The 10 Common Effects of Baseworks

Since our Tokyo studio days, we have been collecting feedback from Baseworks practitioners: video interviews, written testimonials, and structured feedback from our online programs. Recently, as part of our research, I went through this collection systematically: 39 long-form accounts gathered from practitioners in Japan, Canada, the United States, Europe, and Latin America. This article summarizes what people actually report after practicing Baseworks.

The Physical-Cognitive Spectrum

One pattern that stood out when I started to analyze the accounts is that they fall neatly into two broad groups. About a quarter described their results in the vocabulary of physical practice in general—strength, flexibility, relaxation, relief from stiffness and pain, better condition for sports. The rest mentioned some physical changes but spent most of their words on the non-physical: what they had become able to notice in their bodies, and what they could now do with that information—pacing their effort, preventing injuries, handling difficult emotions, changing daily habits. These awareness-related changes tend to arrive on their own, without being trained directly.

I have ordered the list below from the most concrete effects to the most abstract. For each group of outcomes, I also added comments about the mechanisms in our method that support the reported outcomes.

Note: I’d like to emphasize that while we often say that in Baseworks physical gains like strength and flexibility are byproducts of commitment to the practice and the primary targets are perceptual, this doesn’t make physical outcomes less important, nor are they necessarily prerequisites for more abstract levels. Keep in mind that what people report are changes, and a change you notice depends on where you start and on what matters to you. A contortionist is unlikely to report gains in flexibility; someone who has always slept well will have no sleep improvements to mention. And a significant change can go unreported simply because the person never connects it to the practice. So this is not a rating of outcomes, but a spectrum, and many people report outcomes all along it.

(1) Strength, flexibility, and movement control

Physical changes are the effects people often mention first. Practitioners report gains in strength (core strength especially), flexibility, balance, mobility, better posture, and finer control of their movements. Many describe their bodies becoming more aligned and symmetrical.

Considering that our syllabus includes plenty of lunges, planks, and isometric arm holds, gains in strength are an expected outcome. What’s interesting is that some practitioners emphasized that they were able to improve strength through Baseworks for the first time in their life. And it’s not because we do a crazy number of repetitions or hold positions for an unusually long time. In fact, we do exactly the opposite. All our strength-building tasks are conducted according to two of the Baseworks Key Principles, which may explain why our approach works exceptionally well for some people. Distributed Activation engages muscles throughout the entire body during any movement, which gives beginners access to movements that would otherwise be too demanding. Intensity Modification keeps the effort gradual, so strength builds without exhaustion.

As for flexibility, our approach in Baseworks teaches conscious control of the muscles to achieve elongation (rather than the conventional “stretching”) according to your intention, with care to avoid overexertion and overstretching. Practitioners often comment on gaining flexibility without days of severe muscle soreness afterward.

(2) Less muscle tension and pain

Relief from chronic tension and pain comes up in account after account. “My muscles, which would usually be very stiff from continuous desk work, were not as stiff as before,” one practitioner said. “I had no muscle pain the next day.” Another, after years of trying different approaches to shoulder tension and sciatica: “with Baseworks I’ve learned how to just turn it off.”

The mechanism here is likely twofold. By learning to use muscles deliberately and becoming more aware of our posture and how our bodies move, we can partially interrupt the unconscious signals that maintain elevated muscle tone, and make appropriate postural adjustments. This runs through the entirety of Baseworks, because it is what the practice teaches: to understand your body better and to control it better. The second mechanism is the Micromovements principle: by overlaying them on top of every macro-movement (any visible body movement), we repeatedly and gently pull on every muscle in different directions, which creates an effect similar to massage. Certain movement sequences, such as the structured spinal movements, specifically address the tight shoulders and sore backs that come with prolonged computer work (while also teaching how to control posture).

(3) Better performance and recovery in other practices

The effects of Baseworks extend well beyond the practice itself. Practitioners in this sample report improvements in running, swimming, golf, tennis, martial arts, ball games, dance, yoga, and strength training. “When practicing dynamic sports, I noticed that by applying this awareness, I could improve precision of movement and avoid injuries,” one practitioner noted.

This carryover has several sources. The muscle co-activation techniques routinely used in Baseworks can be applied during any physical exercise—at the gym, with an exercise app, in a yoga class—to reduce the risk of injury. The Intensity Modification principle applies directly to any physical activity, making movement execution more comfortable. And the principles of Gridlines & Symmetry and Fixing-Separating-Isolating help break complex compound movements into consciously accessible building blocks—developing a fundamental movement vocabulary that makes other practices and daily movement easier to understand.

(4) A practice that adapts to your condition

Dancers and others who regularly engage in high-impact physical activity often use Baseworks to maintain and condition the body. Many also use it as a gauge of their current state—Satoko wrote about this idea in her article “Litmus Paper for Self-Awareness.” On days when you are tired, or working around an injury, the practice offers the tools to stay active at an appropriate intensity. As one practitioner put it: “It’s not about levels anymore—it’s about matching the class to what I need.”

While the idea that one should adapt the intensity of physical activity to one’s condition may sound obvious, in practice, many people don’t know how to actually apply this. This is partly rooted in lacking the ability to preemptively read the immediate bodily sensations that signal a level of activity with a delayed negative impact. Baseworks teaches this kind of self-regulation as a skill. Once learned, it can be applied in any context.

(5) A calm, focused state, better mood and sleep

People consistently describe feeling refreshed after a session. “Every time I finish I’m very awake and happy and released from all the stress I had,” one practitioner said. Improved sleep comes up regularly, as do better mood, reduced fatigue, and a sense of mental rest.

A Baseworks session is moderate-intensity movement that adaptively becomes low-intensity whenever your condition requires it, with deliberate care not to overactivate the nervous system. The state people describe afterward is calm and relaxed but focused, and it tends to last well beyond the session. Patrick‘s article “The Self-Regulation Wake-Up Call” gives a broader perspective on why the practice is structured this way.

(6) Body awareness and understanding the body

If there is one theme that appears in nearly every account, it is body awareness. People report being more aware of their bodies and their mental state. They often add that in Baseworks they actually learn about their bodies: the practice breaks things down, and there is a consistent logic to why everything is done the way it is.

Helping people understand their bodies was one of Patrick’s main goals when he developed Baseworks. The movement patterns and spatial goals of the practice increase the sensory information available to consciousness, and consistent performance and attention give that information a chance to consolidate. Even professional dancers and athletes describe gaining new awareness through the practice—which is why our concept of Physical Intelligence includes not only proficiency in using the body but awareness and understanding of it.

We approach body awareness training systematically, identifying three distinct modalities with their unique failure patterns and training approaches.

Compiling this list, I also noticed that body awareness sits at the very center of the physical-cognitive spectrum. We generally avoid referring to the concept of “mind-body connection” because we find it mechanistically too narrow for what we are working with in Baseworks—a topic for another long-form article. But using the common language without mechanistic nitpicking: body awareness acts as a bridge between the physical and the cognitive/emotional spheres.

(7) Trained attention and being present

Baseworks asks for continuous attentional control: tracking many body areas at once while following instructions with high precision. Practitioners notice this attention becoming a skill in itself. Several people who had found meditation difficult report that the body awareness developed through the practice gives their attention something concrete to work with.

The habit of checking your current condition, and of using natural breathing as feedback during movement, carries into daily life. Many practitioners find themselves more present and more aware of their emotional states, which often show up first as changes in breathing or bodily sensations.

This section may bring “mindfulness” to mind, and when people first hear about Baseworks, they often ask, “Oh, is it like mindfulness?” Yet the participants in our sample, giving us long-form reflections on their progress and outcomes, rarely use this word. Across 39 accounts it appears only three times, in the following contexts:

• “Everybody would gain something from it—mindfulness and flexibility and awareness of the body movements.”
• “It helps me to be more mindful of the quality of my movements.”
• “It encourages mindfulness through the exercises/movements.”

The practice of Baseworks does require being present, and therefore teaches being more present in the sense in which it is usually understood in the context of mindfulness practices. But there’s an important distinction. By definition, you can only be aware of what you can be aware of. Many Baseworks tasks require paying attention to a signal which is not yet well differentiated—one the practitioner may, at that moment, not be able to perceive at all. It is only with repeated practice that we build the sensory resolution required to differentiate more details across the various sensory modalities. So it’s not only about training attention to be steady but also about increasing the amount of information that is available for you to pay attention to.

(8) Knowing your limits and adjusting effort

Across all the accounts, this was the most common specific skill people described: knowing how much is enough, and acting on it. This is the skill from point (4) in its general form, applied beyond physical practice. “I have become able to catch the state of discomfort before I feel pain or fatigue,” one practitioner noted. Another: “I know I can do more today, or I should do less… I can stop myself from there and prevent or avoid any potential damage.” A third described breathing as her gauge: when it gets rough, “that becomes a barometer that you’re overdoing it.”

This is Intensity Modification internalized. Session after session, the practice teaches you to read your own effort signals and adjust, and that skill generalizes. Many people arrive with a strong habit of pushing through everything (not just physical practice), and being encouraged to listen to the body often comes as a surprise. Learning that taking care of yourself produces better results is something practitioners repeatedly name as one of the most valuable lessons of the practice.

(9) Emotional regulation and stress management

Some of the most striking passages in the accounts describe these same skills applied to emotions. “I notice if anything might get challenging in advance and can take a step back before it gets too much,” one practitioner said. Another, a professional dancer and dance teacher: “Because I could feel the sympathetic activation properly, rather than just getting angry, I became able to wait.” One person described using micromovements to keep anxiety at a manageable level.

None of this is explicitly taught: Baseworks has no emotional-regulation module. What the practice provides is the underlying material—the ability to notice internal states early and clearly. And then, what to do with that ability, people discover themselves: waiting instead of reacting, stepping back before overload, accepting the days when less is possible. “The sense of affirmation that I’m fine just as I am,” as one practitioner put it.

(10) The emergent outcome: the felt aesthetics of space

Everything above summarizes what practitioners reported in our sample of long-form interviews and structured feedback. For the last point, I will speak for myself, since I am also a Baseworks practitioner.

On top of the conventional gains in strength, flexibility, and control, the biggest things I gained from Baseworks are the feeling that my muscles are an extension of my thoughts, better spatial working memory, and a persistent, aesthetically pleasing quality of spatial awareness I can only describe as “spatial music.” I am aware of hundreds of spatial points associated with my body. I can feel the patterns among them when I move, and I can sense these patterns even without moving—both statically and as action possibilities. Walking feels like dancing, and not moving also feels like dancing. I feel entertained, all the time, by the spatial position of my body.

I never knew this quality of experience existed before I started practicing Baseworks, and I was not seeking it. I often wonder whether this is how dancers or advanced martial artists feel. We call this kind of progress an “emergent outcome”: the pursuit of one goal leads to a result you could not have named in advance. Not everyone’s emergent outcome will look like mine, but the pattern of finding more than you were looking for runs throughout the accounts.

What to expect, and when

The effects above arrive on different timelines. The calm, refreshed state is often noticeable after the very first session. Changes in tension, pain, and sleep typically consolidate over weeks of regular practice, though in many cases they too appear right away. The perceptual skills—body awareness, reading your own effort signals—often take several sessions, and sometimes weeks to months, of practice. And the spatial qualities I described build the way a musical instrument or a new language does: through consistent practice over months and years.

The structure of the practice makes this timeline manageable. Baseworks is detailed, and a single session contains hundreds of small, completable tasks, so progress is visible on a daily scale. People often tell us that noticing this progress brings confidence. Some say “freedom.” If you are considering committing to the practice, Patrick’s article “Why You May Want to Commit” is a good companion piece on what consistent effort over time makes possible.

And if you are coming for strength and flexibility: those are real, commonly achieved outcomes. For many practitioners, they also turn out to be just the first thing they notice on the physical-cognitive spectrum.