Editor’s Note: Foundation Training is available for download here. Full acceess to is typically priced at $150, but they’re offering a free course with Kahea Hart, Billy Kemper, and Mikey Redd along with a limited time discount to The Inertia readers for just $120 until June 15, 2018. Check it out.
Success is a goal well met – perhaps even built upon.
In 2008, I was only a couple years into learning to surf, and in all truth, every attempt really hurt like hell. Sure, I’d come in after each embarrassing session with a head full of joy, but within hours my body would enter something I like to call “shut-down-your-life-for-now-until-it’s-over” pain.
My low spine was so bad back then. In December of 2007, my doctors told me that my low back required a “360-degree fusion procedure” between my 4th and 5th lumbar vertebra, as well as a partial fusion of my 5th lumbar vertebra to my 1st sacral bone. I was in my final year earning my Doctorate in Chiropractic at the time I heard the news from the surgeon. This really sucked. I cried for a few days, but nobody knows that.
After the overwhelming emotions of being 27 years old, less than a year from my Doctorate, and in need of major life-altering surgery, I got my shit together and decided to avoid surgery altogether – or die trying.
It worked. There is another side to chronic pain.
I have spent nearly every day of the last ten years, finding major life-altering improvements to my health, strength, and confidence. Each day brought insight, curiosity, frustration, and over time, clarity.
What is truly important is the theory born within the endless hours of physical introspection, built upon a unique level of biomechanics knowledge, injury comprehension, and creativity. The theory is called Foundation Training, and I’ll explain as quickly as I can.
We have an easy capacity to change our patterns, physical and mental, by simply adopting healthier patterns, and repeating them with focus and frequency. Foundation Training is a simple pattern builder for better weight distribution throughout your own body while you move, stand, and sit through life. Foundation Training exercises are based in finding and connecting the largest, strongest muscles in your body, and reminding them of their legitimate responsibility of supporting us.
Foundation Training teaches mostly around two fundamental ranges of motion:
Your rib cage must have a healthy, muscular range of motion throughout both the inhale and exhale. There is a reasonable amount of motion involved in a healthy rib cage. In most modern cubicle-bound, car-driving, smartphone-scrolling lifestyles, this motion is minimal and detrimental to healthy respiration and metabolism. Decompression Breathing is our recipe for improving this vital range of motion.
The hip joints must have a healthy range of motion supported by strong hamstrings, groin muscles, glutes, and a powerful, long, cylindrical torso. Foundation Training has numerous poses (over 30 original, barefoot, bodyweight exercises) to teach your body to get this second vital range of motion correct and perpetually stronger because your hips learn to hinge so well.
Why should you try Foundation Training?
Because I’ve taught thousands of people how to feel better on their own, and most of the time, it works surprisingly well.
I’ve made a lot of friends through teaching Foundation Training. That’s one of the biggest markers of my success in the world – friendship and healthy living wherever we go. These days I’m finding Founders and a few other of our exercises included in pre-surf warm-ups on beaches all around the world, even if just for a few minutes at a time.
Our work is supported by the best of the best among athletes, as well as the doctors who treat them. I’ve met my own personal goal of getting better. I’ve strengthened my weak body parts, and I have been really honest with myself about the good and bad of what I teach.
I need surfing. It keeps me pleasant, and Foundation Training keeps me able to surf and live a more active life.
I trust the work will do the same for you. Choose your goal, change your patterns, and do the things you love to do.
For reference, we have Foundation Training instructors all around the world, and we’re excited to partner with The Inertia to offer a free course with Kahea Hart, Billy Kemper, and Mikey Redd and a steep, limited time discount on access to the full Foundation Training curriculum on our new streaming website.
Check out @foundationtraining on Instagram for updates and info along the way.
To your health. – Dr. Eric Goodman
