Introduction

Do any of these describe your experience with exercise?

Problem #1: Lifting weights year after year, yet continuing to look about the same.

Problem #2: Sustaining injuries or having chronic sore joints as a result of lifting weights.

Problem #3: Doing 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 are exercising 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 jaw problems similar to a pulled tooth that never heals, and a jaw that shatters.

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 farm workers 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...