Dr. Eric Goodman - Founder of Foundation Training

So, what I want people to understand is that they have a they don't have an option at this stage. They literally have a responsibility to take as well, as good a care of their own tissue and body and nutrition and hydration as they can. Because it ain't up to the doctor to fix up. You want to know why everybody's dying? Because the best option most doctors have is a shitty belt.

What's up, fitness fans? Welcome back to the Future Fitness Podcast and interview series. This is your host, Eric Malzone. And in this episode, I got to talk to Dr. Eric Goodman. He is the founder of Foundation Training, which you can check out at foundationtraining.com. So I've known Eric for a long time. Um, you know, better part of a decade of Santa Barbara, California. And he's a hard guy to track down. Uh, he's now in Hawaii and he was uh traveling the country in an RV bringing foundation training to uh all of North America. So I'm so happy that I finally got him on the show. Uh just an all-around good guy. And before I get into a little bit about what foundation training is, um I have an offer for you. So it's awesome. I mean it's free. And if you go to fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash marketing health report, we'll run a free diagnostic on your website. So go check it out. It's fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash marketing health report, and you'll get a free diagnostic from a search engine optimization standpoint and all around uh how your website's doing. So anyway, back to Eric Goodman. Foundation training. Um, there was a point in my athletic career not so long ago where I had two herniated discs, uh, L4, L5, L5, S1. I tried everything. Everything. I got three rounds of injections and I was borderline right ready to go under the knife. And uh then I started doing foundation training. He came into my gym, um, started showing it, teaching it, doing classes, giving his time so generously, which is kind of a hallmark of Dr. Goodman. Um, anyway, I started doing foundation training. Uh the pain uh in my back went away uh within a few weeks, and I was able to start doing the things that I really love because I'm a pretty active guy, but sure, just like you are too. So foundationtraining.com, they have certifications. And in this interview, uh, you know, we talked a little bit about foundation training, of course, but we really went pretty deep uh in some other areas. Uh, but you didn't expect us to go into endogenous uh cannabinoids, but that happened and a couple other topics that were really fun. And uh, like I said, Eric's just a great guy. I'm glad I tracked him down. So without further ado, let's get into it. Episode number 67 with Dr. Eric Goodman of foundation training.com. Hey fitness fans, welcome back to the Future of Fitness podcast and interview series. And I hope you are ready to expand your mind because today I finally tracked down Dr. Eric Goodman in Hawaii, and uh I have him here. Doc, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me, Eric. Love to talk to you again.

Yeah, this is great. So um I've known you for uh a good piece of time since the uh the Santa Barbara days were both uh kind of expanded our lives out. Um I'm in the mountains here on an island. Um let's let's get into just I know you've told the story a million times, but I think for a lot of people within the fitness industry, the the foundation training story is is still new. Um hopefully it won't be in 10 years. But let's give us the origin story about that, and then uh we'll get into a lot of the other things that we've uh discussed covering.

The origin story is, I mean, it gets simpler every time I tell it. I because you eventually it goes from paragraphs to sentences. And uh it's it's a really simple origin. I was one of the people that had a really bad back, like not a disc herniation. My back was folding into itself at the lowest edges, my my lumbar spine became part of my sacrum, or vice versa, however you want to think of it, whichever, whichever direction you want to think of it from. But my L5 and my S1 are not only on top of each other, but have but have found home within each other. My L5 has actually vaginated into my sacrum, and I don't have movement down there. It's kind of a natural fusion that occurred over years, and above it is herniation upon herniation upon herniation for several levels. It's just one of those things. It wasn't an accident, it wasn't a situation, it was a lifetime of a lot of aggressive sports, a lot of ice hockey in particular, taking that into swimming in water polo that is just such a hip-heavy movement without my hips working well, and then lifting a lot of weights all through college, all through graduate school, and becoming a chiropractor, which is a wonderful education, the best education I could ever imagine. But you sit for four years for you know, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve hours a day. It destroys if you're somebody like me, I was 220 pounds, maybe a little more at that time. 6'2, I was a big boy, and that's a lot of torso on top of his when you're sitting all day. And it just got me, and and eventually my back became so bad that it wouldn't just go out to where I was like, Oh, I gotta watch my back today, it would go out to where I I couldn't be doing it. And that would take weeks and then months to recover from. And I was told I needed a pretty significant fusion surgery um in 2007 when I was 27 or 26 or 27 years old, depending on the time of year. Um and I didn't get it because I was, you know, in my last allege of chiropractic school, and that would have been really hard. That would have been a hard valley to climb out of at that stage of my life, and I knew that. And I knew that that might be a decision that took me in a very cynical direction, which is a place I've never been in my life still. I've always been very optimistic about what I can do and what people can do, and I just I put that on myself pretty heavy. And I started trying to understand yoga, trying to understand my body hurting. The details are much more significant than they sound, but I became extremely obsessed with my own movement, with sensitivity to my own movement when I was hurting what I was doing, when I was feeling well with what I was doing, and I started extending my spine pretty substantially, which was a big shift. You're not supposed to extend your spine very much as I heard in rehab back in the day. But I started to and I started getting relief, and I started to build a program that looked like extension, but really for a lot of people was kind of reinitiating it, a neutral curve in the lower spine, and then building on top of that. Fast forward for 10 years and it looks totally different. My program is different today, it's evolved substantially. Um it's still hip hinging as the fundamental range of motion, it's still integrating the posterior chain muscles as the fundamental reason for foundation training. But with the inclusion of decompression breathing, with the kind of the spiraling lines that are starting to present themselves in our work, it's just evolving to something more interesting on an almost weekly and monthly basis. Um now we have a certification course, and I've got almost a thousand instructors around the world, and I've got a teaching team that is better than I've ever taught as of like last week. You know, they're right there on my heels. And and as I was telling you, um, I just kind of bought back for the first time ever. I have rights to my work fully. Really truly have rights and ownership of foundation training with my original crew that I started this with. And I love everybody that's helped me get to the point business-wise, all of it. But I needed to step out from where I was, and then I needed to kind of re-authenticate foundation training from the inside out. And that's what we're doing now. That's what I'm that's my life's work now. I've got a new daughter that has inspired me to really become somebody, and you know, uh a life that is starting to make a lot of sense to continuously improve upon and build upon, just like just like the the work, just like we, you know, just like I started building upon my spine to strengthen my weak points. I find in life and in my business. If we find and focus on the weak points, we're gonna get really strong. Yeah, and that's what we're doing. Yeah, that's foundation training, focus on your weak points.

So, my experience with foundation training was is a great one too. So um, like you, I played a like a lot of athletics my whole life, swimming in water polo primarily.

Um you were better at me at water polo. By the way, just so everybody knows.

You're I played a lot of it. I was in the pool a lot. And you know, through and then finding CrossFit, right? And essentially I found CrossFit when I turned 30, which I think kind of prolonged my quote unquote athletic career. And when I met you in 2010, 11 when you uh came into our gym in Santa Barbara, um, I was at a point where I had her native two discs, L4, L5, L5, S1, and I gone to the normal medical route of you know, you have three options. You do nothing, you get the injections, or you get surgery. I'm like, well, I don't really like any of those, you know. I went so I went down the injection route. I got three injections, and that just allowed me to do the the the you know the PT and do a lot of the work, but still none of it really helped. And the only thing that helped is when I started doing the basic of foundation training, which is the founder, right? I started doing it daily, you know, before it is still yeah, that's the pose. And it works, you know, it just works. And uh, you know, if so, if I'm if I'm how do you describe it, right? I I've had a really hard time trying to describe them like, well, it's it's like strength yoga, but it's not because I know Goodman wouldn't like it if I called it that.

So you can call it whatever you want, man. I don't know so I I've had people do their best to give me credit for what I've done and just call it such different things. The the most common one is core foundations. Guy named Ben Greenfield loves to call it that. And I really like Ben, so I don't care. You can call it whatever that he wants. Yeah. As long as people are getting better, you know?

Yeah.

Um, it's not about the name, it's what's in a name. The idea is that these poses represent an opportunity to take as many of your muscles into sort of a collaborative tug of war as you can find. And that that's really what it is. It's it's a collaborative tug of war. Nobody's trying to win. That's the mistake a lot of people make. You're just trying to tug and get stronger at tugging. You've got a posterior chain, you've got an anterior chain, but in between those and surrounding those, you've got a myriad of other twists and turns that are also chains and networks of muscle connection and muscle contraction. The founder, we'll just talk the founder, is a basic two-fundamental range of motion isometric exercise. The first fundamental range of motion happens actually at the rib cage before we even get into the pelvis, where we have to lift and expand the rib cage, not forwards, but actually up and posteriorly, and widthwise, a transverse and lateral expansion, so that the diaphragm can have a little room to collapse and expand as we breathe. And with that range of motion comes significantly more accessibility to the hip joints, full range of motion. So we go from the rib cage movement, we establish a big, powerful torso, and we take that big torso into a hip hinge. And that's the two fundamental ranges, that's the two sides of the tug of war rope collaboratively starting to play together. And then we go out from those edges. We go down from the pelvis to the arches, we use the pelvis and the arches as their own tug of war, collaborating together, longer, shorter, longer, shorter, tugging the muscles along the inseam of the thigh into the groin, from the arch to the inner calf to the groin to the pubic synthesis, where the pelvis meets in the middle. And then we go from the rib cage up to the SCM, the sternocleidomastoid muscles, to the base of the skull. We lift all that tissue in kind of this long, tall cylinder of a neck, and then we breathe underneath it to fill up any gaps because ultimately your neck and shoulders are only as efficient as the platform on which they rest. Just like your torso is really only as efficient as the muscles controlling it and the platform of the pelvis upon which it relies and rests. So the founder is an isometric that trains the muscles to be as big and powerful and have as much endurance as they can in these fundamental ranges of motion. The other 20, 30 exercises of ours build upon that. The principles are the same, the actions are very similar to get into the exercises. Once you're in them, the motions change, the processes change. There's stuff on the ground, there's stuff on your back, on your stomach, there's stuff kneeling, there's stuff sitting, there's stuff standing, there's stuff lunging. You know, every position gets a gets a handful of opportunities to adjust and adapt well.

Yeah. And you know, my experience too, having, you know, so I was privileged to have you as my initial instructor, right? Um, but there's since then I I've met a lot of foundation instructors, I've taken a lot of foundation classes, and I've actually run some people through, you know, found now and powerful athletes, right? Strong crossfit athletes, like people you look at their physique and what they can do with a barbell or gymnastics-wise, and you just like it's just impressive strength. But you start to get them into some of these foundation movements, and all of a sudden just the wheels fall off. Like it's just shaking and sweating, and it's hard to explain, but it's it's hard. Like 20 minutes of foundation training if you're led by an instructor who's who's fluidly moving you through all these movements. It's it's hard. And this is coming from a CrossFit guy. Like, this is hard.

I know, and you want to know who our biggest. I won't say there are our biggest, I don't think we have fans. Nobody, you don't get fans as an exercise system. You get people that practice your work and are like, oh fuck, thank God. You know, you're not I'm not a fan of yours. I'm just glad that this exists, you know. Like, thank you for providing a solution or an alternative or an option, whatever they whatever it becomes for them. So a lot of the people that use our option are first responders, crazy adrenaline junkie athletes that I love because I'm I'm part there. I'm not all the way there, but I'm part there, and I love interacting with them and helping them go deeper. Um military dude, we got heavy hitters, big guys, scary guys. I'm a big guy, you're a big guy, these are big guys, you know. They do these poses and they just they just start to laugh because they've done it all. But this is different. Every force that a person is used to experiencing in their life comes from the external to the internal. It's an outside end resistance that they're trying to pull or push or something. Foundation training is literally from the center of your rib cage and diaphragm and the center of your pelvis, internal, out. And it's a very different type of force. It's an eccentric force. It's a from short to long, teaching the body to absorb force before we ask it to generate the same force or a similar force. And that's the lesson the body needs. It needs to know how to generate, and it needs to learn to absorb before it generates. Because all generation of force is all force production or propulsion or any of that is is elastic potential utilized well. And elastic potential is loading the band before you let it go.

Right.

I'm a fan of foundation training, and I urge people who are listening right now. You can you can simply there's a ton of videos. If you just if you just uh what YouTube like Dr. Goodman Foundation.

No, just honestly, at this stage, just type in foundation training on pretty much YouTube or Google, and you're gonna find a lot. Yeah. There's gonna be a YouTube page that's just foundation training, and you can put it on there. Um and you can our website has all a lot of resources as well. But uh Eric, you and I were talking a little bit about the website a minute ago, you know, before we started the podcast, and our website's about to be very different. By the time this airs, we nobody will see the one that you and I talked about. Okay. They'll see the new one that we talked about, which is exponentially more accessible. Something I really think is important for any medicine. Something that I feel I kind of made a mistake on and and was led in a way that I I was uncomfortable with, but didn't voice enough and finally changed. So I'm excited for the people that do whoever comes on there, you know, I'm excited for them to see the offering by the time this is out. And and that foundation, it'll be foundation training.com. Um, that that is something that like I can be extremely proud of. Not just the exercises, which I'm already very proud of, but the the business process, the educational process, and the amount we're willing to give above and beyond what I think anybody would expect us to be giving, which I think is pretty traditional of our work.

Yeah, no, you guys are very giving. I mean, just uh when you know I had first met you were very giving of your time. You came in and taught classes at my gym for free, you know, just to teach people and and and spread the word.

I was learning.

Yeah.

And that's what a lot of people don't realize is while you're teaching stuff, especially stuff you're trying to come up with, you're learning the whole time. Like I was the student there.

Yeah. I I do all the time. I do um at least five free consultations with fitness professionals every week. I I love it. And every time they're they're like, they thank me. I'm like, no, thank you. I just learned something completely new. And uh it's just an opportunity to get out there, and you know, when you think you're teaching, you're you're oftentimes learning. Um I I do think you have a really strong message, whether you know it or not, for the fitness professional or for people in, you know, who are just um looking to do something bigger with with their purpose and with their occupation and and tying it all together, right? So you've been doing this for 10 years, right? And uh I think there's one of the things we stand for as an organization is that there is no 90-day um roadmap that's gonna get you to success, right? You've you've put in the time, you've you've done all that. So tell us like what are your, you know, after after the first 10 years, right? You started this in 2008, now it's 2018. You know, what how what have you learned about the learning process and how is that now influencing you with the way you're pushing forward into the next decade or two or three or four or five decades?

That's a good question. I'll talk to you about two people that I know that are good friends, that are really good people. Because these are guys that I learned from in different ways. The first one is my my biggest mentor, uh, this guy, Dr. Tim Brown. Guy kind of guy that like you know about when you're in school, you hear about, you never think you're gonna meet him or anything like that, and then all of a sudden the guys are surfing together, having fun, talking shop, lecturing together. You know, it's one of those really wonderful things. And he really looks to, I mean, this guy, he's in his 60s, extremely healthy, still rips, great guy, still practices, you know. Super healthy, but he's more than that, he's very curious about about our field, you know, about medicine, about health, about physical medicine, about mental health, about physiology of every kind in the body, because that's all as a doctor, you're you're not a doctor because of your skill of treatment, you're a doctor because of your skill of understanding pathology and seeing when the body goes wrong and trying to prevent what you can. And Tim hits that hard. Um but what he really does is he looks outside of the normal scope, he looks outside of the normal lens for educational health, he looks at Finland and looks at their educational system and how they teach students, he looks at the way a human being learns. He told me a really cool snippet of information the other day that you remember about 10% roughly of what you hear, about 20% roughly of what you see, but you remember about 80% of what you experience. And that's big. That's that changes my messaging for the rest of my life personally, knowing that. I'm no I'm going to because I teach on a daily or weekly basis, and I hope to for the rest of my life. And I talk a lot, I'm gonna shut up. We're gonna get right into it. We're gonna get into movement and breathing, and then we're gonna talk a little bit of once they've experienced a bit, then we're gonna talk a little, a little, then we're gonna experience more, then we're gonna talk a little, then I'm gonna show them a couple things because that visual process of seeing something seems to have even double the value of hearing something. But feeling still has eight times the value of hearing and four times the value of seeing. So that's real, you know, you gotta take those things. And I learned from Tim every time I'm around. So my first lesson there is find the people you don't think you can access and try to figure out why. You know, try to figure out how they got there. Um and you're gonna notice most of them, not all some of them are real dicks, but most of them are really truly deeply wounded, healed, wonderful people. And those you got if a lot of people are wounded, a lot, and you see that and you feel that, and it's in just a myriad of ways. But not a lot of people are truly healed from the inside, mentally, from acceptance to relief to excitement. And when you get around those people that have taken it into their work and kind of built, built, built from there, dude, you it's a it's a non-stop learning process when you're around that type of person. You just learn and you shut up and you learn, and that's wonderful. And it it's practical. Another guy I'll tell you about um is another just surf buddy of mine. You know, surfing's been a really big thing in my life, and it's like it's helped me a lot. It's it's connected me in internally, and it's also connected me to a network of people too that I don't think I would have in previous. To otherwise, if I didn't search and didn't love it. Um, one of them I met is a guy named Javier. Javier is an executive of Facebook. He's he's the real deal. He's just a little bit older than me, just turned 40. And we've had a lot of conversations, and I really value him. And he's come through my foundation certification course. He's, you know, he really values what I do. I really value who he is and what he does. He's a he's about three or four years older than me, I guess. And he just did something that he just switched the way he thinks. And he decided that he's going to look 20 20 years down the line, sort of that like what potential the next decision he makes could have, 10 to 20 years down the line, instead of a year, two years, five years. He's like, I've been, you know, you always hear people, what's your five-year plan? What's your but I I actually what's your 50-year plan? What's your 30-year plan? What do you want to look back on? Um, not like, oh, I was such a badass.

No.

More like, I'm so glad I took the hard road there and endured that time because now I'm who I hoped I would be and wasn't yet. And that's why I was having such a hard time back then. It's not because life wasn't right to me, it's that I wasn't prepared to deal with it as well as I need to, to be the best version of myself in that situation. And that's what I'm learning. I mean, I learned that through marriage and having a baby every day. You're not supposed to be cool, you're not supposed to be awesome or a badass. You're supposed to be positively reactive, not negatively reactive. You're supposed to have other people's best interest at heart in a way that feeds your best interest, like your best interest being a helper. I like to spend my time making people feel well, and as a result, I tend to feel well, you know, because I keep myself healthy so that I can be there for other people and help keep them healthy. When you start to look at a description of life in retrospect, it it helps a lot. When when I think of conversations I want to have when I'm 71 years old, you know, 35, what is that, 34 years from now, you know, I want to have some really interesting conversations, not just about the body, about life, about experiences. And Javi's a guy that I've I really like him. He's a brilliant dude. I I don't take intelligence lightly when it's that kind of intelligence, when it's a level that's higher than a lot of other people's. And when they're willing to kind of impart a bit of their process onto you, you just go, okay. And you take it seriously. And I I have, I've taken it seriously, and it's it's why I'm in Hawaii. It's why I'm getting back into practice so that I can treat more patients hands-on, because I I miss that connection. It's one thing to teach a lot of people and to help a lot of people, and I still treat, but I but I don't have a rhythm in which I can have somebody come to me for two months, you know, and now I'm going to, and that's a big, big piece of life for me. Yeah. So if somebody's looking to get better or have more impact or have a bigger, I don't know how to have a bigger bank account. I have not figured that one out yet. So don't listen to me on that. But I do know how to have a bigger impact. I do. I've I've had an impact, and my work is continuously. I I could go away tomorrow and foundation training will continue, and I know that. And that's that's real. That's something that didn't happen until a couple years ago. And if you really want to have an impact, you just got to do the thing that makes so much sense to you that you can't stop saying it, you can't stop sharing it, you can't stop teaching it. That's it, that's my only advice. And if that isn't something you have, then you're not in the place where you should be making an impact. And you need to accept that. Then you need to find the place that makes the ear, the little hairs in your ears stand up, because that's where you are. And you might not find it until you're 50, you might not find it until you're 60, but be open to finding it. It's not about having major success, it's about having an impact in first yourself, and then this concentric ring around you, and then this concentric ring around that, and then the one around that, around that, around that. But it starts with how you take care of yourself 100%, and and how you enthuse yourself into the aspects of life that you either love or are pretending to love. And if you're pretending, get off that shit, go find something to love.

Yeah, so very powerful. And I agree, I think, with everything you said, and you know, my business partner, Doug, you you know Doug. Um I know Doug. Yeah, it's an awesome guy. And we both agree that we actually had this conversation this morning. And, you know, is there is is bit like people want to separate business and life, but business is your life, your purpose, everything. It's just one thing, it's just who you are. And if you can, you know, start start seeing things in a bigger picture, you know. And I I I struggle every day with the balance between um patience in what I'm doing, like, okay, now I'm on the path and just give it time, just keep doing it, right? And then this like anxiety of like, well, I need to get more done now, right? Yeah, like that's it, I think that's that's the balance that every you know, quote unquote entrepreneur, people who are going out and trying something that's you know um untraditional, you know, is is a is a tough thing. I'm not sure where I'm going with this point, but that I agree with you, and I think it's it's gotta it's all gotta come together. Uh, and then you start to, and hopefully the bank account grows with it. I haven't figured that out either. You know, um does your life suck? No, my life's awesome. Right, my life's great.

Part of the secret, and I believe this part of the secret to a happy life might be in the struggle to have one. Um, I don't think it's where you get or what you get to, it's it's what you get through that develops the person and the experience and the personality and the charisma or lack thereof and all those things. It all comes from excitement. Everybody has a different chemical makeup. Not you might not be shouting it from the rooftops, great. Be silently excited, and people can tell there are body language processes that are real and breath patterns and ways of presenting things that only happen if you're truly loved, if you truly love what you do. Yeah. Um, I think that a statement I make a lot, it doesn't make as much sense in the fitness professional world, but it does have the same relevance. In the doctor world, you need to have two really good skills. You have to have these two things in place to have a long successful practice. It's patience and patience. You need both of those things in no particular order, and it's gonna reverse all the time, that order. But you need patience and patience, and you're gonna really have a successful life. Patience and clients doesn't sound anywhere near as witty, but you're gonna need patience and clients. Who cares? It's just a word, it's just semantics. Yeah, you need people in the door, and you need time, yeah, you need thought, you need development. Yep, it's one thing to get a person fit. And it's an impressive thing to help a person get fit. Don't get me wrong. There's a reason that the the training and fitness field is ever growing. It is probably the fountain of youth, as close as we'll ever find to it, when done well and fed well and and thought well, when the whole life begins to become about health and nature and being a natural version of yourself, living in a modern world.

Yeah.

Um, that's medicine in a very true sense. It's in my opinion, it's much more medical to fix your own system than it is to go have a fix. That's true medicine when you do it. Um, there is a medical system that can react and treat you when needed. Thank God. You know, I'm very happy for that. We all are, but you're your you're your best doctor. And as a trainer or a fitness coach or a strength coach or a whatever whatever phrase you use, a you're you're kind of the first line of defense in a lot of ways. The things you teach them are gonna be their best representation of health. So if you're if you're nailing them, knocking them down, beating them up, every single workout is a balls to the wall intensity. Back off a little for a couple, maybe let health lead the way for a little while instead of strength and and and impact and intensity. Uh a statement I use in my certs a lot is that it is not intensity that guides us, it's intent. Intensity breaks us down if it's the wrong intent, if it's the wrong direction. If it's even subtly off, if your joint centration, the ability of your joints to stay centered, especially at the hips, is off by a small little millimeter or two, your frame's off. The center of your physical universe is off. When you load weight on top of that, it is exponentially offer. You know, it's really, it's changed. You're you're you're hitting things with some real force now. Um so as an instructor to a person that's breaking themselves down a bit, just try things like foundation training, DNS, uh, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, um, FRC, functional range, conditioning, um, gynastica naturale, just a wonderful, wonderful movement system for people that need their hips to stay mobile but are endurable. You know, you want to have you don't want to you don't want to go into some of these systems with the injury, but you want to use them to prevent the injury. Um, I actually would recommend that anybody on here who takes a look at Gynastica Natural. Uh, it's a really good program by a gentleman named Alvaro Romano that is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy. I mean, from like trained under the Gracie's for years, he's in his 60s and moves like like a guy that did that for 60 years. Right and very powerful, very strong. But his system is wonderful. A lot of the surf community and action sports community are getting into it as a pretty solid alternative to being in the gym. And it's it's a jujitsu style of training, it's not combative at all, it's individualized, but the movements make your body quite durable. I'll give them that for sure. But little systems like that, because people think that you either lift weights, do yoga, or do Pilates, or you ride a bike, or you run. That's fitness. It's like, nah, bro, that's five ways that the body expresses itself. It's only five though. And there's not an there's not a limit or a number. That's only five of infinite. So we want to really get people to understand that the book is not closed on what can come out and or what's available. In fact, it's probably more open than it's ever been because there's so many things becoming available and there's such a ability to spread information. Are those dogs barking really annoying?

No, no, it's good. I mean, I'm used to it. I have dogs, so we got neighbors that just love.

I think that they literally I think they have their dogs on cue.

Ready? He's at a really good point in this interview. Um, so I I don't want to diverge too much from the topic, but you and I um before this, we got onto something that was interesting because it seems to be a topic that continues to come up on my show. And you just did a thing called Cannabis Camp in Santa Barbara not too long ago.

I did.

Tell us about um your I guess progressive interest in in what's going on with that science and that field and and the excitement that you have around that.

Yeah, that's and I and I will be honest and vulnerable to a degree. Like doing that talk at Cannabis Camp was a very vulnerable moment in my career. It was a little nerve-wracking, but it also worked out really well. Yeah, it was a solid 15-minute discussion on a side of the cannabinoid discussion that is not being talked about enough. You have cannabis, pot, ganja, great. Smoke it, drink it, eat it. There's lots of there's lots of delivery ways. What people are kind of missing is that the only reason that that plan matters is because it stimulates a system inside of us that is readily available to be stimulated by that plan. The endogenous. Endogenous simply means inside of us, genius means genesis, it's made inside of us, the endogenous cannabinoid receptor system. And that system, holy crap. If you look at research, and this is not, I'm not thinking this, I don't theoretically believe this. It's it's proven in multiple, multiple, multiple scientific papers. There's patents held by the US government because of these papers. There's some sneaky stuff going on. There's a bunch of very conservative people buying up large parcels of land to grow hemp plants in the near future because of how much money they can make under federal regulation, I guess almost deregulation. But what people are not talking about is that inside of us is this system and that it is only a stimulatable process because of what's in us. And that stimulation capacity, the ability of the endogenous receptors, the ones within us, to be stimulated, is only as good as we support them and we feed them and we develop them and we practice stimulating them without the plant, without cannabis, without ganja, which is a wonderful plant. I'm not against it. Trust me, I'm much more for it than I'm against it.

You too.

But it's not about the plant. The system is older than humanity. The mammalian endogenous cannabinoid system has been around for millions of years, and every single mammal on earth has it. It is a modulating or mediating system that has two primary locations of receptors. The central nervous system, particularly in the reptilian brain, the deep primal, intuitive regions of the brain are filled with CB1 receptors, cannabinoid one receptors. Cannabinoid one central nervous system is called anandamide, the bliss molecule. Those receptors are stimulated most easily by anandemide, which is a breakdown product of omega-6 fatty acid, arachidonic acid. Omega-6 fatty acid is found in things like avocados, grass-fed beefs. It's found in uh pumpkin seed oils, sunflower seed oils. Not a lot of things, but some things. And arachidonic acid is kind of demonized because there's an end there's an inflammatory component to omega-6 fatty acids. That's why when you buy a bottle of fish oils and things like that, it's all omega-3. I won't get too far into the details of that, but there's a spectrum and a ratio of omega-3 to six to nine fatty acids that seems to be the healthiest for human consumption and utilization. And we're pretty far off of that.

Yeah.

So we want to re we want to include three, six, and nine omega-fatty acids in our diets pretty regularly to make sure that our body is producing enough of its own anandamide out of the arachidonic acid because that stimulates the central nervous system's CB1, cannabinoid one receptors that are filled up along the central nervous system and in those reptilian features in the brain. Cannabinoid 2, CB2 is also a breakdown of arachidonic acid. The shortened term is 2 AG. The long term is called 2 arachidonoid glycerol. It's a molecule that, much like anandamide, mimics marijuana. Mimics, looks like, has the capacity to stimulate us the same way as marijuana. But we don't need to smoke it. Your body makes it endogenously with enough arachidonic acid. Those CB2 receptors are so plentiful in the immune system and peripheral nervous system that it's ridiculous. In your spleen, in your thymus, in your digestive tract, in the places in our body that govern our health, our tissue health, our electrical chemical health. The central nervous system governs hormones and secretions. It governs the atmosphere in which we interact with life. But the ecosystem is that Cv2 receptor. The ecosystem is the plant life, you know, the bacterial life, the muscular life, the structural life. It's where we exist within our body. It's how our body physically exists. And if you take all the research, of which there's thousands upon thousands of published papers on the endogenous cannabinoid system, you can very quickly deduce that it is a mediator of not pleasure, but the capacity to feel well and feel good in the body. Pleasure is the wrong term, but you will experience more pleasure if your body is able to feel well. You will seek more of it too. So what this CB1 and CB2 messenger system does, be it under the direction of marijuana or under the direction of anandamide, or under the direction of cryotherapy, or under the direction of very deep meditative breathing, or under the direction of long endurance athleticism, you stimulate the same system, the same receptors, the same processes. There's no difference. You're not a pothead. As I discuss in my lecture and in a few different ways, of course, you can become a pothead. Anyone can. You're gonna become a pothead. You're gonna get lazy, you're gonna do less. But it is not a sentence. It is a stimulation of a system inside of us that is meant to do good, it is meant to help us thrive in our lives and adapt to stimulus as well as we possibly can with as much health as we can possibly develop within ourselves, and that's why that science is changing my career. I can't know that and operate in the same way that I was operating with biomechanics at the heart of it. Biomechanics is a big piece of my puzzle, but nutrition just became a much bigger piece, and hydration just became a much bigger piece, and supplementation just became a much bigger piece because of all this information. And it's just you gotta know it, you gotta know it, man, because people are dying finding relief. They are dying in tens of thousands of middle-aged, relatively ordinary, mid-class, socioeconomically healthy and stable, looking for relief for pain management or depression, and then they die because of opiate chemistry or narcotic interminglings of some kind or a failed surgery or whatever it might be. Failed surgery is not very often, that's very rare. However, opiate chemistry overdoses are absurdly often. Yeah, I think 60 to 80,000 people a year in America are dying because of things like fentanyl and oxycontin. Come on, that's that's it's embarrassing. Yeah, that's embarrassing as a culture.

And it's touched my life, you know. I it's touched my life, people I love, you know, and it's uh it's it's unfortunate.

Um do you see it in like do you see it like in friends or something like that?

Or family, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Family, very close family, and it's uh, you know, it it's it they don't people are supposed to end their ways of well, if the doctor just can do whatever the doctor says. And there's a lot of amazing medical professions out there, but it's it's so ingrained into the system of like, well, just okay, well, we'll try this medication, we'll try this medication. I guess here's my question for you by sharing this knowledge, right? These things you're learning. What's what's the aha moment that you hope people who are listening have? Is it is it a sense of more open-mindedness?

Is it a sense of very just very very specific? Yeah, I want them to understand that most of the chemistry they're taking into their body in the form of a painkiller or a desensitizer is working on the same system that I'm talking about. It is working on the pain relieving capacity of the endogenous cannabinoid system receptors. Tylenol, aspirin, all these things, they work on the same system. They compete with these receptors. With that knowledge that those painkillers are competing with these receptors, I want you to feed yourself as much of these things as you can because they are competing with pain management chemistry, they're competing with the ability to lock into a receptor. And once one receptor is used, it ain't usable again for a while. So if they can truly compete with opioid chemistry, as they are in, there's anesthesiologists very frequently starting to use marinol as a synthetic form of marijuana, not instead of anything, but because when they have a little bit of that in the person's chemistry, they can use exponentially less of the heavy drug. Exponentially less. And they're finding this is like this is a remarkable thing. So, what I want people to understand is that they have a they don't have an option at this stage. They literally have a responsibility to take as well, as good of care of their own tissue and body and nutrition and hydration as they can. Because it ain't up to the doctor to fix them. You want to know why everybody's dying? Because the best option most doctors have is a shitty pill.

That makes total sense. Yeah, it does. And uh that's a great message, man. I I love it. And I have one last question for you because people know where to find you foundation training.com but um where do you see foundation training i usually ask people in the next five years where do you see foundation training in Eric in the next 50 years surfing but in addition okay that's it but I see um I don't have a numerical goal for foundation training I want it to be taught in conventional medical school medical schools there's one thing that is truly there's two things that are truly lacking in our Eastern and Western medical teachings in America and in a lot of the Western world just like there's some things lacking in eastern philosophy teaching about the western side the two sides have very real evidence based stuff and very real treatment options but it's a blend of the two that is most important.

I want foundation training to be an a translation of the idea that in eastern medicine there is an energy flow within the body that needs to be supported and perpetuated and improved upon loved helped and I want foundation training to become the biomechanical equivalent to that in Western medicine. I want it to be taught in medical schools and I want it to be taught in the military and I want it to be taught in hospital settings and in physical therapy settings and that's my goal is that it becomes a part of the future of medicine that will allow the focus of the future of medicine to be on heavy heavy problems in human bodies because it has allowed doctors and patients to see through a lot of the basic stuff of physical pain with breathing with basic postures because if my work gets in there I guarantee you a lot of other people did too because I'm not the smartest one so if I'm there it's because a lot of other people that are paving the way for me paved the way awesome I love it man.

Well uh thank you thank you for everything you're doing man I mean thank you for helping me with my back right I mean starting off uh you know thank you for for what you represent you know within the field and and your vision and uh yeah and the work you do. So great job man keep it up it's uh you know it's always a pleasure catching up with you.

Likewise likewise send my best to everybody out there and enjoy it and I hope anybody that listens to this gets some benefit. Yeah me too yeah cool man.

Hey fitness fans don't leave yet this is your host Eric Malzone and I want to personally thank you for your support and listening to the Future of Fitness podcast and interview series. If you have a few minutes I would greatly appreciate if you went to iTunes and gave us a favorable rating as well as go to our YouTube channel and subscribe there. That'd be fantastic. If you know of anybody who'd be a great fit for the show as a guest please hit me up at Eric at fitnessmarketingalliance.com that's Eric with the C. Also I have three questions for you. Number one, are you a fitness professional who's been in the industry for over seven years? Question number two do you have an online revenue stream or multiple online revenue streams? Question number three are you ready to break loose from your local market and take advantage of all of the opportunity out there in the online world if you are I want you to go to fitnessmarketingalliance.com forward slash mastermind. This will lead you to our level up mastermind group and all the information that you need to know. This is a group for high level thinkers within the industry who are ready to break free. So go check it out. It's fitnessmarketingalliance com forward slash mastermind let us know if you have any questions. Thank you again for listening a greatly appreciate support we'll keep it up from our end as well