The Best 10 Minute A Day Workout - How To Massively Increase Bone Density And Muscle In Just 10...

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Would you like to get a weekly email from me, a roundup that only gives you all the new discoveries of the week, the cool new things I'm trying, books I'm reading, new biohacks I'm experimenting with things I've done that may or may not give me explosive diarrhea or better cognition or anything else. I test, I experiment, I read every week. And in my weekly roundup, I spill all the beans for you. So. So it's very simple. If you just go to BenGreenfoldFitness.com and you subscribe to my newsletter, you're automatically in on the weekly roundup comes out every Friday. So check it out. It's all, you know, kitchen tools, foods, supplements, recipes, little hacks. Recently I've been actually using a high amount of Gerald Steiner sparkling water, which is very high in sodium bicarbonate, as a lactate buffer throughout the day and to get all the alkalotic benefits of sodium bicarbonate. So simple as that bunch of sparkling water. So that's just one example of what you'll get out of my weekly roundup is how to spend a bunch of money on sparkling water. No, there's a lot more, a lot more on there, along with a whole host of entertaining snippets from my week.

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The Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

I always thought, like, as dedicated as I am to training, like, this sucks. Like, I really didn't get much out of it. And so as I was doing this bone density research, I said, I know that there's a trigger here for muscular growth.

And as I started doing this research and realizing that we need to just get rid of the weight and double down on the variable resistance, I thought I was just going to write another book. Two workouts in. I could barely move my wrists and I could barely move my ankle. I was in pain.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And a few weeks ago, one of my buddies emailed me and told me that he had just talked with this guy named John Jaquesh, who's a PhD and invented this. This bar, not like a bar that you eat, but a bar that you train with. And this guy's an inventor and an author and a scientist who stumbled upon a way to get fit really, really fast while he was doing some. Some pretty advanced osteogenic loading research on how to increase bone density.

And he developed this protocol.

I believe.

You were working. Were you working with your mother, John?

Yeah, yeah. This whole thing was developed, right?

Yeah, for his mom. So sweet. And anyway, so John develops these amazing biotechnology devices that increase bone density and strengthen muscle and improve stability. And I got my hands on one of these bars that he created. It's called the X3 bar to play around with myself. Uh, speak of the devil. I actually have it in my hand right now. I'm standing on the platform with the band attached. And while we're podcasting today, John, I actually, as I've done before when I've used this thing in airports and here in my office when I want kind of like a minimalist, quick, 10 minute workout, I'm actually doing my workout while we're talking.

How cool is that?

I mean, I figured if there's one guy I could work out to while I'm podcasting, it's you. So if you hear me like grunting, I'm not, I'm not taking a dump while I'm interviewing you. I'm, I'm working out. So just, just, just clear that up.

Yeah, I, I actually just did another podcast for. It's called the Motor Cop and they, they, they. There's a video component of it and, and so they wanted me to do like a set to complete fatigue and I could barely breathe. You know, like, it really does wipe you out.

Oh, it does. Like, I'll, we can talk about this later. But I've got one protocol that I do where this, this totally sounds like some dumb biohacking exercise that I'm sure any power lifter would, would snicker at, but it works for me. I stand on a vibration platform with, with your bar set up on top of the vibration platform. And I do the dead, specifically the deadlift and the squats overhead press and dude, it just wipes me clean because you're, you're fighting against the variable resistance that we'll talk about here in a second, but then also having to deal with all the tiny little proprioceptive cues from the vibration and dude. So it's a pretty crazy way to train. The other thing I've done. I didn't tell you about this, but I have one of these. It's almost like. Have you seen like a balance board, like a fluid stance or a wobble.

Board or any of those before?

Fantastic.

Yeah, I'll set this on top of that. So I'm actually having to balance while at the same time I'm doing. So on that. I'll do like curls or upright rows or squats. So I've, I've been playing around with this and figuring out a lot of ways to, to make it even harder or enhance it even more. So.

I'm so glad you brought that up. You're surging growth hormone while you're doing that. I Didn't even send you the study, but I did.

Wait, what? With the vibration platform or with the balance?

Both.

Interesting.

They work the same.

Why?

I did a meta analysis on that. We'll talk about that.

Okay, let's get into that. I won't forget to come back to my little tweaks on this thing, but tell me first of all about your mom and this concept of osteogenic loading and how you actually came to get into this concept of almost like biohacking Bone density.

Yeah. Yeah. So I was 20 at the time, and.

My mother came home from undergrad, and I was looking for something to eat and to get my laundry done like most kids. And so my mom was pretty upset, and I could see. See that on her face. And I said, what's going on? And she said, well, I'm going to die. My mother's very dramatic. So I had heard that before, but I said, why? And she said, well, I was diagnosed with osteoporosis today. And I thought, okay, that's a real thing.

So I said, let me do some reading about it. And I was majoring in marketing at the time and playing Division 1 rugby, so I wasn't focused on medicine at all. But as I began to read, and this process took months and months.

Where I looked at who builds superhuman bone density. There is a group. There is one group, and it's very distinct. It is gymnasts. The rate at which they hit the ground is incredible.

Gymnasts, really?

Gymnasts? Yeah. When they dismount from the uneven bars, they can get 10 times their body weight.

That's crazy. Except the little skinny anorexic ones, right? They probably don't have great bone density.

Well, some of them have, like, overtraining issues and eating disorders and why, they actually fracture a lot, but they're still going through these very high loads. Like, there's no way you can dismount from the uneven bars and not get 6, 7, 8, 10 times your body weight. Doesn't mean there aren't other things. Like, orthopedic surgeons will tell you the most fascinating people to work on is gymnast, but they're also, like, right on the edge of incredible damage.

Right.

So.

Right. Same, same reason, but in reverse, why an astronaut would have poor bone density. They're not getting any loading, they're not getting any impact. They probably also don't have gymnastics equipment in space. But, yeah, it makes sense. Impact creates an osteogenic load that induces some kind of, you know, osteoblastic cell formation.

Right, right. So basically.

What I did was I looked at this gymnastics research and I thought, okay, I need to benefit. And I've been told by my professors, because I went and got my PhD in Biomedical Engineering after this. My professors all told me, if you got your education first, you would have talked yourself out of this because it's so unconventional. But what I did was I thought, okay, I'm going to build a device that gives the benefit of high impact without the risks. So slow and controlled loading in the impact ready position. So think like if you jump in the air and land, there's a 120 degree angle behind your knee, right? We're going to isolate that and we're going to allow compressive force to go through the lower extremities. And so my mother was using six times her body weight after just a year of using the first prototype, which I. Which I built in the garage.

Wait, you mean the prototype of what I. What I'm standing on right now? This is the same thing you. No, no, no, no, no.

Bone density device.

Okay, so this is different.

Oh, yeah, yeah. They're gigantic metal. They're $100,000. Computer screen on them giving you biofeedback. You can find them at osteostrong locations. There's 54 clinics. I just, I just got back from an opening in Stockholm where they opened the first one in Stockholm.

Osteostrong. So this is the device that you created.

Right?

So if someone is suffering bone dust, they could, they could go like, find one of these devices near their house and go use it.

Osteostrong me.

Okay, I'll. I'll put a link to that. Oh, by the way, you guys, the links for today are going to be over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 10 minutes. BenGreenfieldFitness.com ten minutes. You'll learn why here in a little bit, but go ahead, John.

Nice. I like that. So compressive force at far higher loads than anyone would normally be able to get through, even weightlifting. And this is why so many postmenopausal females have bone density challenges. And they say, but I don't understand. I'm a runner. Like, I go through high impact. Well, it wasn't until 2012, where some researchers in Bristol, United Kingdom, determined with accelerometers and blood marker turnover tests where they would do a blood analysis on a regular basis and look at the loading through the accelerometers where they were determining that.

A minimum of 4.2 multiples of body weight going through your lower extremities to trigger any bone growth at all.

Oh, wow.

So that's not going to happen by lifting weights. That's going to happen through either high impact or at osteostrong locations where there's a controlled. There's a controlled event where you're safely loading and using computerized biofeedback. And the machines are actually robotic, so they really calculate the right position for you and then allow you to expose load in that very optimized position.

Did you actually make this thing, like, out in your garage for your mom, or do you have access to some kind of a production facility?

Well, this took years. And the initial prototypes, the first prototype had, like, chains and wooden blocks, and I duct taped, like, towels to it to use as pads, so I threw all those away. I don't even want people to see what I did. My mother was very upset when I made her use it because it looked very scary. Now they look gorgeous.

Yeah.

In fact, Tony Robbins has a set.

I'm looking at the website. Yeah, Tony Robbins. Dave Asprey appears to be a big fan of this thing, but y. Yeah, it looks pretty advanced. Looks far more advanced than this thing that I'm using.

Right. Well, interesting is the bone density research. The whole time I was doing the bone density research and building those devices and getting the robotics right and the mathematics right, and I wrote a book called Osteogenic Loading.

So I looked at what was going on with bone, and I thought, gosh, we're using really high forces, which tells me that humans are capable of a lot more from a force production standpoint than we're really getting in weightlifting. In fact, from a functional. Which is the most misused word in fitness, from a functional perspective, we always choose our stronger range of motion. Like, when you run, you have 180 degrees of flexion available in your knee, but you only use 7 degrees.

Right.

Why is that? And when a fighter punches somebody, they don't want to punch somebody one inch away from their face. They want it almost at full extension, where there's 120 degree angle of inclusion between the upper arm and lower arm.

Yeah. Unless you're Bruce Lee.

Unless you exactly like. Yeah. And there are. But if you watch the way his, like, the rest of his body moves, he does optimize his biomechanics. He twists his body.

Mm.

So, like, we all want to use our optimized ranges of motion. So it's just the way our reflexes work. And then when we go into the gym, it's like, no, I'm going to use a Static load through the most compromised position, and then in the strongest position, too. But that's a thing. And there is a sport of the bench press and the squat and weightlifting and powerlifting and things like that, which is great. But if we want to be as strong as possible, we need to look at these biomechanical variations. And so.

When you read the research section of x3bar.com and look at what I came up with for muscle, which is sort of like the other side of the coin of the bone, which is x3, I thought, okay, this device is not even going to be very expensive. But ultimately, what I looked at first was what Westside barbell was doing.

Yeah. And you know what? Before we dive into how you develop this X3 bar, after you develop this osteo unit, just to close the loop on osteostrong, basically what you're saying is that the minimum force required to trigger bone growth for people who are listening in, who might have osteopenia or osteoporosis is about 4.2 times the body weight. And in order to generate that amount of force safely and somebody has osteoporosis, you need to be on something like one of these machines that kind of walks you through various ranges of motion. It looks like there's like a leg press and like a pressing unit. It almost looks like. Are you familiar with these ARX machines that produce both eccentric and concentric force?

Dave Asprey's house.

Yeah, it seems kind of like that. Is it kind of a similar concept?

No. With the arx, you're really wrestling with a motor.

Okay.

And you're going through a full range of motion, and the loads are not. Are not very similar. Like, for example, I put 4,000 pounds through my legs when I use the osteo.

Oh, Holy cow.

Yeah. Wow. £2,100 through my upper extremities to compress bone.

Interesting.

Adapted to the point. And listen to this. I take a DEXA scan. I'm two standard deviations above normal.

That's crazy, because you're getting this huge axial load that triggers bone growth in the actual bone.

Right. Massive. So I am fractured.

And you can't do that with a barbell. You can't get that amount of BO loading. Or is it more of the injury risk in someone with low bone density?

Yeah, you know, there. There are some people who have done, like, lockouts and really loaded bars up. But, like, would you really, in a power rack, would you really want to get under a thousand pound bar? Like, if that power Rack fails.

Yeah, I get it, I get it.

So using a machine to generate copious amounts of force that actually induce, like, osteogenic load.

And when you use the osteostrong devices, you get to see exactly what your maximum output is as opposed to choosing what to impose on yourself.

Right. Because there's like a computer dashboard that shows you how much force you're producing. Right.

How much force you're putting.

I'm gonna look for a place near my house. I'd love to go try to work out on one of these. Because in looking at your research, it looks like there's a pretty significant effect on muscle growth and also blood sugar and some other health parameters too.

Well, it's creating a myofibril adaptation, which ultimately creates more receptor sites for insulin.

For people who don't know what a myofibril adaptation is, explain that density of cell.

As opposed to holding more fuel in the cell, there's two types of muscle growth, sarcoplasmic and myofibril. Sarcoplasmic is when you sort of compound the pump of the muscle. This is what most people who lift, especially bodybuilding style, they are able to hold more glycogen, creatine, phosphate and ATP in the cells. So the cells become.

Vehicles to hold more fuel for contraction.

Right.

Whereas people who absorb more explosive force, like gymnasts, people who use osteostrong, they're going to have a more dense cell.

Right, right. Yeah. That's actually pretty fascinating. Yeah.

You can do sarcoplasmic training and. And more myofibril type training.

Yeah, I do both just for aesthetic reason. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy or sarcoplasmic training, where this volume of sarcoplasmic fluid in the muscle cell increases via, like a bodybuilding style training or a high weight, low rep style trainer, even like a blood flow restriction type of training with body weight that's great for maintaining blood flow, for getting a metabolic response to training, and for just whatever, looking good in a swimsuit with your shirt off. But it's also why bodybuilders tend to be kind of weak relative to the amount of muscle that they have, because a lot of that hypertrophy is just sarcoplasmic fluid. And it's not an actual increase in the contractile proteins or like actin and myosin. And that's, I think.

Actually in my book Beyond Training, I talk a little bit about this research that Paul Geminet discusses in his book Perfect Health Diet, where he goes into longevity Research and in guinea pigs. And this idea that like the, the explosive, wiry, more like myofibrillar based hypertrophy is better for longevity. It's better for strength. Like you want to, yeah, you want to be more like a quick, explosive, wiry power lifter and be doing more of this either single set to failure training or heavy load training versus like the traditional bodybuilding esque, you know, 12 to 15 reps to failure, which I guess would be a good segue into this bar. So I want to get into that. How did you come from the osteogenic loading devices to developing this thing I'm standing on now?

So as I was doing the research, I had always been a generally disappointed guy in the gym. I played Division one rugby. I was always athletic. I had access to great strength coaches. I think all the weight I put on was really just getting older. Like, you know, from the time I, I did wrestling, swimming and track in high school and then rugby in, in undergrad. So I just like like 180 pound kind of guy, like six feet tall. Like not. I was fit. When I took my shirt off at the beach, people be like, oh yeah, you work out. But when I was wearing a shirt it would be like, okay, you're just a regular dude, right? So. And I always thought like, as dedicated as I am to training, like, this sucks, like I really didn't get much out of it. And so as I was doing this bone density research, I said, I know that there's a trigger here for muscular growth and it's not completely clear to me, but I can see with human capability in these, in these optimized ranges of motion. Look at the loads I have elderly women.

Putting through their musculoskeletal system, right? Like if those are the kind of forces that people are really capable of, then we're massively leaving something on the table or as the case may be at the gym that we just can't get with standard fitness? So when I came across somebody, somebody sent me a link to Westside Barbell and was like, I think you need a take a look at what these guys are doing. I think it may have some bearing on your research. And what they were doing is they'd offload a little bit of weight for regular weight training. Now they train weightlifters and I don't know if powerlifters are weightlifters. I'm not really in that space. But they train people who are participating in the sport of the squat, the sport of the bench press.

And the deadlift. So the main lifts, and they have these special racks to hook bands to. So you have bands and the weight, they offload some of the weight. So like, let's say you're holding a bench press bar on your chest and that weight is X. And then as you extend, the weight goes to 1.3x.

So I got that off of some of their writing that they've done.

Yeah, I, I actually, I don't, I don't know if I told you this, but I used to be a bodybuilder and I would use that a lot, especially during squats and bench pressing. You loop the bands around the bars and you get, not only do you get a lot of, of kind of like the best way I can describe is like a, a shaking and a, almost like a dynamic movement of the bar as you move it up and down. You got to work a lot harder to control it, but then it presses against you a lot more. And on the same, same side you could, you could say this about gymnastics. Right? Like one gymnast that I was working with who was teaching me the muscle up, he simply used an elastic band to, you know, deload me and to help me get up through a muscle up, you know. And so, yeah, it could be used to load or, or to deload. But yeah, I first started using this, this kind of concept back when I was a bodybuilder.

Right, right. And, and so they were doing something great. Now they're doing something a little different than what I'm trying to do. They're trying to make people good at lifting free weights. Whereas my objective with X3 was I don't care about what I bench press.

Or what I squat.

I'm 41 years old. I want to be as strong as possible, and I want to stay as strong as possible for the rest of my life. And so that's kind of where my head was when I was looking at what they did. And so I observed what happened west side. And then somebody showed me a study in 2008. So I've been working on the bone density thing for a long time. Somebody showed me 2008. Professor Anderson and researchers took Cornell athletes, split them into two groups, had one group do their regular weight training, tested them pre deposed for strength, and then had another group do the something similar to what west side was doing. So less actual weight, and then banded and they grew muscle three times faster. Now that's where I got the whole X3 thing. But that's not exactly what we're doing, because when I looked at the two groups, I said, okay, now I think I've got it. Both groups are using weights. The group that had the three times gains was using a little bit of variance. So let's ditch the weights and double down on the variants. Because as I was seeing in my research and I had just. When I was reviewing all this information, I had just this is in 2015, published a study, I wrote the protocol and the hospital ran the study in London where we're loading Postmenopausal women with 6, 7, 8, 9 times body weight through their hip joint. So I'm looking at what they're doing and then when I compare that to the American College of Sports Medicine loading data. When you look at what the American College of Sports Medicine says, non athletes versus athletes load through their lower extremities, it's 1.3 to 1.53 multiples of body weight versus we're training with like 8, 9 multiples of body weight with deconditioned women.

Yeah.

That are over 50 years old. And so I'm saying, okay, screw the weight. We don't need the weight. What we need is massive variant, massive variance.

Like. What do you mean massive variance?

Like very low weight where your joint is compromised in the weak range of motion. And much higher weight doesn't necessarily mean like, you know, beyond your one rep maximum or anything like that, but a weight that is drastically different in the strong range versus the weak range.

Now when you say the joint is compromised in a weak range of motion, what do you mean?

Well.

You don't injure your shoulder when you're at extension in a bench press. It's at the bottom.

It's the greatest risk of injury. Right. That's where you can potentially sublux the.

Joint because you're the weakest at the bottom.

Right, Right. And ultimately, mechanically, like we Only if you're lifting a static weight in a conventional manner, you only go to fatigue in the weak range of motion. Hence we call it the weak range of motion. Okay, and what do we know about the weak range of motion? You have the least amount of muscle firing and you have the joint is at its greatest exposure for potential injury.

Okay, so what I'm confused about here is when you talk about this Cornell study where they compared people who trained with elastic and they were producing. I looked at the study. They were like three, three times greater response for the squat, three times greater response for the bench press, three times the amount of power produced as a result or as a response to conventional training. Right. Training with elastic bands and this concept of variable resistance versus traditional weight training. Are you saying that in that study not only were they using elastic bands, but they were putting people into their weakest range of motion?

Yeah, they were going full range.

Okay, so full range of motion. But what you're saying is when you add elastic, it produces the greatest amount of stress when you're in your weakest range of motion.

No, no, no. What I'm saying, I understand your question. Now, when you lift a static weight, like the control group we're talking about or anybody who's like doing a regular bench press, you are limited by your weakest range of motion. That's why we call it that. Right, right. So and in that weak range of motion, you have the least amount of muscle firing and you have the greatest exposure to potential injury. So what they did in that Cornell study is they offloaded that range of motion slightly so they use less weight on the bar and then they used the elastic to deliver more force in the stronger range of motion. So like I said, x weight on the chest, then 1.3x at the top.

Yep.

And so, and so, and then when I, when I. It's really important because some of the, you know, like online trolls will like look at one sentence in one study and say, well, you're not doing exactly this. So you, you know, you're wrong. No, the reason we have multiple references is because I'm pulling observations from multiple studies. So when you look at the Anderson study and then you look at my study from London, and then you look at the American College of Sports Medicine data, there's a seven fold difference from weak range to strong range. So why don't we train that way? In fact, the Anderson study and what's going on at Westside Barbell is just scratching the surface of what variance and resistance can do. So that's when I came to the conclusion, all right, get rid of the weights. Just massive variants.

Because the body can't tell like especially muscle tissue or this myofibrillar response for hypertrophy or for actin and myosin fiber growth. There is, there's no difference in the way that the body interprets a load if it is from say like a heavy tension based elastic band versus like a barbell made of iron.

Of course. Yeah, the muscle has no idea.

And there's actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a greater eccentric loading effect when you're getting pulled back out of that, out of that range of motion by elastic?

Not necessarily. There's More stability firing for sure.

Okay. So it's more of a proprioceptive cue than an eccentric contraction because you're trying to, you're trying to like maintain it as it moves back through space.

Right. So, so the protocol that I have people following that comes with the product is that you go to fatigue in diminishing range. So let's say you take the heavy band, you throw it around your back and you go to do a chest press. And let's say you hit 15 repetitions at the top and you're six, two. Yeah. So you're probably getting.

I'm six foot, so that's 250 pounds for me at peak. So that might be, you know, 275 pounds or something like that for you. Let's say you hit that 15 times. Now all of a sudden you can't get to the top of that chest press anymore. So you keep going and you're doing half reps with, let's say £180 and you do five more of those and now you can't get to that range anymore. And your last couple of repetitions may only be 1 inch in range of motion. Now you fatigued all ranges of motion simultaneously in one set.

Yeah.

So this, this is a, an absolute fatigue of muscle. This is not something you can do with a weight.

Interesting. But you're not, you're not changing out the elastic band as you go through a routine like that because you're, you're your system. And we can explain this in a session in a second. It comes with like multiple resistances of elastic bands that you can use for each movement. What you're, what you're doing is you're simply adjusting the range of motion that you're going through as the muscle becomes more and more fatigued.

Right.

Okay, got it.

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I want to get into here in a second. Like, like how this thing is actually built, what it looks like. But there's also some really interesting research. In addition to this, the three time greater increase in power that you talked about and also the increase in bone density. And that would be the hormonal response which you alluded to as I was talking about how I have it on like a vibration platform or I'll use it when balancing. But talk to me about what you found as far as the hormonal response to I guess you would call this is the technical term for this variable resistance.

Yeah.

Okay, tell me about the hormonal response to variable resistance training.

So the reason why. Let me just back up and look at how in strength training with a lot of athletes that really need to perform on a field or I'm not just talking like bodybuilders here, but like in a football weight room, you'll see a lot of power racks, you won't see a lot of leg presses, you won't see, I doubt you'll ever see a quad extension.

Right.

So. And they've noticed that there's a lot of translation from squat power to on the field power, whereas not so much for the other, the other two types of exercise. So if you look at, and there have been a few different studies comparing a squat to a leg press. So if you look at what happens like obviously you handle less weight on your back with a squat than you would handle on a leg press. However, you get a 0% change in growth hormone levels pre to post with the leg press. With a squat where you do a 10 rep set, you may get a 400% increase. Actually I think it's 443% increase was the last study that I read.

On this. So Henry Alkire is a researcher that I work with. He's with the company.

We did a meta analysis together last summer and what the meta analysis looked at was we're trying to find out like what this pituitary axis is to trigger growth hormone upregulation. There's a couple of them you can fast and get more growth hormone. You can do, you know, you have a really good night's sleep, you have a higher resting growth hormone. But growth hormone is fantastic. It and I think recently on your show somebody referred to it as human repair hormone. When you're an adult, it doesn't really grow you.

And I forgot who that was that you had on your show.

Probably the guy I interviewed, Dr. Richard Gaines about growth hormone. He's the guy who does, he does my dick injections and he's also like a big hormone expert. And yeah, I think, I think he described it as human repair hormone, which makes sense.

Yeah, much, much Better explanation because people hear the word growth and they're like, I don't want to grow anything. Weird.

Yeah.

So what, what Henry and I did is we found two different data sets that looked at stabilization firing through exercise and pre to post. And then some of the groups, some of the data sets had control groups too. So either pre to post or control to post test. And in the meta analysis you take all the different data sets and use statistics to normalize them. I know you know what that is, but listeners might not.

So we, we put all this research together and then did a bunch of statistical tests and determined with the absolute highest level of statistics, statistical significance P value like.00001 that it's stabilization firing has a massive effect on growth hormone levels. The only thing that attenuates a greater.

Upregulation of growth hormone is the weight that somebody is using. So if you're unstable and you're doing like a one legged squat and you're just lightly bending one knee, not all the way down, you're going to get, you know, a little bit. If you stand on a vibration platform, you're going to get more, quite a bit more. If you're using X3 and doing like an overhead press, as you alluded to, your core is firing at an incredible rate because when you get to the top of that pressing movement, you're holding a weight that you probably wouldn't be able to get there.

Otherwise. So you're holding a massive weight when your arms are an extension over your head.

Yeah, that's what I've noticed. My whole body, my whole body shakes like, my entire body shakes like it wants to let that thing down far different than what I get if I had a barbell over my head.

Oh, right, right, right. Because you're handling a higher weight. And not only higher weight, more repetitions with a higher weight. I tell people, don't be afraid to go 30 or 40 repetitions with X3 because. Yeah, because you're getting to a massive force.

Do you still get like a myofibrillar response or once you get up to that high of a rep range or is it just sarcoplasmic?

No, because when you fatigue the top range, you fatigue the stronger range. You're not running out of ATP, that's not what the fatigue is. You're running out of contractile tissue. So that's a different stimulus. So the body, you know, when you go to fatigue in the stronger range of motion, central nervous system saying, yeah, we need to actually have more protein Synthesis here. We gotta, we gotta build more myofibrils, a denser tissue.

Yeah, you're training heavy in a weak range of motion.

Well, I mean at the top range, I mean like in the strong range. And then when you get to the weaker ranges of motion, that's more of a sarcoplasmic effect.

Okay, so you're getting both to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I've definitely had like that sarcoplasmic pump after working out with this. But I'll, I'll be honest with you. Like I'm using heavier latches bands and I'm only doing like 5, 10 reps max when I've been using it and just going through. You sent me a PDF with the basic exercises, even though I know you have a full 12 week program on the website where you get into everything from like forced reps to constant tension to I think you call it a reflexive warm up. You know, you have a whole bunch of stuff and that's, that's all by the way, you guys listening in that, that's all for free on his website. If you just want to go look at, at what this thing looks like like when you're working out on it. And I'm going to describe it here in just a second, but I'll link to that. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 10 minutes. BenGreenfulFitness.com 10 minutes. And again, I'll tell you why 10 minutes in a second. But first, before we dive into that.

Describe to people how this actually looks and why you can include each of the components that you did. Because it's basically three things. It's like a platform, a bar and band. So I could throw this in a suitcase or just keep it underneath my, my desk or, or wherever. But describe to me why these three different components.

Right, And I'm actually glad you asked that question because a lot of people look at it and they expected the whole thing to cost like 30 bucks. And what they don't realize is that bar is designed to handle somewhere between 500 and 1,000 pounds of force because you handle a lot more weight in your stronger range of motion. Plus there's ball bearings on each end, so your grip is never compromised. Because the bar swivels.

Yeah.

So that's the equivalent of an Olympic bar.

It's way, it's way different than just holding on to an elastic band.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, the elastic band, like if. So every, every once in a while I'm at a Place where I'm showing a group of people. Like, I went to Go Gold Gym in Chicago, and I started doing reps, and somebody said, well, can I just, you know, do curls with. With a band? And I had him do a couple curls with the bar. And I'm like, all right, now let's take the bar away. And the guy said, oh, my God. It's like, I'm gonna break my wrists. Right? You can't do the exercise. You need a way to grab it. Like, there's a reason we train with bars and not, like, lifting rocks.

So component one is this bar with the ball bearings inside of it, and the elastic bands kind of slip over the little hooks on either end of the bar, right. And then they go down to this plate. And I'm standing on the plate right now. Usually until you sent me one of these devices to mess around with when I'm training with an elastic band, like, let's say I'm gonna do upright rows, I would stand on top of the band, not on top of a platform like this, and just like, use my feet to hold the band down, and then do an elastic row without the bar. And the bar just. I mean, I can use way more force now that I've got this bar in my hand, so I can use a much heavier elastic band. But then the. The plate itself. Why. Why do you have to stand on this plate?

Protect your ankles. Because, like, if you're doing a deadlift with a really heavy band and these bands go to hundreds of pounds.

Yeah, they're heavy.

The height differential is. Makes a difference. Like. Like you're being 6 foot 2, you're going to have more. Because you stretch the band more, you're going to have a little bit more force than somebody who's 5 foot 10. But the point is, people are training with 200 or 300 pounds in a deadlift, if you try and step on a band that's got two or three hundred pounds going through it, you will injure yourself.

Oh, yeah. I'm doing deadlifts right now, right. Because I've got this.

This.

So I've got the bar in my hand doing the deadlift set on the plate. There's no way. And I've even. I'm only using, like, the second elastic band in terms of force. I know these things will go up to 500 pounds of force if I use that big, thick one back behind me. But I mean, like, even right now, like, my muscles are shaking as I'm at the top of this deadlift. While I'm talking to you. And.

My ankles would be like, they'd be hurting me right now if I. If they were being used to support this.

It's a process called neural inhibition. Right when you're uncomfortable, your body starts shutting your muscles down. Is it like, what the hell are you doing? Stop doing that.

Right.

You know, like the same reason why you reach, you know, you put your hand in the fire and it snaps right back. You don't have to think about pulling your hand out of the fire. Same kind of thing. So it's a body protective process. So as I started doing this research and realizing that we need to just get rid of the weight and double down on the variable resistance, I thought I was just going to write another book. I thought I was just going to write a book about band training and how much better it is than weights. And then I went and it took some. I actually had to search out, like, who had really heavy resistance bands, because there's not a lot of people who make heavy resistance bands. And so I found a couple and started doing some exercises and trying to make them as heavy as possible so I could really gain some muscle. Two workouts in, two days in, I could barely move my wrists and I could barely move my ankles. I was, I was in pain and I thought, okay, this sucks. Like, I've got to make an Olympic bar to grab a hold of these bands and then a way to mount the bands to the ground, which is what that ground plate is. And then they needed to be built as strong or stronger than a regular Olympic bar because of you're stronger in the stronger range. So people, even people who don't think they can lift that much, are going to be training with a lot more weight than they otherwise would with more repetition. So these things needed to be built for absolute power.

And I, and I end up working with Legend Fitness, which makes some of the greatest really high powered strength equipment so they understand massive forces.

Are these elastic bands special? I mean, like, because honestly, we all know you could go to like Alibaba these days and get a bunch of elastic bands from China. Like, what? Why is it that, that these bands are so special?

Yeah, so they're not, they're not petroleum based rubber. Like most bands, like 99% of bands out there are poured in a mold and they're petroleum based rubber. The problem with that is they don't really have that much resistance, even if they look thick. These are layered latex.

So now you have a latex allergy. You got to Go out and get the rubber ones and make do. And you can do that. But layered latex is powerful, like far more powerful than a refined polymer, a petroleum based polymer.

Okay.

So yeah, that's, that's why these things are so powerful. And sometimes you, somebody sees a small video online and they're like, this thing's $500. I don't get, I don't understand like why like a rubber band thing is. It's like. Yeah, you don't quite know what you're looking at. It's described very well on the website.

But people are layered latex, so it comes with these bands. What's, what's this plate made out of that I'm standing on?

Polyethylene. It's a high density polyethylene. They make boats out of that. Okay, so really, really powerful. Yeah, I put £500 through that at repetitions many times, no problems.

Okay. So in a pinch, I can actually take this thing out into the ocean and use it as a boat. Good to know. Okay, so, so let's get into this 10 minutes thing. Why do you, why do you say that you use this thing for 10 minutes a day? Or is it, is it 10 minutes a day or is it like two 10 minute workouts a day? Describe to me like the protocol.

No, I do it 10 minutes a day.

Okay.

Now I'm not wanting to throw other exercise in the trash, especially like, because some of your listeners are CrossFit guys or are lifters who are looking to get their next best performance. And so it's like, I don't want to say like that's wrong or anything like that, but for me, from my own personal needs and the needs of probably most people who buy x3x3 is all, all they do. Like I do, I do nothing. I do zero cardio. I'm, I'm lean as hell. I have veins in my abs.

How does that work, doing zero cardio? Is it, is it similar to this Doug McGuff idea of a huge increase in, I think he calls it peripheral resistance where your, your heart is having to pump so hard against peripheral resistance for moving super slow.

Slow.

Right, right. Well, with diminishing range, when you diminish the range, when you fatigue, the strong range, mid range and then weak range. I mean, your blood is pumping.

Yeah, I mean, my heart rate goes through the roof when I'm using this thing.

Right, Right. So I'm cardiovascularly healthy. I have a low resting heart rate and I have low blood pressure or, you know, low, normal and so all I'm doing is 10 minutes of X3 per day.

And what's it look like for you? Walk, walk me through a sample workout that it looks like for you for 10 minutes. I'm just curious.

So like today I'm gonna do.

My workout number one. So it'll be chest press, tricep push down, overhead press and calf raises. Okay, so four, four sets, all out, complete fatigue. That's it, that's the whole workout.

Now do you get, do you get some, some kickback? Because this is something that I always raise an eyebrow at and a lot of, you know, a lot of everybody from crossfitters to strength conditioning coaches will as well, doing things like bicep curls and calf raises and all these like single joint exercises that don't seem to be that efficient versus just having like if I were to just do a 10 minute workout on this with more multi joint moves like the chest press and the squat.

What?

But we've been talking today, I've been doing the deadlift and the upright row just because I can stand in front of my microphone and do it that way. But fill me in on why the single joint exercises, doesn't that kind of fly in the face of efficiency?

Completely. However, people still have vanity and people still want to look good. And like women when I tell them their calves are going to look better in heels.

Oh, okay. Like, like ultimately it's, it's a, it's a product that's for the masses.

So if you're doing this, you can use it for aesthetics. And if you're using it for aesthetics, some of these single joint exercises. Because when I was a bodybuilder, the way that I did things was I would do three full body workouts because I'm a hard gainer, I'm a lean guy. So I would do three full body workouts Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And this was like deads clean squats. So rather than me doing a body part split, it was three full body workouts. And on the weekends I would do vanity exercises, which is actually what moved the dial from an aesthetic standpoint where I do a huge amount of calf raises and bicep curls and a lot of abdominal work.

A lot of people talk about functional strength. Most people want to look pretty.

So we're addressing both.

If somebody goes, yeah, those specific exercises, just a waste of time, waste of energy, waste of muscle building resources, that may be true, skip them. But those are the people who know the difference. And ultimately, like I have a 12 week program and I show people how to do some exercises. There's. So last week I was with a group of recon marines who got a bunch of X3s and they're going to be putting it into their program. Well, recon marines still have to be recon marines. These guys are special forces. So they want to do the movements like the deadlift, the overhead press that mimic what marines have to do.

So they're probably not doing a lot of bicep curls, except for the ones who are trying to look good at the beach. Yeah, but you know, when guys are special forces military, they're not really focused on looking good at the beach. They're killing machines. Like, they gotta be efficient. So now I also work with local Bay Area SWAT team team. Whereas they realize that one of the biggest deterrents of violence from. Because they do a lot of riot control, we got a lot of unhappy people in America right now. So when they go to do like riot control, one of the things they're focused on with their lifting is they want to look intimidating because that keeps people from picking fights with police officers. So bicep curls are right up their alley.

Interesting. Okay, that makes sense. Now for to. I know we kind of, we kind of rabbit hole there for a minute, asking about the single joint exercises. But as far as the actual like sets and reps for this 10 minute workout that you'll do each day, what do the sets and reps look like?

This. So the sets, it's. It's one or two sets to absolute fatigue. I find the guys that are more prone to. To be like a slow twitch kind of potential. Like marathon people, like guys who ran cross country in high school sort of thing, they tend to do better with two sets. But for sprint type athletes like myself, I do better with one single.

Single set to failure.

Yeah. Using constant tension. So never, never resting at the bottom, never letting the band go slack, and never locking the joint out at the top. So the constant tension and then this is really important, diminishing range. So first you go to fatigue in the strong range, then the mid range, then the weaker range.

Okay, so if I were doing like a squat.

Sorry to interrupt.

What would that look like?

So you would start by going like to almost straight leg.

And you, you'd keep going, let's say 15 repetitions. And all of a sudden you won't be able to get to the top anymore because the weight's just so high. And then so you do squats that are more like from the parallel to the ground where the femur is Parallel to the ground to about halfway up, you'll do another five or six repetitions there. And then where you're almost completely squatted down when you're. When you're discharged or the band is almost slack, you'll do another two or three repetitions. That may be one or two inches.

Right. Okay. So as you get more and more tired, you're moving into those weaker ranges.

Of motion, and then usually you just collapse after that.

Okay, gotcha. So basically what you look at then is as you go through the actual exercise, there are points of the exercise where you've got a little bit more tension, or, I'm sorry, a little less tension in the band, like at the bottom of a bicep curl versus the top of a bicep curl. And what you're saying is go full range of motion, and then, like, for a curl, say, go through mid range of motion and then finish in that range of motion where you've got kind of a little bit more elastic band left over. But you're so fatigued anyways, it doesn't matter.

Right.

Okay.

Now, one of the protocols that I'm working on, I'm gonna do some advanced programming. I've been planning on doing this for, like, two months now, so I really got to get to doing it. But.

I have Cedric McMillan, who is a bodybuilder. He'll be in the Olympia next year. He won the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic a year ago. And so what he observed was that a lot of people think they've gone to fatigue and are really cutting themselves short. So the advanced programming is going to be like some static kind of isometric holds at whatever top position you're at to really do a check, like, am I truly able to not go forward? And so there's pauses at the peak, depending on where you are in the range of motion. And I've got some of that, and that'll be in the programming. Another one who's helping develop that protocol, you'll probably remember this. This guy who is. He was just an amazing bodybuilder. Phil hernan.

He was Mr. USA in 1996. And he helps. He's such a great guy. He helps people really get away from anabolics and focus more on nutrition and still be a competitive lifter.

He's really doing. Doing great work.

Nice. Okay, cool. Yeah, I actually. My. My calves. I've been doing calf raises the whole time. You were saying that. That's a. I'm not a big calf raise guy, but he actually. It feels like it almost decompresses the spine too. It's so cool. Now I, I, I gotta ask you, like I mentioned earlier, I've been doing this on the vibration platform. Like I've got a, I've got a full on power plate vibration platform in my living room. I'll put this thing on top of, I've used it on like a balance board for a little bit better proprioception. And that, that growth hormone response that you alluded to, just learned about that. I've used it with blood flow restriction bands so I get a little bit more lactic acid which also causes a dump of growth hormone. Any other interesting ways or inventive ways you've discovered people are using or incorporating this thing?

Those two things. The vibration platform, in fact. Vibe plate. The company vibe plate is making a new vibe plate that accommodates.

The.

Top of the X3. So the X3 will plug right into it.

Oh, that's cool. Nice. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's a great idea. Because that power plate that I have, it's got some handles and some bands on either side, but they're not even elastic bands. It's just like isometric training and it doesn't work that well.

I used to be the chief science officer of that company.

Oh, nice.

Cool.

Yeah, we could really go down a rabbit hole in vibration. And some of the goofy claims that have been made about vibration, it's a shame because it's a great modality for what it does, but because so many of these companies chose not to do like sort of scientific presentation, more of like, you know, celebrities use this.

They just absolutely have overblown what it does.

Yeah, all the ladies at the gym drinking their 24 ounce Jamba juices and standing on the vibration platform to lose fat. Those type of claims.

Well, very interesting. I know your website, the X3 Bar website. I'll link to that in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 10minutes. Because actually it's a pretty cool device, especially if you don't have a lot of space to train in or you want to get strong with pretty minimalist routines or like John alluded to to. It's actually pretty good for body composition and aesthetics too. And you don't have to be like a big old rugby player like John or an obstacle course racer like me to use.

I wasn't big until I said I put on 30 pounds of muscle the.

First year using this thing. Yeah, dang.

Yeah. I was like you as a hard gainer, like I Couldn't really get. And that's part of my inspiration. You know, the bone density device. My inspiration was my mother. The inspiration for this is just weightlifting never really did much for me.

Wow.

Yeah. I mean, even when I played rugby, like, people look at me now and they imagine, oh, this guy was always huge. I'll show a picture of me when I was 30 and I think my 30th birthday, I weighed 160 pounds.

Wow.

And now I'm 230 pounds.

Well, I just got a whole workout. The whole time we were talking, I did upright rows, I did my curls, did my calf raises, I did deadlifts. So, boom, I feel great. Now I can go eat lunch. But I have a 1550 discount code for you guys. If you want to grab one of these X3 bars, basically just go to. It's a X3. Is it X3bar.com X3bar.com, yeah. And just use code Ben. And that. That gets you 50 bucks off right away. Just go grab one. Do some workouts on it. Let me know what you think in the show notes for this podcast with John. You can go to those over@BenGreenfield Fitness.com 10 minutes. But I love this thing. And also I'll put a link over to the osteostrong website, too. If you are concerned about osteoporosis or bone density and you want to pick one of those up, I'll. I'll link to there. So you could find a location to. Or not pick one up, but go work out on one. I don't think many people are going to be buying a. A $100,000 osteostrong unit, but these. These x3 units are. How much are they?

499.

Yeah, 499. Plus you knock 50 bucks off that with the. With the code, Ben. And it's like a full body training tool, minimalist footprint.

It's a home gym that fits in a drawer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or in a suitcase. So good stuff. John. Thanks for. Thanks for bringing this device to my attention and sending me one to try out and for being a guest on the podcast and sharing this stuff with us. It's fascinating.

It was an honor. I've been a fan for a long time.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with John J. Kush signing out. Check out his website, x3bar.com, check out the show notes BenGreenfieldFitness.com 10 minutes and have an amazing week.

Thanks, Ben.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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