Foundation Training for Back Pain Relief and General Fitness – Mercola.com
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.
Read the rest at: Mercola.com