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The Backstory
When we first teamed up, we knew we were onto something that was going to help a lot of people contend with one of the most persistent and difficult-to-answer questions in fitness and health: “How do I get out of pain?”
Our answer—one of the first new ideas to come about in the world of exercise in years—is Foundation training. Since we were offering something completely different, we did not know what to expect, but our simple workout has proven to be more effective than we could have imagined. The extent and speed of the improvements we see in our clients consistently surprise us. We could not have predicted what Foundation training is doing for people of any age at all levels of fitness. Based on the results we’ve seen, our motto has become from pain to performance.
Our confidence is confirmed daily by the dramatic changes in the lives of all the clients we are training. People who had tried everything to relieve their back pain began to feel a difference in as little as 2 weeks. Many of our clients had relied on prescription painkillers or over-the-counter remedies several times a day for years. They were happy to throw away those pill bottles and manage their pain with Foundation training. Others wanted to avoid surgery, and some were frustrated that going under the knife ultimately did not solve their back problems. They were so relieved to find that these exercises did more for them than extreme measures. Our success stories range from professional athletes, the likes of NBA legend Derek Fisher and world champion surfer Kelly Slater, to everyday people who come to our weekly classes. We have seen remarkable changes in people from every walk of life. For example:
- After two back surgeries in 2 years, a client in his fifties was still stuck in debilitating back pain. He had almost forgotten what life was like without pain. In just 2 months of Foundation training, his pain was almost gone, and he was able to resume vigorous activities he had long ago given up.
- A mother of two showed no improvement with months of physical therapy after surgery to repair a herniated disc. She made great progress in a few short weeks with Foundation training. She’s such a convert that she invites family and friends to join her one-on-one training sessions.
- Derek Fisher, point guard for the 2010 NBA Champs, the Los Angeles Lakers, had an impressive collection of injuries after 13 years of professional basketball. With Foundation training, he is in the best shape of his life, and he says his body feels better than it did in his early career.
- Pro surfer Kelly Slater used Foundation training to become pain free and powerful while competing for his 10th world championship surfing title.
- A larger-than-life financial genius had been taking powerful prescription painkillers twice a day for 21/2 years after having many surgeries for his knees, back, and neck. After 8 months of Foundation training, he hikes 2 hours a day, paddleboards with his kids, and is completely off painkillers.
Our program produced unprecedented and lasting results. People were stronger, healthier, and feeling better than they ever thought they would again. Foundation training gave them a new quality of life, hope, and the tools to manage their pain and maximize their energy.
Our client list has grown exponentially. We never dreamed we would be working with so many influential people, movers and shakers in Hollywood, sports, and the business world. All this buzz, and we don’t advertise or actively look for publicity. It has all been through word of mouth. When people break through the barriers that pain has created in their lives—often after years of trying—they want the world to know. Our clients can’t seem to stop talking about what Foundation training has done for them.
Best of all, we get to write this book and to introduce Foundation training to everyone suffering from back pain who may not be lucky enough to live in Southern California, and that’s a staggering number of people. More than 80 percent of the population of the United States and Europe will experience back pain in their lifetimes. It’s the most common reason people go to see a doctor, after upper-respiratory infections. Americans spend more than $50 billion a year on back pain. It does not have to be this way.
Foundation training is designed to strengthen your lower back and posterior chain; alleviate your back pain by correcting mechanical imbalances and weaknesses; and create maximum power, flexibility, and endurance by concentrating on your real core. Foundation training redefines the core, shifting the focus from the abs and the front of the body to the back and the posterior chain. Before we explain in detail what Foundation training does for your body, we want to tell you how we arrived at this change of emphasis.
Foundation Roots
Foundation training initially grew from Eric’s experience, his education as a chiropractor, his own back problems, and his work as a trainer. He was an athlete, a personal trainer by age 18, but his movement patterns were all wrong and were actually creating injuries. He started to get back spasms at 19. It was painful for him to get up if he sat for a couple of hours, and he had to strain to stand up straight. The pain became more frequent each year he was in college. What started as discomfort was now creating a real problem. When he was a senior in college, he sat down at his computer to study after a long bike ride, and was gripped with pain that he’d never felt before; it was more severe than anything he’d ever experienced. When he tried to stand, his right leg went weak and just wouldn’t work. A sharp pain shot into his spine and down his right leg. He lay down on his back on the floor with no idea of what was wrong. The pain radiated from very low in his back down the back of his right leg. He thought all the sports and exercises he had been doing were benefiting his body, but there he was flat out, unable to move without pain.
X-rays revealed that he had substantial dehydration of the discs and degeneration of the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae and the sacrum at the base of the spine. The discs were heavily compressed and severely degenerated. His last two vertebrae were sitting on top of each other. The x-rays showed the wear and tear of a much older spine. He hadn’t even made it far into his twenties. His movement was inhibited because the muscles connected to his lower spine could not relax.
As Eric started chiropractic school, the pain persisted and worsened despite the fact that he could not have had better access to treatment. He was trying everything. He was getting adjusted frequently and had regular massages. Though treatments were effective for the short term, the pain always returned. For the next 3 years, there were very few days that he did not have some sort of back pain. He began to understand the ways in which pain can limit your life.
Eric observed that the baseline and plateau set by existing rehabilitation protocols were a bit too low. The fact is that 90 percent of people with back pain symptoms will feel better within 2 months, no matter what treatment is used, but the pain will return. Dealing with his own back problems, Eric found that traditional exercises and treatments seemed to have a ceiling on how much he improved; the results were less than stellar, and they were usually short-lived. It became obvious that the basic protocols and even doctoral-level training were not working for him; he had to believe that they were not working for other people, either. Eric became aware that much of the rehabilitation was based on movement patterns that were incorrect for our bodies. He realized that to stop pain for the long term, a fundamental change in movement had to occur. All the treatments and corrections he had been trying offered only a minimal shift in the mechanics of movement, and without that essential change, he would just keep reinjuring his back. He understood that the reason there is so much back, hip, and knee pain—that the statistics are so off the charts—is because we are loading our bodies incorrectly.
Eric had always been interested in Eastern medicine and philosophy, so he took up yoga to stay flexible and manage his pain. He studied Pilates, which focuses on the deep abdominal muscles and lower back, and modified his resistance training. He began to tweak yoga exercises in an attempt to strain and stress his body in slightly different ways. The exercises used torque and leverage to maximize the amount of tension on his weakest muscles. His goal was to build the deep supporting muscles of his spine. He wanted to concentrate all of the pull on the back side of his body; specifically, on the posterior chain—his neck, back, butt, hamstrings, and heels. With this shift in focus in mind, he developed the exercises of Foundation training, which are based on the essential principle that movement comes from the hip joints, using a braced spine and the posterior chain.
As Eric experimented with this new movement, his back started getting stronger, and the pain and uncertainty he had lived with for 4 years evaporated in a very short time. He began teaching his ideas to friends and a few patients. Around the same time he was asked to help Dr. Terry Schroeder with the USA Olympic water polo team as chiropractor and strength coach. Observing injuries the athletes were developing as a result of their demanding sport, Eric started to introduce modifications he was using himself into the team’s training. He changed how people did standard exercises like squats and crunches, concentrating on the back of the body instead of the front. He worked with an entire team of Olympic athletes for nearly a year before the 2008 Games in Beijing. The vast majority of those athletes responded extremely well to the changes in their workouts. The team remained injury free while performing at a high level through the months of tough training. Their bodies did not break down. The team exceeded everyone’s expectations and went on to take the silver medal. It was one of the success stories of the Olympics. Eric has been fine-tuning the exercises ever since.
Eric moved to Santa Barbara in January 2009 and reached out to the fitness community there to establish himself. Among the people he contacted was a big name in fitness, Peter Park, an elite athlete and one of the most influential trainers in the world. He’d been Lance Armstrong’s strength coach for more than 10 years. In his e-mail to Peter, Eric described the success he was having with Foundation training. Peter liked the sound of it. Even with his considerable experience, Peter had never heard of anything like Foundation. The rest is history.
We bounced our training philosophies off each other, and it was evident our ideas complemented each other very well. Eric visited Peter at one of his gyms to demonstrate his new approach. Peter was trying to remedy his own chronic back pain. Just as Eric had done, he was looking for answers and not finding them. We decided to train together for a while.
Peter didn’t have any real injuries, but he was training at least 5 hours a day, which put a tremendous load on his joints. Over time, his movement patterns and the repeated stresses to his joints led to muscular imbalances. The pain he was experiencing was his body’s way of warning, “Something’s not right here. You need to change something.”
We started with the basics. Peter was amazed by the results he experienced within a week or two. His body felt different—much more powerful. He noticed while running and biking that his back pain was diminished, and soon it disappeared. One of the best-trained athletes in the world had experienced a fundamental change in his movement patterns. He came to understand that the movements he had been working on for years and years just did not work. With the corrections provided by Foundation training, he found that his back and knees were hurting significantly less and the range of motion in his shoulders increased considerably. He became a different athlete after a few months of training.
Convinced that by combining forces we could really help people, we decided to partner up. Together, we have refined Foundation training with the goal of helping everyone at all levels of fitness to break through pain and exercise more effectively. Eric’s focus is on fundamental movement patterns and building the initial strength needed to go forward. Peter works with clients to reinforce that strength and those movement patterns, bringing our clients to a pinnacle of fitness. Foundation training not only reduces pain but also opens a road map to fitness, giving people the tools to go wherever they want to go with assurance.
There is a reason we call it Foundation training. Learning these exercises will give you a strong structural foundation on which you can build, a baseline for any sport or exercise program. If you can create perfect movement for your body, everything else becomes so easy to do. With Foundation training at the center, you can branch out to whatever physical activity interests you—yoga, Pilates, P90X, weight lifting, tennis, golf, etc.
Our partnership has been 100 percent driven by results. Give us 2 weeks and you will notice a substantial difference in how you move. We are confident in saying this because we have seen these exercises work for so many people. We have helped young athletes, ages 13 to 15, whose parents had tried everything else to help their children resolve their back pain. Foundation training has allowed those young athletes to pursue their passion. We work with postsurgical clients in their forties, fifties, and sixties to bring them back to full mobility and an active life, and we have been able to steer many clients away from surgery and toward taking control of their pain, a fringe benefit of strengthening their backs. Peter even has two clients in their late eighties who continue to run and play tennis, doing what they’ve done their entire lives.
With this book, we want to reach beyond our immediate community to make Foundation available to people who need it—including many of you who are on your last nerve of chronic pain. Back pain is a barrier for millions of people, interfering with their health, happiness, and enjoyment of life. People come to us fed up with living in constant pain. After they incorporate the simple movements of Foundation training into their lives, it’s not just their backs that feel better. They open up to a different idea of what their lives can be. They gain insight into how stressful the pain has been, affecting their moods and energy levels. Accustomed to being limited by pain, they are now energized by the realization that they can get out and do things without anxiety about further injuring themselves and bringing on more pain. They can once again enjoy their partners and kids as well as their own bodies. We have witnessed this transformation repeatedly. We want to give you our solution for back pain and help you accomplish powerful changes in your body and your life.
Foundation is a complete user’s guide for the back and for your whole body. We want you to understand the central role your back plays in every move you make. Doing Foundation exercises just three times a week can significantly reduce the pain that has been dragging you down and inspire you to take control of your own wellness. We have designed a program of three workouts to be done progressively over 6 weeks. The workouts correspond to different levels of back pain and rehabilitation as well as difficulty: a basic workout for acute back pain, a moderate workout for chronic pain, and a more intense workout for prevention and strengthening during pain-free periods. As you cycle through the three levels, devoting 2 weeks to each level, you will not only reduce your pain but also feel stronger in everything you do. There is a bonus chapter of exercises for added flexibility, targeting tightness and pain in the hips, pelvis, and upper legs, a direct result of all the time people spend sitting.
The success of Foundation training is all in the results we see every day. Throughout the book, you’ll read about what Foundation training has done for our clients. Their words are the best proof that this new approach to exercise works. Foundation training has reduced the pain and improved the fitness of every client we’ve worked with to date. We hope to count you as one of the growing number of people who have learned to manage their pain and raise their level of fitness with Foundation training.
Commit to doing these simple, equipment-free workouts three times a week and see how you feel. The only way you will know how effective these workouts are is to try them. You can do them anywhere, anytime. Don’t wait. Start today.