How To Get Rid of Back Pain & Get the Best Posture of Your Life in Just 12 Minutes a Day

Use this routine and forget about back pain for good

Do you ever catch yourself in a mirror or see yourself in pictures or videos and think, “Man, I hunch too much.”

Maybe you don’t care about how you look, but you’re starting to feel pain down in your hips, up by your neck, or out in your shoulders. Hell, you might even have a full-blown spinal injury.

I know I do. Despite long years of athletics, including yoga and martial arts, I grew up with video games and laptop computers, cell phones and desk jobs, and like many of you, I’m often horrified by the slouched posture I sometimes find myself in and despite regular mobility work, I started getting pain sans improvement.

So what can you do about it? In my experience, mobility work is amazing but isn’t always the most approachable. It can take long periods of regular practice to start seeing results, and it can be hard to decide what tools, tactics, and techniques are the best for your situation.

And while I definitely use mobility for all sorts of other things, I recently discovered the most effective method ever for quickly eliminating back pain and fixing up your posture.

What Is Foundation Training?

Whether you’re dealing with pain, want to prevent it, or just want to look better, there are all sorts of reasons why fixing up your posture can change your life. Back pain is the number one cause of disability worldwide, and there may even be psychological implications to hunching too often.

It turns out you and I aren’t the only ones who’ve become frustrated with the available tools.

Back in 2007, Eric Goodman was finishing his final year of Chiropractic school. That same year, he was recommended for spinal fusion surgery to deal with back pain he’d been experiencing since he was 19.

Despite trying everything he learned and having some of the best access imaginable to non-invasive solutions, Dr. Goodman could not solve his own pain.

But instead of taking the fusion surgery, he decided to look at the problem through a different lens. Contrary to the classical methods of building our “core” by training our ab strength, Dr. Goodman experimented instead with training his weakest muscles: those of the posterior chain.

The resulting program is what is now known as Foundation Training, and the results speak for themselves.

As Eric began experimenting with focusing the majority of his training on his neck, back, butt, hamstrings, and heels, the pain he had been dealing with for 4 years quickly evaporated. Shortly thereafter, he began teaching his ideas and was eventually asked to help Dr. Terry Schroeder with the USA Olympic water polo team as their chiropractor and strength coach.

Water Polo is an incredibly demanding sport. I myself played it in high school (where we somehow managed to make it to the state championship), and to this day, it ranks as the hardest sport I’ve ever played, including full-contact MMA, rock climbing, Competitive Crossfit, and long-distance running.

Even so, Eric was able to keep the team injury-free and they surprised the world by taking a silver medal at the 2008 games in Beijing that same year.

Since then, Eric has helped thousands of people fix their backs, ranging from clients who have undergone multiple back surgeries that were able to become nearly pain-free in 2 months of foundation training to other top athletes like Derek Fisher of the LA Lakers and Lance Armstrong himself. He had helped people get off pain meds, resolve pain that physical therapists couldn’t, and get folks back to their lives when all seemed hopeless.

And when I came across his work shortly after beginning to feel sciatica pain, I latched on immediately.

How Does Foundation Training Work?

While I’ve already laid out the basic premise, I’d like to delve a little deeper by talking about my experience with foundation training. After all, the theory is great, but the results speak the truth.

I found Foundation Training (say that five times fast) as someone who is already engaged with daily mobility work. Having studied the work of those like the legendary Dr. Kelly Starrett or used the Gymnastic Bodies program by Christopher Somner here and there, I’ve been doing 10 to 30 minutes of mobility work several days a week for years.

Even so, I found that these tools seemed to require a lot more time than I had or cared to commit in order to see big results, at least for my back. I still had ulnar nerve issues in my right arm (that sometimes got worse with mobility), and as I said earlier, I began experiencing the first noises of sciatica pain.

If you don’t know, sciatica effing sucks. This pain is caused by impingement to your sciatic nerve, usually where it runs through your hip bone at the buttocks. Sciatica can cause intense pain, burning, numbness, and immobility throughout your leg, and when I first experienced a dull buzzing tension in my lower back at the hip joint, I got paranoid real quick.

Looking for solutions, I came across an interview with Dr. Eric Goodman on Aaron Alexander’s podcast (author of the align method).

I’d never thought about back pain from the perspective of strengthening the posterior chain, and while I’d trained in deadlifts and kettlebell swings on occasion, this was clearly something else.

The way I’d describe foundation training is like an ab routine for your back. You know how we’re always throwing ten-minute abs at the end of our workouts 3 or 4 times a week? Eric described how what we should be doing is 10 minutes lumbar, and you should train your posterior (back) 3 to 4 times for every 1 time you do core.

So I decided to try it out.

I bought Eric’s book and read the first section. And stopped.

Not because it wasn’t any good, but because I also hopped online and did the 12-minute foundation training routine Eric posted on YouTube back in 2011.

When I tell you I have never experienced better posture in my life, I’m telling you I. Have. Never. Experienced. Better. Posture. In. My. Life.

After completing the 12-minute routine, I swear I added an inch and a half to my already 6’4” frame (no easy feat), and the sciatica pain was gone.

And what’s more, the effect stuck around for the rest of my day. I found myself looking out from this new, chest-out, stable, great posture. The way I walked felt different, how I moved felt different, and everything I did came from this place of deep stability.

I’m not sure if it’s related, but I also haven’t dealt with my shoulder nerve issues either, something that months of banded distractions and other techniques couldn’t quite guarantee.

How To Get Rid of Back Pain and Get the Best Posture of Your Life (in 12 Minutes a Day)

And that’s it. Yep. All you gotta do to feel this yourself is hop on YouTube and type in “12-minute foundation training routine.”

Do the original 12-minute routine or the new foundation routine (I alternate them daily) and just go through it. I’ll warn you, it isn’t the easiest in the world but also not the hardest, and I’ve gotten many of my own clients on this practice regardless of athetlic ability.

After you finish, Eric will end the video with a simple statement that I hope you’ll take to heart: “Do this every day: no back pain ever.”

Well, I’ve been doing it every day, and so far, he ain’t lyin’.

What’s more, this routine has not gotten in the way of my ability to do any other training. On the contrary, I think it’s boosted all of it. The only slight exception is that I don’t like to do this routine immediately before a run, but I will throw it in after or a few hours before other exercises.

So, while normally I love to put all sorts of fancy techniques in these guides or give you 8 ways to do X or Y strategy-based, I am more than happy to say that this one is simple.

Open youtube. Do foundation training once a day. Eliminate back pain and get great posture.

I will say foundation training does work great as a start-of-the-day routine. I’ve used it in that capacity in the past, as well as later as a break between work blocks or after a workout. Personally, I have found that as long as you do it daily, you’ll see results that extend further and further beyond your sessions.

To put it plain and simple, there are not a lot of things I think everyone should be doing. Foundation training is one of them. Aaaaand guess what. I have absolutely no affiliation (or plans for affiliation) with Foundation Training or Eric Goodman whatsoever at the time of this writing!

This is purely an article about my favorite tool for back health that I have ever found, and I am not at all alone in that assessment (ask Matthew McConaughey).

Here’s that 12-minute routine. Go get rid of that back pain, tiger.