Optimizing Movement for a Pain-Free Life through Foundation Training, with Dr. Eric Goodman

Dr. Goodman:  It’s so crazy. That was the first video we made. We made that one for Lance Armstrong and for a guy named Doug Ulman, who at the time was CEO of Livestrong. Then Lance came clean about a lot of stuff, and that was an interesting moment in life for him. But luckily, we snuck in there, helped him return to the Tour de France, and he really helped my old partner and good friend Peter and I grow our initial thing. That video was kind of a representation of that.

Now, [I’ve] made a life out of it. With that video, it wasn’t even Foundation Training yet. It was just becoming what it was [and] figuring it out. We put our first book out that year in May 2011 called Foundation. In 2016, I put out True to Form, which was the theory of Foundation Training. If you look at True to Form, you will see the most accurate physical expression of Foundation Training. I would consider it more or less still true. It’s really lasted the test of time. I’d say that is as far as I could evolve those movements. That’s as far as I could get them; that’s as good as I could get them. There [are] 13 or 14 movements in True to Form, and we’ve been developing advanced layers and movements, so now when you look at Foundation Training, there [are] 25 movements. Each one of them is based completely around two principles, anchoring the pelvis and decompressing the torso. Creating as much space around the spine, the nerves, [and] the visceral organs, [all] the different reasons I was expressing [why] pain occurs in people. We’re now teaching to create as much space as possible throughout the entire torso.

[In] January of this year, I put [out] my first more narrative-style book, which is my perspective on pain management in general. That’s called Foundations of Health. That one goes into the 25 movements of Foundation Training [and] more why they exist than how to do them, and it goes into the anatomy and physiology of chronic pain. The three things that I recommend in that book are movement practices like Foundation Training, heat therapy—and I recommend traditional saunas. I really don’t recommend infrared in the same way. I say go to the real heat; go to the tried and tested source. It’s been around for generations. So, real heat saunas, moving with breathing exercises, and any way that a patient can naturally stimulate the endogenous cannabinoid system as long as it’s fed as healthfully as possible with enough omegas [and] enough of the building blocks to make anandamide [and 2-arachidonoylglycerol] (2-AG).

I’ve really gone down the rabbit hole of why adapting to Foundation Training feels so good in the body and blended the two with research we found [on] the endogenous cannabinoid system, or, [as] I call it, the endogenous homeostasis system, versus adapting your body intentionally to very powerful positions. That’s where it is now. [We’ve] got certification courses, we have apps, we have books, [we’ve] got a real thing, man.

Chris Kresser:  It’s an amazing evolution. It’s great to see that happen, and it’s great work. We were chatting before the show [that] my ski coach, Tom Gellie, who I’ve had on the show, as well, sent me your 10-year-old initial video on YouTube about 25 days into the [last ski] season [after] I started to develop some low back pain, which is not typical for me. I did it for eight or nine days straight, and the back pain completely disappeared. So even the old-school variations are still working very well. But I’m curious now, if I would have picked up the phone and called you in that situation, how would you [have advised] me to get started? Would it be with the foundational movements?

Dr. Goodman:  It would have been through the current iteration of what I call supine decompression. This is my acute back pain recipe for patients. We’re going to take gravity as much out of the equation as we can, so you’re going to be horizontal, supine, [and] we’re going to anchor the pelvis as the hip joints move inward. Hips are [typically] way outward. So we’re going to twist them back in and create an elongated glute, and we’re going to wrap the sacrum. Usually, the sacrum is thrust forward when the glutes contract. So we’re unwrapping that, wrapping the hips forward into internal rotation. Kind of zipping the knees together, zipping the toes, [and] you’ll even see, if you’re looking at it accurately, [that] the toes touching the heels are separated while the knees are touching. So what we’ve done is we’re basically taking the muscles and using them to unwrap tension at the nerve level, at the spinal level. We’re then doing something called decompression breathing, which is taking the front and back of the ribcage and moving it away from the lower spine uniformly with our inhalation through the nose, creating an eccentric diaphragmatic contraction. For anybody [who] doesn’t know, that means we’re training the diaphragm to feel the force it has to absorb under tension before we ask it to generate any force. That breathing, that tethering of the hips from below, and expansion and expression of the torso from above creates this beautiful decompression along the spine.

We’ve been able to test that with a lot of different types of people, and I am so looking forward to researching this with anybody [who] will do it with me. All I want you to do is tell me what to test against in chronic pain, and I will put Foundation Training against it and we will work our butts off. You can test it. We will stand back and just make sure the poses are done well. Because [in] the small tests we’ve done with [the] Los Angeles County Fire Department, with a couple of teams, with anecdotal evidence from doctors and physical therapists, and many, many PhD students writing their thesis on us and things like that, we’ve had incredible outcomes, but no real double-blind studies. That will really make a difference in our work. So I’m really looking for that. I’ve done a few interviews with Joe Mercola over the years, [and during] my first one back in 2012, I was like, “Somebody please do research with us.” It’s a hard thing to come across, especially as a chiropractor.

Chris Kresser:  Well, we have a lot of researchers in our audience, PhD level, and practitioners, as you know. Maybe someone will hear this and respond to the call. Hint, hint.

Dr. Goodman:  Back pain is a plague. It’s a real thing. It affects so many people. And some truly unfortunate people are otherwise completely healthy. A small change occurs in their back, and their life changes forever because of how the reaction occurred. Not because of the problem. But because of the advice they were given and the steps they took. That’s what we need to help people avoid.

Chris Kresser:  Right. It can lead to painkiller addiction, surgeries that go wrong, and cause a real structural problem that wasn’t there prior to the surgery. I’ve seen so many examples of things [going] south very quickly and very dramatically from mismanaged back pain. I fully agree, it’s a huge problem. Just from reading a little bit that you [wrote], I’ve found this phrase in a few places, “Everything we do is either building us up or breaking us down.” What do you mean by that? I mean, I have a guess of what you mean by that. But I’m curious what that lens brings to the work for you.

Dr. Goodman:  If you go all the way back to November 11, 2011, I got to give a TEDx talk [called] “The Unexpected [Physical] Consequences of Technology.” The net impact of that talk was meant to be the idea of complacent versus active adaptation. Complacent adaptation being [that] your body is going to adapt no matter what because it is a beautifully wired, perfect adaptable mechanism. It will improve at what you’re asking it to do, even if what you’re asking it to do is passive, relaxing, minimally metabolic, and potentially bad for it. It will make itself better at doing that at an effort of efficiency. You take that energy [that’s] being used anyway, and you focus it a little bit like we do in corrective exercise, or like you do learning a language, learning an instrument, learning a new skill, learning a martial art, learning to dance, [or] learning to communicate with friends and partners better. Each one of these is a buildup of that same adaptive mechanism that only was more refined, more focused, more patterned, [and] more practiced.

Patterns are what our body knows, and it’s always trying to improve the patterns, from a microcellular level to a macro existence level. It’s trying to improve the efficiency within itself of those patterns, and the gift of the human body is this adaptability [until] we die, to some degree. You hear of people learning jiu jitsu in their 70s, and having wonderful times in that process. The idea that it’s either building us up or breaking us down is that we’re not given the choice of whether or not we adapt. But we are given the choice of taking a subtle pattern and [controlling] that, and not getting hard on ourselves if we miss a day or two or three days, but keeping the pattern alive of trying to do good things. That’s the idea.

Incorporating Foundation Training into Your Overall Routine

Chris Kresser:  On that note, how does Foundation Training fit into an overall training routine? Let’s say, at this time of year, I’m mountain biking, I’m hiking, I’m kayaking, wakesurfing, doing a bunch of other stuff. I do strength training, squats, and deadlifts and that sort of thing.

Dr. Goodman:  It fits in everywhere.

Chris Kresser:  Just to give people who are less familiar with it [an idea], how often do you suggest that people do it? Is it something they incorporate within their routine? Or does it ebb and flow depending on their needs and what’s going on? How do you work with people to incorporate it into their life?

Dr. Goodman:  That’s a good question, and it’s not a set answer. We have a lot of instructors in different types of lives and different demographics. We have some instructors [who] only work with 60- to 85-year-olds. We have some instructors [who] are college swim coaches, and that’s where all their instruction fits in. We have some [who] are young kid dance or gymnastics coaches, and we have some [who] are master-level jiu jitsu coaches. So all across that board, we have entry points, [and] those entry points [always] look like a little bit every day. Always. For some people, a little bit is okay. I did my little bit today. It’s better than nothing. For some people, it’s 30 [or] 40 minutes [of] a very focused, very intense Foundation Training, which is hard.

You see, this is me at the end of every interview I do. I start sweating because I get into it, and I’m starting to move and I get pretty excited about it. It works to make your body active a lot. When you do decompression breathing, if you do it well, while you’re doing it, you’re kind of shaky. Your body’s working very hard. But then when you go to your activity, [like] your skiing, what you’re not doing is this hyperextension that your body is used to because that shaking that you were experiencing during the warmup activated the protective muscles around the ribs. And that’s not unique to skiing. That’s using the right muscles for big movements and using those big movements to prime the exercise.

You want to be able to have a very powerful hip hinge, so one of our primary exercises, the Founder, is an isometric hip hinge and then a practiced dynamic hip hinge that is obsessively, compulsively detailed. That will translate to any sport you do because your body needs the hips to be the power center of the body. If you’re not hip hinging, you’re spine bending, and if you’re practicing spine bending, your hips are kind of turning off. They’re not as available for you as they were prior, and you don’t want that. You want the hips to be the absorption and power production centers at the bottom.

Chris Kresser:  That was a big one for me. After being exposed to it, I understand the biomechanics of it and why it makes sense. But I think, at least in certain types of athletic training, there’s an idea that having that structure where the lower back is arched is dangerous and [if] you’re lifting heavy weights or something, that’s going to lead to injury. But it seems like it’s the other way around.

Dr. Goodman:  It’s both. Because you can go too far.

Chris Kresser:  Right, you can hyper.

Dr. Goodman:  Hyperlordosis is just as bad for you as a hypo because both of them take force instead of being driven through the spine. There’s a breakpoint in one direction or the other.

What I tell people is [that] you don’t fix that by nutating or counternutating, [and] you don’t fix that by anteriorly or posteriorly rocking the pelvic joints. You fix it by inner rotating the pelvic joints [and] broadening the expanse of where the foot hits the ground so that it’s very even. The foot controls the leg muscles, so the more of the foot on the ground, the more muscular activation of the leg all the way to the hip joints [and] to the pelvis.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Dr. Goodman:  That switch is a fixed anterior and posterior pelvic tilt. Whereas if you’re anteriorly tilted and you just posteriorly tilt, you’re creating hypermobility instead of fixing the problem.

Chris Kresser:  It sounds like it’s a lot also about aligning the skeleton so that force is being translated or communicated through the skeleton in the best possible way so you don’t have breakpoints, and you’re using physics to translate that force in the most efficient and supportive way.

Dr. Goodman:  That was perfect. That was it. People should listen to that because that’s what we’re trying to do. You shouldn’t have mechanical interruptions because through mechanical interruptions come other interruptions. Very rarely does a nerve shorten its tension and that’s why something changes in the body. You don’t really hear that. But muscles can adapt if we shorten under the weight of the body, and it changes them until you change them back. Each of these things is very real. That’s what I want people to understand. People think, “Oh, my back hurts,” and they get upset when it doesn’t go away because they think they should be able to just take Advil for the next 10 years and they’ll never have it again. There [are] so many other problems that come with that desensitization [to the] ecosystem in your body that it’s just not worth it. Experience your pain. Feel it.

Chris Kresser:  This is so fascinating, and I love this approach because there [are] so many synchronicities between the work that I do and a functional approach to health and this very functional approach to [pain]. [And] it goes so far beyond pain. Pain is probably the thing that brings people to it, for the most part, but it really seems to me to be about what is the most powerful, efficient, effortless, and enjoyable way to be in a body. Whether you’re talking about just being pain free and being able to go through your day and feel good in your body, or whether you’re talking about being able to perform at a super high level because you’re not being impeded by any kind of obstructions in the body in the way that it’s aligned, and you’re using your body, or whether you’re [a] firefighter holding a fire hose in a certain position for a long period of time or doing other kinds of repetitive mechanical activities all day. It seems pretty amazing.

Dr. Goodman:  Let me give you a quick rundown of what happens with firefighters. We have a really interesting close connection with firefighters because my brother-in-law, [Coach Jessie Salas], who is my partner in Foundation Training, is [as] strong as an ox. He was a 17-year heavy rescue firefighter in Orlando, and then six [or] seven years ago, we yanked him out of there, and he became my main partner in Foundation Training. He and I have treated people all over the world together. He’s told me a lot of what this does for him, and he was one of our main people pushing this into fire departments initially.

With firefighters, we found the first major [component was] the skeletal structural strength component. From carrying packs to sitting in the truck on the way to a fire, to a rescue, to whatever it has to be. Over five or six years of working with firefighters, we pulled more in. One of them is on our core educator team. His name is Evan Halquist, and he’s a captain at Los Angeles County Fire. More interesting is [that] for years, [he trained] all their recruits, and for years, he got to add in 10 minutes of Foundation Training [each] day to each recruit class. It was substantial and it [was] felt. We were able to see some reports and see the significant reduction in injuries. Much more interesting [were] three things: decompression breathing and pelvic anchoring was able to show an improvement in lung volume, a decrease in reported mental stress, and an increase in grip strength. In there, we have two mortality markers, in grip strength and lung volume. That was the most interesting. We did not anticipate that. We understood the lung volume thing because you are practicing very big breathing with decompression and eccentrically, in particular. But the pain part was [that] we figured it was going to help with pain. It makes sense. We’re strengthening the posterior chain, [and] we’re aligning the body; of course it’s going to help with pain. That’s not rocket science.

The grip strength thing just shows the integration of the body that our poses provide. That’s it. And the lung volume thing is just, “Hey, everybody needs better lung volume.” Not just the ability to breathe quickly or shallow[ly], you need to really express both directions of inflation and exhalation. You have to be able to do that. So it was very promising, and I know we’re leaning into that a little bit with some of our styles of teaching lately. Again, we’re hopeful, and I know we’re going to have more research. Our business has been growing, our notoriety has absolutely been on an upward trajectory for several years now, and I feel that the research is around the corner.

Chris Kresser:  It’ll come. I love that you’re doing that work with first responders. At my former clinic, [California Center for Functional Medicine], we did a lot of programs for firefighters, and it’s such an underserved population when it comes to supporting their health and well-being because it’s hard work. They’re exposed to a lot of really challenging situations, everything from having to share meals in the firehouse and not having control over what you eat, to being in difficult physical situations.

Dr. Goodman:  If there’s any community in the world that needs [it], every fire station on the planet should have a hot sauna for when these guys and girls get off of calls [so] they can detox all those environmental toxins there. Cops, too. People [who] have to experience both environmental toxicity and trauma-style toxicity, you need to be able to purge that. Take Foundation Training completely out of the picture, whatever. Those people need to purge. They need their lymphatic systems to drain, and I think you’d see a huge impact on the mental well-being and overall health of first responders with the simple addition of a traditional sauna at each station.

Chris Kresser:  I agree. So Eric, if somebody’s listening to this [and] they’re really interested [and] they want to get started, what’s the best way to do that?

How You Can Get Started with Foundation Training

Dr. Goodman:  We have entry points of various types. Absolutely, go try it out on YouTube. We have a great YouTube page [where] you can see samples of our work. You can get a tutorial in decompression breathing, you can get a tutorial on anchoring, [and] you can get all these different bits and pieces that help you understand Foundation Training for free on either YouTube or on our streaming site. Once you get to the streaming site, there’s a few things for free, [and] then there’s our baseline program, which is 14 weeks, every single day. We walk you through 112 days of daily Foundation Training. From there, you can go into any of our myriad programs. There [are] hundreds of workouts on there. We have workouts from myself, Jessie Salas, Nicole Medas, Allison Cost, Sean Yeager-Diamond, Evan Halquist, Matt Wiest, and Lorena Lee. We’ve got a lot of different doctors [and] a lot of different trainers and practitioners [who] add their perspective on Foundation Training there. So there [are] many entry points, from the older people to the younger people and everything in between.

We have three books on the subject that I wrote, and then my wife wrote Shaping Your Baby’s Foundation, which enters into the first year of life for new parents and really walks them through it beautifully. She is a pediatric physical therapist and has a really remarkable mind. There’s a lot [of] information that surrounds this, and we’ve been around [for] a bit now, so you can find some credible information about it. Once you’ve looked at what Foundation Training is, [and] you decide, “Yeah, I’d like to give this a try,” [check] if there’s an instructor nearby. We have over 1200 instructors around the world, [and] you can find a trainer on our page at FoundationTraining.com. If you have the opportunity to learn this in person, it’s the best way to learn it. Some of them teach on Zoom, but if you can learn in person, learn in person. That’s always better. We’ve got books, certification courses, we have the app, [and] we have in-person instructors. Other than that, you’re going to have to come up with it yourself.

Chris Kresser:  I think that’s a really great suite of tools for people. I like learning through as many different mediums as possible. I like books [and] video[s]. It’s good to have all those different entry points for folks. And it sounds like also for different populations who have different needs and are coming from a different place in life. So, [I’m] super excited to get this work out there. Like I said, it’s been transformative for me, and I’ve already told a lot of people about it because I don’t often encounter work that I feel like is really addressing all the different angles that need to be addressed. Some people or bodies of work tend to do one thing really well, but neglect other things that I feel are really important and need to be included in the equation. It’s hard for me to recommend those bodies of work, at least without some significant qualifications and caveats and things like that. But I really love the holistic way you’re approaching the physical causes of back pain, [and] the emotional and trauma-related causes, and then the way that your work brings together breathing and movements and other practices to address it. It’s really remarkable, and I applaud your continued willingness to grow and evolve the work and not just rest on the accomplishments you’ve had so far. And I’m excited to see how that will continue to transform.

Dr. Goodman:  That’s really cool to hear. Thank you, Chris. Again, I’ve been a fan of what you do for a long time. I’m always trying to dial in my own physiology. As you can see, I sweat like an ox. So I’m always trying to dial this in a little bit and figure out my electrolytes and aldosterone and all these different things. I’m kind of quietly behind the curtain paying attention very much to what you’re putting out there. Thank you for the platform and for letting me talk about Foundation Training. This is my life’s work. I live it and breathe it every day, and I really hope that people [who] are listening to this get some benefit from it if they try it.

Chris Kresser:  Great. Everybody, make sure to check out Eric’s work, FoundationTraining.com, the books on Amazon, and the streaming platform is really slick. I’ve been using it myself the last couple of weeks and really getting a lot out of it. So don’t suffer unnecessarily with back pain. This is another thing that I’ve found, and I’m sure you have, as well, [that] a lot of people just feel resigned. They feel like, “I’ve had back pain for 15 years, or 20 years or whatever. I’m always going to have back pain. There’s really no point in doing anything about it.” But I think that, again, while it’s understandable to be discouraged, there’s always room for movement and shift and transformation. So I hope this encourages some of you to get out there and make an effort.

Dr. Goodman:  Let me give one little statement I’ve made to a lot of people over the years that has resonated with a lot of them, myself included. You’re going to have to surrender to something in pain. Either you’re going to surrender to being in pain the rest of your life, or you’re going to surrender to the reality that you have to work on it for the rest of your life. One of them is active and builds you, builds confidence, builds your personality, builds your character, builds your body, [and] builds your brain. The other one pacifies you, disconnects you, makes you a victim, and hurts like hell. Please choose to surrender to the reality that you have to work on your body for as long as you have it because that’s what we have to do. Everybody. Nobody gets out of it.

Chris Kresser:  Love it. That’s a great way of looking at it. Thank you, Dr. Goodman, for coming on the show. It’s been a pleasure. And all of the listeners, thanks for listening, and keep sending your questions to ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion.

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