Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want

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Copyright © 2020 John Jaquish & Henry Alkire

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0892-4

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Dedicated to Paul Jaquish

For years we watched and have begun to understand your unconventional and, most often, more elegant problem-solving methods. For those who ask us how you put a car on the moon (the lunar roving vehicle): The solution most often involves you going in the opposite direction of other inventors/engineers for the answers. You have taught us so much, and you are an inspiration to hold ourselves to a higher standard every day.

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1. Where Weights Went Wrong

2. How Variable Resistance Was Underestimated

3. Optimizing Our Hormones and Growth Factors

4. Inventing the Ultimate Solution for Maximizing Muscle and Minimizing Body Fat

5. X3 in Action

6. Optimizing Nutrition

7. Falsehoods of Fitness

8. What about Genetic Potential?

9. Hyperplasia

10. John’s Protocol

Conclusion

Appendix

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

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Foreword

I’ve always loved working out, but at forty-three years old, after seven orthopedic surgeries and some hard conversations with orthopedic surgeons about joint replacement, lifting conventional weights just wasn’t an option for me any longer. Fortunately, I met Dr. Jaquish, whose discoveries have allowed me to maintain size and strength without any damage to my joints. Now that I have begun to reinforce some of my damaged tendons and ligaments, strength is increasing for the first time in a long time.

Critics question Dr. Jaquish and his team for their unconventional approach to building strength, but anything truly revolutionary is always initially met with resistance. Personally, I’ve seen many fighters and athletes injure themselves with poorly conceived programs and improper technique. Dr. Jaquish’s program is straightforward and relies on natural human movements. When you look at the approach of stronger variable resistance with no static weight at all, it makes sense with human biomechanics. Dr. Jaquish’s research from the UK National Health Service (NHS) showed that people could exert sevenfold greater peak muscular output compared to the kind of weights they would lift in the gym. This is one of many studies cited in this book that has led me to believe that this system and the training techniques in it would be extremely helpful for athletes of any type. Other than competitive weightlifters and powerlifters, athletes shouldn’t care about how much weight they lift. Lifting weights is a means to the ends of strength, power, and muscle mass. For instance, fighting is not a contest of who can lift the most weight but of who can show up on fight day with the greatest power-to-weight ratio and the lowest chance of injury.

If your goal is to gain strength and muscle with a program that is sustainable and is not irritating to your joints, then this is the book for you. The information in this book will get you closer to what you want than almost any conventional approach, even if you, like most people, don’t have pain-free movement. Now if you DO have pain-free movement, then that only means you haven’t injured yourself YET! Why not try a simpler, safer method all while improving joint health without the risk of injury? There are also some interesting, well-supported, cutting-edge, scientific advancements in this book that can help you improve almost every aspect of your life. The goal of this book is simply put: optimization, be it through diet, time-restricted eating windows, or strength training. At the end of the day, this book strives to help you become the best version of yourself.

Forrest Griffin

MMA Hall of Famer and former light heavyweight champion

Two-time New York Times bestselling author

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Introduction

Do any of these describe your experience with exercise?

Problem #1: Lifting weights year after year without seeing visible results.

Problem #2: Sustaining injuries or experiencing chronic joint pain as a result of lifting weights.

Problem #3: Performing hours of cardio without significant weight loss or muscle gain.

Problem #4: Quitting exercise entirely or never starting a routine because you don’t have enough time.

If you’re like most people, at least one of these statements applies. Why? You might be surprised to learn your busy schedule isn’t actually the problem, and neither is how long or hard you work at the gym—it’s a gap in knowledge. Most exercise routines mistakenly rely on principles scientifically disproven as many as forty years ago. This creates a tremendous disconnect between how people exercise and what science shows us is the most efficient, effective way to work out and achieve measurable results.

What if you learned a better, faster way to build muscles and lose fat?

What if this method was scientifically proven, so you knew it was effective?

And what if—instead of the hours it takes to drive to the gym, work out, and then drive back again—your new regimen took approximately ten minutes a day and could be done at home with only a few key pieces of equipment?

Your problems with exercise would be solved. With the knowledge gap eliminated, you’d know exactly how to get the body you want, in far less time than you ever imagined.

If all that sounds good, keep reading. We’ve done the research and have the science-backed answers you need to start getting far better results with a workout even the busiest people can fit into their day.

Engineering a Disruption

As biomedical engineers, we didn’t set out to disrupt the fitness industry. We weren’t looking to debunk fitness recommendations that continue to exist despite a lack of scientific evidence regarding their efficacy. In the beginning, John was simply trying to help his mother manage a medical problem.

John’s mom had been recently diagnosed with osteoporosis. Studies show a fifty-year-old woman presenting with similar bone loss to hers has a 2.8 percent risk of death related to hip fracture during her remaining lifetime—the same odds as dying from breast cancer.1 Even when death is not the outcome, the statistics are grim. There is a 40 percent chance of never walking independently again, and up to a 20 percent chance of needing nursing home care due to that same potential broken hip.

John’s mother was understandably upset at the news. However, while she wanted to get healthier, she also didn’t want to take osteoporosis drugs. Common side effects of those include headaches, stomach pain, nausea, heartburn, fever and chills, pain while urinating, and dizziness. Less common side effects include rare cancers and osteonecrosis, a rare condition in which jawbone cells start to die off.

Most people faced with this situation would have a difficult choice to make: take the pharmaceuticals and hope to avoid the laundry list of unpleasant side effects, or forgo the drugs and hope to never fracture a bone. Luckily, John’s mother isn’t most people—she has a son with an avid interest in human physiology, and he happened to have a great teacher for problem-solving: his father. With those family members on her side, the prognosis was anything but typical.

John’s dad was on the team that designed and built the Lunar Rover. He received more than 300 patents during his career. He even likes to wear his inventor hat at home, once creating a motion-detector sprinkler system to protect the family garden from scavenging animals that featured water pressure so high it could knock over an adult deer. Needless to say, animals went elsewhere after one experience with this system.

So it’s not surprising that upon learning of his mother’s diagnosis, John did exactly what his father would do. Presented with a challenge, he became determined to find a solution. It was as complicated and simple as that.

Seeking the Highest Impact

To solve this problem, John’s first objective was to understand what environmental factors had a positive effect on bone density. He decided the best way to uncover this information would be to find people who were already outliers in this area. If there was some group of people achieving superhuman levels of bone density, he might be able to identify the behaviors that led to those results. And if he succeeded, maybe there would be a way to translate what he learned to help his mother.

He soon discovered his target population: gymnasts. People who participated in gymnastics had higher bone density than non-gymnasts of the same age, even if they quit the sport long ago.2 John discerned that infrequent high impact force exposure was the key to their bone strength because it triggered an adaptive response of self-reinforcement in the bones, which is protective against progressively greater impact that could actually cause injury or fracture. This is the effect associated with practicing gymnastics.

Gymnasts encounter forces that most people may not even know the human body can withstand. For example, when gymnasts dismount from the uneven bars and land on the ground, the sudden deceleration creates impact forces that can exceed ten multiples of their body weight.3 That means a 120-pound gymnast’s musculoskeletal system might experience 1,200 pounds of loading, if only for an instant, when they engage in a fairly standard gymnastic movement.

Upon discovering this information, John began reading all of the loading and bone adaptation studies he could find. One of the earliest examples of this sort of research dates all the way back to 1892 in a paper describing the Laws of Mechanotransduction.4 This work states that bones develop by adapting to stress much in the way muscle does. Another study included farmworkers who received higher levels of impact, where researchers observed adaptations through cadaver bone extraction. These studies seemed to confirm John’s hypothesis, reinforcing his determination to move forward on this project.

Of course, John’s mom wasn’t going to take up competitive gymnastics in her seventies. Once someone’s bones are structurally compromised by osteoporosis or osteopenia, it is hardly a safe option to begin jumping off of tall objects. However, John thought that creating a medical device that simulated these high impacts while eliminating associated risks was within the realm of possibility.

John began his quest to develop such a device by identifying the positions in which humans naturally absorb high impact forces. Next, he envisioned a device controlled by a robotic arm to reliably place individuals in these impact ready positions. Finally, he recognized the need for computer software to control that process, provide biofeedback, and ensure the intervention could be consistently repeated over a series of many sessions.

With this vision in mind, John came up with a cocktail napkin drawing of his invention. On the surface, it may have looked similar to exercise machines seen in gyms, but in reality, it was quite distinct in functionality from any existing equipment. The proposed medical device was grounded in emulating the amount of impact humans absorb when doing gymnastics.

In envisioning a sophisticated osteogenic loading apparatus designed to measure and deliver the amount of force necessary to trigger bone growth, John had begun to crack the code to decreasing and possibly even reversing osteoporosis.

Inventing a World-Changing Medical Device

However, he still needed assistance in designing and building a prototype. Although he was working on his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the time, the project required electrical engineering knowledge—something he did not possess. His father’s mechanical engineering abilities and National Instruments, a multinational producer of instrumentation and test equipment, proved helpful in this phase of development. Over the next several years, John iterated through several different design concepts for an osteogenic loading device.

Several years later, a hospital in London purchased one of John’s osteogenic loading devices and carried out a research study testing that device on post-menopausal females diagnosed with osteopenia or osteoporosis. The results were even more promising than John had hoped. Deconditioned women in their fifties and sixties were creating force of up to nine times their body weight on the device. This is well beyond the force a professional weightlifter can produce using traditional weightlifting equipment, and out-of-shape women were doing it relatively easily with minimal risk of injury.

Around this time John brought Henry Alkire, an eighteen-year-old aeronautical engineering student at Cal Poly, on board as an intern. Along with other scientific research he was involved in, Henry spent the next several years working with John on product design for subsequent iterations of osteogenic loading devices. After a long period of careful development, the current commercial version of OsteoStrong’s Spectrum System—the Robotic Musculoskeletal Development System (RMDS)—was born.

The Spectrum System allows OsteoStrong centers to deliver precise body positioning where higher impact forces can be naturally absorbed in four key areas of the body: upper, lower, core, and postural. Users engage in four brief but maximum force presses and lifts that are somewhat similar to the deadlift, abdominal crunch, chest press, and leg press. In this way, the Spectrum System produces axial bone compression throughout the entire skeleton.

Most bones require a force of at least two times body weight to trigger an adaptive response. Research published in 2012—years after John’s hypothesis was developed—suggests 4.2 multiples of body weight is the minimum force required to build bone density in the hip joint.5 While conventional weight training can only generate peak forces just approaching 1.5 times body weight, OsteoStrong is designed to deliver impacts of many multiple times a user’s body weight, essentially turning on the switch for bone growth.6

Based on his internship experience, Henry changed his major from aeronautical to biomedical engineering and continued working with John throughout college. He graduated Cal Poly on a Friday, was back to work with John on Monday, and is now listed as coinventor on the patent for OsteoStrong.

As for John’s mother? She no longer has osteoporosis, and the osteogenic loading devices have since been placed in over 300 clinics worldwide, helping over 600,000 individuals with their bone health. One study on these devices demonstrated over 14 percent bone density gains in both the spine and hip as a result of one year of once-weekly treatments taking less than ten minutes each.7

You can see the dramatic changes graphically here (baseline to post hip and spine force output differences in twenty-four weeks).

From Bones to Muscle

In our pursuit to solve John’s mother’s medical issue, we ended up inventing the most effective bone density building medical device available. OsteoStrong’s efficacy was recently confirmed through research, most recently involving scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center at the University of Texas Medical School,8 and OsteoStrong is now partnered with Tony Robbins for rapid clinical deployment of the technology. But the story doesn’t end there.

As a direct result of testing done with OsteoStrong, John became the first scientist to fully quantify the maximum capacities for muscular output. Cross-referencing OsteoStrong user data with exercise statistics compiled annually by the American College of Sports Medicine, he determined a sevenfold difference between the average muscle load created in a typical fitness environment—on weight machines and when weightlifting—and what we are actually capable of doing.9 He then took this information a step further, plotting a detailed force curve identifying peak capabilities throughout the entire range of motion, from weak to strong.

Consider a bench press. The weakest range is when the arms are fully contracted at the beginning of the lift, when the bar is just above your chest. The medium range occurs midway through the lift, with the barbell in between its highest and lowest position for the repetition. The strongest range is at the top of the rep, where the arms are nearly fully extended but the joints are not locked. Each range is capable of handling a different amount of weight. The strong range is where it gets easiest and feels lightest—and consistent with that sensation of lightness, this is where the muscle has the most capacity to produce force.

A light bulb went on: Weightlifting has everything backwards. It doesn’t give people the results they’re looking for because it can’t provide the amount of force necessary to trigger muscle growth throughout the entire range of motion. Our weight choice is limited to what our weak range can handle, so we’re not effectively working our medium and strong ranges. Worse, when we choose a weight that better fits those stronger ranges, we sustain injuries because the weak range is where the most cumulative joint damage occurs. Weightlifting overloads joints, which increases the chances of injury and forces us to subconsciously hesitate, and NEVER achieves anything close to full engagement of the target muscle. Weights don’t change the force they put on you as you move by any magnitude, let alone a calculated one. See the force output capacity in different positions.

This is why we say weightlifting is a waste of time.

We know this is a controversial statement and one that may make people shocked or angry. However, John’s peak force power curve clearly demonstrates that people have a vast amount of unused muscle capability that weightlifting can’t begin to stimulate.

Leading a Fitness Revolution

So what is needed to maximize muscular growth and optimize the inefficiencies of weightlifting? A weight that changes as we move, giving us a lighter load in the weaker/joint-compromised ranges of motion, normal heaviness in the middle ranges of motion, and a tremendously high weight in the impact-ready ranges of motion. This was the way to achieve the level of engagement we now knew the muscle is capable of based on John’s research.

This realization led to the creation of the second invention: X3.

X3 is an exercise system that builds muscle much faster than conventional lifting, in far less training time, and with the lowest risk of joint injury. It delivers varying weight throughout the range of motion, triggering your muscles to adapt and change much in the way OsteoStrong triggers bone growth. X3 marks the beginning of a physiologically, scientifically sound shift in the fitness industry. Some could argue this is the first time science has ever been applied to fitness from a specific movement standpoint.

In this book, we will show you a tremendous amount of data supporting just how poor a stimulus weight training is for its intended purpose, as well as a tremendous amount of data showing how variance in resistance is the obvious answer to this challenge. We’ll also show you how variance in the proper proportion will grow muscle and change body composition