The Future of Cannabis and Pain Management - Dr. Eric Goodman

I don't recommend hot during my courses or anything like that. I just think that if you're a person who's really truly trying to get better in life, and you're considering any form of medication or supplementation, your first consideration should be marijuana. CBD initially, once you feel ready and courageous to explore, small amounts of THC to your audience.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Future Fitness Podcast and Interview Series. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and this is episode number 158. He's back, Dr. Eric Goodman. Really excited to have him back. If you haven't checked out the first interview he did, I believe it's number 67, and I believe it's our number one or two top-rated podcasts ever. So I've known Eric for a long time, close to a decade now. He always amazes me with every time I talk to him, he's onto some new layer of education. He's truly a perpetual student, always learning, always educating, and uh always evolving and innovating. And really mine. Great guy. And in this episode, we talk about a lot of different things. Um, we get an update of what he's doing with foundation training and the streaming options that they now have at their website, which is awesome. Uh check it out. That that stuff literally saved me from back surgery. So um it's I can't I can't tell you about the benefits enough of how good it is. Uh and we talked about his research that he's really getting into about what he believes the future of chronic pain management will look like. And spoiler, uh, I think it's in the title of this episode, a lot of it has to do with cannabis. And we talk about that very openly um what we think about it and our experiences with it and what we've seen for you know people we love and work with. And Eric works with a lot of people, a lot of pro athletes, action sport athletes, uh, royal families, celebrities, uh, you name it. And you know, if there's one guy who has access to a lot of information, it's Eric. And uh it's great to have him on. So before we get into it, uh this episode is brought to you by Certified Course Creation, uh, which is a company owned by Kate, Heramillo, and myself. And uh we're always looking for great partners. So if you have a concept, right? Um you have a depth of knowledge in a particular area and you think it's beneficial to get it out in the form of an online accredited certification, uh, then we'd like to talk to you and find out more. Uh, you can go to our website and go ahead and uh schedule a call with me and I'll I'll chat with you about it and see you know how great the opportunity is. Uh and there's a lot of reasons to do it. You know, I talk about all the time. You look at like Dr. Eric Goodman and what uh certification has done for him and his business and how many people um have been certified now, creating this exponential impact across the globe. That can be you. If you if you have that type of knowledge and you have that type of will um to get something out there, then we'd like to be part of it. So go to certifiedcoursecreation.com, check it out, and without further ado, uh episode number 158 with the man, Dr. Eric Goodman. Enjoy the show. We're live. Dr. Goodman, welcome back. Thanks for having me. Good to see you, Eric. Yeah, you too. So uh for people who are just listening, explain where you are right now. I'm in Ohio. Thank you for watching. It's beautiful background. Yeah, it's nice. It's really nice. Well done.

I'm in uh I'm I'm actually I'm home in Oi, California, which is a place, you know, my wife Jen and I have been searching for different communities, different areas. We really love traveling and all that, but OHI has kept us, man. Really like it here. Uh the last time you and I spoke, we were in Oahu. That's right. If I if I do it right, if I really play my cards right and and and try really hard, I'm gonna try to live life between OHI and Oahu to the best of my ability. That that is a life worth living. The next time we talk, I might be in Kansas. Who knows?

I know I won't, I personally would not allow that. Nothing wrong with Kansas, but I just know uh no, that's not you, dude. That's your your Ohio.

Yeah, this is a good area. This is a this is a great community. Uh it's it's you know, it's just like Santa Barbara Carpentry. It's another extension of Ventura and that that really wonderful nearly central California coast. I love that. This area is great, it's beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, man. So it's been a while. I think it's been about a year actually since we recorded our podcast, believe it or not. I think um longer.

Definitely it's been at least a year, almost a year and a half. We were out of Hawaii by uh by June of last year.

Yeah, yeah, it's been a while. So maybe get get people a little caught up, man. Because you've been busy. I mean, you're always you're always keeping your done.

So the most exciting thing happening in foundation training and and in our world right now, honestly, is we're watching our daughter develop really well and and we're we're seeing a lot of uh really look. I I'd love to take credit, but I just had the fun part. Jen does an incredible job of really focusing just the the details of raising Sunny. Yeah, a little OCD about it, but we're seeing the benefits and and it's huge. So our daughter is almost two and she's really healthy. She's really well, she's she's she's really with it, which is cool. Cool. Uh and Jen is finishing up her book, which it kind of expresses how the parents can help children just lay the best movement foundation, you know, uh as we'd like to talk about. But how they can basically lay the best imprint for their child's developmental success. Uh it's it's going with nature, it's just allowing them to hit milestones when they're meant to hit them. And if they're not hitting them, Jen does a really remarkable job of helping parents understand kind of how to reverse engineer, get where they need to get to, and then move forward with accurate progress. Uh so her deadline is like in a in a month or so, and she's turning that that project in and that coming out in like you know, it takes like another handful of months or a year or so. But that's gonna be a really cool book. Uh as of right now, I think it's called Shaping Your Babies Foundation. And it's it's a really interesting, very healthy, very holistic guide to to new parents, especially. Um on my personal stuff, uh, we've been working really intensely with LA County Fire Department. Um, actually, since since I've been back in California, it was one of the reasons that we came back here. Uh, we're doing some very interesting research with multiple battalions in Los Angeles County at this point after a very successful beta test with uh a lot of their recruits and even a couple captains and chiefs that were part of this small but but interesting beta test. Uh, an eight-week inclusion of 10 minutes a day of foundation training led to in the 80th and 90th percentiles of decreased injury reports among recruitment classes uh over a pretty pretty substantial series of recruitment classes. Um, enough so that the Chiefs actually pulled us in deeper, and we're now doing an intra-battalion research. Uh, it's gonna take us like a year or two. So many. There's four of us that are doing it, and there's like 4,000 firefighters, and we're not gonna hit all of them. We're gonna hit most of them. You know, some are on Sith Leave, some are this or that, but we're gonna hit most of them. And over the course of that process of training all of them, they're going through this eight-week first responder program that we're really excited. We did it with them. We filmed it at Los Angeles County headquarters with their department, their film production crew, their chiefs, their captains. It's this, it's unreal. It's it's crazy. And before we release that publicly and make it available to other first responder communities, um, kind of sponsored by Los Angeles County Fire, we're testing it accurately with them. And the results so far are extraordinary. And I don't see why they would change, but we're not gonna push them out there, you know, until maybe like mid-2020, when we've got enough time, enough data, and can really show uh a proof of concept for foundation training at what I would consider the highest level, which is the most progressive fire department in the United States, uh, with a gigantic spread and some really serious injuries. They spend over $90 million a year on injuries currently. Right? Yeah, that's a lot, man. That's a lot of people.

It's I mean, I don't think people realize how big LA is. It's human. I mean, how many, what's the total count of of population? It's like 50 million or something like that.

It's somewhere between like 35 and 50 million people. It's it's remarkable. It's a country in in a handful of square miles, you know. It's gigantic, and it's surrounded by this massive wilderness that burned. You know, it's it's really a it's a pretty interesting place. Um, and the fire community in LA is is is very serious, they're very professional. We're we're fortunate to have about 10 certified instructors there currently within Los Angeles County fire departments that are active firefighters that bring foundation training in. Um a gentleman, Evan Halquist, who is uh in charge of training all of Los Angeles County's recruits. So he's he's in charge of kind of guiding the recruits in for their first, I think, six or seven week or through maybe three months or something like that recruit class. And Evan, who's been so he's actually on my core teaching team, he teaches certifications with us as well. It's a really gifted guy, he's a really gifted guy in a lot of ways. Um Evan has been introducing this to their recruits now for three years. You know, five, six, six recruitment, five or six recruitment classes minimum have have gone through this. And it's dude, it's it's in it's interfering with the culture of Los Angeles County Fire Department. Like it's changing, they're still they're asking for it, they're talking about it. It's it's they they liken it to when people decided to stop smoking cigarettes within the fire department. It was kind of taboo at first, and then it slowly filtered its way through until it was like, well, of course we're gonna, yeah, of course we're gonna adopt this policy. And it appears that foundation training is is on a similar trajectory where the right people have have found it. We've gone in as we tend to, which is like, hey man, our hands are behind our back in a very peaceful way. We're trying to bring you something that's only gonna be good for you, and we're not telling you not to do anything. We're just saying also do this and do it to the bare minimum, but do it. And they uh they're receiving it very well, they really are. We've been able to fix some pretty interesting injuries already that I mean it's this is the stuff that's like soul feeding, you know. We don't make money from this. We might down the line if all the research comes out and people are like, holy crap, foundation training heals, you know, 80% of injuries, we're gonna make some money down the line with corporate wellness programs. We're gonna we're gonna become part of the employee benefits thing at Facebook. And you know, we're we're kind of on these trajectories already. Um, the health clinics that that that are the in-house medical centers for Google, for Facebook, for Apple, they're all on to foundation training. They all like it. They've we've all done in services with them. Like what we're working towards can be served by this research extremely well. Um, or it might just show that this stuff is really worth doing, and we might just stay on the slow, steady progress that we're on, and that's cool too. But in my head, I kind of go to that that grandiose place every now and then of what could happen. I see it, I see the trajectory, I know it could happen, so let's keep pushing hard, see what happens.

Yeah, well, that's that's your job. You have the vision, right? And that's that's literally your job within foundation training. So, okay, for people maybe who who aren't as familiar with foundation training as obviously you are, because no one is, but me as well. You know, explain like how how is it helping the fire department? I think it's a great example. Like, how is foundation training actually affecting change?

The fire department is is a really unique series of people because those that are out there actually, you you get on the truck, not you wake up literally not knowing what you're about to get into. So your adrenaline is up here from the get-go. I am not a firefighter, of course, but I am very connected with firefighters and have been for most of my life. My closest friends are all firefighters, with the exception of Dustin, who's my partner in foundation training, who's a chiropractor. So all of us are either chiropractors or firefighters. My brother-in-law, Jesse, is my main resource, and and he introduced me to my wife 20 years ago. We got married a handful of years ago, but but because of him and his brother's influence on me and her, a lot of things happened, including having the firefighting world be just ever present in my life. And all those guys, man, all those guys, they just had a work ethic and kind of a I can do it attitude that that was awesome. That I I really I love. I fell in love with that. I felt I'm so inspired by that attitude. And firefighters have that attitude regardless of if they can do it or not, which could be pretty fucked. Like they're gonna do it. They're gonna push, they're gonna push through, they're gonna grab the person out of the car, they're going to have that heroic moment very likely in their career. What foundation training can do is it can give them confidence to move through that moment that moment with accuracy, with power, with less fatigue, with more strength, with more durability, with more likeliness that their reflexes are going to be accurate and their strength is going to be present to protect those reflexes. Because that's when people injure themselves. Oddly enough, the most common injury in the fire department is like getting up out of bed and stepping on, stepping off the truck wrong when you have 70 pounds of gear on your back and you tweak your knee, your ankle, your back, your hip, your whatever. Right. So, what foundation training does there is actually when you're in the truck, you're putting your gear on, you're sitting there, you're working on your decompression breathing, you're giving yourself as much force dispersion throughout your entire body as you possibly can. So that when you stand up with the gear, you're supported and powerful, and you're very likely not going to injure yourself. In fact, that stand up with the gear is like lifting a kettlebell all of a sudden. It's it's going to strain through you, it's going to recruit more tissue, it's going to make you a more powerful, more useful version of yourself. And damn it, I just don't believe anything does it as well as foundation training. And even you need kettlebells, you need weight training, you need pulses, but you need our work to kind of load the frame as well as possible to go into those. So one of the things that we actually teach the first responder community is called our baseline kettlebell. It's not swings, it's not presses, it's actually one isolated press. It's static holds, how to disperse the weight of a kettlebell the best possible way throughout your body, how to pick it up off the ground and hold it, how to pull it towards your body, how to recruit all of the tissue in your body with a light kettlebell as you press something over your head without collapsing instead of growing as you press. And those things are all taught by Jesse, who's certified in numerous kettlebell certifications and has been for years, as well as being our program director uh for foundation training, Jesse Solace. So what we can do for first responders is protect their base layer so that everything else they do is is more protected and more efficient. Efficiency is key. This the parasympathetic and sympathetic response you get and control with breathing is very powerful, but not if you don't know how to breathe biomechanically accurately. So with decompression breathing, we're teaching them to muscularly interfere with their current state of nervousness or anxiety or intensity. Muscularly interfere with it now. Breathe big, get the ribs to expand, get the serratus muscles to expand, feel your transversus abdominis really wrapping like a scroll forward and inward. And all of a sudden, you're out of your head, you're into your body, and your parasympathetic nervous system and your sympathetic, they start to just level out a little bit. You don't want one here and one here. You want them to always be able to do this, like a tide. You know, you don't want tsunamis, you want a tide. That's how the sympathetic and parasympathetic communication should work. And with biomechanics, you can really influence it at least, you know, 10, 20, 30 percent, which is a lot. On top of that, you add diet, you add timing of respiration, and now you're probably into the 50, 60 percentile control of your autonomic nervous system. But it starts with with where are my feet? Where's my head? How how am I supporting my wrists right now, my elbows right now, my shoulders, like what's just hanging and what's being supportive? And it takes like 10 minutes a day to figure that out.

Yeah, yeah. It's it's almost like it sounds like almost like a checklist for preparation, right? It's like you which and then through that process you get to control your state of arousal, right? I mean, sympathetic, parasympathetic, all that stuff.

It's awesome. Yeah, it's it is, it's it's it's a checklist of physical capacity and integrity, you know. Brian King, you know, Brian. Brian and I used to use the term all the time, structural integrity. I love that term. I love it. I think he got it from Rolfing. I think he introduced me to that term initially. Um, and I think Ida Rolf used to use it for to describe what what Rolf could offer, uh, Rolfing could offer what Rolfing could offer uh patients. You know, she was an MD and she saw everybody as a patient. I see everybody as a patient, and what we can offer is is relief to the various chronic ailments of imbalanced electrical energy or imbalanced force dispersion. And those come in as chronic pain, anxiety, sleeplessness, shortness of breath, headaches, digestive issues, movement issues.

Yeah.

It's not it's not trauma care. It's not emergency medicine, it's just aches and pains and agonies that really impact our lives.

Yeah, man. So you you brought me in, you brought that up uh into an interesting, you know, not a segway, but really more of a continuous line of conversation here. Um, you know, when people look at things like anxiety, depression, trauma, they usually look internally into the head, and rightfully so, right? You know, between um, you know, mindfulness practices or you know, a lot of medication, right? A lot of medicating, um, whether self-medicated or prescribed. Um, but very few people are looking into the physical side of things and how to tie, and this is one of the things we talked previously, and before the recording was, you know, how how are you getting into trauma, whether it be emotional, occasionally physical, and how are you using the physical aspect of whatever foundation training or the, you know, you're always learning something new. That's what I love about it. Every time I talk to you, I'm like, whoa, we just want to something completely new but linear, right? Um how how are you seeing that that relation? How are you how are you working on that with your patients?

So I I'm not in any way, shape, or form a specialist in trauma. You know, that it just seems to come with the territory a lot of it. So it comes with the territory. You you start working on chronic pain, and if you're with a patient enough, you're gonna start to recognize patterns very often that in addition to their external rotation of the right hip, might be increasing their symptoms just a little bit. And a lot of that has to do with like shallow breathing or you know, extreme reactiveness or overly emotional to kind of that doesn't really meet where that emotion maybe should be. Maybe it's a little too high, a little too reactive, a little too intense. And what you find with that is like you know, people kind of get stuck where they are. Uh, my sister, who's a marriage and family therapist, just recommended a book to me based on a lot of the patients I've been seeing lately who are very kind of stuck and really like they're kind of stuck in these traumatic moments of their life physiologically, it seems. No matter what, that's where they kind of they kind of ground out to. It's not a good baseline to return to. It's a it's a it's an internal safety blanket that's wrapped a little too tight and it's hard to break through. And she the name of the book is uh The Body Keeps the Score. The Body Keeps the Score. It's a very interesting book. I really like it. The guy who wrote it, uh it's a bezel. Bezel something. It's a name that I'm not sure of. I it's I think he's a European guy, but The Body Keeps the Score. It's a very interesting book. I'm about three-quarters of the way through it. Uh, and what it speaks to is what I would uh what I'm coming to agree with. It's not, I don't form these thoughts and then find people agree with me. I'm agreeing with this guy. I believe what this person is saying very much, and it coincides with uh another woman that I've spoken to, Dr. Belissa Branich, uh, who writes about breathing. She's a clinical psychologist, I believe, who writes about how breath work can impact anxiety, depression, mental health issues. Wim Hoff is a perfect example of somebody who is not from the scientific community or the clinical community, through his own personal practice, really challenged his depression so much so that he found ways to dominate it and to understand it and to coexist with it. And that coexistence is his control of breath and temperature. But everything he controls ultimately comes down to breath. It's really, really interesting stuff. Look at the XPT, you know, you go to the Uber athlete world with with Gabby Reese and Laird Hamilton, the the best of the best of the best. And at the center of their very interesting training methodology is calming the mind and the body through breath and temperature control. And uh it's it's everywhere, man. It's for geeks, it's for jocks, it's for old and young, it's for high blood pressure and low blood, low blood pressure. But you gotta become, you don't need to learn to breathe, man. You have to learn to control your breathing. Those are two very different things. Everybody knows how to breathe. It's an eight. And if you just stick with what you learn as an as an infant and what you go with, it's lazy. It's like lackadaisical breathing. It's shitty. You gotta get better at it. So at the heart of everything I teach now is decompression breathing, which is my way of physically expressing how the diaphragm is pulled away from center. And I've been working on that thing, that description since we've known each other pretty much every day. I'm starting to get it down. I'm starting to understand how you stabilize the central tendon of the diaphragm from all angles. And it's so interesting, man, because all of a sudden I'm seeing all these strength programs with arrows that look a lot like my stuff from true to form, man. Look a lot like my lectures I've given, and there's just no, you never see it. You never saw these people talking about breath other than abdominal bracing. You know, we brace the abdomen, we do a valve maneuver.

Yeah.

All of a sudden recognizing that. All of a sudden, people are recognizing that the rib cage has to get out of the way for the diaphragm to stabilize two chambers, one being the visceral, one being the lungs and the pleural tissue and fluid around them and the heart within it. Like those two chambers have completely opposite pressures. This one is compressive, this one is expansive. You can't just put the fucking arrows there. You have to give the explanation. And I'm seeing all these arrows going with piss poor explanations. They're trying to almost teach of salva with a decompression breath at the same time, and they're complete opposites. So, long story short, breathing is really important, and the fitness and strength community are starting to recognize it too. And what I just said sounds like I'm trying to take credit for it. I'm not taking credit for it. I'm saying that people are catching on, and I caught on too. You know, but breathing has been around longer than I've been around. And breathing improvements and holotropic breathing and controlled hyperventilation, uh uh shit, sticking your tongue at the roof of your mouth and breathing is a form of meditation that's been around for thousands of years. We're all just catching on. We're all just catching on. Well, don't not your finger, sticking your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

I was like, what?

Press the roof of your mouth, the soft palate, up. Just breathe for a couple minutes. It ensures that your mouth stays closed. It supposedly stimulates the pineal gland a little bit more. Yeah. If you add that upward trajectory at the soft palate, if you add that up the upward trajectory to the soft palate with the tongue, you can add this vasopressive from like the root of the diaphragm, the low belly diaphragm, up, up, up. And if you've ever seen people that kind of vacuum their gut in, that's what a vasopressive uh breath is. Dr. Joe Dispenza gives the best description of vasopressive breathing that I've ever heard. It's on YouTube. I don't recall exactly where it was, but Dr. Dispenza just, I mean, nailed breathing better than anybody I've ever heard. Um, if I can find the link, I'll send it to you after this.

Please do.

Yeah.

Man, it's it's interesting to me. I um, you know, I didn't pay as an athlete most of my life didn't pay a whole lot of attention to breathing. Um, I've talked about on the show quite often. Like, and you last time you and I talked, we had a long conversation over cell phone, and um, you know, I told you like I I had some trauma in the last three years, right? And it getting through that, and one of the things that's helped me tremendously is now in the morning, I do cold exposure first thing in the morning, and then I do Wim Hof breathing. And it's it's blew my like at first. I just did it because, well, it makes me feel better. And then I started getting really getting really into it, right? I'm like, I'm starting to notice. Yeah, right. Yeah, and I uh I'm starting to notice every little piece of my breath. You know what I mean? Like how each breath is different. And I think that's like an incredible awareness of like I can tell how different one breath was from the other and where I breathed into and what part, how that makes me feel. And that type of awareness I'm super grateful for. I mean, nowadays, if I'm having a stressful moment a day, I'll stop, I'll take five breaths and do it specifically the way I know that works for me. Like, I didn't even know I could breathe into my upper back. Like now you do. Yeah, I lived 40 years of my life not knowing that I could actually breathe into my upper back. Like I didn't even know I had access to that, right? And what that's done, and I don't know the physiological, all I know is that it works for me, and that my natural default state in the morning is anxiety. But once I get through my routine, I'm cool as a cucumber. You know, it's not always perfect, but I'm drastically different now.

And let's be honest, how hard is your routine? How difficult?

It's not difficult at all.

Like at all, right? It actually perpetuates health and feeling well as you're going through it.

It takes willpower, right? Like nobody likes to step into a cold shower in the morning, right?

But you choose your stresses. That's a that's a chosen stress that helps all of the others be more manageable.

Yes. And it's great. I talk about all the time. Like, I don't know why more people do it. And the guy who got into me, Jake, if you're listening, thank you. Jake uh is a tattoo artist up here in Montana who's a very successful uh tattoo artist. And he's like, you know, in Matin, he's like, I want to share something with you, man. Because he's like cool, he's very successful. People fly in from all over the world to get artwork done by him. And what part of Montana? He's in Whitefish. Yeah, Bertelson tattoo. Nice. Yeah, Bertelson art. If you guys everyone wants to look it up, it's it's tremendous. But yeah, it's it's one of those things where I it made me realize through, you know, and I'm I'm I'm a fitness guy, right? I'm an athlete. Like I've it's been my world forever, yet I didn't know how to fucking breathe until my 40s. Yeah, it's wild. I'm not alone, right? And just those little things that you start to notice, and all you have to do is like, well, no, it doesn't have to be just go breathe intentionally. Start with that.

People have to start thinking of breathing as their greatest capacity for a workout at any point, at any moment. Uh if you breathe very powerfully, it's one of the most metabolically active things your body can do. Muscularly, uh, the pressure exchange that occurs is very caloric heavy, meaning the uh the in and out of the diaphragm movement, the in and out of the lung exchange. Like the chemical respiration's no joke. Your body works really hard to maintain healthy chemical respiration, and the first place that happens is in the lungs. You get yourself out in nature, you take a lot of really deep breaths with as many muscles as you can, and you're going to positively influence your body and your brain. You're going to.

Yeah.

You get out in a city, you get a bunch of car exhaust, you you kind of close in a little bit, you you rest into yourself, you kind of shield yourself a little bit, you're gonna feel a little bit more anxiety, you're gonna feel a little bit worse, you're gonna have worse chemical respiration, you're not gonna die, you're just not gonna feel as well. You're gonna the your quality of life will be that reflection of exactly what you're living in. Um, and that's not to say that people that live in cities and things are unhappy or less happy, it's just a different baseline. The good thing about living in a city is that when you go to these healthy places, you really experience the sensation of health and relaxation if you get if you let yourself. So, you know, they're both good. They're both good.

It's contrast.

The breath control is massive. Breath control allows us to enjoy life as we get older and as the demands of life continuously increase. Uh, whoever or however we got designed to this point of evolution, to this point of physical sensibility and sensation, we have all the tools necessary for an extremely pleasurable life in the face of major adversity.

Yeah. Oh, that's awesome, man. So you uh we had talked, you know, before recording about a vision you have for the future of pain management, really, right? And how how you see it unfolding. I know you've been researching, you've been doing a lot of research in cannabinoids and CBD and THC and and all the collective body of work you've been doing for the last 20, 30 years. So play it on us, man. What do you what do you what do you envision?

I definitely didn't start this when I was eight years old.

No.

I'm gonna I'll say I'll say 10 to 15 years. Okay, fair enough. I don't want to over I don't want to overshoot it, but it's been a very involved 10 to 15 years. Yeah. Uh so my future, the idea of what I see as kind of a future of pain management exists in a certain demographic of pain, which is chronic pain, which is lifestyle ailment meets repetitive stress meets uh sh you know, fucked up relationship, challenging job. You know, you're acting up kid or family member or dog or whatever. This your stress is a little high, your pain is a little up, your diet's not perfect, and you're just sick of it and nothing's working, and you've tried a couple surgeries, you've gotten the injections, you're on medications, and you're just tired of it. You have found some success in things like foundation training, perhaps. You have found some relief, but you're not over the edge. You're not over that control mechanism. I changed my pattern, my habit edge. I think the future of pain management lies in that small window of changing that pattern entirely, of guiding people over the cliff of you have to kind of go through and change your pattern. You have to jump off the old pattern and go full on into the new one. And there's some really interesting tools available to us that are intentionally adaptogenic. They guide and assist your body's natural ability to neuroplastically adapt, to meet challenges and improve upon them. The endogenous cannabinoid system is a big part of it, literally. Literally a big, gigantic web that that coincides with both the central nervous system, the lymphatic drainage system, the peripheral nervous system, the joint tissue. It's incredible where this thing is. And what it does, this is not my lesson. This is what I've learned over the years, and what I'm trying to kind of dispel the people a little bit and help them understand a little bit, is it's kind of dispatched for homeostasis. This is the best way it can possibly be explained. Yeah, it's not that it does any one thing, it's that it has a minor role in everything, which is why I think I like it so much because I feel very similarly about foundation training, where if you improve a little bit of movement, it improves a lot of elements of life. If you get your endogenous cannabinoid system better at A, supporting itself, meaning you have enough of the fatty acid building blocks to build these receptors and maintain these receptors and maintain the hormones that these receptors are stimulated by, you're going to maintain your body's capacity to find balance intersystemically. The heart, the heart rate, the digestive rate, the breathing rate, the digestive rate, the excretion rate, the uh the the genesis of new red blood cells, the use of white blood, all of these things are governed by individual systems that are governed by this overwhelming inter-systemic communication dispatch called the endogenous cannabinoid system. The research pointing right now at CBD is wonderful. It's awesome. It's opening a really hard gate to open, which is stigma, and it's allowing hemp and cannabis to move into that gate slowly, allowing people to say, oh, maybe it's not as bad as we've heard. Oh, there's medicinal benefits, interesting. Oh, but let's make sure we avoid that psychoactive component, THC. I hope people take as long as they need to, but I believe the future of pain management exists more in THC combined with CBD, combined with healthy diet, combined with heat and cold, sauna and ice, combined with healthy light exposure, salt exposure, electrochemical balance through EMF management, not avoidance, by the way. EMFs are relatively natural. We give off electromagnetic frequency. They're very similar. It's just management of all those things, all those things are managed in some small part by the endogenous cannabinoid system's ability to inter-systemically manage homeostasis. Should everybody start smoking pot? No, but some people should. A lot of people should. Or ingesting it through oils or tinctures or transdermal, whatever it is, start looking towards savory foods that have a little bit of cannabis in them. Smallest amounts possible. Milligrams, itty bitty. Everybody is sensitive to that stuff initially. And it's not something you need to necessarily build the tolerance to. You just got to get your body good at stimulating its own endogenous cannabinoid system. Some people can do that by smoking pot, but you don't smoke pot and then sit on the couch. You and this is something I gave a lecture about, the lectures on YouTube. Um, you don't you don't just passively use these wonderful adaptogenic herbs. You use them and then you move towards the human being you want to become. End of story. That's how they work. You want to learn something cool, research cool things and put them into practice. If you want to learn about pot, don't just start smoking pot. Learn about it. Learn about all of the different metabolic benefits. Go read the studies that correlate human metabolism being improved long term with pot smokers and THC users versus others. Diabetes and things like that are significantly lower in those populations versus people that drink alcohol or even against non-users of anything. There is a regulatory function within the endogenous cannabinoid system that lends itself to tremendous pain management and lifestyle management benefits. But it has to be done in conjunction with things like foundation. In fact, the greatest confluence of uh endogenous cannabinoid receptors, CB1 receptors, is very close to the thoracic nervous plexus, which is you know, along the back edges of the rib cage, these spinal nerves that branch off. There's about 12 of them. And within those nerve branches lies the autonomic nervous system, as well as the greatest confluence of cannabinoid receptors, as well as the greatest opportunity to change the biomechanics within the body through breathing to give as much space as possible for chemical exchange, chemical respiration. The back of your rib cage is an incredible place, neurologically, electrochemically, and biomechanically. In decompression breathing, we expand upon it, but in all my level two work, we really create these rotations that really widen the lat muscles and expand upon that thoracic plexus accurately. One of the really interesting reports we get from our level two instructors, of which there's only 50 so far. We only have done two courses and we cap each course at 25. But our level two instructors report psychological benefits in addition to pain management. And I'm not asking them to report that. I'm not asking them, hey, tell me what's happening. They're just like, this is what's happening. There's a big focus on breathing and all of the new work. Big. Every single breath is focused on. And with that comes what happens when you breathe well. I don't recommend hot during my courses or anything like that. I just think that if you're a person who's really truly trying to get better in life, and you're considering any form of medication or supplementation, your first consideration should be marijuana. CBD initially, and once you feel ready and courageous to explore small amounts of THC to your tolerance.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's an interesting time. It really is. And I think people in our grade age group, especially, like um who are not naive to marijuana, right? Like my dad's 83, and um, you know, it's a product of the 50s, right? There's always a stigma. I got busted my fair share, you know, growing up with holding. And uh that's you know, those are foolish mistakes. But you know, and I would always he was very disappointed, he was very upset, right? And now, you know, it's funny is that everything's come full circle. My dad, you know, due to years of dentistry and just cranking on people's teeth, he's got tremors in his hands, and nothing works, right? Um, except CBD. And now, like, you know, it's it a funny story is that he he called me, he's like, Eric, you know, when you visited last, you gave me some C BD and it worked. It like it had to reduce at least by 50% my tremors. I'm like, Dad, that's fantastic, right? And you have so many things he can do when his hands aren't shaking. Like, you think about that. Think about if your hands are shaking all the time, right? What things you can't do. He couldn't put a golf ball on the teeth, right? He couldn't do things like that and broke my heart. And and then he calls like Eric, I'm out. You know, stuff you got me, I'm out. Can I can you get me some more? I'm like, Well, Dan, I'm in Montana, right? Like, what do you what do you want, you know? You gotta figure it out and I'm like, well, actually, hold on. I made one call to a local dispensary in Truckee, California, and within 20 minutes, they dropped off two bottles of C B D at his house. And he was like, first, well, we were both blown away. I was like, Whoa, what kind of day are we living in? Well, I'm ordering C B D for my dad, right? Yeah, who's always against it. But then so it's like you start to see that, and you're like, wow, this is this is fantastic. Like we can just push that stigma aside and just look at it for what it is. It's a medication, right? It's a it's a something that's ancient, yet for some reason, well, we know why. We don't want to get into the history of it, right, and the politics of it. But that like we know now, like this is this is a very, very good thing, and it's solving a lot of problems. And but there there needs to be education behind it too, because what you said is critical. People can't just go to you know, a new dispensary and the first time they use it, they go get edibles or whatever. That is bad fucking news, right? Like people need to start feel like garbage.

Yeah.

Or worse, like you just completely you're like, oh my god, that was way too much. I can't stop, I'm can't get out of my own head. I never want to do that again. Gone. That opportunity is gone to help that person. And that's something I think people need to take more responsibility for. Because, hey, you know, the the 23-year-old who works at the dispensary, um, you know, giving it to someone in their 80s, like you gotta be really fucking careful.

No, there, and one of the biggest differences, it's this is going to change as legalization takes a stronger hold. But you get a mil, you know how many milligrams you should take of at bill. You know how many milligrams you should take of X, Y, or Z. Never do they say we don't really have an upper limit. But maybe start small. They just say, here's your dosage. And in fact, the upper limit is 800 milligrams. Do not exceed that amount. In marijuana, there is the, I mean, for some people, three milligrams of THC is too much. For some people, they'll never feel 50 milligrams of THC. There's no standardization among the body. And that has to do with the uniqueness of everybody's different cannabinoid receptor systems. Everybody's different. You have to start small. CBD is by far the greatest entry point. Once you've entered, once you feel, oh, maybe you know, I think that's helping, I would argue continue with it or maybe even move into very low dosage healthy ratio THC, CBD. And if you feel like exploring, have some fun. Go get a joint and see how it goes. You know, it you don't have to be that safe with it. The reason I like I actually really like smoking pot compared to eating pot. Because you're just getting a lot less at once. It's a faster, it's a faster registry. Your brain will tell you, okay, maybe no mark. Whereas when you're digesting it, all of a sudden that wave comes and it might be a tsunami. You know, it might be a big wave. You don't know.

Yeah. And that's, you know, uh everybody who has been using, you know, marijuana or or however you want to say it, taking marijuana, like there's always that story about the edible, right? Yeah. Like, well, I didn't feel any, I didn't feel anything, so I took more. I'm like, oh shit. Yeah, I know I've heard this story, right? I've heard this story before. And it happened to my wife. And uh yeah, yeah, and it's it it I think it needs the right attention, you know, and and things can go a long way. Um it's cool. It's cool to be around it's happening.

My wife's a champ. She never, she would, she, she wouldn't over, she wouldn't get that that nauseous feeling. But I've had a couple ex-girlfriends that that did. And I was like, all right, all right, you you had like half a cookie. It shouldn't be happening, right? And they all it seems like people that drink a lot they have a very, very low tolerance to cannabis. Um, and maybe people that have a decent tolerance to cannabis actually have a very low tolerance to alcohol. Um you know, you both of them have to do with what you have in your system. With cannabis, it's it's the sensitivity of your endogenous cannabinoid system. With alcohol. Alcohol is the capacity of your body to produce alcohol dehydrogenase, which breaks down alcohol. If you have a body that doesn't produce a lot of alcohol dehydrogenase, you have a lot of toxic alcohol in your system until it's broken down. If you have a body that produces a ton of alcohol dehydrogenase in and out quick, very little hangovers, very little residual issues. So everybody's different in everything. And marijuana is not for everybody. Nothing is for everybody. But I suggest chronic pain patients and neurological autoimmune condition patients, any autoimmune condition patients, any neuroendocrine cancer patient. If you have pancreatic type cancer or anything like that, get your ass to the dispensary. Find a doctor that's going to really promote cannabis in your life. But it doesn't work for every tumor. You know, not everything is a neurologically driven tumor, a hormonally driven tumor like neuroendocrine tumors. So you have to get very specific on what the thing is for. Cannabis can help a lot of things, but it doesn't help everything. And I don't think it cures anything. It's just a helper.

Yeah. So let's let's clarify the formula, man. You because you all you have you eloquently laid it out. But you know, for the future of trauma and dealing with it, where what do you see the major components of it? I mean, you know.

Breath.

Go ahead.

Breath work. So first is like the basics hydration, nutrition, breath work, biomechanics, meaning healthy bodyweight exercise that integrates breath movements, especially hip movements and shoulder movements and big joint movements, big bodyweight movements. Once that has been exhausted, you move into supplementation before medication, unless medication is absolutely needed, which sometimes it is. If the medication that is needed is a pain management medication, like an opiate or a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, then I highly suggest that you make the transition as quickly as you can, or at least attempt to, to cannabis. If your condition is cardiovascular disease, and you have angina-type pain as a result of that, you gotta be with a doctor. I'm not giving you advice. I'm just not giving you advice. Breathe to the best of your ability, but everything you do should be under the care of your cardiologist and talk to them about medications and cannabis and all that stuff. Um but for chronic pain, your next step should be looking into cannabis if you're not already. And the reason you're looking into cannabis is so that you can start to break the patterns of needing other pain management groups, like you know, from Advil to Tylenol to aspirin to oxycontin to fentanyl. Up that whole trajectory, there is a competition at pain management receptor sites that cannabis can compete and hold a candle to every single one of those. It's been proven time and time and time again. They compete for the same receptors. Because of that, because they compete for the same receptors, it's really a matter, you know, which one do you want to have more of? Yeah.

Yeah.

There are a few, there's a few pain management drugs. Um P435 or something like that. You can read if you just type in uh CBD contraindication medications, there's a class of drugs that have an enzyme in it that CBD basically makes those drugs ineffective. Like it competes so well against them. So people that are using those drugs have to be aware that all of a sudden their dosage might have to skyrocket up to be getting the same benefit they were getting. It's because CBD competes so well. Like it's a very interesting compound molecule. CBD is one of the more interesting compounds in hemp and in pot. One of them. There's various CBDs, there's various THCs, there's all sorts of things. And uh I mean the jury is definitely still out on on how good it is for us, but it seems it's it's at least decent for us.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, man. Well, I mean, I'm a 25-year case study. I'm doing all right for the most part.

And uh I'm I'm 12 years behind you, but doing my best to catch up.

Well, yeah, it's part of playing water polo in northern California, man. It just came with the sport. Um So tell us what's what's new in foundation. You guys have um you know streaming available now? You have a lot of different, I guess, delivery devices for what you do.

Last the last time we spoke, the last podcast I did with you, that maybe like a year and a half ago or something like that, we had just started creating our streaming platform, which is a it's the congregation of all of our uh it's our whole catalog. It's everything I've ever put out. Um, from the oldest stuff I did in 2011 to the most recent stuff that we're putting out this month, next month, the month after, the month after, the month after. We've kind of become a machine. We uh we we brought in a production company named Paul. Paul Paul has made all of our videos over the years, and Paul actually owns a production company called West Beach Films. Um, but we made Paul a partner, a full-on partner in foundation training, and have kind of pulled in all of that production equipment and capacity. So we're making things fast now. And we've got some really talented education team that also is very fit and very strong and moves very well, and every single one of them is injured, used our work to get better and then learned it so well that they became part of the crew. Um, all of us are injured. That's the most interesting part of our team now, is everybody on the team has back injuries or hip injuries, and many of them had surgeries. And it's it's it's a good place to teach from. It's a very compassionate place to teach from. Uh so the streaming site has everything from like sports specific, you know, surfing, running. Uh, we're gonna have we have a golf program that just came out that that's we did it with my TPI with uh Dr. Bobby Duval of My TPI. That came out like a month or two ago. That's that's doing pretty well. Um, we have all this stuff coming out with Los Angeles County Fire Department. We have a desk bound program that is literally done at a desk with the chair. Like most of the work is done in the chair or just getting out of it. Uh a minute or two at a time. It's it's four hours. We're gonna have a nice, decent corporate offering pretty soon. Um what else do I have that I want to talk about up there? Oh, we have our baseline program. Our baseline program, so it started as an eight-week program. We walk you through every single day for eight weeks, about 10 to 20 minutes a day. You literally, you next video, next day, you just go down the line. Uh, and we just added six weeks to it. So now it's 112 days where we walk you through every single day. Every day is different, and you use it compounds the learning. By the end of that 14 weeks, you know foundation training in your body so well, it's crazy. And you can really move into all of our different programs. You can do a lot of the level two stuff. We have there's probably 30 poses on there that are taught individually, and then each of those poses is present in you know, there's probably 300 workouts up there between all the programs and everything.

Awesome, man.

Yeah.

That's huge. I mean, you've um you've always created amazing content, and I'm excited that you're doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on that because it's it's just it's just a great way to get out there. I mean, the thing about, you know, people don't know about you, Eric, is that I think you are um so much about the mission and the impact, right? Like the monetization, I mean, everybody wants monetization, but that's always been kind of secondary. You've always kind of sacrificed parts of times to do what makes sense and and create your vision and and you know, like I said, force the impact that you want to see. So that's I think it's extremely commendable. And I I think now um, you know, as every time I talk to you, you evolve into a different way of of following that that vision and that impact that you want. So it's it's it's awesome, man. And I think uh, you know, thanks. I'll keep talking your praise and because you, you know, dude, you got me, you got me out of surgery, potential surgery. And that's like I'll be eternally grateful for that. And it's awesome. So thanks for coming back on, man. It's always a pleasure.

That's that's awesome. Thank you for such kind words. Uh I'll keep doing what I'm doing. I love it. And and our streaming site is 15 bucks a month. And if the best I can do in my whole life is make a living at 15 bucks a month and support my crew and support my family and support their families, we're getting there, man. Yeah, yeah, you can get there. And that's with a ton of free stuff. Our YouTube is filled with free stuff. Yeah, yeah. You can learn a lot of foundation training for free, and I'm very happy if you do.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Well, thanks for coming on, Eric. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Eric Goodman. Welcome back. We'll see you again.

See you soon, Eric.

Hey fitness fans, don't leave yet. It's your host, Eric Malzone, and I have a quick favor to ask. Actually, three favors. So, number one, if you're a fan of our show, I ask you to do something that takes under three minutes. Go to iTunes, please, and subscribe to our show. Please, please, please. It means so much to us. It's so important. And then give us a favorable review. We would really, really appreciate it. And uh, I can't tell you how much it means and helps us out. So I know it takes two minutes of your day, and uh it means a lot to us. So please do that. Number two, go to our YouTube channel or fitness marketing alliance, and uh please subscribe to our YouTube channel there. Number three, if you like this episode or any of the episodes that we've released, share it on social. That's huge, that's a big deal for us. And we're we put a lot of work into these episodes, uh trying to give you great actionable content uh for the fitness industry. So that would mean a lot. And that's it. So we have some big plans coming up for this show. I'll be talking about that in the next couple episodes. But thank you so much for listening. It means so much. And uh, if you have any questions, please reach out to me. I'd love to hear from everybody. Eric, E R I C at Fitness Marketing Alliance.com