By Dr. Mercola
Dr. Eric Goodman is the creator of Foundation Training, a highly
effective protocol. Foundation Training focuses on body weight
exercises that integrate as many muscles as possible to strengthen and
elongate your core and posterior chain — which includes all the muscles
that connect to your pelvis, whether above or below it — thereby
alleviating many chronic pain issues.
The protocol has evolved over the years, and I’ve interviewed Goodman
twice before, in 2013 and the most recent two years ago in 2014,
covering various updates.
In this interview, he delves into some of the details covered in his latest book, “True to Form: How to Use Foundation Training for Sustained Pain Relief and Everyday Fitness.”
Goodman, who is trained as a chiropractor, is a pioneer in the world of
structural biomechanics. His program teaches you to optimize your
posture, thereby decreasing bodily pain and your risk of exercise
injury.
“The idea is really simple. Our body is made to help itself. As
long as we can get the muscles to align it properly, our breathing
patterns to align properly, our pelvic muscles to be more stabilized,
our posture will involuntarily become stronger,” he explains.
My education is in chiropractic. I’m licensed in Colorado and
California, but I only really see patients if they need an adjustment
for some reason that they can’t do the poses.”
Why Foundation Training?
While in chiropractic school, Goodman developed severe low back pain.
His doctors suggested surgery, which he wisely rejected. Instead, his
own pain set him on the path of discovering a long-term solution, which
ultimately resulted in Foundation Training.
“My passive care was good. I was getting chiropractic care. I was
being stretched. I was being massaged and worked on. But I wasn’t
strengthening my spine myself. That’s the difference that I made,” he explains.
“I don’t think that I will ever negate chiropractic, because I love
chiropractic. I love the ability and capacity to align the body, align
the nervous system and create a very good environment for different
process to occur.
[But] if you’re going to get your neck adjusted, I want your neck
to stay long and strong afterwards, because that’s what’s going to stop
you from having that same adjustment again a week later.”
While obsessively studying anatomy, alignment and exercise in an effort
to resolve his back pain, Goodman began to notice that he, and many
other people who were in pain, could not move the way the body was
designed to move, and this was causing a degenerative effect — and those
who were moving properly were able to regenerate and increase
strength, while reducing injury and pain.
“I was in chiropractic school. I really understood the body well. I
decided that this is going to become an obsession. I’m going to figure
this out. I can’t become a doctor, have patients come to me that are
asking for my advice on an injury that I have that I can’t fix. It’s
not OK. So, over the course of about four years, I did that. I became
very obsessed. I used my anatomy knowledge. I used my understanding of
exercise. I was a personal trainer actually long before a chiropractor.
Foundation Training is what I came up with. It’s what I do for myself
every single day, and it’s what I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to
teach to thousands of people at this point.”
The secret to Foundation Training lies in its simplicity: no gyms, no
specialized equipment, no complicated stretches. By incorporating a
series of powerful movements into your daily routine, you can move
better, breathe better and get back to using your body the way nature
intended.
Addressing Back Pain
Low back pain is a very common problem, and the most common reason why
people seek out Foundation Training. In the video below, Goodman
demonstrates a back extension exercise that is particularly helpful for
back pain relief.
The premise is simple. By strengthening the muscles in your back, they
will keep your spine properly braced through all the movements you do
as you go about your day-to-day life.
Overall, about 7 out of 10 people who learn Foundation Training do so
to address back pain; 2 out of 10 seek to improve their sports
performance, and the remaining 10 percent typically seek to address
knee pain, neck pain, jaw pain, plantar fasciitis, carpal tunnel and
other chronic pain.
How to Get Started With Foundation Training
In addition to their latest book, “True to Form,” Foundation Training
offers a variety of ways to get the benefits of their system, including
their free videos on their website at www.FoundationTraining.com. Foundation Training also offers certification
for clinicians, practitioners, trainers and instructors who are looking
to share this groundbreaking and highly effective protocol with their
clients and patients.
“There are probably more people using our free videos to get well than using our DVDs and books,” he says. “That’s awesome. That’s why we have free videos.
Our latest book, “True to Form,” is our illustrative process of
bringing Foundation Training into your everyday activities — brushing
your teeth, waking up from bed, reaching into the refrigerator,
whatever, how to apply very simple movement patterns that make you
stronger while you do that.
Then if you want to really get into it, we have DVDs and we have a
new streaming website. If you’re really into it … come to our workshop
or certification. If you come to our workshop and you decide you want
to go through a certification, we take the amount of money you paid on
the workshop, 100 percent of it, off the cost of the certification.”
The Importance of Posture for Ease of Movement and Health
As noted by Goodman, “Posture is a beautiful thing, except when it’s
messed up.” Indeed, while I see many people walking the beach during my
daily walks, poor posture is the norm, with hunching being one of the
most prevalent posture problems. Indeed, “standing tall” is so basic yet
most have forgotten how to do it. When you stand tall, your muscles
actually work more effectively.
“We naturally adapt towards our chosen method of absorbing gravity …
Our muscles absorb force … Whether they’re contracting or expanding,
they are absorbing or providing force.
If you take the opportunity of gravity — this ever-present weight
of your own body — and simply provide 5 percent more energy in absorbing
it, 5 percent more conscious effort throughout the day, it’s going to
change your life forever. It’s going to have people reacting to you
differently. It’s going to have you reacting to things like anxiety
differently. You’re going to feel the difference of a closed airway and
an open airway.
You’re going to feel the tightness of your jaw from the head
traveling to forward, contracting the back of your neck when you’re in a
bad posture … You start interacting with people like a confident human
being interacts.”
Patience and Practice
Most people have poor posture these days. Besides chronic peering down
on your smartphone or tablet and excessive sitting, which encourages
poor posture unless you’re paying careful and active attention to your
body at all times, we’ve also been taught certain posture strategies
that actually worsen posture rather than improve it.
Pulling your shoulders back to straighten your posture is one example.
As noted by Goodman, this is a “compartmentalized correction” at a
place that’s not actually causing the problem. More than anything else,
the places that cause the problems in posture are the upper and lower
ends of your spine.
A very basic explanation is that your upper and lower spine should be
pulling away from each other, not compressing or falling toward each
other. So the back and top of your head needs to be pulling away from
your tailbone, straight up, and neither forward nor backward.
As for how long it might take to correct your posture, it clearly
depends on your individual and specific circumstances: how long you’ve
had poor posture, how much time you dedicate to corrective exercises,
and the extent of your postural problems.
“It may be a matter of weeks to months. I believe for some people
it may be a year [to complete] the whole process. [But] they’re going
to be feeling better along the way. They’re going to notice incremental
changes. They’re going to see that their body is supporting itself
better steadily. They’re thinking about it less. They’re feeling less
pain. They’re feeling better posture. That’s when the real changes
start to happen. But there’s no set timeline.”
Walking 101
Walking is foundational for optimal health, and walking with good posture
can really maximize your benefits. Your choice of footwear can have a
significant influence here. When walking in sneakers or heels, your heel
is raised higher than your toes. This in turn makes your arch tighter,
which completely alters your range of motion. So, to start, walk
barefoot, or find a pair of zero-drop shoes.
The rationale behind walking barefoot has to do with plantar flexion,
the shortening of the muscles on the back of your ankle and the
lengthening of the muscles at the front of your ankle and shin. When
walking barefoot, you alter the way the back of your body absorbs force
for the better.
Dorsiflexing is a tremendously important piece of walking. This is
where you’re lifting the top of your foot toward your shin. When you’re
walking with plantar flexion (due to wearing heels), you rarely
dorsiflex, thereby contracting and shortening the muscles of your shin.
“That’s Step 1, making sure that there is good dorsiflexion in every step,” Goodman says.
“Literally lift the top toes away from the ground. Lift the balls of
the feet away from the ground and try to spread your feet a little bit.
That will allow your hips to follow a much more natural range of
motion. As your feet dorsiflex, it triggers these muscles of the inside
and outside of your legs.
Those muscles have internal rotation capacity and external rotation
capacity. Both of which are very important for walking … The ability
of the adductors, the medial hamstring, the muscles of the inner part of
the thigh, the inner upper part of the thigh, to contract during a
walk, to spin that hip a little bit more neutral towards straight ahead
…
Long story short, range of motion of the hips is so significant to
walking. That range of motion is limited most frequently in people at
the feet with plantar flexion, excessive plantar flexion or excessive
external rotation.”
Head Posture While Walking
The other piece of the puzzle is the location of your head. Most people
walk as if they’re sniffing their way forward, head leading the rest
of the body. A more natural posture is to lift your chest upward, which
allows your shoulders to lift and your chin to retract more or less
automatically. So think: “Chest up, chin back.” Initially, this may feel
and even look a bit awkward, but you’ll notice it’s a significantly
more powerful way to walk, allowing you to engage more muscles.
“If you simply focus on chin back, chest up, shoulders big, broad,
not backing down but out — if you focus on that — you’re going to be
walking very different. You’re going to experience this really rhythmic
counterbalance in your walk. When the right foot comes forward, the
shoulder comes forward on the opposite side.
It’s just these nice little muscular glutes, hamstrings, calves,
adductors across the body to the opposite shoulder and pec … So many
muscles involved. It’s the SCMs that are very important as well to keep
that chin back, chest up function happen.”
Preventing iPhone Neck and Dowager’s Hump
The chest up, chin back posture will not only make you look better, but
proper posture may also help prevent osteoporosis and significantly
reduce your risk of developing a dowager’s hump, which tends to be
quite common among the elderly, and women in particular.
This forward slumped posture tends to be related to chronic improper
posturing that worsens over time, eventually leading to the development
of rigid intractable calcifications. The beginning of the progression
of the dowager’s hump is typically the loss of thoracic extension.
“I think the lack of movement and stagnation in bone leads to
calcification and typical degenerative changes. Degenerative changes
along with spine make it less mobile … It supports it because the
muscles aren’t, the discs aren’t. It puts very rigid support structures
in place.
Now, can you imagine 20, 50 years from now, when it’s 60 or 70
years after cellphones and iPads came around, the dowager’s humps, we
can start calling them the iPad hump … The younger you are, the more
capacity you have to be plastic, to engage your body’s natural tendency
to respond to stimulus in such a fashion that will get better and
better at doing the thing you’re asking it to do.
If you’re often asking it to look down at your phone, please often
ask it to lift your chest up, to pull your chin back, and to just stand
very firm on the ground. Just look at your phone while keeping your
chin back and chest up.”
According to Goodman, even if you’ve already started to develop a
slight hump, chances are you’ll be able to significantly improve your
alignment provided your spine has not yet calcified. Exceptions might
be if you have ankylosing spondylitis (AS) or diffuse idiopathic
skeletal hyperostosis (DISH). Naturally, the younger you are, the more
room for improvement there is.
Decompression Breathing
One important aspect of Foundation Training is what Goodman refers to
as compression breathing. With his breathing protocol, you literally
re-educate the muscles surrounding your axial skeleton, the spine of
your rib cage, teaching them to be in a state of expansion rather than
contraction. You’ll find a demonstration of this technique in the video
above, followed by another founder exercise.
“[This breathing technique] is something that’s always going to set
our work aside from everything else. Not better. Not worse. Different.
It’s an accessory,” Goodman says. “Decompression breathing, which can be taken and applied to any
movement, any exercise, any activity … will do more for your spine, more
for your chest and neck, more for your dowager’s hump … than anything
else I can possibly teach you. The unique thing about it is our
specific protocol of learning how to engage the diaphragm more
appropriately by drastically strengthening the muscles that surround
the rib cage.”
Here’s a quick summary of the compression breathing exercise demonstrated above:
Position your feet so that the OUTSIDE of your feet are parallel.
This will make it appear as though you’re standing slightly pigeon-toed
Pull your chin back and lift your chest
Place your thumbs at the bottom of your ribcage, and your pinkies on your pelvic bone
With each breath, your aim is to increase the distance between your
thumb and pinky fingers, as well as increase the width of your upper
back. This occurs as you elongate the back of your ribcage. Each
inhalation expands your ribcage, and each exhalation will keep the
abdomen extended and tight. So each in-breath fills up your ribcage,
and each out-breath maintains the height and width of your ribcage
Repeat 5 to 10 rounds with 3 to 4 breaths per round
“I have a friend that is [in a wheelchair] and we do some of those
workouts. He’s a very good guy from Oklahoma City, but had a very
tragic accident. I really hope I get to spend some more time with that
guy and see what we can do just based on breathing,” Goodman says.
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