GOATA, or the Greatest of All Time Actions/Athletes is a functional training system with an end goal of saving the worlds connective tissue. It’s the most durable, fluid, and explosive way that a human being can move. The idea originated when our founder, Coach Gil, experienced years of back pain and found no helpful way to correct it. Taking matters into his own hands, he ended up studying 1000’s of hours of slow motion film from the worlds top athletes. These are the elite movers of our time, whose multi decade careers were largely injury free. Think MJ, Deion Sanders, Randy Moss, Simone Biles, Allen Iverson etc. At a fundamental level, they all showed the exact same patterns of movement. From here he was able to reverse engineer what they were doing, break down those processes, and create an exercise model that completely eliminated the pain he was experiencing in his day to day. It’s important to note that while he came up with exercises centered around the principles of the worlds most durable movers, he didn’t actually reinvent anything. These are basic, fundamental movement patterns humans across history have intuitively understood, that have all but disappeared in the modern world, except for a select few groups. On top of elite athletes that are kinetically gifted, these same patterns have been observed in indigenous tribe groups, babies, and ultra endurance athletes aged 80+ .. what do these groups have in common? None have been affected by the modern technology that has taken over our world.
Think about this fact. Homo Sapiens have been walking the earth for 200,000 years at the least. And up until about 100 years ago, our ancestors generally relied on physical movement to provide for our families. Hunting for food, traversing open planes to conquer new territory, tending to our land, even just doing manual labor at the factory. They didn’t have the ability to sit down at a desk, open up a laptop, and get to work. No, they had to physically exert themselves in order to survive. There’s no chance humans would have evolved as far as we have, if we didn’t have the ability to navigate the world without injury. A torn ACL or achilles back in the day was a death sentence. Hence why it rarely happened. We believe that us humans were perfectly designed by a supernatural force (GOD), as beautiful creations, to efficiently move pain free throughout space and time to further advance civilization. Pain free movement is your birthright. And the human body was simply not designed to be as immobile as we are in the year of 2022.
So why does everything hurt..? All the damn time. You’re not alone here. This certainly can’t be normal. Although there is no malicious intent behind (some of) the technologies of the modern world, put simply – they keep you STAGNANT and COMFORTABLE. You were born to move, play, dance, run, and jump. Not sit in a chair all day long, with your neck scrunched forward, looking at a screen. Don’t forget about your commute, that’s another hour or two in a less than ideal position. Those shoes you wear? Likely compressing your feet, leading to a laundry list of problems up the body. You see, everything is connected, so when one area of your body starts to hurt, it leads to overcompensation, misalignment, and discomfort in other areas of the body.
But enough of the problems already. If you’re still reading at this point, you’re probably looking to understand how the GOATA method can help you move pain free. Let’s take a high level look at what the system is.
There are several laws of GOATA that are crucial to keep in mind in order to move like the elites.
Back-chain dominance: Think of your body as two different planes. You have the front side (anterior) of your body, and the backside (posterior). All of the big boy muscles are on the backside of your body. So naturally it would make sense to derive our movement and power from here. When pressure sets on the front side, it leads to a compressed state of being. And when pressure is set and created from the backside, your body and spine are in a decompressed state. To instantly operate from a back-chain state – keep your hips set behind your ribcage when at a standstill or moving.
Foot Control: Inside Ankle Bone High – When training, most people neglect the positioning of their feet and honestly for good reason. It’s very easy to overlook this body part as you might not think there is anything wrong with your foot and ankle positioning. However, that could not be farther from the truth. Let’s use a house as a good analogy to the human body. The first thing completed when building a new home is to set the foundation. You pour the concrete and make sure that everything at a base level is secure. Without that foundation, the whole house is susceptible to collapsing. That relationship with the ground is incredibly important. Your body is no different. Your foot and ankle are the first and only body part consistently making contact with the earth. Let’s call this the foundation of your house (body). And there’s a right way to lay the concrete.
There’s a natural arch structure to your feet. And just like any arch structure in the world, when an arch collapses, the rest of the creation falls apart. Your body is no different. So by recoding our feet to keep the inner ankle bone higher than the outside ankle bone on all movement, we can train ourselves to keep the integrity of our natural arch. This means that the pressure is largely going to be felt on the outside balls of our feet, with little to no weight on the heels.
Column building Through Straight Feet: Now we can divide the body again into two parts, called the columns. This is where all of the load joints are aligned and will ideally move in a synchronous fashion. Your ankle, hip and shoulder are all ball and socket joints that when have enough space, can essentially act as pivot points for your body. To ensure the columns are fully supported, the feet need to be properly underneath the above joints. This is typically a bit closer than you might be used to standing like. You don’t want your feet to be pigeon toed or have those ugly looking duck feet, sticking out to the side. We want our feet to be pointed straight ahead, which can be identified by the first or second toe looking ahead. This will force the hips to set behind the ribcage, bring you into a more back-chain dominant state as we talked about earlier.
Head Control: Your head is the heaviest part of your body, so it only makes sense that we want this to be supported by the columns when we’re moving. This allows for explosive fluidity.
Preparing the Energy: Within GOATA, and your day to day life, there are two fundamental movement patterns observed. They would be how you “land” on the ground, and how you “leave” the ground. When you land on the ground, you set all the pressure into that leg, and it’s what we call the bow. If your foot and ankle are in the correct position, when you land, you’ll externally rotate your leg outwards at a 22.5 degree angle, which creates a bow shape. This is like a mini slingshot in your leg, and the upper body follows this same external rotation.
Releasing the Energy: The second well observed movement pattern is found when leaving the ground. We call this the “corner” and is the process of your body releasing energy to go from an outwards position to an internally rotated position. It’s a 45 degree rotation that sets up your body to land perfectly on the other side, creating the next bow.
As with any system, I don’t claim this one to be a perfect one. It truly is a revolutionary way to move and has personally eliminated most of the pain I felt in my knee for over a decade. And while it’s a fantastic system for those who want to create durability in their movement patterns, move pain free, it’s probably not going to get you jacked to the gills.
That isn’t everyone’s goal, but ultimately, building strength via traditional weight lifting is a huge factor into your longevity and one of the highest ROI activities you can participate in. So that’s our biggest gripe with the program. While most GOATA coaches have strayed away from traditional strength training, we still want to maximize our strength and look the part. Since GOATA is slightly limited in that sense, we’re not pigeon holing ourselves to just GOATA training. It’s moreso the hygiene to the lifting patterns.
This hopefully gave you an inside look on how the GOATA system was created. If you’re looking to become a better athlete, move pain free, and move beyond the limitations of your body – book your free movement assessment here.