History

History & Development

Baseworks is a system of sensorimotor training that evolved through approximately 10 years of iterative refinement across 10,000+ learners with the primary goal of reducing instructional ambiguity in movement education (i.e. maximize the efficacy of movement communication). It addresses a fundamental problem in movement instruction: the motor equivalence problem (Bernstein, 1967), where ambiguous goal-setting leads to misinterpretation of intended movements.

The method in its current form was developed through an unusual three-stage process:

1. initial formulation by the founder Patrick Oancia drawing from athletic/teaching experience and sports science, with a focus on safety
2. iterative refinement by Patrick in collaboration with 10-15 teachers working with 10,000+ students to ensure everyone “understands the movements” and “performs the same movements,” including learners with low body awareness (LBA), and
3. reverse engineering by a Asia Shcherbakova to formalize and explain the system’s mechanisms.

In the process of iterative refinement, Baseworks has evolved its focus on developing perceptual skills (sensorimotor discrimination capacities) rather than prioritizing muscular, cardiovascular, or technique outcomes. conventional fitness outcomes, such as improvements in strength, flexibility, balance, and endurance, are seen as only by-products of the practice.

A more lay term for perceptual skills is body awareness. We often use it for external communication / education materials, but it is not precise enough/somewhat misleading for what we do.

Problem Space and Motivations

Patrick Oancia opened a multidisciplinary practice studio in Tokyo in 2003, originally conceived as an interdisciplinary learning space offering a variety of movement classes, workshops, and lectures, taught both by himself and by guest teachers from around the world. The studio was among the first in Tokyo to host events combining yoga, dance, music, expressive arts, and other disciplines. However, operating this environment over several years revealed a set of persistent problems — both at the studio and across the fitness and wellness industry more broadly — that ultimately drove the development of Baseworks.

The central observation was that the interdisciplinary format worked well only for people who already had a solid foundation in at least one structured movement discipline — whether athletics, martial arts, or dance. These individuals could show up, learn, and take something meaningful away from diverse classes. What they typically had in common was a history of sustained, committed practice in a single discipline prior to engaging with the interdisciplinary environment. The majority of students, however — those without this foundation — were not progressing, despite regular attendance. They would become confused by the volume of disparate information, struggle to understand how to advance, and in some cases sustain strains or injuries. Many would eventually drop off.

Several interrelated problems contributed to this pattern:

The industry at the time (and still today) offered limited infrastructure for foundational skill development. Multi-style studios — where different instructors teach unrelated modalities with no coordination between them — had become the norm. Unlike academic institutions, where faculty maintain awareness of what students are expected to know from other courses, movement education spaces typically lacked any such curricular coherence. The entry point for establishing a solid physical practice was unclear for anyone not already adept at moving their body.

Teaching approaches tended toward two extremes: pushing hard for performance-based results (often leading to burnout or injury) or backing off entirely under the banner of “mindfulness” (often resulting in minimal learning). There was rarely a middle path that balanced challenge with sustainability. Meanwhile, a culture of immediate gratification led students to set unrealistic short-term goals, with little emphasis placed on foundational aspects such as body awareness and sensitivity to one’s own conditions and limitations.

Patrick’s own trajectory informed these observations. Coming from a background in competitive athletics, music, and extensive study of yoga and martial arts, he had sustained significant injuries during earlier stages of developing his own practice — a direct consequence of what he came to see as unsustainable or misguided approaches, sometimes reinforced by teachers. Developing a method that prioritized long-term physical sustainability was partly motivated by the need to address his own accumulated damage.

The operational model of the Tokyo studio crystallized the problem further. With classes running from early morning to late evening, seven days a week, taught by 10–15 instructors, consistency became a practical necessity. If any student could attend any class with any teacher and expect to practice the same methodology, then the methodology itself had to be unambiguous enough to produce consistent results across both diverse teachers and diverse learners. This operational constraint became the forcing function for what would later be formalized as the communicability optimization: reducing instructional ambiguity so that learners — particularly those with low body awareness, who constituted the majority — could reliably understand and execute the intended movements.

The collaborative nature of the refinement process was essential. The teaching team, under Patrick’s direction, collectively attended each other’s classes and continuously evaluated what worked and what did not — what students responded to, what they found confusing, and what led to breakdowns in movement execution. Satoko Horie, Patrick’s business partner, co-developer, and a dedicated Baseworks practitioner, played an instrumental role in systematizing both the method’s practical applications and the teacher certification framework. Her organizational abilities and strategic background (from a prior career in advertising strategy) were critical in generating a coherent, distributed teaching body capable of delivering the method consistently. The team frequently had to step away from conventional approaches in sports and fitness, guided by a pragmatic principle: do whatever works better, as long as it is safe.

The cumulative effect of these pressures — the need for safety, the observation that most learners lacked foundational body awareness, the operational demand for consistency across teachers, and the willingness to depart from convention — produced an environment in which the method could evolve through sustained, collective, empirical refinement. Patrick later described this as “harnessing something that was emerging as a by-product of trying to communicate movement.” The specific patterns that characterize Baseworks practice today — spinal micro-movements, oppositional forces, strict symmetry constraints, step-by-step progressions — were not designed from theory but emerged because they reduced communicability failures in practice.

Developmental Details

The pressure to optimize for “communicability” emerged from a specific operational constraint: the founder’s (Patrick’s) desire to create a studio where anybody could show up at any time and practice a consistent movement methodology with any available teacher. Patrick’s studio in Tokyo offered Baseworks classes 7 days a week from 6am to 10pm. To establish consistency across 10-15 teachers, it was necessary that everybody — teachers and students alike — understood the movements precisely and performed them the same way.

But what exactly does it mean that everybody performs the same movements, if people have different capacities — flexibility, strength, skill level, body awareness?

The answer could not be that everybody achieves the same positions (bodies are different). It had to be that everybody is executing the same control strategy — attending to the same parameters, applying the same constraints, making the same kinds of sensory discriminations. This realization was not explicit from the start; it emerged through a decade of refinement.

The feedback loop worked as follows: teach → observe where communication breaks down → modify the movement and/or instruction to reduce the breakdown → teach again. Safety was a prerequisite constraint throughout (movements had to be safe even when misexecuted). With safety as a given, the driving optimization was communicability: reduce instructional ambiguity so that diverse learners, including those with low body awareness, reliably produce the intended movement.

What changed during iterative refinement:

Both the movements themselves and the instructional approach were modified, though the line between the two is blurry:

• Forms were simplified and organized into step-by-step progressions
• Symmetry and spatial constraints were imposed, changing the appearance of forms
• As recurring patterns (e.g., GRAVITY, TRANSPOSE, EQUATE foci) were recognized across forms with different movement dynamics, the understanding of what was being trained in each form shifted
• Identified bottlenecks were explicitly targeted: when students consistently struggled with a particular aspect, it was given more training time even if this increased short-term failure rates
• Instructional redundancies became defaults (e.g., “draw the shoulders down” in every movement, even where the biomechanical purpose was unclear) because consistency reduced the cognitive load on junior teachers and made the system more robust

Emergence of the principles: The principles were not designed top-down. They emerged from the bottom up through this refinement process:

• DA evolved from various physiotherapy-like techniques (movements activating muscles around joints) combined with redundancy. Sometimes “pulling the shoulders down” protects the neck, sometimes it stabilizes the shoulder joint, sometimes it serves no biomechanical purpose in that particular context — but it was easier and safer to apply it as a universal default, especially with junior teachers who lacked detailed musculoskeletal knowledge. Over time, the pattern of widespread low-level co-contraction in every movement became recognizable as a distinct principle.
• FSA & GS evolved from standardizing progressions and imposing spatial constraints. Breaking movements into steps and requiring symmetry made movements easier to teach and evaluate (instructors could see deviations), but harder to perform — because natural movement is typically asymmetric and smooth, not segmented and constrained. This “harder but clearer” tradeoff was the signature of the communicability optimization.
• MM evolved from tension-release techniques, eventually becoming a continuous self-monitoring practice.
• NB and IM evolved from the observation that some students push too hard, combined with the knowledge that endorphin release from intense exercise reduces pain sensitivity — which is exactly the opposite of what’s needed for sensory discrimination.

The overall trajectory: practical redundancies → recognizable general patterns → distinct named principles → emergent perceptual training effects that were not anticipated but could be explained after the fact.

The naming and conceptualization of these patterns happened in two stages. By the time the reverse engineering began (~2016), several terms were already in active instructional use: “distributed activation,” “micro-movements” (originally referring to spine/ribcage), “natural breathing,” and “moderation/intensity modification.” Other principles existed as specific cues (e.g., “don’t open the hip” for GS, “keep the foundation” for FSA) but had not yet been unified into named principles. The formalization, the macro/micro distinction as a category, the three perceptual skill domains, and the theoretical grounding were contributions of Phase 3.

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Timeline

2003~2009

Studio Opening and Conception Patrick Oancia opened a multidisciplinary practice studio in Tokyo in 2003 as an interdisciplinary space offering classes across multiple disciplines. The backbone and overall approach behind the Baseworks Method evolved from Patrick’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 two 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. By approximately 2007, a core group of about ten teachers began training in the principles and applications of the approach that would become Baseworks, though it had not yet become the studio’s formal syllabus.

20102020

Iterative Refinement From around 2010, the studio schedule progressively shifted toward Baseworks, becoming the exclusive syllabus by approximately 2012. Classes ran from early morning to late evening, seven days a week, taught 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 studio served as headquarters, but development also took place across all associated programming that ran alongside the studio’s daily schedule, including master classes, intensives, and collaborations.

2016~2020

Reverse Engineering and Essence Extraction 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.

2020~2022

Digitalization and Program Development 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.

2023~

Education, R&D, and Collaboration 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. In 2025, Asia did 2 presentation about Baseworks at scientific meetings: Neuropsychology Dat at the Neuro, Montreal and at the ICNN (International Conference on Neurology & Neurophysiology) in Astana.

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Baseworks Practice Modules and Learning Formats

Historically, when Baseworks Practice was delivered in public class format at the studio in Tokyo, the studio offered 4 types of classes, corresponding to 4 modules: Foundation, Elements, Strategy, Integrate. A module is defined by (1) forms that are included in its curriculum, (2) learning objectives. While the basic physical demands of the 4 modules increase from Foundation to Integrate, they were not meant to be hierarchical, and students were encouraged to attend all classes that they feel physically able to attend and “cycle” between them.

• Foundation and Elements strictly follow the 6 principles and movement patterns to develop perceptual skills and movement vocabulary
• Strategy and Integrate were less focused on the 6 principles (especially, less FSA, more fluid movement), and included forms with more physically challenging movement dynamics.

Currently, we don’t have the Tokyo studio anymore, and we focus on teaching the Baseworks method at the Foundation / Elements level, with the implicit understanding that the role of Strategy and Integrate will be fulfilled by other practices in the practitioner’s life.

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The evolution of the concept of Cycling

The concept of cyclical practice developed in branching layers across the history of Baseworks, with different dimensions becoming explicit at different times.

By 2017-2018, there was the concept of module cycling: the non-hierarchical structure of the practice at Tokyo studio, where practitioners were encouraged to attend all accessible modules rather than progressing linearly toward harder ones. The infographic from this period renders this as a figure-eight loop — a spiral, not a ladder. The 2019 certification manual makes the rationale explicit: you return to Foundation not to repeat it but to re-experience it “from a heightened perspective” shaped by what you’ve practiced since. This is already the core mechanism — but it was still described entirely in terms of modules.

Cross-practice cycling was present in the same period as a practical recommendation (other movement practices serve as “vocabulary sources”; Baseworks refines skills for other practices), but was not yet framed as part of the cycling concept itself.

Task-level and session-level cycling as a formal two-level taxonomy were articulated explicitly in the Primer (Segment 8, 2025). Task-level cycling formalized the “return at heightened perspective” mechanism with Fitts-Posner grounding: deliberately re-entering the cognitive stage for movements that have become autonomous. Session-level cycling named the decision dimension: how you allocate practice time across modules, intensities, content types, and external practices.

The underlying mechanism connecting all levels — active cross-referencing, where each practice context is used as a lens for the next — has been referred to as “revisiting” (for example, in the Smart Revisit feature on the practice platform). Without cross-referencing (active reflective process), cycling is just variety. With it, every return is a discovery.

The concept thus evolved from a studio operational policy (“attend all modules”) into a pedagogical philosophy: practice as a spiraling, multi-dimensional process of refinement rather than a linear path of progression.

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Practice Platform

Baseworks Practice Platform was launched in 2021, offering a digital format for Foundation and Elements modules of the Baseworks practice. The platform launched with three plans:

• Basic (Foundation only) - 20 USD/m
• Cyclical (Foundation + Elements) - 32 USD/m
• Deep (Foundation + Elements + Baseworks Meta + opened and complete sessions ) - 48 USD/m ( with yearly discounts ) the problem with this format was that it only worked for people already familiar with the BaseWorks method, which eventually led to the development of the Baseworks Primer course as an onboarding step to get introduced to the Baseworks method.

Currently the practice platform (URL: practice.baseworks.com) serves as the learning app for all digital Baseworks educational offerings, including Primer. As of February 2026, new subscriptions for the practice platform are closed, we are in the process of creating a system where people who have completed the BaseWorks Primer can continue practicing the online classes on the practice platform, although this requires restructuring the pricing.

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