So anyways, My guest is Dr. John Jakish and he's been made relatively famous not only for his work in building medical technology called OsteoStrong, which if you've ever been to a Tony Robbins conference, you've probably seen it. It's an extremely effective bone density building medical technology. But he also invented the X3 bar, which is essentially like, you know, an Olympic barbell training system that you can travel with anywhere in the world. And we talked about that quite a bit in our last episode. And you know, it allows you literally like Hundreds of pounds of squats and deadlifts and anything else using this method of training called variable resistance training, which actually does save you a ton of time, which. And I personally travel with this thing.

All over the world.

So anyways, I have a ton of questions after reading John's book, so I'm going to shut up and welcome you to the show, John.

Hey, Ben, thanks for having me. You know, I never corrected you last time, so you've been saying my last name wrong for like.

I never do that.

It's pronounced Jake Wish, really. So my fault.

I think you should call it Jacques, man. Jacques sounds better.

You talk to your parents, you know. Yes, but it is the way it is. It's sort of like science that I tell people about that upsets them because it means they've been screwing around and pissing their time.

Good, good segue, man. I like how you did that. Well, you, you actually talk about that in the book. You, you say that weightlifting has everything backwards. Everything backwards. And so I want to jump in right there because weightlifting has been around, last time I checked, for quite some time. And now you're kind of throwing a grenade in there and saying, no, you guys got it wrong. So explain to me why you say weightlifting has everything backwards?

Because we underload joints. I'm going to quote Peter Attia here. We underload joints and I'm sorry, we overload joints and underload muscle. That's what he says. And it's when we pick a weight, we're going to lift. And let me preface this by saying if your goal is to grow muscle and develop your body, then weightlifting is a waste of time. If your goal is to pick up weights and throw them on the ground to make a loud noise, I got nothing for you.

Okay, now when you say weightlifting, what do you like? What's your definition? If you say weightlifting has everything backwards and if you say that, if your goal is to just pick heavy stuff up and set it back down and waste your time, what are you referring to? You're referring to o lifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding?

It depends. It all depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to develop your body, weightlifting is not something you should be doing. If your goal is to show off and throw weights on the floor like a child or a crossfitter, okay, then go for it. You know, but that's not who I'm really talking to because I realize a lot of guys who lift weights, it's really about the weight that they want to talk about lifting, not really developing Their body. And that shocked me. I didn't even realize that was a thing.

You mean you have found that guys tend to be more focused on the amount of weight that they're lifting than changes in their anatomy? Yeah, that surprised me, actually.

Yeah, yeah, it surprised me too. Like what? Like, because like even, even people trying to have a serious conversation with me, they're like, but you know, what do I tell people? Just like, who cares?

Well, it's, I should say it's surprise. It surprises me for a recreational exerciser who I would tend to place into the bucket of doing many things for aesthetics, sometimes for functional athleticism, but often for aesthetics, you know, that's a lion's share, I think, of, you know, bros walking around the gym, for example, and in many women as well. But then in the sector of athletics, you know, professional athletics, whatever, crossfitting, Spartan triathlon, you name it. I know in those situations it wouldn't surprise me that people are more focused on performance metrics than anatomical or aesthetic metrics. So I think it kind of probably depends on the audience that we're talking about here.

Sure, sure, sure. So for people who want to develop, change their bodies, especially in the most extreme way, what you need to do is load the body in accordance with its capacity. So when I was doing the research with the bone density medical devices that I invented, it was very clear to me that we could put people in the position they would normally absorb high impact forces and they could massively load the body. Like I'm talking deconditioned elderly women who had never exercised in any way in their life after six months were putting five times their body weight through their hip joint, maybe even seven times their body weight through their hip joint. Well, that's weight that a weightlifter can't even use with full range movement. So I'm looking at just the impact ready range of motion. And I thought, wow, like, humans are capable of so much more in this position that you would normally absorb high impact. And so it's a combination of leverage with the different positioning of different bones. So there's that factor. But that also comes into play when the muscle is. The target muscle is at its shorter position, not shortest, but a shorter position. And so when we isolate these positions, humans are capable of seven times more than they are in a gym type environment. Because in a gym type environment, you're picking.

When you say a gym type environment, you mean lifting weights in typically in what would be called an isotonic based format, you pick the weight up, you put it down you're talking about instead something that we, that we discussed a little bit in the last podcast. But I'm going to make the assumption that some people may not have listened to that. You're talking about instead keeping a high amount of tension on the muscle throughout a full range of motion as being a superior way to train. And that is your definition of variable resistance training.

Correct. And the high tension is variable in that the tension needs to be magnitudes higher in these impact positions, and then it needs to drop off. So when I, when I do a chest press, when I'm just short of lockout, I'm holding £540 as I let the weight come towards my body. When I'm in the halfway position, it might be £300 and then it's £100 at the bottom. So I might do 25 repetitions and get to that £540 20 times. But then after I've done that, I can no longer continue like, I've gone to fatigue, but I can still get to the halfway point. So I do half reps. Because you.

Still have strength through half range of motion, you don't have strength through full range of motion, so you can essentially kind of keep on cheating through half reps at that point.

Well, I don't call it cheating, but.

Yeah, but a lot of people understand that language, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You'd call them half reps or something, but, you know, so I'm getting to that £300, and then the last few repetitions may only be that hundred pounds in that weakest range of motion, but now I've fully fatigued the muscle and fatigue that is. And you know, because you use it, but it is a far more profound level of fatigue. And the more intense the fatigue, the greater the adaptation. And so people grow very quickly.

Right. Okay, so I want to summarize for people who may need to kind of get like, the quick and dirty summary here of variable resistance training. And again, go listen to my other podcast with John if you want a deep, deep dive into the science of variable resistance training. But essentially, when you walk into a gym, you'll find that some weightlifters are doing things like hooking cables and bands and chains and all sorts of things like that to barbells and dumbbells to allow the actual weight to change as they move through a range of motion based on the idea that the body is naturally stronger at certain points of a lift. Meaning that as John just explained, if you're like halfway through the, let's say a bench press, you're actually going to be producing more force than you might be able to at say, the very bottom of the bench press. And you might be able to produce even more force than that at the very top of the bench press. And so using variable resistance like chains or bands or something like that would allow you to challenge yourself during the entire lift. And then furthermore, when you pair that with, as you kind of poop out during a set and you begin to not be able to move through full range of motion, you can simply continue to do reps moving through partial range of motion, again, still using some type of variable resistance apparatus. And what you're saying, John, is that if your goal is to actually maximize your time working out with a minimal effective dose of exercise, and your goal is primarily force production, slash muscle maintenance, muscle building, that it's a pretty dang good way to, to train in an extremely time effective manner.

Yeah, I think it's the only way. I would never waste my time lifting weights now that I know what variance can do. So, I mean, unless I decided I was training for like an actual weightlifting event, because then you have to get good at the sport of lifting a static weight through an entire range of motion. That's completely different subject.

Okay, got it. So with something like variable resistance training, what I'd like to do, I have a lot of other questions for you about things you talk about in the book, like cardio and blood flow restriction training, and some really interesting things you have on growth hormone and testosterone. First question I have for you regarding variable resistance training, since we're on this topic already, is what does an actual workout look like? Let's say I've got your X3 bar. Let's say I'm going to use your X3 bar. And, and I've got my bands. They're hooked up to this bar that you develop that's like an Olympic training barbell, but it fits in a suitcase and I've got all my equipment. What's the actual workout look like to be able to adhere to the variable resistance protocol that we just talked about?

So we do a push, pull split, which is pretty standard. One day, one workout, the next day, the next workout. It takes 36 hours for a muscle to completely recover and complete muscle protein synthesis. And we know this through muscle biopsy studies as a very high level of evidence. So we have complete recovery and adaptation between workouts. But each workout is really just four sets, so it can take you 10 minutes. The reason we do multiple Sets is because the stimulus is lousy. Like when I. When I say to somebody, they say, well, you know, one set is ridiculous. And I gonna say, okay, how many sets do you need to do in the sun to get a suntan?

With traditional weightlifting, you're saying that multiple sets become necessary because you're training inefficiently. But what you're saying is that if you're doing single set to failure, variable resistance training in the way we just described, you can get away with just one set.

Anything more would be over stimulus. There's one correct way to do it, and it is one set. That's it.

How many reps?

We go higher reps because you're using higher weight. It's mostly for safety purposes. So we go between 15 and 40 repetitions.

Okay, got it. And then are you resting at all in between any of the exercises in the. In the push sequence versus the pole sequence, or you're just going exercise to exercise, to exercise?

Yeah, you just feel like you've been hit by a truck after. After every set. So it's the hardest set you'll ever have?

Yeah, I actually borrow a little bit from, like, the. The strong first and Pavels. That's a lean crowd. And in between sets, kind of do like. Like a boxer would like some bouncing, some moving around, keeping the blood flow going. And then once I feel ready, I'll go and tackle the next set to failure. You know, and I'm typically doing this, like, in my hotel room or, you know, in a park or where I happen to be, you know, exercising with minimal equipment. And so I'll just bounce around. Typically it takes me around 60 to 90 seconds, and then I'll go on to the next set. So it takes about 10 to 15 minutes with the full routine.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay. So that's what the actual routine looks like. Now, I want to backpedal a little bit here and actually get into a little bit more of the science behind this. One thing I want to ask you about is hyperplasia, which you discuss in the book, meaning that muscle cells and muscle fibers can split to form additional new fibers. And that's basically what hyperplasia is. And you talk in the book about ways to actually maximize. Not hypertrophy, like an increase in the size of the muscle cell, the muscle fiber, but hyperplasia again, an increase in the number of cells and fibers. Now, when it comes to hyperplasia, why did you write about it in the book? What does that have to do with variable resistance training?

It Happens to very high level strength athletes. And you can get more of the effect by going through specific protocol. I wanted to give the person who reads the book, who maybe doesn't know what X3 is, something that's very valuable that they're not going to find in hardly any other books. There's 32 pages out of 268 that are specifically about X3. I didn't want to make the book necessarily a commercial for my product, though I do talk a lot about it because the development of the product brought me to a conclusion that strength training is a lot more simple than it really has been presented to us. But we're just doing the wrong thing. Picking up static weight is just garbage next to using a high level of variance with variable resistance. I just wanted to give people something that they could apply like the next day.

Okay.

But also, yeah, it's super useful because the hyperplasia protocol, it works especially with what we do with amplifying cellular hydration.

Yeah, I get that, I get that. But what I'm asking is, can you explain to people how you actually maximize hyperplasia? Like, what's your strategy for maximizing this increase in the number of muscle cells and muscle fibers that's going to obviously, when stacked with muscle fiber, hypertrophy going to allow for significant adaptations when it comes to just your overall muscular development.

You want to create as much internal pressure in the cell and a relaxation of the cell at rest. So when you're going through muscle protein synthesis, the cell, like really the biggest constraint to hyperplasia and cellular growth has to do with the external pressure of the fascia that surrounds the entire muscle. If you can get that to relax by super hydrating the cell and also by stretching the muscle while it is super hydrated, you create a little bit of extra space and that extra space allows or encourages the cells to split.

Okay, so this would be like if I had a balloon, and let's say that balloon is the actual muscle fiber or muscle cell itself. Or let's say it's full of muscle fibers or muscle cells. Right. What you're saying is that the balloon, the lining or the skin of the balloon would be the fascia. And if we can pull that balloon in all directions and stretch, stretch, stretch it so we got more room for the muscle cells or the muscle fibers to multiply, to increase in number, which is what hyperplasia is, and then simultaneously put a whole bunch more fluid in that balloon so it presses even more against that fascia that we've stretched that Based on what research has shown about hyperplasia, that combination of hyperhydration and stretching would result in improved hyperplasic response.

That's right.

Okay.

That's right. It was a friend of yours who really made this discovery was Professor Jose Antonio.

Oh, no kidding.

Yeah, he documented the hell out of it. This was his dissertation project.

So for the stretch part, are you just saying, I mean like do yoga or stretch in between your sets? What does the stretch part involve?

I wouldn't say yoga. You'd want to really get a hard stretch for 30 seconds and I would do all the stretching after. But you stretch the target, the muscles that you just worked.

Okay. Yeah. And I know that, I think there's one study that you cite in the book where they took some pretty rapid measurements of flexibility adaptation after stretching and found that if you can, if you can hit the muscle like within about six minutes after you finish the workout, like for your post workout stretching, and then you hold for around 30 seconds, which allows more blood flow into the muscle. That's kind of the way to do it. So, for example, if you were doing the, the X3 bar and you did, you know, one single set to exhaustion of the chest press, well, at some point in that six minute window following your full workout, some kind of stretch for the chest, like, you know, whatever, a hang from a pull up bar or a chest stretch against the wall or anything like that, you get in that position, hold it for 30 seconds, give the fascia a nice deep stretch. And that if you combine it with the hyperhydration, which we'll talk about in a second, would allow for maximizing hyperplasia.

That's right.

So how do you hyperhydrate?

So I do a vasodilator and then a small amount of carbohydrates after the workout. So vasodilator before the workout, which can be on kind of a medium effect you'd get from glycerol or epimedium, which are both natural. Well, I mean, what's natural?

Yeah, I mean. Well, they're vasodilatory agents. Right. I mean, they'll be like arginine, citrulline, nitric oxide, beetroot. Anything that's going to open up a blood vessel. You're saying will assist with hyperhydration?

That's right. That's right. And then, and then of course, like the more powerful ones would be like Viagra.

Yeah. I actually know a lot of athletes and lifters who really dig Viagra. And I've used it prior to workouts. And you know, I've discussed this I think when we did our podcast on blood flow restriction training, another podcast with Jay Campbell. Like there's a lot of benefits to sildenafil, the active component of Viagra in terms of the nitric oxide response that make it pretty potent for working out. And that's also the reason it's banned by wada, you know, because it's pretty potent as a pre work. But yeah, the vasodilatory part makes sense because if you're gonna hydrate a cell, you obviously need more blood flow to it. But there are a couple other compounds that are interesting. One I used to use before it became banned or on the banned substance list and that's glycerol, just like straight glycerol powder.

It's off the banned substance list now.

It's off now. Alright. Yeah, I haven't been following the banned substance list so much just to supplement.

People were like come on guys.

Yeah. But it draws a bunch of water into the muscle and it also, that's kind of a 1, 2 combo because it also has a vasodilatory effect which is interesting because glycerol is dirt cheap. I mean you can just get glycerol on Amazon and you're saying you would, you would use something like glycerol for the hyperhydration with a vasodilator and then the other one would be something that I think many people are familiar with as a cellular hydration amplifier. And that would be just basic creatine monohydrate.

That's right.

Okay, so, so let's summarize thus far. You're going to work out for 10 minutes with variable resistance training. Single set to failure. Push one day, pull the next day. Something like a, you know, four, four workout a week. Or you could even do a full body protocol. I, I kind of like the full body body protocol almost every day. That's, that's the way I sometimes do it when I travel. It's also cause I just like to move every day and then beforehand some type of vasodilatory and hyper hydrating substance to maximize hyperplasia. Then afterwards stretch each of the muscles that you worked for about 30 seconds. And that's kind of the hack for minimal effective dose. Getting hyperplasia and hypertrophy using variable resistance training.

Yeah, we also rec like, I mean the only time I would ever recommend carbohydrates would be in that 30 minute window after, after you stretched. Because carbohydrates also replace glycogen very quickly when your glycogen depleted. So right after a workout, before the gluconeogenesis starts for somebody who's ketogenic. So you can absorb and you. I believe now the research would say. The research I cited says anywhere from like 0.5 to 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. I've been going a little lower than that because I feel like I have an insulin event if I go to that recommendation. So I'll go below half. Mm. So I'll get maybe 40 grams of carbohydrates.

Okay, got it.

Which is small amount, but. And I can. I canmy muscles look like they're gonna explode?

Yeah. I mean, that, that's the old secret from, you know, from my days in bodybuilding. Once you did youryour morning kind of pose off and judging between the morning show and the evening show. I mean, I do pancakes, bread, just as many carbs as I get my hands on, and I'd just be swole by the evening. Sometimes I put on £12, £15 in a day. Just between morning and evening.

Would your stomach be bloated also?

A little bit, yep. And then. And a lot of times you'll. You'll see bloat in. In some bodybuilders when they're posing for the evening shows.

Because I could swallow the sea turtle.

Yeah, you get fermentation and. And yeah, it can definitely happen. I'm not saying it's a healthy practice, but it, you know, that's. That's how you do it.

Nobody ever said bodybuilding was about health.

I want to ask you a few other questions while we're on the topic of hyperplasia and muscle fibers. One of the things that you believe, or at least you talk about in the book, is that you shouldn't worry too much about your unique muscle fiber type. And a lot of people are doing. Not doing muscle biopsies, but a lot of times, like genetic testing to see am I more type 1 versus type 2? Should I be doing strength training versus endurance training? And you say it doesn't really matter that much at all. Why do you say that?

Yeah, so it pretty much says people do strength training regardless of what type of muscle they have. So, you know, slow twitch versus fast twitch. It really has to do with the speed at which a cell turns on, and we're talking about microseconds now. It just so happens that people with a lot more slow twitch become better marathon runners. People with a lot of fast twitch become Better sprinters. However, when it comes to building of muscle, especially size, it doesn't matter.

Well, I think that if you are doing strength training in the way that we've described and you actually are going to failure, you're recruiting every muscle fiber. You're recruiting both slow twitch and fast twitch. You're not just working type 1 or type 2 muscle fibers in isolation, you're working all of them. And I think one study you talk about in the book is how total muscle fiber mass increases, but the ratio of fiber types remains constant, proving that all the fiber types are affected.

Yeah. You did a better job explaining it than I did, right? Yeah. You read the study?

Yeah, yeah, no, I did my homework. So basically it doesn't matter. You don't have to say, well, I'm more like type 2, therefore I should kind of focus on maybe a heavier set, lower reps, or I'm type one, so I need to do high rep, low weight. Just do the full single set to failure in the manner that we've described. Exhausting yourself and then moving through the range of motion that you're actually able to handle even after a previous range of motion is exhausted. And you're basically going to utilize every muscle fiber. And it's almost very similar to something like if you were to, let's say you're injured or you're rehabbing and you have to use electric muscle stimulation, anybody knows that that can make you super sore because that electrical muscle stimulation is just grabbing every single fiber, often fibers you haven't been using or muscle groups you haven't been using. And what we're talking about is trying to get the same effect using something like variable resistance training.

Right?

Okay, got it. Okay. So that was a question I had about the muscle fiber composition ratio. And then I also wanted to. And this might be a little bit more of an involved question, but. But you talk in the book about the questions that an ideal exercise program should answer, and you specifically have a few criteria. And I wanna ask you questions about the. You really have three criteria. One is that you wanna get the maximum of hypoxia, meaning low oxygen in the actual muscle that's being worked and myostatin downregulation. Why is that and how can we get those?

So we have noticed through different research studies and different protocols, mostly with blood flow restriction, that we get a downregulation of myostatin when we create a hypoxic effect in a muscle. And this was mostly obvious when they do blood flow restriction studies where somebody's Obviously restricting their extremities. You can't really restrict your core, but they would notice pectoral growth when somebody would do blood flow restriction in the legs. So it's obviously not something that's affecting the local muscle that is constricted. This is system wide and this is how the myostatin effect was discovered with blood flow restriction. But blood flow restriction has some limitations because your body. Well, let me just stick with myostatin. So we knew that keeping the blood from returning to the heart, however we do that, is going to down regulate myostatin. And for those who aren't familiar with what that does, that changes.

Google myostatin Knockout bowl or Myostatin Knockout Mouse or Myostatin Knockout Dog, and you'll see what he means. Giant muscle bound animals.

Muscular animals. Right?

Yeah. Because myostatin, it's a myokine, it's a protein produced and released by myocytes and it inhibits myogenesis, which is basically exactly what we're talking about. Hyperplasia, hypertrophy, muscle cell growth, muscle cell differentiation, pretty much all of that is encoded by that gene. And so you want to inhibit myostatin, and you're saying that one of the better ways to do that is by inducing some kind of a hypoxic state within the cell as you're training?

That's right.

Okay, so how would one achieve that if they weren't going to use something like tourniquets and do blood flow restriction?

Yeah, the problem with tourniquets is youryour body knows there's a tourniquet there. And that's why you can only train very light because you have all kinds of neural inhibitory processes going on. You know, if you got something clamped onto your arm that's keeping blood flow from happening, that's why you can, you know, you got to cut the weight by 75%. But if you just use constant tension with variable resistance, which is part of the standard, every exercise with X3 encompasses this. You, you get that hypoxic effect, but you also are using a lot more muscle cells because you're allowed to train much heavier than you even would. I mean, forget about training with, with blood flow restriction. You, you're heavier than you would in.

In a normal gym environment, but it requires constant tension. Like you, you, you cannot. Like, if you go to full lockout or you rest in between reps, that's not going to induce a hypo. Like, that's one thing that I've seen in the literature is that it does require constant tension under load. So if you're one of those people who's doing like intra rep rest or you're whatever, locking out at the end of a chest press, holding it there, taking a few breaths and then go through the range of motion, you're not going to induce hypoxia. So you have to move through full range of motion in a manner that does not involve resting at lockout or resting at the beginning of the range of motion to induce that hypoxia. If you're not using something like blood flow restriction bands or Katsu bands.

Right, right.

Okay. So the idea behind the blood flow restriction, of course, is that if you were injured or you could only use lightweights or maybe you're traveling, you don't have variable resistance training on you or something like that, you can get the same effect with blood flow restriction training. Now I actually want to correct you about something you put in the book though, John, that I disagree with you on, and I disagree with you on this point. You say that because blood flow restriction is training light, because you just can't train heavy when the muscles are restricted from blood flow. That therefore, if you're training light, you're not going to stimulate testosterone receptor activity or trigger testosterone or upregulate growth hormone. Now that's true if you're training light in the absence of blood flow restriction. But there are a variety of studies that show a hormonal response that is significant to low intensity, low weight blood flow restriction exercise. So I still think that you get a significant growth hormone and testosterone response if you are training with light weights, if the muscle is tourniqueted, or if you're using blood flow restriction. So I think that you were kind of right when you wrote that in the book. But at the same time, I think that that goes out the window if you actually are restricting blood flow. From all the, all the literature that I've seen.

Interesting. So to the same degree as just, I mean like.

No, no, not. You're, you're never going to get as high as you would with, with a, with a high intensity high load protocol. But what they, what they have done is compared blood flow restriction training under light load to regular training under heavy load. And the testosterone response is a little bit higher with the heavy load without the blood flow restriction training, even though you get a pretty significant testosterone response even with low load training with blood flow restriction bands. But here's what's interesting. The growth hormone response is the same between low load training with vascular restriction and traditional high Load resistance exercise. So, like, long story short is you actually can get a hormonal response with blood flow restriction training.

Okay. Yeah. And you're not really going to get any. It's just a lower.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Okay, so. Well, it'll be a second edition. I can. I can.

Yeah. Well, we, we got. We got into the weeds a little bit. But so. So what I mentioned was that you said there were ideal questions or questions that an ideal exercise program should answer. And so one is we got to induce hypoxia and myostatin downregulation. That makes sense. Number two was you said that you need to get stability firing if you want to get a really high growth hormone effect. What does that mean? Stability firing?

So my co author And I in 2016 did a meta analysis of different destabilization type protocols and then destabilization type protocols with weight added and how much of a growth hormone effect there was because it was very observable. Like a standard squat, like free weight squat. There's a growth hormone effect, but there's like a leg press or leg sled kind of type exercise where you might be using a lot more weight. There is no growth hormone event at.

All because you are not having to stabilize the muscles as intensely when you have that kind of like. Well, they're both closed kinetic chain exercises. But the leg press obviously involves far less stability mechanisms than something like a squat.

That's right.

Okay, so if I'm using the variable resistance training, if I'm doing the X3 bar, and if I'm at the top of, let's say a shoulder press and my muscles are shaking because the resistance band. The best way I can describe is the muscles are shaking. They're very unstable. What you're saying is that if you can induce unstability during a workout, then you've seen literature suggesting that that's going to amplify the growth hormone effect.

Yeah, yeah. In the meta analysis, we got 23 different data sets.

Huh. I wasn't, I wasn't aware of that. That's actually. That's really good to know.

Oh, it's magical. It's like, it's. Once you. Once you realize this is why people who like, train with barbells are like, you know, it's like, oh, do you use any machines? And like, I don't really get any results out of machines. That's why.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's number two. And then number three, you said that you have to make the weights that you work with heavier to trigger the maximum possible amount of testosterone upregulation and the greatest activity in testosterone receptors. To me, that, that third point seems to be the most straightforward. All you're saying is that you're not gonna get a testosterone response that's significant by lifting light weights. With probably the only exception being you want to grow.

It's gotta be heavy.

It's gotta be heavy. With the only exception being blood flow restriction training. If you just can't lift heavy loads, you're still gonna get a greater testosterone response than nothing at all.

Right?

Yeah. Okay, so that makes sense. So basically we want, there's a lot of stuff we're stacking here. We want hypoxia, we want myostatin down regulation, we want instability, we want the maximum load that we can lift, ideally, if we can, we want some type of vasodilatory substance or hyper hydrating substance beforehand. We want to push the muscle through failure through each of the different ranges of motion, preferably in an unstable environment. And if we are doing this correctly, not wanting to waste a lot of time or we're achieving that all in one single set. That's kind of the summary of everything we've discussed so far, right?

You're an amazing interviewer, dude.

Okay.

Yeah, you, you, you. God, you do your homework.

Well, I love to geek out on this stuff. So. Yeah, so, so this is all very cool. So what about cardio? Because, you know, I, I've, I've interviewed way back in the day, the guy who invented like super slow training, and he said that you get so much peripheral resistance in the arteries and vasculature, moving a weight through a slow range of motion, that you see a decreased blood pressure response, an increased stroke volume in the heart, and all these things that you normally get through cardio. I think that was Doug McGuff that I interviewed about this. You can get through resistance training. You say cardio for weight loss. So we're not even talking about cardiovascular health, but we're talking about weight loss. You say cardio for weight loss is a lie. And I'm curious why you say that.

Most of what I chose to talk about is what the mainstream is looking for, which is aesthetic. When most people do cardio. When you ask them why do you do cardio? And they're like, well, I want to be lean. I don't think it's a very good way to approach being lean because you get a much longer cortisol effect and you know, like there's, and I should.

Mention a decreased growth hormone and testosterone response. If we're talking about chronic cardio, we're not talking about like, I'm talking about.

An hour of cardio, right?

Yeah.

More than 20 minutes. 20 minutes seems to be the threshold. So when somebody's doing a lot of cardio, they're up regulating cortisol in a chronic manner. And cortisol's objective is really diminishing muscle mass and protecting body fat, holding as much body fat as possible. And that's really the opposite of what somebody wants when they're doing cardio. Now, I know a lot of cardio people who do a lot of cardio, they don't care how much muscle mass they have. I'm thinking of a lot of women, which is unfortunate because I think women who hold a little bit of muscle actually look incredibly feminine. But that's sort of the question a lot of women have like, oh, I don't want to look like a man, so I only do cardio. And then they end up just sort of being skinny fat. So they have diminished muscle mass. Poor, poor posture. They're slumped forward.

I don't know, man. If Gwyneth Paltrow does it, it must work.

Yeah. Let's talk about the rocks she tells people to hold in their vaginas that cause infections. You want to talk about that?

Yeah. No, vaginal infections aren't on my list of things to discuss today. But yeah, I think that people should look into that. Yeah, just Google that. Long story short is that what you're saying is that you're getting a downregulation of the growth hormone and testosterone, that you would normally want to be able to enhance lipolysis and also be in a more anabolic phase.

Right. You want high growth hormone, you want.

Low cortisol, and at the same time you're breaking down lean muscle tissue, which is going to obviously affect overall metabolic rate and even, you know, non exercise based activity thermogenesis. The rest of the time that you're not training. And so, you know, I think that's, that's all pretty straightforward. But I do want to mention that, you know, I do cardio. I do. And the, the reason for that is that I, I think it does have a place when it comes to metabolic efficiency and some amount of fat burning efficiency. And I'll explain what I mean here in a second. And I also think that there is something that is. And even Dr. Andrew Huberman kind of talks about this in some of his neuroscience research there. There's like this meditative low blood pressure, decreased stress Response to this concept of constantly moving forward. Now the caveat here is that for me, cardio means that I'll get up in the morning, fasted and walk up and down the farm road with the dog for a half hour or I will try to hit 15,000 steps a day just by engaging in low level physical activity throughout the day. I no longer do my one hour beat down on the treadmill at a moderate intensity or, or a long two hour hammer fest on the bike where I'm just chronic cardio over and over again. I define cardio in two different ways. One I define as a more kind of ancestrally appropriate. I'm hunting, I'm gathering, I'm gardening, I'm moving slowly throughout the day. And I think that's perfectly appropriate for metabolic efficiency, for fat loss and even for some of the overall health benefits from de stressing and simulating meditation to a certain extent, constantly moving forward. But then when you cross the threshold to I'm just going to hop on the elliptical trainer for 45 minutes and jam or I got my one hour treadmill session or I'm just going to go like ride the bike down the trail for an hour out and an hour back. Don't fool yourself into thinking that that is going to accelerate weight loss, fat loss specifically, but do know that it's going to inhibit any amount of lean muscle gain and probably decelerate or even impair any type of aesthetic performance. That, that's kind of like my approach to cardio.

You got it?

All right, so do you, do you do that, by the way, do you do much walking or you know, just kind of low level physical activity throughout the day? Not really, because you're kind of jacked and I, I don't, I don't find many super jacked guys who move a whole lot. It's like Dan John's mass made Simple. He, you know, I interviewed him about that book. He's like lift weights, eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and watch football the rest of the time.

Yeah, I, I would not eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe an almond butter and blueberry, I don't know, crepe on a lovely sourdough bread or something like that. Maybe, maybe we should redefine peanut butter jelly.

But I'd probably just eat it still.

Kind of. Just give me the ribeye. Okay, so I've got a few other questions for you John, because I know that people might wonder about this variable resistance training. I'm going to go to Amazon, I'm going To grab myself some of the top ranks elastic training bands on there or some elastic tubing from, you know, Rogue Fitness or whatever. Or maybe my local sporting goods store, take that back and start doing this single set to failure training. Just like holding the bands and holding the tubing. And I'm curious what you think about that because I seem to recall in our other interview that there's a, there's a difference in the elasticity of certain forms of bands.

Unfortunately, like my, my initial plan when I realized what humans were capable of. The seven forms fold difference with how, you know, how strong we are in the impact ready range of motion. Truly fatiguing a muscle. We needed banding that was far more powerful than anything that was available. But then the problem is when you like get a pull up assist band. So there were some bands out there that had a lot of power in them. You know, they could offload your body weight by a few hundred pounds with pull up assist. You know, I'm talking about when you hook it around a chin up bar. And if you throw one of those, those heavy bands and of course x3 bands are 5, 10 times even heavier than those you could in trying to do push up with it or a squat or something, you could break your ankle or your wrist. Like those are really powerful and they're putting lateral force through joints that should not have lateral force put through them.

Because as you are moving the resistance band through range of motion, it's pulling both laterally and vertically.

That's right. And so I realized like people were just going to get hurt if they tried to do this. Like they weren't going to get any results at all. They were just going to get a different type of injured than they would, you know, with regular weights. So I realized we needed an Olympic bar. Olympic bar is a brilliant invention and it works very well. Our bodies interface very well with an Olympic bar. Why I say Olympic because of the rotational nature of that.

Right. You're. So you're not holding the elastic band in your hands. The elastic band is instead attached to a bar. So you're eliminating a lot of that lateral pull while still maximizing the vertical and the long bone loading.

Right.

Okay. And what about the makeup of the band itself in terms of potential to snap or break at higher resistances or you know, the, the actual. I don't know exactly how elastic bands are made. It's not something I've studied up on. But fill me in on how you keep the band from snapping or being able to withstand really high loads.

A lot of different ways. So, you know, with the kind of high, high density band we needed to trigger muscle growth, they needed to be non petroleum based. So most of them are petroleum based. So, like, they're made of oil, and those have a tendency of stretching out. There's a reason they're cheap. They don't last very long. And so people think they're getting stronger, but what's really happening is the band is getting longer. So that doesn't do anybody any favors. And those do break from time to time. So what I needed to do was develop something that was layered so a layer could fail, but the whole. The whole unit would not fail.

Okay, got it.

Right. So our.

So that. That is probably why if I leave my x3 bands out in the weather, which I have before, sometimes I'll notice that, like, the outside layer starts to peel away a little bit. Right, that's why.

Yeah.

Okay. Got it. Yeah.

And one, you know, one layer, it's like a rope that's a little frayed. Does it still work?

Yeah, sure.

So it's not. With, like, nicks in their bands and they go, this is okay. Yeah, it's fine. I mean, if you get a tear all the way through, which somebody can do because they hook it on something, you know, by accident.

Right.

And then they just tear it. Well, yeah, you need to replace that.

Yeah. Okay. So. So the layering of the bands is one part having the band attached to a bar. So you're getting more. You get basically superior mechanical leverage on the bar. And then the final piece that comes with this X3 bar setup is the ground plate. And that's interesting because a lot of times I'll train barefoot. And so I'm standing on top of the actual elastic band itself. And it seems to. I think we even talked about this in our last podcast. It pulls up on your ankles. It'll snap out from underneath your foot. And so you kind of figured out how to create this lightweight plate that the band just kind of goes underneath.

Yeah, the band slides freely underneath your feet and doesn't twist your ankles.

Yeah. So your ankles aren't rotating inwards, especially if you're doing. Because. Because you can do. I mean, I. I've seen you do, I think, like 600, 700 pounds, you know, peak force on a deadlift. And I. I believe that was using the, like, the. What's. What's the heaviest x 3 bar band called?

The Elite.

Yeah, the Elite, the big orange one, which. It hangs in my garage. I've used it a Couple times. But I'm not even to that level yet to be. Be able to. Yeah, I'm just. I'm not quite as strong as you. Yeah, but. But that would literally break the bones in your ankle if you were standing on top of the actual band itself.

Right, right. So the. The reason. The product. The reason I didn't write a book first and develop the product first and then wrote the book later was that I needed to. I needed to come up with something that was actually useful for strength training first.

Yeah.

Because the bands by themselves, they're just not that great. And I see people writing nasty things on social media about band training is stupid because, you know, it just, like, doesn't work or I don't like it or what. And. And then people send me the link and they're like, go, straighten this guy out. And I'm like, well, why, like, band training by itself doesn't really work. Now, they may be misquoting the science. They may not understand exactly what's going on or why bands by themselves aren't so effective. But when I hear somebody say I hate bands, I'm like, okay, well, me too.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The. The. The. The type of bands that we would traditionally think about. Now, what about. I don't know if you get this much. I've. I've heard a lot of people say that, you know, if you're working out and you're getting the type of results that I see in a guy like John working out 10 minutes a day, like, you got to be on the gear. Like. Like there must be some kind of, like, hormones, testosterone, something like that going on. What's your take on that? Because I've seen that kind of floating around out there as well.

Yeah, every high school kid with a visible bicep vein is accused of being on steroids by usually people who have never worked out or at least don't look like they've ever worked out. So that's unfortunate. I work with 12 different NFL players directly and 40 different NBA players. Got like another 15 professional athletes around the world. And these guys are all in incredible shape. And they're all drug tested. Well, the bodybuilders aren't, except for the bodybuilders are drug tested. And it's amazing. They have absolutely amazing physiques. They look similar to me. And they're not on anything, so you don't need to be on anything.

Well, granted, also, I haven't messed around that intensively personally with what we just talked about on this show. The Hyper Hydration with the vasodilatory substances followed by the stretching for the hyperplasia. I would actually love to kind of guinea pig this on myself. Using that full protocol. Probably creatine, glycerol, viagra and other nitric oxide precursor, do the variable resistance training, do the stretching afterwards. And you, you know, I could do a little one month, you know, experiment just, just to see any transformation in my own body. Because actually would be interesting to, to pay attention to how much you would get if, if there is that amount of a myostatin down. Regulation. Yeah, well, it's, it's, it's super interesting stuff. Obviously we could, we could talk about this stuff all day long, but the, the X3 bar and you guys are still manufacturing it, it's still people, people still get it, right?

Oh yeah.

Okay. Oh, all right, cool.

Yeah, we're sending out, yeah. Thousands of units a month.

I don't remember what our. We, we have like a special discount code for you guys. I think you save. What is it, John? Like 50 bucks? Something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so if you guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com waste of time. BenGreenfieldDentist.com wasteoftime I'll link to my other interview with John and then I'll also make sure I think the code is Ben if you go to the X3 Bar website. But I'll double check and I'll hook you guys up with whatever discount that John and I can work out for you. But I'll just put all that over@BenGreenful Fitness.com waste of time. And I think probably after this discussion, I'm gonna go hit my X3 bar this afternoon. Just because whenever I chat about stuff like this, I don't know about you, John, but it just makes me want to go do it. So, yeah, so yeah, I'll probably be out there in the driveway later on today with my, my x3 bar. I can't promise I'll have the elite band out. Sorry, ma'.

Am. Yeah, it's okay. You need to be pretty ready for that.

Yeah, yeah.

I tell people all the time, like a lot of people order it and they're kind of beginners and I say, okay, well, you know, keep it as something to work towards. But you're not going to be able, you know, you don't really want to discourage somebody, but at the same time it's like you don't need that, man. Like most, most of the NFL players. Most of the NFL players can't use it.

Yeah, yeah. You know what? One thing, by the way, did you hear my interview with Milo Sakev, the bodybuilder?

No, but I know who that is.

Yeah, we talk a lot about intra workout nutrition, and he had some pretty cool protocols for when you have really enhanced blood flow to a muscle, which actually is the case using the protocol that we just talked about. If he had certain compounds, many of which we've already discussed, like creatine and post workout, like a dextrose or really high glycemic index carb that rapidly replenishes the muscle glycogen levels. But he also talks a lot about amino acids and high blood levels of amino acids during the actual workout itself. So he'll consume during 10 to 20 grams of essential aminos, but do them in between his sets. And so another one you could throw in there would be do your first set and then as you're recovering after your first X3 bar set, you know, suck down a few sips of aminos and then do your next set, then suck down a few sips of aminos. With the overall idea being you actually maintain extremely high blood levels of amino acids, which I know you kind of touch on in the book a little bit yourself. And that would also probably be something that would combine well. But I'll link to that podcast in the show notes, the one with Milos Sarkav. It was super interesting and probably if you're still listening at this point in the podcast with John, what Milos and I talk about would be right up your alley.

So I'll put a link to that one as well.

Anything else you want to touch on, John, while I have you on?

No, I love the questions you ask. It's great because when you decide how you're going to interview somebody, you don't listen to, like another interview that they've had and then just ask the same questions. So many podcasters do that. And you came up with all original stuff and I appreciate it.

Well, you know the reason why I can tell you this, because I get books shipped to me all the time. They all come with an 8 and a half by 11 piece of paper that says, here's what to ask the author. And the first thing I do is I throw that out or I use it as a bookmark for the book because I do not want to ask what the publisher thinks I should ask. I read the entire book cover to cover, and literally, I've got books on my bedside, books by my electrical muscle stimulation unit downstairs, books on my desk. I am pretty much if there's downtime at the house. I've got a book under my nose, and I just. I read the actual book, and then I ask the questions that I want to ask. Not that the. Not that the publisher wants to.

You know, I don't even send those, by the way.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you didn't get a piece of paper, say, ask me this.

Yep.

Yeah, because I. I knew you would. And I don't actually do that for anybody, but the problem is they'll go watch another podcast I did. And then ask the same questions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. Well, cool. So suppose one thing.

I did think of something. I want to say the. When I wrote this, a lot of people got offended by the title and of course, didn't read the book. I mean, I think judging a book by its cover defines a fool. But I also have to say, before rushing to the defense of the fitness industry, you have to ask yourself, who's really fit? Now, I have some statistics in the book that talk about how, like, the leanest 1%, and I like tracking lean because that includes muscularity in that calculation. The more muscular you are, the leaner you are by proportion. When you look at really how the fitness industry has done over the last, let's say, 50, 75 years, the leanest 1% of males are 11% body fat. That's not impressive. That's the top 1%. Also, one in six males over the age of 18 in the United States have used anabolic steroids. So that means almost everybody who's used anabolic steroids has also failed to become what anybody would refer to as fit. So what the fitness industry has done is basically nothing. I don't see. Like, you and I are outliers compared to the average person at the average fitness facility. We walked into a. I'm not talking about Gold's Gym in Venice Beach. I'm talking about Planet Fitness and, you know, the middle. Middle of America. You go in there and then you go to the pizza place next door. And does it people look any different? Probably not.

Yeah. Well, that's the whole problem with. With the. With the fitness industry as a whole, is we have relegated ourselves to feeling as though we need to walk into a gym or a health club to get fit. That's why so many people ridiculously said that they got in the worst shape of their lives during the COVID pandemic, when, in fact, all it takes is literally walking, having a kettlebell or an X3 bar or some kind of a setup in Your garage, which is dirt cheap to do. Yeah, trust me, Google will allow you to do any number of body weight exercises to failure with nothing. You know, but the problem is people want to walk into a gym with the TVs, the magazines, the Jamba Juice, the, you know, the shiny stuff. Being able to sit down and be hunched over your cell phone while you're sitting on the pec deck. Like, that's gym culture. It doesn't get results, it doesn't produce athleticism. And, you know, I think just about everybody listening into this show is probably, probably sick of me, you know, getting on a soapbox about this. But yeah, I mean, you, you have to take your health and your fitness into your own hands and defy the status quo of what the typical American or gym junkie considers to be fitness and actually figure out a way to creatively and proactively design an environment that allows you to be active anytime, any place, just like our ancestors did for thousands of years before gyms even existed. That's the way that you should live your life. I'm not saying don't go to the gym. Gym is actually my happy place. I like to go to the gym and, you know, walk around, try new exercises and stuff. But don't fool yourself into thinking that that's how fit people actually get super fit. You know, they basically integrate fitness into their entire lifestyle. So, yeah, I'm on the same page as you, man. Well, let's, let's wrap this thing up because I actually got to go, so. BenGreenFulfitness.com WasteOfTime is where the shownotes are at. If you guys have questions, comments, feedback, if you want to grab your own X3 bar, you can use code Ben. And I'll put a link on in the show notes as well. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with John Jackish. Did I get it? Jakeish? I was close, man, like Jake and Wish.

Okay.

Oh, that helps me out. That, that kind of mnemonic is very helpful. John. John. Jake. The Jake wish. The Dr. Jake wish. Signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Amazing week, everybody. Thanks, John.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, Use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you, even each and every week.