 Okay, we're gonna get started here, everybody. Appreciate you all coming out after lunch. And how many people went to the movement session right before this? All right, got a good group. So my name is Jason Moore, and I'm honored to introduce Dr. Eric Goodman. And Eric has helped thousands of people manage their chronic pain and fix their degenerative movement patterns. And he's also the author of Foundation, which is redefine your core, conquer back pain, and move with confidence. So without anything else, I'll pass it over. Great, thank you. Thanks. He is surprisingly accurate in that description of who I am and what I do. That is the first book that I wrote, and it's been a really interesting process of evolving my work since then. And that's what I'm here to present to you all, is the evolution of this program as opposed to the protocol of this program, which is very easy to learn. That's not what this time is meant for. Foundation training is a very simple process. It's a modern remedy for our modern times. In an ancestral group like this, I feel like I really don't need to go much further. As everybody here seems to agree with me, this is very preaching to the choir. So at this point, are there any questions? Anybody? No? I appreciate your time. Thank you. We've evolved. Which has a reasonably positive connotation to it. But if it is really considered, it's just a process, it's an action, evolving, and you evolve towards anything you do more frequently than other things. It's your body's job, it's evolution, and we've evolved to postures that harm us. We've evolved to movement patterns that are detrimental to our movement patterns. They take us into compressive patterns that hurt us in a variety of ways, and there are several experts, some of them here, that have incredible methods of getting you out of these problems, and this is just my collaborative effort to share my piece of information of helping my own spine, and hopefully it resonates with some of you. We move different, we have to learn to move the way we're meant to move. Has a lot to do with the hip joints. There's this idea of complacent adaptation. Again, when you evolve, it's an action, you're just evolving towards the things you're doing most frequently, so what are those things? What are you paying attention to? What are you repeatedly asking your body to do? Most often, it's what we're doing right now, which is unfortunate, which is sitting. I realize the hypocrisy in a lecture like this, but I'm standing, I'm feeling pretty good. A lot of people wind up getting to foundation training because of back pain, and a few years ago, I would have been standing up here talking to you very heavily about back pain as something that must be treated holistically, something that requires the integration of muscle chains, and something that can be managed very easily through movement, as we know, at least some of us know. But what has happened in the past few years is that I have seen that just like my talks about back pain involve the symptoms of back pain being treated improperly instead of the root cause, what I'm starting to recognize is that back pain is just as much a symptom of this modern dilemma, this modern plague of compression of our tissue, not just our spine, our tissue. Gravity acts everywhere on us, downward, literally pulling us towards the center of the earth, and it is our job, we literally have the physiology that is composed ideally to push back against that, and we're not using it well. Back pain is one result of misused gravity, misresisted gravity, but it's a perfect opportunity to learn how to do it well, and the things that occur when you learn how to manage gravity well, when you learn how to put your body in angles that actually develop a lot of power in your structure, give you the muscular ability, the muscular integrity, the structural integrity to support your torso musclarly and expansive as it's meant to be supported, quickly mitigate things like back pain, but also show you how much thought patterns, digestion, other organ function of every kind, breath patterns, all of this has to do with the same patterns that break down your spine and lead to back pain. Lifestyle illnesses like back pain, lifestyle imbalances are the real root problem that seems to be showing itself, and in my young, reasonably inexperienced and mildly uncredible mind, I think that compression is really showing itself as this major, major societal malfunction that is hurting our health, hurting our spines, hurting our communities, hurting our healthcare systems, because it presents something that is extremely challenging to treat if you break apart the systems of the body into systems. It's extremely hard to treat if you look at nervous system, cardiovascular system, muscular system, structural integrity of any kind requires all of those things to go as close into collaboration and conjunction as possible, and what the medical system tends to do, what we as patients, ourselves tend to do is respond to a symptom that takes us further away from the congruent symmetrical movement towards balancing the systems of the body, including the muscular systems, instead of taking it further away. That's what foundation training does, in my opinion. It is decompression in a compressed world, and it's a modern remedy for a modern plague with symptoms like back pain and other structural breakdowns. We'll get a little bit deeper into that. I have a couple anatomy slides that I'm gonna try to get to at the end of the lecture. I don't want to take too much time in there, but what I do want you to know is that every exercise I teach you is rooted in the philosophy that the rib cage has to first expand so that the muscles that surround the rib cage that are really rigid right now and actually blocking your full inhalation, often blocking your full chemical respiration through breath, need to learn to expand muscularly and contract muscularly in order to allow our most repetitive function of breathing to occur well. Otherwise, every breath that we're taking is impeded. And if your breath is small, if you're taking in 60, 70% of the amount of oxygen that you're meant to be taking in, you're getting rid of 60 to 70% of the amount of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that you're meant to be getting rid of, which leads a lot. It leaves so much stuff residual in the lower lobes of the lungs. One of the big things that people see when I first start teaching them decompression breaths is they'll get lightheaded for like three or four breaths, which is actually, I think, quite a benefit. But as they're doing this, they're like, oh no, am I doing something to my vasculature? Am I doing something to this or that? Do I have some kind of weird hypobloid pressure? No. You're literally getting carbon dioxide and monoxide out of the lower lobes of your lungs at a greater volume than you're used to and you're going to feel a little bit lightheaded for a moment and then it goes away. And as we do decompression breathing, I bet a few of you will feel that and have it go away just as quickly. Now's actually a good opportunity to start that. Everybody sit up just a little bit taller in your chair. This'll be the first of a little bit of a demo. And I'm going to get yelled at for stepping out of my light but I think if I warn them, it'll be okay. You have to have your thumbs at the base of your rib cage. You have to have your pinkies at the base of your pelvis. That's your measuring stick. And I also want your knees coming just a little bit closer towards each other and the toes pointing towards each other just this much. Every time you inhale, I want you to increase the distance between the ribs and the pinkies. Your shock assign should get bigger. Every time you exhale, it should maintain the height it just got. That's your job on the breath out is to maintain expansion. Let's do three of those and I want you to start pulling your chin back ever so slightly and noticing how it allows the sternum a little bit more space to move. Big breath in to elevate. Big breath out to maintain the height and expansion. Two more. As you breathe in, if you're doing it correctly these front neck muscles are gonna start contracting just a little bit and if you were to talk you would sound similar to this without the microphone and then just relax and sit down and just compress. Enjoy. Correct breathing facilitates powerful posture. And posture is an incredible dynamic thing. Very, very, very important in your daily life is the way that you go about every movement that you make and that's what posture is. It is not an isolated static process. It is the body that you take into every movement you make. For some of you that are pretty intense lifters and such if your posture sucks, your lifts suck. That's the way it works. If the body that you bring into a position is unstable that position is unstable and if you're loading additional resistance on top of that you are very likely giving yourself the proneness to hurt yourself more. You might be accelerating the degenerative process that might already be going on in your body very likely. And your job as an athletic healthy person wanting to move towards increased physicality, increased athleticism, increased endurance in the spinal muscles that protect the spine so that the hip joints that protect the body can move well, you got to learn to breathe. You got to learn to breathe really muscularly, frequently and with a lot of focus. One of the most important things you can do in your life and this is one way of doing it. There are many others. Just make it a huge priority in your health if you're a person who seeks it to learn to breathe. Posture requires power. If there's one thing that I harp on in my teaching it's that you can't go about changing a pattern lightly. We are very reluctant to change. So much so that our body produces rigidity as a result of repetition in a lot of tissue and it's moving wrong. It protects itself through rigidity. Therefore, if you're starting to change these patterns you're going to initially be met with severe and significant rigidity. There is a certain degree of muscular integration and muscular contraction that is required in order to open tight things. And tight is usually less a result of short muscles as opposed to muscles that are rotated off their axis. The hips so frequently externally rotate. The shoulders so frequently internally rotate. That you require exercises that balance those things out. They powerfully force the shoulders open and teach the muscles to maintain that posture. They take the strongest muscles in the body from the pelvis down towards the femur, the adductors and they take those muscles and stabilize the pelvis inward so that it doesn't have the option of being unstable. You're not simply changing the plumb line in your body because that's only going to affect you while you're actively changing the plumb line in your body. You have to remind the muscles frequently with a lot of intent and a bit of intensity where they're meant to be. And the degree of strength that is actually asked of them to stay there, to be there as often as possible because we have done so much to ourselves unintentionally but we have done so much to ourselves to go the other way. Mental well-being, something all of us are continuously working for myself certainly, including, you know, we're never balanced, we're always going there. Physically, mentally, energetically all of these things, we never get there. We're going there, we're moving towards it. Mental well-being in my opinion is this idea that we are not meant to overreact too often or underreact too often but we're supposed to really work on our reactions and how we react to ourselves, to pain, to people, to whatever stimulus is being pressed at us. Whatever that is, our reactions are very important and I want to go back into that basic compression talk and I want to talk about the compression that occurs from sitting so often right at the gut. The rib cage literally, it begins collapsing downward towards the pelvis and there's some really important tissue in here and a part of that really important tissue, not just the digestive system, not just the reproductive systems but the nervous system that lines all of that stuff, the enteric nervous system is literally being compressed upon and the posture of compression here leads to a posture of compression here so not only is the base of the enteric nervous system being compressed upon but the communication vessel of the enteric nervous system as it goes up through the SCM muscle, the sternocleidomastoid into the brainstem and offers us as much advice as it can give us about our fight or flight response to any given stimulus it is being compressed upon. The thing that dictates the degree to which we react to any given stimulus is just as much a victim to the compression at your spine, compression at your torso, compression at the lungs and rib cage as the discs in the spine. Yet the only thing we really think about is the pain associated with compression. Chronic pain is a thing, it's a piece of these puzzles and the reactions, the mental wellbeing, the thing that is going to either help you make good reactions, good decisions, move towards health or react poorly and move away from it is in the exact vicinity with major communication coming from the digestive tract up to the brain, dictating our thoughts and processes, not telling us what to think but giving us the theme of the message, giving the thoughts, the fuel to go this direction or that, good for us, bad for us, overreacting, underreacting, whatever it is. Fight or flight is some serious stuff and when you're stuck in a really intense sympathetic reaction, when your autonomic nervous system is told to stay tense and stressed, your muscles do the same. Which goes further into this basic pain of chronic muscular breakdown. Tight muscles, short muscles, twisted muscles, a body that is moving away from balance instead of towards it does not feel well and it doesn't make good decisions. Mental, physical, these things are so tied in. It's not just this idea of mind, body, being an idea, it's the way it works, very seriously and I love preaching to the choir in here, I know that that's what we're all here for. Physical ability, very, very important. Mental wellbeing, physical ability and inspirational capacity are in my opinion the things that compose a posture that is dynamic through life. Physical ability being the representation of what you can do with that posture, physically. Don't do that. We choose the degree of health we want. We don't have to elevate ourselves or drop ourselves down to anybody else's desires in health or physicality or endurance or strength but we should be able to maintain our own and we should be able to do the things that we want to do as well as we can as often as we can and that's health. Your posture should support your health in such a fashion that you can do the physical things you want to do. If you wish to progress steadily, your posture should also progress steadily. You should be getting progressively stronger so that you can support the additional physical improvements that you're making. That all goes together. Inspirational capacity is two-fold. The first one is physical. It goes back to the breathing that we were mentioning, that I was mentioning. The expansion of the lungs is literally your inspirational capacity and as your lungs are becoming too rigid because they're getting used to being compressed upon by your shoulders, pressed up upon by your digestive tissue and inward by the pull of your pecs, your inspirational capacity physically decreases. Your ribs get used to being here and they actually, instead of protecting the rib cage and the heart and the visceral tissue, they impede it. They're overprotective. We've all had somebody in our lives that's that way and it's terrible, it's very limiting. The other part of it is the inspirational capacity that you carry with you in a different realm. What happens when you go places? What happens when you interact with people? Are they going to want to become better as a result of that? Or are they going to have to be kind of repelling whatever it is you've got going on? Are you livening people up? Are you motivating them? Are you making them excited about what you do? Are you making them inspired about how you live your life and how you carry yourself and how you consider yourself, respect yourself? All of these things are shown physically, mentally, all of this stuff and stuff. It's a really big part of inspirational capacity and it's a really big part of health. One of the biggest problems I see in the world is people taking health advice from people that aren't healthy. And here you have the opportunity to give health advice without saying a word by simply living the things you preach. Keep yourself healthier. When somebody watches you breathe, they should watch you being strong, not collapsing inward on yourself. Your posture represents so much about who you are and it is worth your while to work extremely hard at maintaining it and improving upon it throughout your life at any age. I've had clients from three years old to 93 or 94 or 95, I don't know, I might be lying, I might be like 92, that might be the oldest. In the 90s though, for sure. And they all improved and they were able to improve to varying degrees and it's because they repeated a process. There's no magic in movement whatsoever. There's no miracles in movement whatsoever. There is simply the obvious cause and effect that if you strengthen your body as it's meant to be strengthened, it will get stronger. The visual response when somebody sees a body that's getting stronger and its natural position is to go, hmm, I'd like to do that too. It feels good, it seems. That person seems happier and more energetic than the people around them. There's something calm about them because posture that is truly powerful resonates calmness, it doesn't resonate intensity. It's not this, it's calm, but it's very powerful. It keeps your body ready to move, which keeps you with the knowledge that you're ready to move. It's not going to hurt you when you go this way, that way, that way, whatever. It's not going to hurt you to pick that up or to get that. And that's a huge thing that is lacking in so many people's lives is physical confidence. Is the video still in here? Do you know? There might be a video. There is. So this is Franco Colombo. He's Arnold Schwarzenegger's old training partner. Thank you. And what I wanna show you is just two feats of strength that both require powerful posture. I want you to notice the long spine, the tricky internal rotation at the knees that looks like it should be making him weak, but it's making him very strong because he's doing it well. The neck position, the width of the rib cage being one of the most important things you're seeing here. Look how broad the back of this man's rib cage is. Every breath he takes pulls his upper back away from his hips. And I want you to watch his ribs. This is a hot water bottle. Look at the expansion. Notice he's not a belly breather. Feats of strength often don't have very much to do with this. They have to do with a whole body doing what a whole body does well, which is pulling together to lift something or pulling out to push something. The rib cage has to have movement for the body to have strength, and it's a surprising thing that so many schools of thought practice this as their first strengthening process because the problem in modern society and the vast majority of human beings that live in it is this. Why would you take us further into a posture that is hurting us? We're already strong this way. The vast majority of people are not strong this way and this is what we have to look at as a possibility as movement helping us improve is extension and expansion and lengthening as opposed to shortening because everything else we do shortens. And then just another simple visual cue of strength and a very different body type. This is my model of reactions is Bruce Lee. This is a guy who spent his short life working entirely on his reactions and has the physical representation of a man who's done that, that's what it looks like. These are the things we all hear. Your knock need, your hyperextended, your flex, you got pigeon toes or duck feet or whatever it is. They're imbalances that are isolated in their expression, feet out, feet in, knees out, knees in, head forward, head back. They're isolated, they're compartmentalized. Another really good example of that is anterior pelvic tilt or posterior pelvic tilt. Who cares? It is the center of the body being off axis and you don't fix the center of the body only at the center of the body, you fix the body. You bring the entire body towards balance which will then allow the center of the body to move towards balance and maintain balance but if you just fix the center, you have a lot of external appendages to worry about later. That you're likely going to take further away from balance in isolating the center. The core of the body is not the abdomen, it's not the lower back, it's the pelvis. It's the structure of the pelvis and therefore the muscles that are meant to make the pelvis move are the muscular core of the body as they control the center of our physical universe. That means the muscles below the pelvis are equally if not more important than the muscles above the pelvis because it is the counter pull that keeps it centralized. The hamstrings, the adductors, the iliacus muscle, the hip flexors, sartorius. Psoas muscle is reasonably important but it goes actually from the femur across the pelvis into the spine and is much less a player than people are led to believe in overall breakdown of the physical body. There's little things like all of these terms that actually take us further away from balancing out the human frame because they have us looking at a symptom of imbalance and then we go really heavily towards it. Sometimes we even brace these things. Sometimes we even get these people to really, that's a nice sound, how appropriate Esther, just kidding. Just kidding. All of these things have to be lengthened first. Muscles pull. That's what they do. They pull from point A to point B based entirely on the direction and length of their muscle fibers. That's all they do. They don't have other forms of autonomy. The body is what really dictates where point A is and where point B is and very often those points move away from each other not lengthwise but rotationally. And if you have point A and point B connected like this in straight lines and then this happens, there's some serious differences going on and discrepancies going on on the strings that are connecting those things. And it will really feel like if you do this or this, like some of them are really tight, really loose. And if you spend all of your time doing this and this, you know, oh, oh, doing these little stretches, you're going to feel and find these tensions but you're not going to manage them accordingly. You're not going to manipulate the process that is causing those tensions to be tense. So we're gonna stand up for a second as reluctantly as possible. As you stand, I want you to stand very tall. I want you to think of just a few of the things that I've said here and I want you to get long. And for the time being, let's keep using this little measuring stick of the thumbs at the base of the ribcage and the pinkies at the pelvis and let's just expand. Every breath in expands upward and outward, front and back. And every exhale, challenging as it may be, does not let those things collapse. Your goal in every single breath you're taking in this room right now is to expand the ribcage in both directions. On the inhale, on the exhale. The exhale is going to feel like the abdomen is working very hard. The inhale is going to feel like the back of the ribcage and top of the ribcage are working very hard. Keep going with that. And we're gonna actually turn the toes in. And I want you to grab the ground with your toes a little bit or grab your shoes with your toes. Grab something. Grab your neighbor. Stand as tall as you can and as you're lifting the torso up, we're just going to hinge back ever so slightly. And this is not a new idea in any way, shape, or form. In fact, this is just what the hip joints do, is hinge. They pull the sacrum back away from the front of the pelvis. Taking the front of the pelvis with it. It's gonna feel like your lower back is engaged. Some of you with very tight posterior chains are going to feel like the hamstrings engage very quickly. Let your knees unlock about this much. And if there's a chair in front of you, reach your hands towards it and your hips as far away from it as possible. But don't let this happen. Don't squat into it. Pull the hips back and lengthen the back of the legs until they're almost straight. Not here. Still a little unlock. And feel the hamstrings increase as the arms reach forward and the hips pull back. This is lengthening the posterior chain eccentrically. The process of taking a muscle from shorter to longer is an eccentric contraction. And this is taking a chain of muscles from shorter to longer. The tighter the lower back gets, the more it challenges the hamstrings to lengthen under tension. Keep the lower back tight. Keep the hips pulling back and keep increasing the distance in those hamstrings. And I want you to notice that if you turn your knees in a little bit, the hamstring stretch is going to feel ever so slightly different. Even the lower back is going to feel a little bit different. And if you turn the knees out a little bit, it's going to feel a little bit different. You're going to be using slightly different muscles and it's going to slightly illustrate that idea that point A and point B aren't always shorter or longer but twisted. Let's try to stabilize ourselves for about 10 seconds here. Hips are back, lower back is tight. If you can find the hamstring stretch, find it, then I want you to turn your palms up and lift the hands as high as possible. And I want those of you with postural problems to notice that your head goes like this and I want you to pull the back of your neck longer, not the chin down, the back of the neck up. And hang on to this for about five more seconds. Let the lower back burn a little bit. See if you can squeeze the legs in a little bit and try to find places in which more muscles contract to support this position. And then just stand up and relax and shake it off. Sit back down if you would like to. Just feel what your spine is doing with its new length. The practice of repeating muscular stability, taking a spine longer, supporting it more effectively is one of the most important things you can do for your health because a long, strong spine allows the hip joints to work as well as possible. It allows the rest of the tissue in the body to maintain its expansion instead of just compressing, which is what we don't want to do. Compressions all around us, it's readily available. We have to kind of fight against it. So back to basic chronic pain, basic compression. Why aren't people finding relief? It's because we're looking at the wrong part of this. We're responding to chronic pain acutely each time we find it. We're treating the same pattern breakdown as if it's the first time it's happening each time it happens, and that doesn't get us better. That gets us worse. We can't do that. We're also photographers. Modern convenience is a big part of this. The things that we do take us away from adapting to challenge. Being able to be as comfortable as possible in various positions, laying down, standing up, sitting down, driving, having phones that take us in, having screens that take us in, everything converges inward on us, and our bodies are responding by converging inward. And as our torso converges inward and we rest on our pelvis, our pelvis expands outward, and that's a really crappy thing to have happen. It stops the glutes from functioning properly. It allows the lower back to become the weight-bearing structure of the body. It's not meant to be. It allows that rotation in the muscles to occur. It allows the arches to flatten a little bit as a result of lack of muscular tension above them. It just has a whole bunch of processes that really hurt. This is our solution to it. And our solution to it should be used among and with other solutions to it, certainly not exclusively. There is nothing in the world that exists in isolation and health. There are pieces that help one another help you. And there are certain pieces that really seem to help other things help you more. In my opinion, foundation training is one of those things. The integration of this work into your spine, into your hips, into your life, into your neurology allows you to benefit more from other things you're trying to benefit from physically, mentally, all of that. The act of becoming more mindful of your movement, which is what this is, it develops physical sensitivity to your problems, will take you closer to mindfulness in general. This is all a daily practice. It is not an hour-intense workout once or twice a week. It's five to 10 minutes a day of repeated movements that challenge your posture as much as they can possibly be challenged so that your posture responds because when your posture responds, every other movement you do improves. It's really cool. Two principles, decompression and anchoring, they are the heart of foundation training or the core of foundation training. I'll use that instead. Decompression is the action above the pelvis of pulling the tissue up, out, expansive, creating an upward pull and it's responding to the anchoring muscles below the pelvis, creating a pull from the femur to the pelvis, from the arch to the femur, creating muscular tension from the iliacus muscle to the adductor muscle down the leg all the way into the arch with an upward pull that actually gives a counter tension to the decompressive pull above the spine and creates proper expansion and muscular support in the body. Every one of our exercises is rooted in anchoring and decompression. It's how you know you're doing it right. The integration process is very simple. Muscles are meant to be integrated with other muscles in their fascial chains. They contract together better than in isolation. The integration of these principles into your life will make your life physically better. As your life improves, physically your life improves. It makes you feel better. It makes your body function better. It helps you sleep better and it naturally tends to help you eat better because you want to continue feeling well. Integration is huge, but that's the practice of this. This isn't a gym program. This is a movement program. This is not going to help you move like a child moves because children and adults are very different. Babies don't have necks. They do, but they're very short. The proportions are very different. There's this process of ossification that occurs over time that seems to make us more rigid as adults and we have to learn how to use our adult bodies. We don't have to mimic this. We have to learn how to use this. It's very different. I've seen a lot of people become very frustrated because they're trying to do this sort of thing without maintaining the process that is required to be able to move this thing. Don't get stuck in that. This is my spine. It's messed up. It's crappy. It's compressed like crazy. Everything I talk about, everything I teach is 100% my experience of pulling myself out of injuries, maintaining my own not wanting to have fusion surgery on my lower spine. My L5 and S1, you'd think that this was my L5 and this is my S1, but this is my L5. This is my S1. They've grown together. They have a very close relationship. I'm happy they get along well. They used to not get along at all. But these days, with enough support around them, they figured it out. My primary support structure of muscles has finally taken over for my secondary support structure of joints and connective tissue. And it's taken several years, and in that several years I've learned how to teach other people the things that I do to maintain my own spinal health. Health. They're one and the same. I don't take this stuff lightly and I'm very new to the game of posture and lecturing and writing and teaching. However, I won't stop doing it because I've seen the absurd amount of people that when they integrate the same process into their lives that I've simply done into mine get better. And it's been a really fun education. I actually graduated chiropractic school and then started learning. I don't practice chiropractic. I teach. I teach movement. That's it. It's such a different way of being a doctor but it's such a rewarding way of going through life. To share with people, literally, just what you do so that they can implement it and get better. And I'm still very surprised at the amount of people that implement it and get better. I'm gonna go back to the Q&A if we have time afterwards. I wanna just, these little anatomy slides that I'd at least like to cover. So I've said iliacus, I've said adductor a lot. That is very, is that as fuzzy as it seems to you guys? Or can you see it pretty well? Okay, looks really fuzzy from here. So the adductor is on the inside of the thigh. Let's go to this one. It anchors the pelvis. It literally has a muscular action and muscle fiber orientation that takes the femur and pulls it hard into the hip joint. So that the hip joint becomes more stable. When that adductor is out of its effective position it does a better job of pulling the knee in than the hip up. Because the other muscles have twisted out of the way, the iliacus muscle, this one that lines the inner wing of the pelvis, the thing that is so often put in together with the psoas muscle, the iliopsoas doesn't exist. There is an iliacus and there is a psoas. They do very different things. The iliacus participates in maintaining the adductor's integrity so that when it pulls it pulls up instead of in. Because when it pulls in it hurts your knee, flattens your arch, makes the IT band too tight and keeps you stuck in external rotation. When you're stuck in external rotation we get things like piriformis syndrome, sciatica, basic lower back pain, glute amnesia, medial knee pain and flattened arches. It is a direct response to our hips opening as we sit, as our spines collapse upon them. The only reason that our hips open is to make space for the tissue on top of them. If you pull away from that hip opening, close the hips a little bit, you are coming closer and closer and closer to maintaining structural integrity as you sit. But these are things that you have to work on hard. I'm gonna plug you here. I think Esther does a very good job of teaching sitting and teaching positions that help you maintain that posture well, keep length in your spine which is one of the most important things you can possibly do when you're sitting. One of the most important things possible is to maintain spinal integrity in the positions you maintain most often. What you do is sitting, you have to start maintaining it. You have to start finding spinal length or you're going to have a series of problems if they're not already there. External rotators are huge. When they shorten, we go duck foot, we're just turned out. It's almost impossible to effectively hinge your hips back when you're externally rotated. The glutes have to get out of the way. They have to lengthen as the hip internally rotates in order for the tailbone to pull back. So very simple mechanics don't allow that to happen very easily when you're externally rotated and your feet are out and you're flattened arched. You have to pull away from that so that you can pull the hips back which repetitively strengthens the muscles that are required for pulling the hips back. So everybody sit up as tall as you can. Squeeze the knees in a little bit, lengthen the spine as much as possible, pull the chin back as much as possible. Think of lengthening the muscles along the back of your body. Think of lengthening the back of the neck so that the SCM muscles get long and support your neck as they're meant to. And just take two full deep breaths that they feel like they lift you out of your chair. Do it as hard as you can like you're lifting heavy weight. Make this into a resistance exercise. As you exhale, try to go further up and then just bring that into your life. Learn the basic stuff. I've got free videos all over the place that's so easy to learn how your body works. There's other people doing similar things that will literally just hand you their information like I will and say, take care of yourself because it's good for the world when you do that. Take advantage of that. Take advantage of me. Take advantage of the other people in our community that are really trying to teach you things that are experiences that we've had that have helped us and just get better. It's the whole purpose of doing this. It's the whole purpose of coming to a conference like this. It's the whole purpose of being alive is to get better so that you can help other people get better too. So just enjoy that. Thanks so much for listening. If there's a Q and A, let people know that I'll kind of scoot outside. I guess I can let them know, can I? We have a little bit of time to take questions right now, I think too. I'll take the mic over here. Please step over here and just speak into the mic if you have a question. Pretty please. Hi, thank you so much. I'm actually really interested because I suffer from chronic pain, but it's nerve pain. It started out as structural pain, tendonosis, tendon tear, et cetera. Now it's something called complex regional pain syndrome. And I'm wondering if you've seen anybody who suffers from nerve issues use this as a way to sort of help themselves and if so, how? I will, it's in conjunction with another thing which is dopamine therapy. Which is, and I'm speaking of one patient that was one of the first patients I worked with that I worked with for over three years. And this I worked on the movement end of this. She had forearm CRPS. It was literally flexors that were, you couldn't touch them. What we worked on was not the flexors. We opened up the muscles that are responsible for opening flexors, which are the extensors. And we didn't do the agonist antagonist thing. We went much higher up in the chain. We went into the lats. We went into the opposing adductors and we started lengthening things that were being pulled on really hard. The dopamine therapy she was doing was amino acid based. It was something called the Kalish method. It was very powerful. I'm probably reasonably known within this circle. But it was just like this thing called demacuna which is just an amino acid based neurotransmitter replenisher. And there's no cure in most imbalances. It's not really how they work. But the collaboration of movement and practice, better diet and neurotransmitter support had her through that process in about three and a half months and then for three years it did not come back. And I don't know that it's gone still but I haven't spoken to her in about a year, year and a half. And I would assume that that's because it's still gone. And she was about 66, like 65, 66 years old when we began. But that is my only experience with CRPS. Still really great, thank you. And Dr. Goodman said he'll be around after for more questions. So let's go ahead and wrap up everybody round of applause.