Heroic Interview: True to Form with Eric Goodman

You're listening to True to Form, an.

Optimal living interview with Eric Goodman and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Eric Goodman, who wrote an extraordinary book called True to Form. He created something called Foundation Training and is one of the world's leading thinkers on how to move optimally. And. And I've known about Eric for quite a while. We share a mutual friend, Trip Lanier, and I've had his stuff for a long time. But it wasn't until I got into really studying movement, kind of officially in preparation for a class that I dove in. And it just so happened that two things came together at the same time. One, I was doing a coaching call with Ben Greenfield, who is a bottomless source of unbelievable information, and he said he changed his morning routine completely to follow Eric Goodman's foundation training. And something that Ben does like, that is something I pay attention to. So I said, okay, check out the new book. And then on the new book, Joan Vernikos, who I had recently fallen in love with, who is the head of NASA's Life Sciences Division, basically in charge of keeping astronauts healthy before, during, and after their flights, gave the strongest possible recommendation to Eric's work. She said, foundation training exercises are the answer to my many years of research on the negative effects of sitting. And I was sold and love the book. And Eric, I appreciate you taking the time to share some of your big ideas with our community.

After that introduction, I don't really want to say anything else.

Yeah, well, we're good. Thank you. So there you go. Get the book True to Form. Subtitle how to Use Foundation Training for Sustained Pain Relief now in Everyday Fitness. So Eric's been at this for a long time, but tell us about what does it mean? I like to start with our authors, like True to Form. Why did you name the book True to Form?

The idea is that it's as expected. I think anybody that has followed our work for a long time has seen that. A, we're extremely obsessive. Anybody that is kind of on the main team of Foundation Training, we're pretty obsessive about how our work is presented and how. How it's felt and what our poses feel like. And we throw a lot of stuff out and we do that so that what we do present as this work evolves, which it steadily does, is as you would expect from foundation training. And my hope with this book was that anybody who read the first book or has been introduced to the idea through Us or through friends or through anybody else, and has heard these sort of, these stories out there that exist about what this work has done for people. I want them to read the book and be like, oh, that's exactly as good as I thought it would be. Or better. Like, that's, that's why there was no other real thought to it. And then as we were thinking of titles, True to Form started to make a lot of sense because it's in our, in my thoughts and in the people that have helped me over the years. It's our idea that the body moves lots of different ways. But if you want, if you want to return it to a strong, safe training place, an exercise or an isometric pose that can make it strong quickly or bring it back to a structural center quickly. Foundation training, is that for you? It's that form that you should find.

Yeah. That's awesome. And it was, it was interesting too, just to affirm that, know how life changing this can be. I was hanging out with a friend, an investor of mine, and, and he was saying, unsolicited, he's just like, you know, that, that true to form. My buddy got into that, my golfing friend, and he had all these back issues forever and they were basically gone X weeks after, after putting into place your work. So it was fun to hear that from him. Talk to us about. Can I. Let's just start at the high level. The first idea that I covered in the Note and in the, in the little TV episode was gravity and compression. Can you talk to us about gravity and compression and its effects?

Not as well as Joan Vernaco, but I'm going to summarize. I'm going to summarize what I learned from my body that she has studied in a lot of other people. What it feels like in my body and what all my work comes from is what, what I feel and then what I do to make it better. With some pretty nasty back injuries, when I'm compressed, my digest. First thing is my digestion gets just slower. I feel sluggish in a lot of ways. It's like my metabolism is not functioning at its. At its strongest. My thoughts are cloudy. It's almost like I ate that bad food. But even when I ate good food, I'm just not digesting well. And with that comes a lackadaisical energy throughout the entire body. Whether it's headaches or mood swings or insomnia or just, you know, general crankiness. When I'm not compressed, I feel that I have much more control over Those metabolic functions, digestion, mood, headache, breathing patterns. It's almost as if when those nerves of the spine, and that's what the spine is really interesting central canal that has other side canals and the water that flows through that is basically the life force of our body. It's the electrical energy that makes our muscles move. And it's also the electrical energy that lets us know when something's hot or cold or vibrating or not. It's all of our senses, it's all of our movements. All of that stuff comes through these canals, that central canal of the spinal cord when it's under pressure. Things aren't flowing quite as well they should be. And our body's designed to absorb this, this kind of constant force of gravity around us, not straight down, but all around our body. It's this, like, expansiveness, like we have to push out against it. And that outward push, that expansion, is what keeps us from that. That lackadaisical sensation of compression. The back pain associated with compression, the neck pain, the tight shoulders, the. The crummy postures, and as you get deeper and deeper into it, the slew of metabolic events that occur from those things. That's compression. When your body's not feeling right, chances are it's kind of squeezing in on itself improperly. Your torso is a little too tight. Your abs and your hip flexors are a little too short, your spine's a little too flexed, your head's a little too far forward, and instead of lifting up, and everybody that just heard me say that they're lifting up right now, take a really big deep breath and just put everything in its place, lift up really big. And after a couple breaths like that, you're going to notice very quickly that you start to just be mildly clearer. Decompression breathing is the root principle of foundation training. When you take certain steps to do what you just did or just tried to do by lifting up and you do it really well, and you follow a protocol, you very quickly understand through feeling, through sensations in your body the difference between having a spine that's in a compressed position or a torso that's in a compressed position, and not having a torso in a compressed position, decompressing it, supporting your spine as muscularly as you can, which means with as much length as you can. And with that length comes space. With that space comes this better flow of electricity through the spinal cord out to the nerves, out to the body, from the body into the spinal cord up to the brain. When that flow improves, you start to very quickly recognize the difference of when you're compressed and when you're not. And I don't have a better name for compression. I don't know how to call it. It's not like this isn't some original idea. This is just how I explain chronic pain and lackadaisical feeling.

Yeah, I love it.

Compressed, you feel crappy. When you're decompressed, you feel better. Like your CEO's friend or your friend's golf buddy. His back hurt not because his back was messed up, because his body wasn't supported fully. As he learned foundation training, he learned to support himself fully. His back doesn't hurt anymore.

It's good through that idea, even as you're describing that. And I've been just having fun, just trying to create that length that you talk about. So obviously people can get the book. And I highly recommend getting the book where you walk through the explicit steps in the process and you have all of your DVDs and workshops, et cetera. But can you give us those quick tips you share in the book in terms of creating that length and being able to actually breathe from kind of an open, expansive perspective? What would be the top things to consider so we can actually do that a little more properly?

Starting now, the concept. And breathe with me like you, Brian. Do it with me. And listener, folks, have at it. Really try this. If you're standing, stand tall. If you're sitting, sit up. And if you're driving a car, don't crash. Sit up tall and pay attention. Just, you know, look like you're looking at the top of your rear view mirror. Take a really big, deep breath and think two things when you're taking that deep breath. Chin back, chest up. Do that a couple times. Chin back, chest up. And what that means is that you're in full inflating the lungs within the ribcage. And by doing that, they're sort of pushing the front and the back and the upper ribs out of the way. So with that in mind, take a couple big, deep breaths. Pull your chin up and back a little bit, not looking up, but so that there's space and length at the base of your skull where it meets your neck. Pull your chin back, lift your chest up, and take a huge, slow, steady, deep breath. That pushes your shoulders out of the way. That's sort of the first little bit of decompression breathing to get this first part. So we'll take like four breaths here. So you inhale, doesn't matter how long. Just, you know, don't force it. Inhale in such a fashion that your shoulders are literally being pushed up from below, not pulled up from the muscles that connect them to your neck, pushed up from this platform that is steadily expanding underneath them. It should start to feel like your chest is expanding, like you've got a little Superman s on your chest and it's got a lift. Get really big, and that chin back, chest up should actually start to be making room for this upward and outward expansion of the chest. As that's happening, get that chin back and make sure that the breath pattern is going into the ribs, not into the belly. A lot of people make that mistake. And this is just when you're doing foundation training. Don't breathe into your belly when you're doing foundation training. The lungs are in the rib cage, and we're reminding the ribcage of its expansive nature, its muscular, expansive ability. One more deep breath that pushes into that muscular, expansive capacity of the ribcage. Your shoulders should actually start leveling out, and your head should be floating over them. Less of a forward head carriage, more of just a neutral, very weightless neck and head. So now the physical, practical approach to that, because that was more of like, all right, try this, try that. Take, like, a little clearing. Deep breath, everybody. Like, just take a deep breath and just let it out. Now, the practical approach to what we just did is to take your hand and to make a little Chaka sign with both hands and to put your thumb at the very base of your rib cage, where the ribs become soft tissue, kind of somewhere between the front and side of the rib. And the pinky fingers go to the pelvic bone called your anterior superior iliac spine. It's the pointy little bone at the top of the pelvic wing. For most people, that's pretty short, probably like three, four, or five inches apart. That's going to be your measuring stick. Your thumbs are at the base of the ribcage. Your pinkies are at the top of the pelvis. Every deep breath you take is going to increase the distance between the top of the pelvis and the bottom of the rib cage, so that Chaka sign will get longer. Everybody take a deep breath or two again. If you're driving going forward with that inhalation, increase the distance of the ribs lifting away uniformly front, back, and side lifting away from the pelvis. That space is basically telling you that the space that is available for your digestive organs, for your spine, for your stomach, for your intestines, for your pancreas and your spleen and Your liver and all kinds of stuff. Crazy how much they fit in there. We have to increase that space. We really do. This is theoretical, but it's also rather important because the more you sit, the more you use your cell phone, the more you sit on the couch, the shorter that space learns to be, the tighter that area remains and learns to operate in that space. Incredible how good your body is at doing what you ask it to do. Often a little better each time. So ask it to get more space there very, very frequently. My last little instruction on this breath is here. Every inhalation increases the distance between the thumb and the pinky on the belly, the distance between the bottom of the ribs and the top of the pelvis. That gets longer and longer with the inhalation. But the magic happens on the exhalation. That's where you're going to learn to keep the space that you've just gained on the inhale throughout the entire exhale. Keep the expansion of the ribcage, keep the length at the hip flexor, keep the length at the abdomen. That's how we're going to train those muscles slowly and steadily over time to maintain their ability to create space and to create a larger, broader torso. And that's a very nice place to be once you get there.

I'm in deep decompression, breathing heaven right now.

If you ever want people to feel good, just make them take like six, 30 breaths. Doesn't matter what else you say, they're gonna like it.

That is so good. I love that. And I'm still excited. I've just been practicing. I often like when I'm even walking. I'll kind of do that. The shaka signing of, or symbol, whatever, of kind of spacing it out. I haven't adjusted my morning to kind of do the actual foundation training yet, so I'm excited to get your tips on kind of the first steps to integrate that in a moment. But just that idea of, Of. Of being aware of that space that I constantly compress, you know, in all the ways you just mentioned, and deliberately trying to. To extend that and to actually work those muscles. Not only when I'm everywhere, right. Sitting strong, standing tall, walking tall, et cetera, it's been. That alone has been awesome as I, you know, take the first steps in getting into this.

When you're first getting into this work, what happens is you start. You sort of feel like you're doing it all the time. But if you get good at it, it's because you worked your butt off to get Good at it. I want people to recognize is that there's this work to reward ratio that exists in foundation training. Phenomenal. It's at least one to one. You put a minute in, you're going to get a minute out, you're going to feel a lot better that next minute, but probably a lot longer than that, too. If you follow the workouts as we teach them in the book, the daily routine, it's I think about 50. I think it's like 15 to 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes for some people to do it a little slower. And it's a lot to ask. But if you, if you start to get the benefit and you start to see that very quickly, you can almost not do it for a day or two. Because you're doing it while you brush your teeth now and you're doing it when you're picking your kid up or when you're getting out of your car. You're starting to adopt these patterns. You realize, like, okay, I get it. At first it felt like I was having to walk with these measuring sticks, these shock assignments. At first I felt like I was having to like, really actively pull everything into place. But you hit a point pretty quickly, that you do that enough that your body's like, oh, I get it. That's what I do now. Okay, cool, I'll be there. It's a neural pattern that is, I think, the easiest way to say. It's almost like ready and willing. Your body wants to feel. Well, it's built to be feeling strong, not weak. You just have to remind it when.

I love the metaphor you use of. It's kind of like learning a new language and becoming fluent in it, right? Where you go through that. That phase where you're having to translate things in your head and bring that mindfulness to it. And that, that movement, those movement patterns that you encourage us to embrace are very much like learning a new physical language. Can you tell us more about that? Because I just. I love that emphasis that you have throughout the book on. It's about consistency, not intensity per se.

Yeah, I'll do my best. I mean, I wish I was smarter to explain the physiology of what's happening with these patterns, developmental patterns. My girlfriend writing a really cool book on the first year of light based on our work, based on foundation training and neural patterns of development. It's really cool. But as far as what this does for our pattern, I know one thing, it changes them. It improves them. I think unless this is ultimately terrible for us all and you're not supposed to feel good. You're supposed to feel terrible and get through life like that, but you're not supposed to, I don't think. And what this does is it sets. Can I give a. Instead of a language, can we make it an instrument? I know that I said a language in the book, but I started describing it as tuning an instrument. And that makes so much more sense to me as an instrument. You start to look at like if you play an E chord and it's not quite in, you really notice, especially if you play music periodically and you are tuned in to what an E chord sounds like. You play a C the same, a G the same, you know what it's meant to sound like. When you can get there quicker and quicker and quicker. It's because you're a better musician, you understand music more. Easier to stay in tune. Movement works the same way. Once you have felt good and felt bad, you recognize the difference. The more you practice feeling good, the better you get at getting there. It's just that simple. It's like you're staying in tune. You just have to practice that you remember what it's to going sounds like. Because that way you know when you're there and in movement, you got to practice, you remember what it feels like because that's. That's how you know when you're not there. There is a real problem within all human culture of desensitization. The more we have all this external stimulus, the less remember we really remember how to move and how to feel. We don't really get to recognize how good the human body can feel most of the time. Most people don't get to experience that in their life because they live a life behind a desk. And not using this physical specimen of ours, which is remarkable in what it can do. And like any instrument, when it's in tune, it's gonna sound good. If it's played right and your body is the same, like, keep it in tune and then use it. Get better and better and better at, I don't know, feeling well. I don't care how strong you are. I don't care if you can do handstands and cartwheels or bench press £1,000. I don't care if you feel well and you're happy and you're getting through life well, you're nailing it, in my opinion. I think foundation training helps a lot of people hit that note.

Yeah, I really love that vision and that being both tuned and then attuned to whether or not you are tuned right. And Having that mindfulness and in my work, I talk a lot about the fundamentals of eating, moving, sleeping, sleeping and having that clarity of wow. When I eat this, I feel this way. When I don't sleep, I don't feel particularly good. And I think your approach on the movement is just so strong and so spot on. So love it. Again, details on the specifics of foundation training in the book. Check that out. And then online as well, of course. Just we'll talk about at the end too. But what's your website? Just so people can. Can make note of it. That is easy. Foundationtraining.com okay, cool. So a couple.

We even have like YouTube. You can just go search free stuff if you want to try it on YouTube. Just Google foundation training and lots of videos come up.

You've got that hilarious one with your buddy who's behind you. Oh yeah, this is super funny. So go, go, go Google. I think it's called the founder.

30 day founder.

Yeah.

30 day founder challenge. One minute a day for 30 days.

Hilarious.

Your whole life will improve. Your finances will get through the roof. You'll be the happiest person on the.

Planet in 30 days. One minute. And you'll laugh at the video. So couple of things I just want to hear you describe. One, we talked about decompression breathing and kind of the posture of breathing. But I loved your description in the book of the ideal human posture. Can you just describe that for us so we can kind of conceptually and physically kind of feel into that?

Well, the first, the first thing that everybody can do. If you want to, if you want to look at the most comfortable static posture for space in the body, look at anatomical position. And that's more or less like the human structural integrity form. The word posture is something that represents in most people's minds a very static image. When I stand up, I should look like this. That's not how posture works. Your posture is sort of a representation of how your body supports itself in every and any angle. Sitting, standing, kneeling, laying down, all of those things are postures. You have to think of it that way. You can't think of it the old way anymore. It doesn't help you at all. You have to think of it the new way. Your movement is your posture. But you have to get better at each of those movements. When you think of where your head position should be, I want you to think of your head as like the end of this long, flexible, expansive tube, fusiform tube. And at the base of that tube is your tailbone. Not your hips. It comes to a point in the center of your pelvis, just at the tailbone. When you think of those two ends pulling away from each other. Like the back of your head is the tip of the top arrow. The tailbone tip is the base of the bottom arrow. When you pull those two ends apart and you pull your chin back just a little bit, you start to feel this sort of fusiform, expansive torso. And you can pull the shoulders up and out away from each other, not pull your shoulder blades down towards your back pocket, not squeeze your shoulder blades together or pull your chest open. That's not posture. Those are each in their ways, expansive at one end and compressed at the other end. You have to expand your posture. That that sphere, that fusiform torso of yours needs to be broad. The broadest point is the rib cage and shoulders. The narrowest point is the skull and the tailbone. Get very long and even. Your neck is long and expansive and, you know, strong, stable. That's that chin back, chest up position. There's so much to posture, it's annoying. I mean, I'm a chiropractor and I remember learning this fun line. I remember learning what posture is supposed to do. Oh, man. I remember learning how to stack joints. Don't do that. Don't rest your joints atop one another. Use those beautiful pulley systems that are built into your body. Those muscles that pull, they pull joints away from each other. They expand outward in a way so that when you need a proper fulcrum at one of the joints, the lever arms are at their proper length. It's great how that works. The body is this incredibly well built pulley system. Your posture is how well those pulleys are working. Everything else is passive except your muscle. Your muscles can move you. If you're just resting on your joints, you're not moving your muscles very well. I hope that wasn't too confusing.

It was, but I think it also just reveals just the how we could talk about this forever, you know, and just kind of the depth of your both passion and wisdom. And again, we were talking before we hit record here just about the effort you made in the book to kind of delete everything that just isn't essential. I think you did a really strong job of that while presenting a compelling overview of these are the basic mechanics we need to pay attention to. Now let's get to work on tuning those in. So I dug it and I trust that individuals listening are going to get something meaningful out of that. And then the phrase you use in the book that I think is really powerful is I forget the name of your mentor, but stand tall. Yeah, stand tall. That's gone through my head so many times. I'm walking and I usually, you know, just feel like standing tall. Right. But now that's just. There's a bounce that comes, an expansion that comes in thinking of that distance as you described, between the top of my skull and my tailbone. And just standing tall is just such a great simple way for us to make some small but significant improvements. Right?

Absolutely. And I gotta say, in my life, most of the interesting things I've done and most of the interesting people I've met are a direct result of Dr. Tim Brown. He's a friend, he's a mentor, he's a really good guy. And he sums up a lot of things very well in that. In that stand tall statement from a mental to a physical state. He's. And he lives the part, really lives and breathes the work he does. He invented a company called Intelliskin, these posture apparel shirts. He's like the main guy that started the whole basis of functional taping, the kinesio tape and stuff that you guys see out there. He's just a real impactful doctor and mentor. If you ever, I'll tell you, you should interview that guy. He's got a lot of really interesting stuff to talk about. And he's a quiet but incredibly well respected doc in the sports medicine field.

Right on. Yeah, I'd love to. Well, this is good. One more thing that changed my life. You and Katie Bowman influenced me with get out there and move more frequently. You know, as I studied all this stuff real well, I'm active and sedentary. I move, of course, I exercise, do all those things and I sit all day long. So, you know, no longer being active and sedentary and creating or at least reducing the amount of which I'm sedentary. And one of the tips that you had that crystallized it for me, I think she's planted some seeds that you just kind of formulated in a really concrete way. Your idea of setting a stopwatch for. I think you said 30 minutes or even better, 20 minutes. That's what I did. 20 minutes. Tell us about that. Because that personally has impacted me and I just would love to hear you.

About the standing up every 20 minutes.

Yeah, just that basic. I mean, it's a super basic idea, but it was just so big for me.

Oh my God. I stole that directly from Joan Vernaco.

Oh, did you?

Was it from JOAN he said 10 minutes. And I thought, I just thought people were less willing to do that. So I said 20 minutes.

That's awesome. I'm gonna have to adjust.

It's not scientific at all. It's just. Okay. If you've been sitting for 20 minutes and this is like if your daily five day a week typical routine is that you sit for six or seven or eight or 10 hours a day, you need to do this.

Yep.

Directly to you. Get up as often as you can. If you need to set a watch, which is totally fine, set one for every 20, 25, 30, 10, whatever, whatever cycle is going to keep you doing it because that's your reminder that your body is going to feel better. Feeling better, you have to take a minute or two minutes or three minutes to breathe as deeply as you can. One of the things we push very heavily in this book is when you stand up. It's not just standing up, it's what you do. You have to be big. You have to expand. Think chin back, chest up. I want that rattling through everybody's head because it's one of those cues that will get you to stand up tall immediately. Learn decompression breathing and take that little 20 minute sequence every 20 minutes. Take 10 breaths, take 20 breaths. Decompression breathing is not just breathing. It's a structural biomechanical reset for your rib cage and your axial skeleton. Literal re education of your axial skeleton, the center of your structural integrity. When your body learns that sitting makes it smaller and breathing can make it bigger, your body is not going to overthink that. It's just going to do it. It's going to do what feels well and makes it run more efficiently. I really hope everybody, like if you're. If setting a stopwatch is going to make you do it, set a stopwatch and listen to it every 20 minutes. Even if you're sitting in your chair, sit in your chair as big as you can and get away from your backrest. Little things like that over time make more impact in your health than most things you can do for it.

This is good. Okay, I have a question that's very selfishly personal here. I read a lot and I've played around with the idea, obviously, and I played around the idea of listening. But for me, there's just something about reading a book, right? Holding a book, reading a book. If you. And I'm standing right now as I'm talking to you, and you know, I spend more and more time in, you know, a dynamic standing posture and all that kind of stuff. Having said that, reading. If you're reading a book, how would you do that posturally? How would you approach that?

I would do it as comfortably as you could, if that means laying or sitting or whatever. Every position we rest into is for the most part well within our body's biomechanical capacity and range of motion, joint to joint. The problem is not reaching a rest point. It's not sitting. Fitting is not bad for you, sitting all the time. If you sit all day long, you gotta walk or at least ride a bike at the gym or something like that while you're reading. You have to, because if you're just sitting down to read, you're just repeating the pattern you do all day anyways. Not helping you. It might be stimulating your mind, but it's not helping your body. You can definitely, if you're an active person, use reading as just a relaxation. And you should. And if you're sitting in a scrunched up position, that's totally fine. Use tools to unwind from that later. That's the key. It's not what you. It's not, it's not that you're hurting yourself when you're sitting. It's that you're not taking legitimately effective steps to remove those compressive structures within the body. You're not pushing back outward. You're just letting your body kind of continuously rest upon itself. That's the focus. Whether you're reading or walking or sitting or working. I can't tell you. I mean, you know, maybe a zero gravity chair. Maybe if you have a deep sand beach without too many people, go for a slow walk on the beach and read while you walk. That's what Joe Mercola does. And he's a very health conscious man who's actively pursuing health on a daily basis. And Joe walks like four miles a day in the sand and reads a book every time he does it.

That's great.

You know, he's a brilliant dude. He, you know, he's got a very busy mind. So I'm sure it really is a great way to do it.

I love it.

You gotta find what works for you. There's one way.

Yeah, no, this is.

Gotta do the stuff that countermeasures.

This is good. So I think it's the countermeasures and it's also. Well, are there constructive ways not to discount how important the countermeasures are? And are there like even just sitting tall and Joan Vernaco style, you know, can I balance a book on my head? While I read a book and being long and being, you know, sitting tall rather than collapsing and compressing everything. And then, you know, dynamically stretching of. Can I open my hip while I'm leaning over and reading a book and staying long and trying to find ways to. To. To optimize that while I. For me, reading isn't a leisurely thing. It's very much a. You know, I'm in there, and it's where I'm doing my work. Right. But it's fun to imagine all the different dynamic poses, and I think keeping that. That tall and long and dynamic feel to it, as you've expressed in this call, will be even more salient in my mind as I optimize that aspect of what I'm up to. So thank you.

Yeah, it's nice to see that you're putting it into work. I love to see that people are using foundation training. It actually blows my mind on a daily basis that this work is getting out there the way it is. But it's because it's effective. I know it's effective. I use it.

We didn't even talk about your story.

Right.

Of just kind of being laid out and being told, you got to go get this most ridiculous, crazy, intense surgery, and no, thank you. And, you know, how you recovered and, you know, you outline that story in the book in such a powerful way.

Just know there's no martyrdom to my story. I. It's very easy, and everybody should remember this. When your surgeon tells you that they want to operate, it's very easy to say no and look for other options. And if you have to find the option, if you find the option that works, whatever struggle you went through is worth it, because you don't want to get surgery if you don't have to. Some surgeries are very worthwhile, and I suggest them. I send people to surgery pretty steadily, actually. My stuff doesn't work for them. And we try a lot of other things. Especially central canal stenosis is the one I always speak about, as it's like my nemesis. I can't seem to help it very much. That's canal stenosis at the middle of the spine. It's very, very scary, but I get a lot of. I get a lot of questions about health and a lot of specific ones, like how should I read? How should I walk? How should I sleep? How should I ride a bike? How should I sit at work? How should I drive my car? How should I sit in a plane? I hear those on a daily basis, and I've learned. If I want to be an effective doctor and educator, I have to find very simple responses to each of those because I don't want to just turn those people away. I want to give them something that I think will truly help them with their question. And what I give them is decompression, breathing and anchoring. The two principles of foundation training, you can learn them for like $10. You can learn them for free. If you're willing to put the time in on YouTube, you can learn them on a DVD. And if you just want to know a real in depth version of this work and be able to teach it, you can come to a certification. It's available. And it's crazy how simple it actually is once you learn it and how many of those questions it seems to answer. Not all of them ever, but a lot of them. And you know, just keep it simple. And foundation training is a pretty simple response to this modern dilemma of chronic pain and sort of lackadaisical energy systems in the body. So I just hope it helps people. It seems to. And I really, I like that. I like that it's helping people.

Yeah. That's awesome. I appreciate your humility and your commitment and foundationtraining.com check Eric out and his work. As he said, there's the book, of course. We talked about some of the ideas from true to form, how to use foundation training for sustained pain relief and everyday fitness. Check that out wherever you get books, super easy. Read tons of illustrations to make a lot of the ideas we talk about, we just talked about come to life. And then of course all the online resources. So Eric, thank you so much. Appreciate you and your work.

Thank you so much for having me on here. That was a really nice interview.

Isn't it a bit odd that we.

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