True to Form

They say you can’t really claim fluency in a foreign language until you’ve dreamed in the language—in other words, until it’s lodged in your subconscious.

The metaphor works for Foundation Training as well: You can only claim that your body is decompressed and anchored when the movements and postures of the exercises in this book have become absolutely automatic, when you’re no longer “translating” in your head how to hold yourself and move right. You’re doing it right without thinking about it—unconsciously if not subconsciously.

Or, by the same token, you know you have restored your body’s natural foundation of strength and flexibility when the movements and postures you fell into before you began these exercises make you uncomfortable, when flopping into a chair or twisting your neck to look behind you is an anomaly, not normal life. That tells you that, like a foreign language seeping into your subconscious, correct movement has become instinctive—the natural foundation of your body once again.

Getting to that point, however, requires considerably more than regularly practicing the decompression and anchoring exercises in the previous three chapters; it requires making the movements and postures of those exercises daily habit until they become your automatic, unconscious way of holding yourself and moving. Ironically, however, achieving that unconsciousness takes a sustained period of very conscious awareness when you need to be mindful of your movements in just about everything you do—in all the activities of daily living that make up the routine of your day.

This chapter is a guide to how to go about meshing correct movement seamlessly into the daily routine of your life, whether you’re at home, at work, on the road, hanging out, or stepping out, morning till night. Certainly, not every suggestion is applicable to every life, but it is hoped that you will adapt what’s discussed here to your own situation. The point is that how you hold yourself and how you move when you do what’s ordinary—whether it’s sitting at a desk or waiting for the bus, driving the kids to school or cleaning the house, walking the dog or checking your email—is what will ultimately restore your body’s natural foundation so that you don’t have to translate at all to maximize the inherent power and flexibility that come naturally to you.

MOVING MINDFULLY TO MOVE RIGHT

The problem is that while it’s certain is that your body’s frame needs to be supported through axial-appendicular tension in whatever you ask it to do, the small, simple, typically repetitive activities of daily living you need to concentrate on are precisely the sorts of activities we all tend to perform mechanically—without thought or premeditation or even much energy.

So how do you suddenly imbue these routine tasks with purpose? The easy answer is to tell yourself to focus, to stay aware of what you’re doing, to be mindful. But how precisely do you do all that when the brain, so busy organizing, operating, and controlling every function and process of the body, is so apt to wander in a million different directions?

It requires effort. Significantly, it requires the initial effort of forcing that wandering brain to come to rest and focus on your body and how it moves. Unfortunately, the only trick I know of that will do this for you automatically is pain, the subject of the next chapter, for pain is able to remind us all too sharply of how we’re holding ourselves and how we’re moving. Otherwise, the only way to take control of your consciousness and focus it on meshing particular postures and movements into the mundane activities of daily living is by just doing it. There’s no other way except to preplan the intention to focus and carry it forward—and when it gets dropped, as it invariably will, simply to pick it up again without self-recriminations.

What in due course reinforces the intention is that the brain works on the pleasure principle. The more you carry forward the intention to be mindful of how you hold yourself and move through the activities of daily living, the stronger and more flexible your body will become and the better you will feel. The pleasure you take in how you feel in time becomes the incentive to move right, and eventually, moving right becomes your new normal—habitual, automatic, and unconscious.

It will take time. No surprise there; it took years for you to let your body adapt itself into incorrect postures and movements to fit the lifestyle of your time and place. Combating that complacent adaptation with mindful, willful retraining of the way you hold yourself and move won’t be an overnight battle.

The goal, therefore, from your first stretch in the morning to your final toothbrushing at night, is mindfully to thread the movements of decompression and anchoring into all the ordinary, automatic activities of your life—to fill your life with them so that they become second nature for your body wherever you are, whatever time it is, whatever activity you are engaged in.

Granted, if you work in an office, it’s not always possible to get up from your desk chair and hurl yourself down onto the floor for an anchored bridge posture. A couple of lunge decompressions performed on the sidewalk would probably draw the kind of interest you would rather not attract. And your fellow moviegoers are unlikely to be pleased if you suddenly rise up, crawl over their knees, and launch yourself into woodpecker in the theater aisle. But the truth is that while a half hour spent doing the exercises in this book is a great start on unwriting the effects of compression, it’s just the opening chapter. As author of the new message you’re sending to your physiology, you have to live the movements till they become the complete manuscript of your body’s new foundation.

STARTING YOUR DAY

Good morning—and hold it right there.

We Americans tend to rush things in the morning. We talk about “leaping” out of bed, “racing” to start the day, “wolfing down” a quick breakfast. Try not to. Slow down instead and pay attention to your body, to waking it up and giving it a good start by focusing on how you move, even while still in bed, how you get up from the bed, how you support yourself as you go through the morning’s ablutions, through the process of getting dressed, through all the small rituals and habits that are your way of preparing for the day. Do this slowly and carefully, and everything you do for the rest of the day will go much better, I promise.

Start the minute you awaken. Your eyes are open, and you feel an urge to stretch. Good! Make it a supine decompression. Zip your legs together so that your heels, toes, and knees touch one another, and reposition your body long in the spine. Now take about ten decompression breaths.

Focus on keeping your chest big. Again, picture your lungs: They are balloons within your ribcage, and you want to fill them up. Your chest’s inhalation circumference is the measure of this, so fill your lungs high and wide and watch the chest get bigger and bigger. Hold that circumference on the exhale, keeping your chest big as you recruit those muscles below the ribcage to maintain support.

Want to get up? Fine. After those ten decompression breaths in the supine decompression posture, sit or stand, face your feet forward, and do ten more breaths either as seated decompression from a chair or from the side of the bed or as standing decompression.

Spend a total of maybe 3 minutes doing these decompression breaths and you will have made a very good start to the day. You will have oxygenated your body, fired up your body’s metabolism, activated the muscles all around the torso to get them going on their support function, reminded the spine that it is free to focus on neural communication instead of having to hold you up, and stimulated your respiratory, cardiovascular, muscular, and digestive systems.

Next step: Head for the bathroom; it’s time to wash your face and brush your teeth, not—as may have been your habit—by leaning against the sink in that half sleep you once trudged through knowing that the porcelain would hold you up, but by using the ablutions ritual as an opportunity to strengthen the posterior chain. Seize the opportunity by spending 30 to 60 seconds of your face-washing time in the founder posture. Return to an upright position to towel off your face by all means, but position yourself in founder for another 30 to 60 seconds while you’re brushing your teeth. Stretch the hip joint back as far as you can, lengthening your spine and challenging your posterior chain with every splash of water or mouth rinsing.

It may interest you to know as you do this that, in effect, you’re copying or imitating what just about all four-legged animals do when they yawn and stretch simultaneously—it’s called pandiculation—a reflex action thought to refresh muscles by stimulating the lymphatic system. You’re achieving all that while re-patterning your hip joint through an integrated hinge, activating your posterior chain, and gaining a clean face and teeth.

Speaking of “clean,” you may be in the habit of running a vacuum cleaner or carpet sweeper here and there around the house before heading out. Each of these is an activity tailor-made for continuing the integrated hinge while adding the counterbalancing movement of your arms reaching forward. The job of vacuuming is particularly suited to starting off in the woodpecker stance, then lunging forward as you push and pull the machine. The woodpecker rotation works great when you need to shift the cleaning head slightly to get into some tight spaces.

No doubt you will need to remind yourself at first—even compel yourself—to position your body in these postures and to execute these movements as you go about doing things that have been utterly mindless up to now. After all, you’re at home, it’s morning, you’re barely thinking as you go through the motions of getting up and getting going. But focusing your mind on small efforts throughout the day can ensure that your body does not regress to default patterns of no resistance. Keep on reminding and compelling yourself till these postures become the new automatic.

COMMUTING

More than 86 percent of Americans commute to and from work by car, van, or truck; 76 percent of us do so as solo drivers.^*

Just consider: The right foot is pressing the gas pedal so that the foot and leg are always externally rotated. The hip flexors and chest are squashed. The ribcage is pressed down toward the pelvis, while the head is thrust forward in that Queen Nefertiti position called anterior head carriage, with all the ills that can result when the back of the neck becomes shortened and flops onto the neck. It’s worth mentioning yet again that such compression can have a seriously unhappy impact on the vagus nerve, and since the vagus nerve is responsible for keeping your heart rate constant and for the process of digestion, you really don’t want any kind of impact on it at all, much less a seriously unhappy impact. And that means that as best you can, you want to keep your neck muscles long and your head positioned for space at the back of the skull.

Now let’s be clear: When you’re behind the wheel of a car, you’re there to drive. Safety, obviously, comes first, and alertness is the first rule of safety. Whatever you have to do to stay aware and alert is your first priority; everything else is a distant second. But to whatever extent you can manage it, you will be doing yourself a favor when you press the back of your neck against the headrest put there for whiplash protection and keep your upper back pushed back against the seat. You want your chin to be over your sternum, not ahead of it, if possible. And you should try to keep both feet facing forward and your knees turned toward one another as much as possible. In this posture, you are fighting both external rotation and anterior head carriage. It’s a kind of vehicular version of the seated decompression posture—a way of fusing Foundation Training into the realities of our car culture.

Even before you get into the car or train or bus or boat that takes you to work, do three deep decompression breaths in the founder or standing decompression positions. Then, whether you drive to work or are conveyed by a train engineer, bus driver, boat captain, or airplane pilot, think of the commute as a form of seated decompression that you can control.

By the way, if you’re in the passenger seat of a car, the seatback and headrest typically make an excellent surface to engage your back as you do frequent decompression breaths. Driving or riding, whenever you can—and certainly if you are stuck in traffic or stopped at a light—do the decompression breath several times for anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds. Similarly, when you can, contract every muscle in your body and hold the contraction for 10 to 15 seconds. These are static holds: Nothing really moves; just contract, then relax. Both actions help your body stave off the worst effects of the enforced compression that driving or being a passenger in some kind of conveyance represents.

And getting into whatever means of transport you use, take three decompression breaths in the founder or standing decompression positions after you exit. It’s a great way to undo whatever decompressing the body has just experienced. No one will notice. There’s nothing to notice except a person breathing.

Maybe you cycle to and from work. After all, among all commuting modes, bicycling shows the biggest rate of increase nationwide^*—just ask the residents of Portland, Oregon. But if you commute by bike, you are likely angled forward at about 45 degrees—maybe even less—which makes it natural for you to lean your body weight forward as well. That probably means your ribcage is scrunched inward and your chin jutted outward. You’re curled down; you’re probably uncomfortable; and the fact is that you are exerting a lot of effort to little effect, in a posture that squeezes your body and in no way positions you to burn as many calories as you should no matter how much huffing and puffing you do. Again, that’s the position that seems to come naturally when cycling, but it’s a compressing posture you can do something about.

Of course, safety comes first on a bike as it does behind the wheel of a car, but the key here is to make your hips the center and starting point of your movement. Start pedaling from the hips, not with the knees, not in the quads, not anywhere else. To do so, press each foot full-force into the pedals and keep your knees close together and close to the center of the bike—so close that they are almost kissing with each pedal stroke. This positioning, with the balls of your feet and your toes and knees all moving toward the center of the post, primes your gluteal muscles to lift your torso so you widen and lengthen your upper body.

Now you’re in the right posture to do what you know how to do: Expand your upper back, pull your neck long, extend your shoulders wide, pull your elbows away from each other. You don’t have to change your angle for any of this; just expand and elongate where you are. The idea is for your chest to be up and over the handlebar, so that when you look up, you are doing so with your chest, not your nose.

I can sum it all up best in the immortal words of my friend Peter Park, a world-class and world-famous personal trainer and a passionate and expert cyclist. He offers a simple and succinct mantra for how to position yourself on the bike: “Break the handlebars,” says Peter. What he means is: Bend it like you’re a strongman who can tie it into a knot.

I know it’s a steering mechanism but pretend it’s precisely an iron bar and you’re Mr. Muscle Beach (even if you’re a Miss, Ms., or Mrs.) in a 1958 cartoon about the feeble wimp who wants to bulk up so he can win the girl. Grip the handlebar with the pinky side of each hand down and the thumb side up and press downward, applying all the force you can to bend that handlebar and turn it into a corkscrew. The action of bending the bar is both static—it’s an action, not a movement—and isometric—yes, the bar is pressing back. That means that the force is transferred through your wrists into your forearm and upper arm muscles, and since those muscles are also static and unmoving, the force travels right up the arm into the shoulders, neck, and ribcage. And that’s the bottom line, for as you try to bend the handlebar, your shoulders, neck, and ribcage should expand and lift. What you’re doing, in other words, is making your body as big as you can get it while riding a bike by pressing down on the handlebar and lifting up in the torso.

That’s admittedly a lot to keep in mind as you cycle—especially if you commute to or in a busy city and must concentrate on traffic, stoplights, and other realities—but as you make these adjustments, you will find that you also improve your balance on the bike, find your true center of gravity, burn more calories than before, and boost the efficiency of your pedaling.

AT WORK

We work in office parks and on factory floors, in cubicles or alongside assembly lines, in elegant corner suites or open-space “bullpens,” but wherever we work, 86 percent of us, according to a 2013 study,^* do it sitting down all day, every day. That has to stop.

I understand that staying glued to your desk can be a point of pride. I understand also that office traditions or office politics may make it expedient to concentrate hard on the task at hand—or to look like you’re focused, in any case. But add the hours seated at work to the time you spend seated at meals, the time you spend seated to read or watch television at night, the time you spend seated going through emails or surfing the Internet or playing at your Wii or Xbox or PlayStation, and you will have spent most of your day succumbing to being pressed down into a chair by gravity.

There’s a simple solution. At least every 30 minutes—every 20 minutes is preferable—stand up. Don’t just stand up, either; take a break from work. That is, do something else—something other than work—and what I am going to suggest is a 3-minute decompression routine that will pull your torso up, anchor your pelvis from below, and decompress you. Here it is—five movements:

1. A standing and/or lunge decompression

2. A founder and/or integrated hinges

3. A woodpecker and/or lunge decompression

4. 15 to 20 decompression breaths

5. Shoulder tracing

By all means, mix it up—in terms of selection and sequence—so long as you do at least 15 deep decompression breaths. Whatever movement or movements you perform, know that each is a physical meditation in which you create stimulation within your body; that is why the three-minute break is so powerful.

And it is why you must be willing to step away from the desk. Especially if you’re someone who works at a keyboard staring at a computer monitor in order to execute your job, the break every 20 minutes or half hour is essential. Will your actions strike your fellow workers as odd? Isn’t that their problem? Still, if it is awkward for you, there may be a break room or quiet area you can escape to for the three minutes—even the ladies’ or men’s room. But if it’s impossible in some way or for some reason for you to do the routine I’ve suggested, then at least do something else: Walk to the water cooler, do the decompression breaths, stretch, anything other than sitting. And if there is some impenetrable reason why you cannot take a legitimate work break for three minutes every half hour, have your boss call me because there is something seriously unbalanced either in the organization you work for or in your life, and something must be done about it.

In addition to taking breaks that count—not as a replacement for them—there is also a way to make sitting “pay,” and that’s by decompressing as well as you can while you’re seated. Remember also that you can augment the benefits of these seated decompressions by simultaneously squeezing a water bottle, rolled-up sweater, box of tissues, or the like between your knees as you breathe.

The situation is slightly different if you work in a factory or plant rather than in an office, but what holds true whatever your work environment might be is that spinal stability stems from how you position your ribcage and torso. If your job has you working up against a table where the tendency is to press your hips against the table to rest them, counter that tendency by pulling your hips back and keeping your chest up and over your workstation. If your work requires lifting and/or reaching overhead, counterbalance the lift by squatting, and turn the reach into a lunge or standing decompression. These are easy solutions, and the beauty part is that doing them just looks like you’re working—which you are, but you’re re-patterning your movements and decompressing your body at the same time.

AROUND THE HOUSE

Being at home typically entails a number of small chores we tend to do mindlessly, but these chores are actually a great target for making the postures and movements of Foundation Training habitual. In most such chores—straightening up a messy room, dusting, doing the laundry, and everybody’s least favorite chore on earth, emptying the dishwasher—the key is to focus on integrated hinging. So as you begin to reach down to pull the plates out of the dishwasher, or to look deep in the fridge, or to toss another wet load into the dryer—focus on keeping your feet parallel with your weight on the heels and your toes gripping the floor, as you breathe deeply and hinge at the hip, keeping your spine long and pulling your hips back behind the heels.

Another at-home activity, although it’s one you do outdoors, is gardening. Those who are passionate about it can spend endless hours preparing soil, planting, weeding, dead-heading, and more, and I have seen gardeners contort their bodies into absurdly uncomfortable, unflattering, and unhealthy positions. The solution is the posture called kneeling decompression, both the easiest and the most effective way to execute just about any task in any part of the garden in any season.

Get on your knees but positioned as tall as you can be, with your feet straight back behind you. Make sure all the weight is on the knees, not on the feet; if the weight goes through your feet and your feet grab the ground, that contracts the muscles on the front of your legs, and that, in turn, tightens the abdomen. Instead, keep the weight on the knees, take a deep decompression breath, and hinge your hips back. You’re now perfectly positioned for both decompressing and gardening.

DOWNTIME

You’re at the bus stop . . . in line at the deli counter waiting for your order . . . marking time in the lobby till the elevator arrives . . . in the elevator, riding up or down: It’s time you can use to be as active as possible with as little movement as possible—a great opportunity to activate muscles isometrically, the perfect opportunity to fine-tune your standing decompression posture.

For all intents and purposes—and to all appearances—you’re just standing there. But in fact, this is the time to breathe full into your lungs—front, back, sides—raising your sternum, drawing your chin back to keep your neck long and to position your head for space at the back of the skull. Be sure to use your foot muscles as well. Squeeze your feet together and flex and extend your toes inside your shoes.

Downtime is not an annoyance when you use it to improve your health.

EXERCISE AND SPORTS

From professional athlete to weekend warrior, it is axiomatic that the better your body supports itself, the more efficiently it works and the less prone it will be to injury. That’s just common sense; such a body is stronger and more flexible and therefore better equipped to sustain physical activity and to withstand physical impact. That is why it is so important to take a decompressed, anchored body into whatever sport or form of exercise you make part of your life.

After all, we all know you can’t strengthen the body’s foundation by just doing cardio, or just going for muscle mass, or, a little like Hallie back in Chapter 2, just crunching like crazy to sculpt six-pack abs. In truth, you can’t do it by just carving out a half hour in which you slip into designated workout garb and head for the gym—although a gym workout is a very good thing to do, as are cardiovascular exercises, weight lifting, and, in moderation, sit-ups. In fact, whether fitness buff or sportsman—or both—whether heading out to the golf course on the weekend or putting yourself through a weekday workout at home or in the gym, there are two things you cannot do without: 1) the right equipment and 2) a warm-up routine. Foundation Training provides both.

The equipment is the body you bring to your favorite sport or exercise. Whether you are going for a layup or going for a walk, swinging a club or a bat or a stick, leaping hurdles or bracing for defense, the body you bring to it should be one that moves correctly and is in sync with its natural capabilities. That general rule applies to any game or exercise.

And as everybody from professional athlete to weekend warrior knows, it’s important to warm up before you start your favorite game or exercise. The problem is that too often warming up begins and ends with some sort of hustling move aimed solely at raising the heartbeat—and that simply isn’t enough. What your warm-up should do is turn on the right muscles and turn off the wrong ones; that means focusing on those movements that get the biggest muscles in the body equipped and ready to support the big movements your sport or workout will demand of you. So it’s not just about getting the heart pumping; it’s about stretching and activating the muscles that control your hips, because the hip joint will be at the center of those movements. Whatever your preferred physical activity—heli-skiing or hockey, surfing or soccer, basketball, gardening, track, free-climbing, or raking leaves—if you are going to spend time and effort doing it, you may as well prime your body to gain back as much benefit and gratification as you can from the time and effort you spend.

THE FOUNDATION TRAINING WARM-UP

Each of the exercises in this warm-up routine stands alone as a challenge to your body, summoning it to pull out of its old patterns and into a new one. All of them access the important muscles of the posterior chain. They also prompt you to stretch the muscles along the inner thigh—not so far that they actually weaken, just far enough for them to remain strong as they pull the thighs back toward the center of the body.

Take your time with these exercises; focus on each one to the point of exhaustion. Give your body the chance to become more sensitive to all the muscles you are using while you exercise, not just to the muscles that are the object of the exercise.

FOR FITNESS WORKOUTS

Here’s a routine especially suited for yoga, Pilates, barre, dance, gyrotonics, or other similar practices that address the whole body. Do each exercise three times for 1 minute each time:

Prone decompression

Anchored extension

Founder, with your legs as far apart as you can comfortably distance them, and focusing on being anchored

For practitioners of CrossFit and for weight lifters, whatever the style of weight lifting and whatever the form or size of the weights, do these four exercises twice each, taking from 30 seconds to 1 minute for each exercise:

Internal leg tracing

Anchored bridge

Shoulder tracing in the founder posture

Shoulder tracing in the woodpecker posture

FOR THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

It’s hard to come up with exact figures, but among the American populace, men and women both, the competitive games most frequently played are golf, tennis, soccer, hockey, basketball, and baseball, while an estimated 15 million of us pursue the solitary “sport” of running or jogging. All of these sports—in fact, all the sports you love to play—require a warm-up beforehand, whether you’re undertaking a training session or practice or actual competition. Such a warm-up should include these five exercises done three times each for 1 minute apiece:

Standing decompression

For fitness or for fun, whenever you ask your body to work harder than normal, to achieve a level of performance and expend an amount of effort and energy beyond the norm, you need to help it get ready to do so. These warm-ups center the body structurally, ensuring that the muscles central to your hip function are working well so that when you swing the bat, make the leap, lift the weight, slam the return, it is the pelvis that is initiating the motion, giving both your body and your sport the most benefit possible.

ENDING YOUR DAY

Day’s end: Work is done, dishes are done, kids are asleep, and you’re winding down. That doesn’t have to mean that your body is collapsing. Before you turn in for the night, take time for the supine decompression, for in that posture you’re still asking your muscles to stabilize even though you’re “just” lying there. Hold the posture for 5 minutes while you breathe gently: Inhale through the nose for 5 seconds, exhale through the mouth for 6 seconds. The slightly longer exhalation has long been known in yoga and other Eastern health practices as a calming and destressing influence, and it is a great way to prime the body for a restful sleep—another one of the many valuable lessons I learned from Dr. Tim Brown.

PERPETUAL AWARENESS

Until correct movement is embedded in your unconscious, awareness of your body’s posture is both a means and an end in creating new patterns of movement and strengthening your body’s foundation. Such awareness is gained through practice, self-reminders, reminding one another if there’s a spouse or partner you can turn to in this endeavor. You simply have to be mindful of where you are and what you are doing—and how you are positioned structurally and moving muscularly as you do it.

So there you are watching television in the evening, and you’re more or less curled into the couch and scrunched from head to toe. At every commercial break, remind yourself to stand up, decompress, move, activate your muscles before you plop back down.

When you’re walking, whether to get somewhere fast or out for a stroll, be aware of how you’re doing it. Don’t lead with your chin. Actively pull your sternum up and out. Keep your feet pointed straight ahead; that is, after all, where you want them to take you.

You’re seated with friends in a restaurant or bar . . . you’re at the movies . . . you’re in a meeting. Whatever the situation, there is a moment in which you can take control of the way you are holding yourself, raise your sternum, elongate your torso, anchor your feet into the floor, and breathe high, wide, and fully. As you fill your lungs with oxygen, you also fill your life with a new pattern of support that is really a return to your body’s natural flexibility and inherent strength.

To make Foundation Training most effective and long lasting, it should be used in your everyday movements. The basic things we do throughout our days can begin to build us up instead of constantly breaking us down. To help you with this, we created the following whimsical story of how Hallie’s daily activities incorporate the exercises and keep her free from pain. . . .