After 20 years working as a stuntman, going to the gym 5-6 times a week I felt like Hercules, but then my back went. Spent 18 months in bed! Now 5 years later I found myself as a chronic back person. I trained as a structural bodyworker and now I work with people with chronic back pain, but can only work 4 hours a day before the pain stops me.
But 5 weeks ago I found Foundation Training, and now my pain is almost gone! I'm back in the gym with new hope, and a job as a personal trainer! Yesterday I did a 10 min plank! How is that possible in just 5 weeks?? What can I say. Foundation Training safed my life! Getting better day by day. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!! From me and my clients!
My hope is one day to come to the states and become a part of the Foundation Training family!
After a decade of endurance sports racing it was becoming more difficult to move through life without an incredible amount of day to day pain. All traditional medical remedies were failing including chiropractic care, physiotherapy, prescription drugs. It wasn't just that I could no longer participate in athletic events - it was to a point where I was (1) having difficulty being active with my kids, and, (2) I was considering the very real possibility of having to give up my career as a flight paramedic. I came across foundation about four years ago. After reading the original publications I immediately ordered the DVD and began to feel better in a matter of days within starting the workouts. I now do foundation exercises everyday of my life. EVERYDAY. I move pain free now. I am constantly telling everyone I work with who I see suffering the same muscular imbalances and erroneous muscle recruitment systems I used to suffer from about how foundation can help remedy this. More importantly I can now be the active father my children need. Foundation training has given me a new lease on life.
I just wanted to say that I'm really impressed with the foundation training exercises and videos. I've been on the Canadian Snowboard Team for 10 years and competed in many World Champs, X-Games and 2006 Olympics in Half-pipe and snowboard-cross. We've trained with some of the best physical trainers and physios but your short training video make a world of a difference to me. Makes my back and core work at all the right places and feel my hips and lower back stretch as well. Thank you so much for making a difference. I've told countless amount of friends as well about your website and everybody is amazed in what a 18-21min video can do. Keep up the great work and TED conferences.
[Foundation Training] was the keystone to my recovery… it gave me my career back. The Foundation exercises rapidly increased my strength, flexibility, coordination, and balance quicker than I ever could have imagined… I went from having a hard time walking up and down stairs to competing in the Amgen Tour of California in May of 2010... I was not only able to meet my goal of finishing the 7 day, 812 mile race but I was also able to finish inside the top 20 and be highly competitive day in and day out. Since, I have taken these exercises to heart and put them into my training regime year round. They helped get me back to racing competitively as well as cured other imbalances I had developed after years of racing my bike and neglecting my core strength. I encourage everyone to have the open mind I did when seeking help for my injury. Follow that path and a better, healthier lifestyle is right around the corner.
Long time surfer / kitesurfer / stand up boarder, work out every day, well in my 40s. August 2015, my back went out on me for the first time in my life. Stuck on a sofa for several months, couldn't stand, sit, or even lay down on my back, got drugged up pretty bad by doctors without a clue on how to treat a herniated disc (S1 L5). Worst experience in my life, thought my ocean days were over. Deep inside I knew the solution was in moving the right way, but where I live no-one really knows how. So I kept searching the web until I stumbled upon a surfer's website. His workout were too rough for me - I was still hardly able to walk - but he mentioned Foundation Training on his blog, so I checked it out. Seemed soft enough for me to try, so I did, through the short videos. Initially I was hurting when doing the founder, but my gut feeling was to keep trying. Went on to purchase the videos, did the fundamentals day in day out for a full month. It was like a miracle for me. Slowly but surely, the unbearable hip pain that radiated all the way down to my toes began receding. Couldn't believe it. After a month or so, moved on to Daily Workouts. I found them hard, especially the forward fold, I would have never have dared do something like that just 2 weeks earlier. Kept on going. 6 monts after my back went out, and about 2 months after starting the FT program, I was back in the water. Life saver. Now I know back pain is all about posture. Learn the right postures, stretch and strengthen the posterior chain, and keep doing so forever. And you'll be fine again.
~Surfer from Morocco
Foundation serves as the backbone of not only my workouts but also my lifestyle. At first I thought that it would just make me a better athlete, but after nearly 3 years under my belt, it has done so much more. It just makes you a better functioning human being. I like it so much that everyone around me knows how much I like it because I talk about it all the time. Baseball players sit on airplanes and busses and in dugouts. We have actions that are always one direction. Our backs are a mess, our hips are screwed up and foundation helps to right all those wrongs. Everyone I come into contact with has some issue and I get to share with them the gift of foundation. I know its worked in my life and in my friends life – and I always get a kick when someone I've never talked to about it comes up to me and says “Hey, what’s this I’m hearing about your funny workout you do, can you show me?”
I have written to you all before about how Foundation Training has helped me but I keep getting better so I wanted to give you an update. I got the MRI that diagnosed my 9mm herniated disk between L4-L5 and the 3mm herniated disk between L3-L4 that is torn in May of 2013 and was promptly told I needed a multi level lumbar fusion. I was 27 years old looking at losing my job as an RN after only working for one year. I did not feel that surgery was the right choice for me since I had all sensation and motor control. I found a wonderful chiropractor that wasn't afraid to work with me and he told me surgery was not my only option. I was there a lot but he helped me I was able to keep working. I read about Foundation Training in The Wellness Journal in August 2013 and proceeded to go for it after my chiropractor said that the exercises looked great. It got me out of pain quickly and helped me re-learn how to move the way I was always meant to. The exercises braced me for 2 car accidents I experienced in 2014 and helped me recover quickly. I share Foundation Training with anyone I meet who say they have back pain or ask me how my back is doing, I do the Founder exercise while in the Nursing station and have many of my coworkers ask about it so I go through that move with them too. This experience has opened my eyes to the sadly common problem of back pain and I want to give back so I am planning the attend one of the certifications in the Spring of 2015! I have gone from doing a 2 hour FT workout almost everyday in the beginning to about 20 minutes a few times a week because I have so little pain and because I know Foundation Training has truly changed the way my body moves at all times so it is like my whole day is FT exercises. Bending to get dinner out of the oven, picking up my friends kids, sitting at my desk, dressing/ turning patients, walking, hiking, and picking up heavy stuff looks very different now. I use the strong muscles that your program has reconnected me to for my movement and that has gotten out of some serious pain. Thank you so much!
I heard a pop in my groin after shooting a goal in a college water polo match in 1977. 35 years of low back pain and two weeks before my wedding last year I had a laminectomy. I had given up some sports and desperately hung on to others. While x country skiing in Central Wisconsin, my buddy says "you have to check out Foundation Training." I now enjoy work and play like a child. For the first time in years I can put my pants on pain free. How good is that.
I have had lower back pain for 5 years. Just constant aggravation in the lower back. Also have had numbness in my thumb and two forefingers in my left hand. My lower back pain disappeared after just the first two sessions of learning the movements. I bought the disc set and am currently on my 3rd week of practicing the movements. My hand numbness is 60-70% better and expect that it may very well disappear in 2-3 months. I could not be more sold on your exercises and program. By the way the MRIs indicated that I have a bulging disc in my neck and a herniated disc in my lower back.
Using the hips to hinge, paying special attention to the head/neck relationship, developing the core strength of the posterior chain vs. limb strength or ab strength I’d heard all this before, thirty years before and have had decades of personal experience with the various systems out there that attempt to focus on these concepts. So I put the book down, ignored the DVD and didn’t try Foundation Training. (Hint, this was a mistake, don’t do this.) Fortunately I was offered a couple of sessions with a Foundation Training expert trained by Dr. Goodman to learn about the work directly and I grudgingly went along with it just to check out what the buzz was around Foundation Training. Literally two minutes into the exercises I realized something special was going on here. Dr. Goodman has taken a very well-worn path and blazed a completely new trail which is impossible to appreciate or understand until you get your first two minutes of Foundation Training and the light bulb goes on. Foundation Training is like powerlifting or Olympic weight training for your deep postural muscles. As we sit a lot, collapsed, and work on computers these deep postural muscles degrade and weaken to the point they can no longer function and hold us up. Even the “fit” among us, professional athletes, tend toward developing poor movement patterns from the years of sitting we all do that then translate into their sport whether it be basketball or cycling. Breaking these postural movement patterns is virtually impossible using most all of the existing systems. Yoga increases flexibility and strength, weight training increases muscle strength, the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais make us aware of poor movement patterns, but Dr. Goodman has developed the unthinkable – one single set of exercises that quickly, almost miraculously create profound muscle strength and flexibility at the same time in just the areas we are weakest and tightest from our modern lifestyle habits.