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

body composition is most effectively changed when the right hormones are released to facilitate muscle building and lipolysis. The hormones designed to retain fat become suppressed.

It’s a common misconception that cardio is an effective way to lose body fat. In reality, it can have the opposite effect of what people typically want or expect—prolonged cardio can keep you fatter, for longer. That’s because cardio stimulates cortisol, the body’s natural stress hormone.

Cortisol can promote two effects to undermine your fitness goals. First, it has the potential to inhibit lipolysis, thereby protecting body fat. Second, it can promote proteolysis, including the breakdown of lean muscle tissue.

Like traditional weightlifting, it seems cardio gets everything backwards. It increases cortisol, which holds onto fat for fuel and decreases growth hormone production and promotes the reduction of muscle

Along with muscle growth, testosterone is one of the largest drivers of cardiac health. There is more testosterone absorption in cardiac muscle (the heart) than there is in any skeletal muscle in the body, based on the more than doubled capillary density of cardiac tissues.

“Testosterone insufficiency in older men is associated with increased risk of death over the following 20 yr, independent of multiple risk factors and several preexisting health conditions.”

We’ve already mentioned it, but it bears repeating: if you want muscle to grow, there is no getting around HEAVY. You have to use a weight where you are unable to continue repetitions after thirty to sixty seconds.

It’s important to review the literature that shows the relationship between the more extreme weight a person can handle in an exercise and the up-regulation of testosterone: Only maximal but not submaximal weightlifting significantly increases testosterone.44 These results indicate high power resistance exercise can contribute to an anabolic hormonal response with heavier training, and may partially explain the muscle hypertrophy observed in athletes who routinely employ high-power resistance exercise.45 Testosterone-to-cortisol ratio changes appear to improve with the presence of overload for the purposes of building muscle mass, meaning the highest levels of fatigue.46

The results showed the ten-repetition protocol resulted in a far higher level of testosterone.

the ten-repetition sets were slower and more controlled because greater balance is required to complete a higher repetition set.

Research supports an increased hormonal response through variable resistance compared to weightlifting.

Stability Is the Secret Sauce Applying heavier loads under higher forces through variable resistance is one key to the natural up-regulation 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.

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 up-regulating 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.

In fact, research has shown that carbohydrates are not needed by any system of the body. As the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board 2005 textbook states, “The lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life apparently is zero.”

Eliminate Sugar The first thing we recommend is to cut out added sugar. Dietary sugar is the leading factor in obesity. In general, you don’t get fat from eating fat, you get fat from eating too much sugar as well as other kinds of carbohydrates.

Eliminate Simple Carbohydrates As we stated earlier in this chapter, carbohydrates are not a macronutrient. They are not required by the body to function, nor do they help it function more efficiently.

Like sugar, carbohydrates keep you hungry all the time. So, our second recommendation is to cut out processed carbohydrates. This includes eliminating processed grains, like anything made from flour, from your diet.

Do Intermittent Fasting/Time-Restricted Eating Research shows fasting is one of the healthiest things you can do for your body. It provides a total metabolic reset, autophagy, and regeneration of the immune system.

Around twelve hours after your last consumption of food, the body begins to break fatty acids down into ketone bodies, which will become the new blood-borne chemical energy vector, replacing the glucose that your body is running out of.

Perhaps the most egregious nutritional recommendation most of you will remember is “breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” This idea was invented in the nineteenth century by Seventh Day Adventists’ James Caleb Jackson and John Harvey Kellogg to sell their newly invented breakfast cereal.136 There is not a single study that supports this idea. Absolutely none.

Creatine monohydrate. Our least favorite cellular hydration amplifier. Creatine occurs naturally in animal proteins and has no side effects, but in its isolated form it has been seen to exacerbate bipolar disorder, kidney dysfunctions, and Parkinson’s disease. It has also been extensively tested as a weightlifting supplement, with unimpressive results.

Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, meaning it slightly restricts blood flow and stimulates an increased heart rate and blood pressure. It’s a great way to start the day, but not my favorite pre-workout protocol because there are benefits to doing the exact opposite—vasodilating.

From a training perspective, my workouts haven’t changed since day one. My emphasis has always been on doing slow and controlled movements. Two seconds up and two seconds down is the cadence that encourages stability firing for growth hormone up-regulation as well as a greater level of fatigue. The main objective is not to “do reps,” but to get to the absolute maximum level of exhaustion so the central nervous system initiates anabolic hormones and growth factors to build muscular tissue at the fastest rate possible.

There are two reasons almost the entire population fails to see any results from standard fitness. These are stimulus and nutrition.

The fact is, people are in worse shape than ever. Obesity and Type 2 diabetes are full-on epidemics. If current common knowledge about fitness was effective, these problems wouldn’t be widespread. They would have been long eradicated.

Choosing a Band In the interest of safety, we recommend starting with the lightest band. The goal for each exercise is to do as many slow and controlled full repetitions as possible, followed by partial repetitions until exhaustion. The cadence of these repetitions should be four seconds per repetition, meaning two seconds up and two seconds down.

If you can complete more than forty full repetitions with the lightest band, you should select a band with higher resistance for that particular exercise the next time you are scheduled to do it. Continue this process until you find a band that allows you to do at least fifteen repetitions but not forty. Stay with that band until you become strong enough to move up yet again.

Be sure to pick a weight you can handle and control through the en...

Fifteen repetitions are the minimum you should be able to complete. If you cannot complete this number, the band is too heavy and for safety reasons you should go lighter.

Repetitions The X3 protocol calls for fifteen to forty repetitions for each of the four exercises included in that day’s workout. Be sure to maintain constant tension on the bands as you perform each repetition. This means not EVER letting there be slack in the band at the bottom, and not EVER locking out at the top of a movement. This ensures the muscle never relaxes, and induces the hypoxic effect described in earlier chapters.

The aim is to go to exhaustion. Once you can no longer complete full repetitions, continue doing half and quarter repetitions. In this way, you’re exhausting all ranges of motion.

Working to Exhaustion With X3, the goal is to continue each exercise until you can no longer move the bar. The last repetition should barely move it an inch.

When the partial repetitions slow to almost nothing, only then is it time to quit.

Workout Frequency X3 is a tough workout and it will take several weeks for your body to adjust to it.

Workout 1: Monday and Thursday Rest day Wednesday Workout 2: Tuesday and Friday Rest the entire weekend

Research shows the recovery window for muscular tissue peaks around twenty-four hours after exercise, and is only slightly elevated by thirty-six hours.243 Since the X3 protocol alternates the muscle groups being exercised without any overlap, an every other day schedule means each muscle is getting forty-eight hours or longer to recover, which is beyond the thirty-six hour minimum. Once you’ve completed four weeks of the initial X3 protocol, we recommend moving to a six-day-a-week schedule for maximum results. Starting on week five, complete workouts for the first six days of every week and use Sunday as a rest day as follows:

Workout 1: Monday, Wednesday,...

Workout 2: Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday...

Myofibril Hypertrophy = Speed and Strength

Phases of an X3 Set When working out with X3, there are two distinct phases to each movement. Phase 1: At the start of a set, users work toward fatigue in the strong range, where high forces promote growth of the myofibrils. Here, you are creating structural fatigue of the muscle but are not yet out of ATP/Glycogen/Creatinephosphate (ATPGCp). This phase is where the most power is built, as the structure of the cell has much more influence on absolute/explosive strength. More tissue is potentiated (called to action), providing the neurological benefit of explosiveness from a different perspective. The hypertrophy in this phase creates musculature with a higher power-to-weight ratio, the most powerful effect of X3. This is comparable to a gymnast’s impact absorption-type strength and is driven by the sevenfold greater force output in the impact-ready range, shown in the Hunte, et al. study (2015).247

Phase 2: Next, in the same set, the onset of fatigue inhibits the user from reaching the strongest range of motion, and they continue exercising in the lesser ranges (diminishing

range). Stores of ATPGCp become depleted and sarcoplasmic fatigue begins. This triggers sarcoplasmic growth and the associated blood flow to recover the muscle. Because a portion of the myofibrils are switched off and a lighter weight is being used during diminished range reps, the muscles are fatigued to a greater degree from both the sarcoplasmic and myofibril perspectives. To compensate for this deeper level of fatigue, the blood flow to recover gets stronger—often referred to as a large pump—which forces a stretching of the fascia. (While this has not been specifically studied with X3, it is the academic understanding of the reaction.) If the principle of constant tension is applied, the hypertrophic effect is greater due to hypoxia. This is because the demand for blood flow, the down regulation of myostatin, and more importantly the replacement and amp...

The Workout The X3 protocol employs a push-pull split, a standard weightlifting strategy. One day you do push exercises, the next day you do pull exercises.

Push Push Day exercises are: Chest press Tricep press Overhead press Squats

Pull Day Pull exercises are: Deadlift Bent row Biceps curl Calf raise