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

by John Jaquish

adulthood. Growth hormone is anti-catabolic towards muscle tissue, meaning it protects the tissue by preventing it from being broken down, such as for energy. This characteristic is different from being anabolic, which is when a hormone actually stimulates tissue growth.

Stability Is the Secret Sauce Applying heavier loads under higher forces through variable resistance is one key to the natural upregulation of testosterone. Stabilization is another when it comes to growth hormone. By stabilization, we mean the body’s natural reflexive muscle firing that occurs to keep you upright and stable.

Requiring the body to stabilize itself during an exercise stimulates a greater amount of muscle tissue, and the stabilization process itself activates special spinal reflex arcs meant for this purpose, which in turn appears to encourage increased hormone release.

Consistent with this, certain exercises are more effective in triggering a hormonal response than others. For example, squats are superior to leg presses.

the end of the experiment, the group that did squats showed a 634 percent increase in growth hormone while the ones doing leg presses showed no increase at all—even though they were lifting more weight than the squat group.51

Sprinting, or doing high-intensity bursts of exercise with rest in between, does the exact opposite of prolonged cardio. Instead of keeping fat on the body by stimulating cortisol, this type of exercise optimizes hormone release by upregulating growth hormone. Clearly, if your desire is to be a champion distance runner, you don’t want to carry a lot of muscle because it will slow you down. But if you want to lose fat and build muscle, high-intensity exercise is the way to go.

Even experienced sprinters work out for only twelve minutes a day.

Here are the design decisions it would make:

Myostatin The MSTN gene provides instructions for making a protein called myostatin. This is an endogenous (created in the body) negative regulator of muscle growth that affects both muscle fiber number and size. In other words, its job is to keep you from growing muscle. It has become apparent over the past few years that animals with mutations stunting production of the myostatin protein experience incredible muscle growth.57

In a recent T-Nation article, Brad Schoenfeld, PhD, an internationally renowned fitness expert, described an alternative way to create a hypoxic effect in target muscles by using constant tension throughout any given standard weightlifting movement. Many athletes simply refer to this as “constant tension.”

Conclusions about Hormones and Growth Factors

Of course, this hasn’t stopped a few elastic (some petroleum-based rubber, some higher quality latex) band sellers from attempting to market bands alone as the ideal training method. But people have been making that claim for decades, and band-only training hasn’t superseded weight training at all.

“What do the strongest people in the world train with—barbells or dumbbells?” Chris replied, “Barbells!”

When John asked why, Chris explained that it’s a matter of practicality and what’s most effective. As humans, we pick up heavy objects symmetrically using both hands and legs. If you had a heavy object to move, you’d grab it with both arms, right? THAT is functional. Nobody would put one hand in their pocket and attempt the task with the other. This is the same way the central nervous system sees exercise. Two-armed exercises activate more muscle because your arms are designed to work together.

As we’ve already noted, you wouldn’t pick up something heavy with one hand. You also wouldn’t pick up two heavy things and balance one in each hand in the course of daily living, and neither would your ancestors.

We chose all the materials for the X3 bar with strength, superiority, durability, and safety in mind.

In the same vein, we wanted to avoid injury by making sure the bar couldn’t be changed or retrofitted, so we designed it to be both durable and difficult to disassemble.

The X3 bar is nineteen inches wide. Biomechanical and human size data shows more than 95 percent of the population fits within this range in terms of shoulder width.

Our banding is made with latex sourced from trees in Sri Lanka, and our manufacturer there is the only one we’ve identified that can produce bands of this quality and endurance.

The small joints in our bodies, specifically wrists and ankles, interface well with flat surfaces. They don’t do well with round surfaces. When joints get twisted, they get injured. In addition, as discussed in chapter three, stabilization is a key factor in stimulating hormonal release.

I realized whatever the answer to muscle growth was, it was not in that building. I also came to a slightly different conclusion than many people did when looking at the trend of people signing up for the gym, and then never going, and then quitting maybe a year or two later.

nutrition, but stimulation for growth. At the end of the first year using X3, I went from 190 pounds and 20 percent body fat to 205 pounds and 11 percent body fat. That means that in a single year, I gained thirty pounds of muscle and lost sixteen pounds of body fat.

And the results didn’t stop there. Within the first two years of training with X3, I’d put on forty-five pounds of muscle and lost nearly twenty pounds of body fat—and my stats are continually improving to this day.

I’d challenge that notion. I was over forty when I started training with X3. My impressive physical transformation came from this invention alone. The scientific principles it capitalizes on to create visible changes work regardless of age.

time, but as I learned later, it is actually consistent with research on the aerobic benefits of exercise like X3, which is discussed at length later in this book.

In the face of conventional fitness “wisdom” that espouses calorie burn for weight loss, people may wonder how we could do a ten-minute workout yet still lose weight and gain muscle. The hormonal effect provided by X3 answers that question.

X3 combines the self-stabilizing, natural multi-joint movements used in weight training with the higher forces provided by the variable resistance. No longer limited to the weak range of motion, these higher forces activate greater stabilization firing and thus X3 presumably stimulates even more release of growth hormone than would be possible with fixed weights.

Translation: X3 enables users to lose body fat, maintain muscle mass, and build muscle all at the same time.

What’s more, delivering variable resistance in high ratios and keeping constant tension throughout each exercise allows X3 to create a hypoxic effect on muscles. This promotes myostatin downregulation and contributes to an even greater muscle mass growth effect.

Quick Stats: In just over one year, John lost twenty-two pounds of fat and gained eight pounds of muscle using X3. John has managed this despite largely flouting the X3 nutrition guidelines (discussed later in this book) and he often posts pictures of pizza on the X3 online forum.

Maykell Lorenzo Quick Stats: An avid weightlifter, Maykell gained twenty-five pounds of muscle and decreased from 16 percent to 10 percent body fat in ten months after switching to X3 exclusively. Maykell has also become one of the most knowledgeable and helpful X3 users, advising countless other customers on the X3 online forums and meticulously documenting his own progress and workouts.

Nutritionally, there are only two macronutrients: fat and protein. You might be surprised to learn that carbohydrates, although easily converted into energy, are not essential to human life at all. In fact, research has shown that carbohydrates are not needed by any system of the body.

Researchers from two other separate studies determined 2.4 grams per kilogram of body weight each day as the optimal level of protein intake. Following this recommendation, if you weigh 200 pounds, this would mean consuming 218 grams of protein daily to maximize your muscle-building potential.

Amino acids are the building blocks of protein.

Amino Acids and Exercise When exercising, muscle can only be created if all essential amino acids are available in sufficient quantities for growth. If just one is missing, this anabolic process cannot be completed. If one is in short supply, less lean mass can be created. Amino acids are utilized by the body through one of two kinds of processes: anabolism, which refers to the processes whereby the body builds more complicated molecules out of smaller building blocks, and catabolism, meaning the breakdown of complex substances into simpler ones often used to meet energy demands.

Evaluating Protein Sources The primary driver of protein usability is how well it provides the body with the appropriate amino acids in proportions that match the body’s anabolic requirements.

The extent to which proteins are actually utilized by the body depends on the type consumed. In general, the body utilizes eggs best, followed by meat sources, then cheeses, and lastly, whey and vegetable sources, like soy or broccoli.

Research demonstrates the efficiency of each. Egg protein usage approaches the 50 percent mark, while 40 percent of ingested meat protein is used in an anabolic manner. Whey protein, which is quite popular in the athletic industry and is relatively well regarded, has been shown to achieve just 18 percent anabolic usage in human subjects.78 Vegetable protein sources came in even lower, at under 14 percent.79 For an athlete trying to promote lean tissue growth through whey protein consumption, this means more than eight out of every ten grams ingested may not be used for its intended purpose.

The scientific nutrition challenge then becomes: how can we create a more efficient protein so that muscle growth can be maximized without requiring a caloric surplus?

Because our ancestors were not able to refrigerate meats, much of what they ate began to break down before consumption and the resultant by-products of fermentation were routinely ingested. Basically, humans are supposed to eat rotting things, but to avoid infection and other risks, we generally don’t.

We call our latest invention Fortagen, a protein replacement five times more anabolic than standard protein sources.

With Fortagen, the body uses almost one hundred percent of your protein intake for muscle synthesis, and a single serving has only four calories.

Fat Fat is the most satiating nutrient. Without enough fat it is much harder, and will require many more calories, to feel full. That’s why if you eat only lean chicken breasts, an hour later you’re hungry.

We’ve put the word science in quotes because much of what passes as science in the field of nutrition is merely the process of surveying people and then identifying correlations between variables in that data. Many

whether or not participants smoked. As is typical in the results of surveys like this, meat consumption correlated with increased BMI, decreased weekly exercise, increased alcohol consumption, and smoking.

For instance, looking specifically at the male population, risk of accidental death increases with red meat consumption. This is generally consistent with the theme that people who eat red meat also tend to engage in other dangerous activities, which pollute the data set.

The Real Science Behind the Red Meat, Saturated Fat, and Cholesterol

Most of us assume, given the long history of the U.S. and other governments officially advising people to limit fat consumption, there must be a long history of compelling randomized, controlled trials conclusively demonstrating the dangers of fat. Wrong! A recent meta-analysis concludes there was no evidence from randomized, controlled trials—meaning, an experiment that was actually performed to test a hypothesis—supporting the 1977 adoption of national U.S. dietary guidelines suggesting the limitation of fat.

Conducted from 1968 until 1973, when ethical standards were more lax, it is unlikely that such a study will be attempted anytime soon. While the study was meant to demonstrate how a low animal fat diet could be used to reduce serum cholesterol (LDL-C) and thereby reduce the incidence of cardiovascular events, the data did not support that conclusion, so it was largely suppressed at the time.

What the data actually showed was that while substituting vegetable oils for animal fats lowered cholesterol, it had no effect in terms of reducing cardiovascular (or other) deaths. If anything, higher cholesterol levels correlated with reduced risk of death! Hardly the popular narrative.