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

We like to remind them that the “R” in TRT stands for replacement. Only people without enough naturally occurring testosterone are even eligible for TRT. When someone has low T, their doctor will only replace the amount of hormone that is supposed to be there under normal physiological conditions, not provide you the supernaturally high doses of testosterone used illegally by chemically “enhanced” athletes.

Falsehood #11: Using Caloric Excess to Stimulate Muscle This theory holds that eating in an extreme caloric surplus will force muscle to grow, or make it grow faster. However, there’s no force-feeding muscle. If you eat at a caloric surplus, you’ll simply get fat because excess fat and carbohydrates get stored as body fat.

Falsehood #12: Wide Grip Is Superior

Instead, they are shortening their range of motion and the lift and ultimately bypassing the strongest ranges of motion completely.

This is fine for a contest, but not if your goal is to grow musculature. We kept the X3 bar at its current length to ensure users take a narrow grip that maximizes muscle engagement. As John often says, “Wide grip is for your ego or a contest. Narrow grip is to grow.”

While a “keto diet” focuses on what nutritional choices you can make to maintain a ketogenic state even while continuously eating, this diet isn’t necessary to get the benefits of ketogenesis. You simply need to be void of digestible calories to start using your own body fat as fuel. Someone could be eating a pure carbohydrate diet (although no one would recommend this) and still become ketogenic by fasting for eighteen-plus hours (check out the fasting section of this book in chapter 6 for more details on fasting).

Falsehood #14: Calorie Restriction Is the Best Way to Lose Body Fat Although we touched on this concept in fasting and time-restricted eating, we wanted to clarify that research shows caloric restriction alone is not an effective fat loss method.

A recent Type 2 diabetes study on younger people took a “calorie-deficit approach to decreasing energy intake by (specifically) limiting the intake of high fat, high sugar foods.” At the beginning of the study, the BMI of the test subjects was thirty-four. After five years of calorie counting and deficits, the average BMI was still thirty-four. While some weight loss happened in the beginning of the study, subjects eventually put the weight back on EVEN WHILE STILL UNDER A DEFICIT. Why? Because their hormones changed to reach homeostasis.191

Caloric reduction does not just selectively reduce adipose (body fat) deposits—wasting occurs with all body tissues, meaning muscle is lost along with fat. At the same time, hormones are driving appetite up. Being chronically undernourished is not what the body prefers, so as soon as calories go back up, even more fat is stored.

This is why we recommend fasting—no adjustment of this kind is needed. Extended fasts force the body to become leaner and preserve more muscle without calorie restriction.

“Everyone’s taking performance-enhancing drugs” is an accusation we hear often. It’s usually made by internet commenters who likely train using an inefficient standard program and eat the standard US 70 percent plant-based nutrition (which is really just crackers, noodles, and pizza)

Higher birth weight is statistically associated with greater strength later in life.199 Most likely, being born large and fed well as an infant contributes to becoming a bigger, stronger person as an adult.

Thinking a strictly carnivore diet was too crazy for most people to adopt at the time, I recommended a standard, easy-to-follow ketogenic diet instead.

because the body uses animal protein more efficiently than vegetable sources.

Jaquish Biomedical product IN-Perium. It’s a great appetite suppressant that kept me from being too hungry on OMAD.

As I experimented with forty-eight- and seventy-two-hour fasted periods, I discovered you can really be as lean as you want while maintaining muscle mass if you are willing to put up with multiple days of zero food at all.

Fortagen was designed to help individuals who want to eat less animal protein or just find it difficult, inconvenient, or expensive to eat multiple pounds/kilograms of meats on a daily basis to meet their protein needs. It