Throwing my back out
Throwing my back out
And looking for ways to keep that from happening again
Dr. Eric Goodman insists he’s the wrong person to talk to about all of this. If I was writing this as more of a feature story, or an investigation into how well a training program works for others, he’d probably be right. But here at Pretty Good Inc., I'm not in the business of endorsing products, or methods, or recipes as anything more than personal recommendations. And this particular invention — Goodman’s invention — happens to have some oddly personal, long-lasting ties.
On a Sunday evening about five years ago, I was folding laundry from a pile on our bed. Standing, bending over the shirts and socks, I reached down to grab something and suddenly felt like I’d been shanked in my lower, left back. Gravity took over and I went straight down to the floor, crumpled in pain.
Thinking I was pulling some stunt to avoid chores, my wife was skeptical, at best, to the kind of discomfort I was in. Meanwhile, as I writhed on the carpet in blinding pain, I thought I might have a kidney stone. It took me a while to even sit up, and I got a terrible night’s sleep. A visit to the doctor the next morning brought the immediate relief that it was not, in fact, a kidney stone. It was just my back giving out, but not in some way that required any immediate intervention. So I turned back to an exercise I remembered from years earlier, this funny motion that looks like you’re simultaneously trying to sit down while grabbing with both hands for something heavy on a high shelf.
My back problems started early. When I drove a bus as part of my job as a summer camp counselor in my early 20s, I developed a sciatic pain in my hips from sitting on my wallet. In college, my (then-)particularly violent golf swing would occasionally leave me with weird aches and pains. And even as far back as high school, I remember an occasional deep soreness under my shoulder blades, whether from bad posture, sleeping in odd positions, or some other, undiagnosed cause.
I don’t remember exactly what prompted my mom to do so, but I know that she purchased a set of DVDs for me from some back doctor in Santa Barbara, sometime in the years before I left California for the east coast in December of 2011. I did not adhere to most of the 12 exercises within them, but found myself sporadically returning to the base move, The Founder, as it seemed to help. As someone in my late-20s, too busy to think much about my long-term health and physical stability, that seemed good enough.
A few years prior, when he also found himself in his late 20s, things were much more dire for Dr. Goodman. In his penultimate year of chiropractic school in Southern California, his own back had gotten so bad — not because of any particular condition, just wear and tear — that he was presented with the reality of spinal fusion surgery and told, quite simply: “You’re not going to be able to fix this.”
An avid water polo player and weightlifter who regularly practiced yoga and who was literally dedicating his professional life to studying backs, Goodman couldn’t understand what he was doing wrong.
“If you would have asked me at the time if anything was contributing, I would have said, ‘I don’t think so,’” he told me. “Now, when I understand mechanics better, 15 years in the rear view mirror, I can see very clearly how I was harming myself and how I was not using good mechanics.”
Goodman’s “aha” moment, such as there was one, came while doing a chair pose at Yoga Works in Huntington Beach in the spring of 2007, when he did something different and felt a release in his back that he hadn’t felt in years. He began experimenting with trying to relieve spinal compression in some of the most common, base yoga moves, altering them in a way that relieved pressure on his spine.
“My Founder is what I needed to do to a chair pose in order for it to feel good for me in yoga,” Goodman explained. He applied the same process and progression to create his Windmill and his Anchored Back Extension, all designed to alleviate spinal compression.
Those experiments established the base for Foundation Training, the DVD set my mom bought me, which has since grown to a worldwide empire of more than 1,400 instructors, including testimonials from pro surfer Kelly Slater and actor Matthew McConaughey. It’s currently being used by trainers with the Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets. But that 12-minute YouTube video from 2011, which has nearly 8 million views, begins with that same, funny-looking pose, the one I’ve done off and on for years, that I’ll still do in the shower after long bike rides.
One look at the comments helps you understand why FT has caught on. But Goodman has also found himself in the right place at the right time over the years to help spread his gospel. His background in water polo led him to a job working with the US Water Polo team before Beijing Olympics. When he moved to Santa Barbara to work with another trainer, it led to him helping Lance Armstrong in his recovery before going on to glory at the Tour de France. Armstrong even wrote a forward for Goodman’s book, shortly before that glory evaporated due to, well, you know that story.
But by then, FT had started spreading.
“There was a lot of serendipity and a lot of opportunity presented to me along the way, and each time I got a little bit better at showing Foundation Training,” said Goodman.
If you’re at all familiar with improv comedy, you may well know the concept of “yes, and.” The idea is that whatever you’re given from another performer, you take that idea and build upon it, adding as you go. One of the things I find personally appealing about FT is that Goodman doesn’t present it as an alternative to the many other bodyweight exercise programs out there, from yoga, to pilates, to any of the other fitness- or spirituality-based practices. Rather, it’s his own “yes, and” to the physical activities you’re already doing. Ideally, FT just makes you better at whatever you like to do.
“I want you to learn how to align your body and take it into its primary stability structure, which is muscles, instead of resting upon its secondary stability structure, which is joints, bones, ligaments,” he explains.
Just as important, though, is what FT can do for those who aren’t particularly physically active. For some people with serious back injuries, he may start for an entire month with a program where they never get off the ground, just working on spinal decompression. Goodman actually rejects a lot of the popular talking points around what a sedentary lifestyle and our many hours of staring at phones are doing to our necks and backs. After all, nearly all of us, regardless of how much exercise we get, are prone to such behaviors.
“The commonalities have a lot less to do with what a person does than what a person doesn’t do,” says Goodman. “Having crappy posture is only bad if you don’t take the 5, 10, 15 minutes a couple times a day to correct how you’re holding yourself and how you’re breathing. If you don’t make those corrections — no matter what you do or how active you are — it’s going to be really difficult for you not to have certain chronic pains, because of the patterns that your body gets used to holding itself in and breathing in.”
That second point — the breathing — has been the one major update in his program since it started. At first, he focused almost entirely on the posterior chain and how to connect the body. That initial program included both dynamic and active isometric postures, but Goodman believes the decompression breathing component in his update takes FT to a new level.
“It accounts for what I was missing in the first book,” he said.
Now 12 years in, Goodman marvels at how well his program has been accepted.
“I kind of can’t believe how little pushback I’ve received,” he said.
It’s not that Foundation Training is necessarily anti-establishment, but it was born out of a rejection of common wisdom and an ambition to find something better. Perhaps that’s why I — as someone both generally averse to doctors in a clinical setting, and someone always looking to explore and challenge the reasons behind conventional thinking — was drawn to it in the first place. But it’s worth reiterating that, for the most part, my experience with it stops at The Founder, that base exercise. In my research for this newsletter, I’ve practiced both routines posted here and am considering how they might best fit into the rest of my physical activity, but I’m not here to present some testimonial of my own, outside of what I’ve already written.
That being said, I’d love to hear from you. If you’ve had your own back issues, what solutions have you tried? Did you know about or even try Foundation Training at some point? Meet me in the comments, and if you decide to try it now for the first time, please report back with your results.