The Baseworks mission is to promote physical and decision-making autonomy as well as a sense of personal responsibility for individual and societal health & well-being.
Baseworks is an education on physical movement, with a focus on theoretical and conceptual frameworks. This is because we believe that the way we think about movement changes the way we move.
While we operate in similar realms, our educational focus stands apart from both the goal-driven sports/fitness industry and the relaxation, stress reduction, self-help, life coaching, and mindfulness sectors of the health and wellness industry.
Our development involves creating new categories and terminology that currently don’t exist in the health, fitness, wellness, and popular science industries.
The function of the Baseworks Method is to educate people on how to learn to better understand their bodies and develop foundational physical and perceptual skills for easier learning. For most, this leads to improved quality of moment-to-moment experience in daily life.
We believe that Community is essential for mental and physical well-being. We organize our activities in ways that support meaningful interactions among people of all ages and backgrounds. People who train with us report that the Baseworks Method significantly impacts their lives.
Our general Research & Development objectives are to clarify the role of physical practice and physical movement in [what is generally viewed as] non-motor processes, such as attention, memory, decision-making, perception, awareness, sensory discrimination, emotional regulation, and interpersonal relationships.
The backbone and the overall approach behind the Baseworks Method has evolved from Patrick Oancia’s experience in athletic and contemplative practices, teaching movement modalities, and rehabilitation from sustained injuries. His approach was meant to address common issues he observed across the pastime sports & fitness sectors: lack of consistency and a clear structure to progress, the 2 extremes (push hard or don’t push at all), no focus on the foundational aspects, and no focus on physical sustainability. It was especially meant to help learners who had trouble understanding movement instructions.
The Baseworks Method was further developed and fine-tuned at Patrick’s studio in Tokyo, where Baseworks Practice public classes were offered from 7 am to 10 pm, 7 days per week, to thousands of students by a group of dedicated teachers under the direction of Patrick and Satoko Horie. Satoko’s involvement as a dedicated Baseworks practitioner and co-developer was instrumental in systematizing both the Method applications and the certification framework. This was an essential step to generate a coherent distributed teaching body. The Method was continuously optimized for safety and effective skill development (especially for individuals with low body awareness/low PQ) as well as consistency and transfer potential (reproducible teachability by the distributed teaching body).
The evolutionary process at the preceding stage led to the development of many effective applications that diverged significantly from common exercise applications, rationales, and narratives. At this stage, Asia Shcherbakova, PhD, was invited to “reverse engineer” the Method and connect its applications with known categories in modern science. Her collaboration with Patrick and Satoko led to the formulation of the Baseworks Movement Principles and a new wave of educational formats, based on the introduction of the principles with the subsequent transfer to practical application. This approach allowed to further improve the learning curve among students, and we collected multiple testimonial accounts of the Baseworks Practice effects on physical and cognitive functions.
At the start of the pandemic, Patrick, Satoko, and Asia collaborated with director Nicci Keller and 10BAN Studios in Tokyo to film the entire Baseworks movement syllabus, marking the beginning of the development of the Baseworks Practice Platform. During the pandemic, the Platform was launched, equipped with features for progress tracking and data collection and featuring a variety of Baseworks Practice sessions and newly-developed digital-only educational video material. Also, The 3 types of Body Awareness framework was developed based on the analysis of the testimonial accounts to allow for a more detailed discussion about the effects of the Baseworks applications and movement practices on awareness and cognition.
The Baseworks team continues further interdisciplinary research and discussions with various specialists in education, neuroscience, exercise physiology, philosophy, musicology, and other neighboring disciplines, creating new educational materials and research & collaboration frameworks. After a prolonged absence from the public eye, the team is restarting educational activities globally in the form of events, lectures, and collaborations. The focus from now on is to place the Baseworks Method into a larger context of Physical Intelligence, an application-based and neuroscience-backed umbrella concept that offers a fresh and unifying view on the role of movement in health, experience, and cognition.
Our vision consists of making physical intelligence-enhancing tools accessible to diverse groups, sharing our research findings, and engaging in further interdisciplinary and research collaborations. If you would like to collaborate, please contact us.
The heart of the team is pretty small, but we wear a lot of hats. Apart from the development of educational materials, we handle everything in-house. We build our own websites and apps, and we’ve even picked up some coding skills to realize precisely what we want. And all the graphic design, photography and video production? That’s mostly also us. We are constantly out in the field, with a strong focus on meaningful purpose as we work on refining the practical and sustainable aspects of our objectives.
We are incredibly grateful to the thousands of students and hundreds of teachers who have been part of our development, both in the present and over the past 20 years. We couldn’t have come this far without them.
To dig deeper into different aspects of the method and its correlation across different ideas, check out our blog and podcasts. For information on upcoming Baseworks events, please visit our events listing page. To inquire about custom programs or suggest a collaboration, go here. Or, contact us for anything else.
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