Eric Goodman - True to Form: How to Use Foundation Training for Sustained Pain Relief and Everyday Fitness

EVERYONE IS BORN A GENIUS, BUT THE PROCESS OF LIVING DE-GENIUSES THEM.

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

CONTENTS

U ntil I started doing Foundation Training, I couldnt lift Thors hammerat least, not without help from Hollywood magic. The problem was that I had injured my back while shooting a movie a few years ago, and it had gotten progressively worse. I tried all sorts of rehab and strengthening programs, stretching, isolated muscle-building, and more, but nothing ever gave me a long-term benefit. I was alternating between limiting my exercises in order to heal the injury and doing more exercises in order to strengthen my back where it felt vulnerable.

Then a stuntman on a film I was working on told me about Foundation Training. He had seriously injured his back, and it was FT that had paved the way to his recovery. I decided to try it. What did I have to lose? Id tried just about everything else.

I began with some of the workout videos available online. The benefits were immediately noticeable. Over the coming months, as I began working one-on-one with Eric, my back grew stronger than ever. For the first time in years, I felt combined flexibility and strength in places that had previously been incredibly vulnerable.

Today I do a Foundation Training sequence four or five times a week for maintenanceand whenever my back feels overworked, tight, or painful. Im now able to do all the activities I did in the past with confidence; I dont have to baby myself through any particular movements. Ive also learned, under Erics guidance, how to restructure my movement patterns and do away with bad habits that could lead to further troubleworse trouble.

Like that stuntman, like so many people who have found relief from pain with Foundation Training, I am grateful for the healing. I am even more grateful for having learned how to fully engage my true core muscles so as to keep my body at peak strength and flexibility. That is the true gift of Foundation Training, and it is the message at the heart of this book.

CHRIS HEMSWORTH

W hen I was fifteen years old, I had surgery to repair my right shoulder joint. The procedure was over in a couple of hours, but the recovery took forever. For the next six weeksan eternity at that ageI had to wear a gigantic white brace that lashed my right arm tight to my body with Velcro. I wore the brace in school and after school, day and night, and when it finally came off, my arm was a noodle. It took another six months before I was able to play the sports I loved at all, and it took much longer to feel comfortable playing.

It was an awful experience, although I think it was one of the reasons that I decided to make chiropractic medicine my profession, and shortly after college, I enrolled in a graduate program and began my training.

Three years into itin fact, not too long before I was to graduate and launch my careerdoctors were recommending I go under the knife againthis time for chronic back pain that had very nearly immobilized me. Those of you who know the reality of chronic back pain and are familiar with the lingo will understand when I say that my MRI showed substantial degeneration of the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae and of the sacrum at the base of the spine. My bottom two vertebrae, the L5 and S1, were actually sitting one on top of the other, which pretty much explained why I could barely move so much of the time. For years I had been treating the symptomsthe painwith increasingly potent and varied painkillers, along with physical therapy, chiropractic adjustments, and the typical forms of rehab that were available at that time. But there was no progress; nothing was fixed. Worse, my pain was no longer responding to the drugs, and the potential side effects and interactions were becoming their own health issue. The only recourse now, recommended by a team of highly trained specialists, was fusion surgery, a major procedure in which bone would be grafted onto my spine to fuse the two problem vertebrae, stop the motion between the two, and, if it all worked, alleviate the pain.

I was twenty-six. Eleven years after the shoulder operation had incapacitated me for half a year, major surgery was about the last thing I wanted to hear.

I was also aware of the irony of the situation, which was painful in a different way. I was about to enter a profession aimed precisely at helping patients find healing outside of surgery, yet I was unable to find such healing for myself. Up-and-Coming Young Chiropractor Undergoes Back Surgery is not a good headline for someone starting a career dedicated to preventing others from having to go under the knife for their back pain.

Mostly, I could not fathom how I had gotten here. I was young, strong, athletic. Why was my body being shut down by physical pain? What was the reason my twenty-six-year-old discs were as worn and torn as ninety-six-year-old onesmaybe more so?

Moreover, I wasnt just a random guy who played sports and worked out in a gym; I was someone who studied how the body worked, a student of the musculoskeletal system and its interactions with the other systems of human physiology. What had I missed? Why had I failed to apprehend what was happening to me while it was happening so that I could catch it, stop it, and turn it back around?

I decided I needed to understand all this far more than I needed surgery. It took some time and much trial and error, but in the process I recognized something so fundamental, so essentially obvious that it has taken me a decade of practice and study to sort it out.

We move wrong.

More specifically, we move in ways contrary to how our bodies are naturally constructed and equipped for us to move. Many of us endure chronic pain precisely because we do not understand how to live correctly inside the efficiently designed bodies we are born into. We werent given an operating manual and for some reason, our instincts have failed us.

This book sets out to change all that.

It all starts with the bodies we have and what were doing to them.

M eet Hallie.

She works for a large company in a large officework she lovesand like so many of us, she is consigned to a desk for the greater part of every workday. Atop her desk is a bank of computer monitors on which Hallie tracks and manages a range of projects, procedures, and operational activities. She does it all sitting down, although often on the very edge of her high-tech, lumbar-supported, mesh-backed, spongy-seat office chair, as she peers with acute concentration at first one screen, then another. Hallie typically rests her elbows or forearms on the desk or her lap, and her hands and wrists on her computer keyboard. Her bodys spine is curved toward her work, and her head juts forward as if it wanted to be ready to meet the next piece of vital information head-on.