PNTV: True to Form by Eric Goodman

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, True to form by Dr. Eric Goodman. True to Form Subtitle how to Use Foundation Training for Sustained Pain Relief and Everyday Fitness. It's an awesome book. So I was chatting with Ben Greenfield doing a coaching session the other day last week, and the guy is a living, walking, breathing encyclopedia of health and fitness. Goodness, check him out. Anyway, Ben was sharing some ideas on a range of subjects, and then he said that he changed his morning routine, which is his superhuman morning routine, basically completely to make room for this, to make room for foundation training, Eric Goodman's work. Now, I take what Ben does pretty seriously because the guy is just all in all about it. So I got Eric's new book. Then, as it turns out, the back cover has a quote from Joan Vernikos, one of my new favorite teachers who we talked about recently in her great book, Sitting Kills, Moving Heels, where she talks about. She's a former NASA director of life sciences, basically in charge of making sure that astronauts are healthy before, during, and after their trips into space. Anyway, she says that in all her work over the last X decades to deal with gravity's negative effects in space, and in sitting this work, foundation training is in many ways the solution to those challenges. So there you go. And here we are. And I'm all in on this whole movement idea. Katie Bowman, move your DNA. Don't just sit there. And then Joan's work and now this. So exciting stuff. Philosopher's note, bunch of my favorite big ideas. Let's start with the first one, Compression. So Joan Vernikos talks about gravity, right? And the fact is. And Eric echoes this wisdom and frames it in another cool way, but the fact is, gravity is working on us every single second of every single day. It's literally forcing us into the center of the Earth. Which is why when astronauts go into outer space, they leave gravity. And then Joan tells us they age like 20 or 30 years. It's crazy how quickly their bone density goes down, their blood plasma levels, their aerobic capacity, everything. Now, of course, they recover quickly when they get back into gravity through her programs, right? But the point is, gravity is necessary for us to fight against gravity all the time. So when we're sitting down all day, every day, it's. It's kinda like a mini version of what these astronauts are doing, leaving gravity completely. It's not natural for us to sit down all the Time. And when we do, we're not fighting up against gravity, we're not pushing back against it. And when we don't push back against gravity, what happens is compression. Everything gets compressed down. So rather than standing tall, which we're going to talk about in a moment, we're slouching and we're bending over our desk all day, every day. We're kind of relaxing in the couch. The age of comfort and convenience, as Katie Bowman says. Right. We're never working to decompress, to push back against gravity. And the book is essentially all about helping us decompress, stretch back out. Our bodies move the way we were designed to move and push back against gravity. That's one part of it. The other part of it is anchoring to the earth. And the book is all about exercises, foundation training on how to go about doing that. So obviously in the note and in this, I'm going to talk about big ideas. Get the book to look at the actual practical exercises to master your foundation. So there you go. Joan Vernakos approved. It's good stuff. Second, big idea. Well, how do we deal with compression? We. We want to decompress. And again, there's a ton of exercises on how to go about doing that. That's the foundation training model. But one of the most straightforward things we can think about right now, that Eric comes back to again and again throughout the book, is to simply stand tall. You might remember that Joan Vernikos talked about g habits, fighting against gravity. Well, she said, and Eric says one of the easiest ways is to stand tall. Joan had a bunch of ways to go about doing that. Eric has some great tips to make it easy. So the simplest thing to think about, stand up right now, if you can, and stand tall. What's your version of standing tall? Know that you standing tall like this is you just kind of sort of standing you standing tall. That's a micro movement. It's a tiny little thing to do, but it's really important. You pushed back against gravity. Right. Anyway, Eric says, chest up, chin slightly down. Chest up, chin down. Right. And you're not shrugging your shoulders, you're just bringing your chest up. And he says, bring your sternum up through your inhale. So as you inhale, bring your sternum up, you gently let your shoulders kind of externally rotate. Right. And what happens when you do that is there's a natural lengthening of your spine. And he says, we want to create space, decompress the space between the base of our skull, which shouldn't be sitting on the top of our spine. It should be light and up. He says you want to move your head up and back and off. He outlines all this much better than I'm going to in the book and check out his YouTube videos as well. On that note, I'll take a tangent. Check out what he calls the Founder, which is the core movement of his work. We'll put a link to the Founder, like a two minute video that Eric put up on how to do the Founder, the decompression movement that kind of forms the base of all of his other movements in the info below. So check that out. But. But basically you're putting your chest up, you're bringing your sternum up, you're elevating the distance between the base of your skull and your tailbone and decompressing. We want to stand tall. Another fun way to practice standing tall that Eric talks about and Joan talks about. But Eric's got this sweet picture in the book of this old school woman, right? Who's like a young debutante who's demonstrating proper posture, right? So if you want to stand tall, put a book on your head. It's a fantastic way to stand tall and to feel what good posture feels like. I can't keep this book on my head if I'm not keeping myself standing tall and strong, right? If I'm slouching, it's going to slip off. If I'm moving around and tilting my head, it's going to slip off. But you get the idea. Put a book on your head. It's a super fun way to. To feel what standing tall feels like. And then Joan Vernikos tells us, don't just stand tall. Sit tall, walk tall. You can put that book on your head while you're at your desk. You want to feel the difference between how you usually are, or at least how I usually am at my desk, and how you could be. Put a book on your head, right? Try typing or reading or whatever. With a book on your head, you're going to feel a different quality of posture. So there you go. Quick. Look at that actually. Long, rambling. Look at that. Third big idea. This, I think is the third chapter. First chapter we look at how not to move, which is basically how we all move. Then the next chapter is how we are meant to move, where he talks about posture and other ways to hold your body, right? And the fact that our ancient ancestors were moving all the time, which we're going to talk about in our last big idea. And then our third chapter is the first, decompression movement. And what it's all about is. And ultimately what we want to do is learn how to breathe properly. One of the big things that happens when we are compressed is our breathing becomes shallow, our ribcage becomes tiny. And within the ribcage that's compressed and small, the lungs can't properly expand to get the oxygen they need. And when your lungs don't properly expand to get the oxygen they need, everything suffers in your body. So Eric makes the point brilliantly, then walks us through why it's so important for us to learn how to perform what he calls decompression breathing. The basic idea is you want to create space between your hips and the bottom of your ribs. Right. Usually we're slouched over. Right. Not what we want to do. And all of his work is extending that and getting your rib cage big and wide is what he describes it as. Big and wide. The circumference of your chest is going to dictate the space in which and indicate the space in which we're allowing our lungs to fill with oxygen. And he challenges us in these exercises to get big and wide in our rib cage and then to hold that on both the inhale and the exhale again. Check out the founder link for more on that and how to go about doing that. But remember, your ribcage big and wide equals good fourth big idea. Fluency. Eric makes the point again and again and again throughout the book that retraining your body to move properly is kind of like learning a new language. We naturally have proper movement kind of ready for us. But through our conditioning and just our lifestyle behaviors, over the last years and decades, our lives, we've developed bad habits. So you need to learn new ways of holding your body. I need to learn new ways of holding my body. And it's kind of like he says, learning a new language. In the beginning, when you're learning a new language, you've got to translate it in your head. Okay. This means that you get to a point where when you practice it enough and enough and you immerse yourself in the culture and you really master language. And I'm not fluent in the second language, but I love the metaphor here. You get to a point where it's automatic and you're dreaming in this second language. Right. He says it's the same thing with optimizing and doing this foundation training. You need to be mindful and translate. No, that's not the way I'm supposed to be holding my body right now. Nope. When I'm sitting, I could be doing this. When I'm walking, I could be walking in this form. And you're constantly translating your current movement patterns with the ideal optimal movement patterns. He says it's much, much, much, much, much more important to be consistent with that training than to be intense. You want to do the proper form frequently, again and again and again, day after day after day in order to change your patterns. It's not about being intense and fired up and then not doing it for a week and then trying it again. He said that's not how the body is rewired. That's not how our mind's rewired. It's not how habits are changed. It's a huge theme of our work. And I just filmed two classes, one on conquering Perfectionism 101 and the other on Movement 101, where I talk about a lot of these ideas. And a key theme in both of those is consistency over intensity. It's rule number one of personal training and fitness, and it's rule number one of this optimization. Consistency over intensity. Too often, particularly when we're perfectionists, we want it all now. Intensity. And then we burn ourselves out and we don't show up the next day or the next week or whatever. We want consistency. Small, frequent actions done again and again and again is where change occurs. That's how we get fluent. And in the note, I talk about getting fluent in Optimize. The language of Optimize. It's not just our movement patterns, it's every single thing in our lives. We have little opportunities throughout our days to practice this new language. Oh, I could be doing this. Whether it's moving myself or my body in certain ways, or thinking or interacting with my loved ones or accepting my negative emotions and choosing to act in accordance with my values, no matter how I feel. These are all little opportunities that aggregate and compound over time for extraordinary results. The incremental optimizer. Keep that in mind as you become fluent. And then our final idea here is the 20 minute timer. So when I'm not recording these and doing other things, I have a little Timex watch super simple 20 minute timer set to recurrent. So every 20 minutes, this is my new favorite thing. I started doing this, I think, after reading either Joan's book or Katie Bowman's book. Every 20 minutes, timer goes off and I get up when I'm sitting and reading and writing or whatever, right? I get up, I stand up and I do something, whether it's 10 burpees or some Stretching or I go for a walk or whatever. And Eric actually suggests the thing that I've been doing, which is exactly that. Set a timer for 30 minutes or better yet, he says 20 minutes and get up. Don't just get up. He says practice one of these foundational movements, even just for three minutes. Decompression, breathing and getting yourself into a grounded place is extraordinarily powerful. Again, remember Katie Bowman's distinction? One of my favorite distinctions in a long time personally in terms of optimizing my life. She says most of us think of movement as exercise. And she says you got to reorient where exercise is. This little circle. It's important. You need to get out and move vigorously. We evolved to do that right now of course you can over train, which is a whole other conversation. But exercise is here and then movement is there. Movement transcends and includes exercise. It's all these little things. So again, you can be active and sedentary. If you go bust out a workout for 60 minutes, you in the morning, congratulations, you just nailed it. And maybe you're one of the elite active people in our society who works out 300 minutes a week, five hours a week, you're hitting the gym. But you got to remember that our ancient ancestors moved all day, every day. Katie Bowman says 3,000 minutes a week to our 300 minutes a week of exercise. But what they did was they moved all the time. They walked five to 10 miles, but they were constantly moving, almost always upright and doing different things, little subtle, simple movements. We need to do that too. And this 20 minute little timer thing is a really cool way to become a perpetual motion machine again. That's on my whiteboard. Perpetual motion machine is what Joan Vernico says we evolved to be. That's what the human body has evolved to be. A perpetual motion machine. We need to make it one. This 20 minute timer idea is super fun. I, I highly recommend it as a part of gaining fluency. Remember our decompression breathing. We want our ribcage to be big and wide. Check out the founder movement. Learn how to stand tall, walk tall, push back against gravity, push back against compression to decompress. And check out this book. If you have any back pain or neck pain or body pain or whatever, or you just want to optimize. I think you're going to love this book. It's a beautiful illustrated and lots of pictures on all the exercises, all that good stuff. I think you will love it. I didn't mention in the intro but Eric is a chiropractor who, when he was just finishing his chiropractic school, had horrible pain in his back and he was actually told that he needed to get surgery infused two vertebrae. And he's like, look, I'm becoming a chiropractor. It's crazy. All of his athletic stuff, whatever, just ground down his back, right? And in the process of working through that pain is how he created this foundation training. Right? So if you have back pain, if you experience physical pain in any way, I think you'll find these exercises incredibly valuable. Remember, we've got a NASA scientist who's in charge of keeping our astronauts healthy saying, this is awesome. It's a pretty strong recommendation. True to form, Eric, thanks for your awesome work. Look forward to connecting for an interview and and what was your favorite big idea? Think about it. Think how you can integrate standing tall, sitting tall, walking tall, and breathing deeply more into your life. And check out the book. All right, have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me. Two basic things. One our free newsletter and it's called the Optimizer. 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