Why Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time | Dr. John Jaquish | TEDxMayfieldHS

I'm going to start with a story that about 15 years ago my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is when the bone starts to lose density, becomes more porous and weaker and then can fracture much more easily, so a higher risk of fracture actually has a much higher risk. mortality associated with this, so there is a higher chance of dying and typically osteoporotic patients can share a similar mortality rate to breast cancer patients, so it is very specific to breast health as well. the woman. More women are susceptible to this, it's like three to five women versus one in five men have it weakened. bone density as they reach their fifth decade of life, so my mother was alerted to the fracture statistics, which was very disturbing, but what was even more disturbing were some of the side effects of the medications, so He explained to me that all this was very upsetting. and I understood why and my first thought was that it is a mechanical problem.

Bone absorbs force and that is why it generates density. So why do we have a chemical solution to a mechanical problem? There has to be a mechanical solution, so I went and looked at everything. I went all over the world to try to find a mechanical solution and what I realized was that there was none, so I invented a series of devices to compress human bone and activate it to grow similar to how we do when we were children. , for children to run and jump. and absorb high impact forces, those high impact forces stimulate the bone to make your bones more powerful and resistant to fractures.

Now, as I develop these devices, when I say impact forces, I'm talking about five six seven

time

s body

weight

, so these are loading events that are much greater than what you would ever see in a gym type environment, like in Fitness. , you might see 1.3

time

s body

weight

or 1.5 times body weight, you won't see anything that's two, three, four, even with elite athletes. I don't see people getting five times their body weight, so when the device was in its first kind of clinical trial in London, England, we had a whole research team and a group of doctors working in the hospital that had low density. bone not yet osteoporosis what they had was called osteopenia, which is like pre-osteoporosis and they were excited about the device and they were excited about the future that it could bring to the world, so they used it along with the test.

The subjects weren't test subjects, but they were using it, you know, in parallel while the study was going on and so they were seeing these high levels of force and they told me how this compares to data like Fitness and said. That's a great question, let me do some analysis on that, so I went to the nains database. It is a database maintained by the federal government, the National Institutes of Health of the United States federal government, and is probably one of the largest databases of its kind. kinds of different health and fitness metrics and what I discovered, probably one of the most important discoveries, at least in my experience in my life, which was just a moment of realization, was that I imagine I'm using both hands but still I can hold the mic, you're seven times stronger here than you are here, that was incredibly profound because if you're seven times stronger in a position versus the weakest position where we started, if we're doing any type of physical activity, that means

lifting

weights is a

waste

of time because a weight stays the same no matter where you are in space, it's the same, we need something to change, so I also realized at that moment that it was something that had bothered me, it was kind of like chubby. boy at the time and I was frustrated by it and kept trying to eat more.

Some of the worst fitness advice you will ever receive is that you have to eat big to get big, that is totally wrong, you have to eat the right things, but What caught my attention was so obvious and had been for most of it. of my life is that everyone wants to exercise, most people quit, so they're usually blamed for being lazy, but they're not, they quit because it doesn't work. They quit because they could spend a year in a gym and then look in the mirror and say, well, I look exactly the same, so show your hand.

Who here knows many people who talk about Fitness?, get involved in Fitness and see each other exactly. the same thing all the time, okay, everyone knows a lot of people like that, right, because that's how it is and it always bothered me. I felt like I was wasting my time exercising, but I also didn't want to not work. because that would be even less healthy, so I kept working out like I don't really know why I'm doing this, but I know I have to keep doing it, so now I realize that everyone's training sucks and doesn't work, but now I know why and there was other information that I realized when I was in high school that was just as important as the observations made in bone density research.

Now I'm going to ask a question about high bone density. fortunately we have some high school students here today. I want you to think about your high school experience. Was there a person depending on the size of your high school? You may not have had that one, but try to think of a person who was so developed athletically as quickly as one year, there were 15 and the next year they looked like they were 25. Show your hand to anyone like absolutely super developing people, so Generally, every high school has like one of those people when you look at them, they all did the same thing. things you did in gym class they went to the weight room just like you they became one of the X-Men and you're the same I'm going to tell you why and I'm going to tell you how we can Fix it, it's a Huge change in the way we approach the human body, but once you understand it, you will never go back and you will never be out of shape if you follow what I'm talking about, when we look at these genetically gifted people.

They have something very specific, it's not the amount of hormones they have because a lot of people say, oh, that guy was probably just born with more testosterone, nor the number of men who have been kicked out of sports or not allowed participating in professional sports because you had too high a level of testosterone is zero, so they don't test for that, the difference is where the tendons insert into the bone. Some people are very lucky because they have a tremendous advantage, so if you look at my pectoral muscle right here. This is the origin, so everyone's pectoral begins at the sternum.

Now, if I stick my arm out here, this is where the tendon inserts just below the biceps, however, in these genetically gifted people it inserts somewhere else, it's here at the other end of the bone. It gives them a lever inside their body that is made of the most elastic material in the world. The tendons are incredibly elastic, and they're actually using what's called in medical research and in kind of physiological research as recycled energy, when they go down. in a bench press or push-up type movement, they have almost a spring to come back up now, recycled energy, everyone here has experienced it to a small degree when you run and hit the ground with the flexion of the foot so that your The top of your foot moves closer to the front of your shin. 17 on average, the energy that propels you forward is recycled energy.

Now these genetic outliers have a much higher percentage and they have it throughout the body, but that is recycled energy. In essence, you are training with elastic bands inside your body. So how can we act like them? How can we be like them? It is doing exactly the same thing outside the body and not internally. So what? I'm talking about variable resistance, so that's the term you would look for if you looked at the research on this and there are incredibly positive studies, all of them have come to the same conclusion. Variable resistance is much more powerful than standard weight training and the reason is because, and this is the definition of variable resistance, the force that is applied to the body accommodates the power capacity in that general position.

So for example, if I'm doing chest presses, I'm holding 550 pounds here, but only 300 here. and 170 here, so it changes as I move to suit my ability in that given position. Now there are different examples of variable resistance. If anyone has ever watched a video of a weight

lifting

gym, they will see tons of chains everywhere. the place and when someone puts the chains around a bar at the end of a bar, as they go up they lift more weight and then as they go down it's less weight so that's an approach now the proportions are not optimized or something, but you'll get better results doing it than just lifting a static weight.

Now many gyms don't allow this because the stacks of chains on the floor are often a tripping hazard and then that's a liability issue so you'll have to go to a weightlifting gym for that and those aren't uncommon places. intimidating, so you should keep that in mind. Now, another way is to take bars in a gym and place bands around them. and then hook the bands to different accessories on the floor, different racks. I have to warn everyone who wants to make sure the racks are bolted to the floor because remember they are seven times stronger in the extended position so you are going to use a lot more weight, you could knock over a rack, it could hurt you or someone else person.

Gyms are now supposed to bolt their equipment to the floor, but that doesn't mean they always do. The third category is the home product. Now there are a wide variety of variable resistance products for the home, you have to take into account again seven times the type of weight you normally deal with, so you want to choose a product that has many hundreds of pounds of capacity, even a unconditioned older person could handle four or five hundred pounds in a deadlift type movement that is for the back, training the back and neck, so don't do it, if it says it has a capacity of 50 pounds, that's not even it's good for rehab It doesn't really do anything it just looks like exercise uh so keep that in mind and then the fourth category is one that I never want you to try which is just using bands on their own because the problem is if I pull a band . a circular band around my back and I go to press, my hand twists because there is nothing difficult to adjust to the band and the human wrist is not something that will stay in place if you have uneven force on one side of the hand. versus the other, so if you rotate your wrist, if you stand on a band to try to do some kind of back exercise, your ankles can rotate inward, it only takes seven pounds of lateral force to break an ankle, more or minus that's like the only physical medicine statistic that Every NFL player knows very well, so you have to keep it in mind: you have to protect the joints so that the bands alone are worthless.

I know I'm seeing a lot of controversial things. Some of the things you may have heard, but the possibilities are variable. resistance even in research is a pretty new category, in fact, I think the first really good study was in 1996, so from a medical research point of view, that's pretty new, I mean, as long as you don't you talk about cancer research, that's new, uh, because it's just Relative to how much research is done in a given field, think about all of this. I want to emphasize the fact that this is such a powerful intervention. Many things come and go.

You've been told about a lot of fads a couple of years ago. I thought everyone needs to train with kettlebells and it was like you look at it and think: Isn't that just a dumbbell? It is, so you know and no one cares and no, you can't even find it. There are no more kettlebells, it was just a fad and it didn't give anyone better results. This is the kind of thing and I'll use an example. I was asked in an interview, about six months ago, I was on a new program and someone tells me what your fitness goals are.

It was a weird question I'd asked myself before, so I said, "Well, I plan on having a kid at some point and I'd really like my kid to look at me like that." I'm a superhero and I guess that was a good response because everyone seemed to love it so I think that's the kind of effect that I want to leave you with the impression that you can absolutely change your physiology by applying this if you apply it. To the highest degree, you will be absolutely impressed with the kind of results you will get. Now consider the fitness industry and as I mentioned earlier, most people engage in fitness year after year and don't see results.

Why would you trust an industry because? I'm saying things that are very anti-industry, but why would you trust aindustry that has a success rate of more or less zero percent? Would you invest in a company? An investment company that lost all its clients' money. You probably don't know if I would. Would you trust an ambulance company that crashes all the ambulances and never takes people to the hospital? No, you definitely don't want that ambulance company to come pick you up when you need them, so you need to realize that what most people have told you is either absolutely incorrect or some kind of distortion of the research to make it simple.

An expression I use often is oversimplification, it's another word for incorrect, so look for variable resistance if you want to have that kind of success, check it out and like me. Look at it and as I've seen variable resistance users grow to hundreds of thousands of people, I'm connected to a million of them on social media. You have to consider that in the future we have the opportunity for everyone who participates to be able to be there. strong everyone who participates can be lean now, those two things are the biggest drivers in clinical practice that you see in the clinical literature, the best drivers of a long life and, coincidentally, those two things have a massive positive effect in metabolic health and immune system health, which means we are all going to live longer we are all going to live better and we are going to live happier lives thank you very much for coming today