The fourth hour goes to the midline
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida narrated the transition out of the third hour into the fourth by describing how the body looks after three hours of work. The lateral line has been organized, the side body has length, the rib cage has begun to lift off the pelvis — and yet something is still wrong. The practitioner sees a stacked-up body that has not yet found its flow. The reason, in Ida's account, is that the midline has not been touched. The first three hours work the surface and the lateral structures; the midline — the inside of the leg, the floor of the pelvis, the deep front of the trunk — is untouched. The fourth hour is the hour that opens the medial column. Its operative structure, Ida tells the class, is the adductor group, and its purpose is to begin the work of freeing the pelvis from below and from inside rather than from above and outside.
"So in the fourth hour, you begin to go to work on that, on the interior of the leg. One of the things you're looking for in the fourth hour is more and better horizontality in the angle and the engine. Key to this hour is the ductors which run up the inside of the leg and attach to along the ramus in that area of the pelvis."
Ida names the fourth hour's territory and its operative structure:
The framing is geometric. The first hour and the third hour reach the pelvis from below and from the outside — the hamstrings and the lateral line. The fourth hour reaches the pelvis from below and from the inside — the adductors and the ramus. The two pairs of approaches together complete a circumference: the practitioner has now touched the pelvis from four directions before turning, in the fifth hour, to the deep front line of the psoas. The fourth hour is what makes the fifth hour possible. In the same Boulder discussion, Ida pressed her senior students — Tom Wing, Peter Melchior, Bob Phillips — to articulate why the fourth hour matters in terms of the seventh, and the answer that emerged was that without the adductor work, the psoas cannot find its proper relationship to the rectus, and the lumbar cannot escape the influence of the lower girdle.
"Fourth hour, I would say, gives you that, what that fourth hour does is it gives you that length that you need on the inside of the legs, on the inductors, in order to get that freedom that you're going to need in the fifth hour. In other words, if you don't establish the proper length of those adapters in the fourth hour, then you're never going to be able to establish the working of the psoas and the balance of the psoas and the rectus in order to free that lumbar section of the influence of that lower girdle."
Looking back at the fourth hour from the perspective of the seventh, Ida states what the fourth hour establishes:
The fascia of the adductors continues into the pelvic floor
Why should working on the inside of the leg change the tone of the pelvic floor? Ida's answer was always anatomical, and it always pointed to the same fact: the fascia of the adductors does not stop at the pubic ramus. It climbs between the rami, blends with the fascia covering the obturator internus, and becomes part of the floor of the pelvis itself. The adductor compartment and the pelvic basin are continuous tissue. When the practitioner lengthens the adductor fascia at the inside of the thigh, the lengthening is transmitted upward into the fascial floor of the pelvis. This was the structural argument that justified the fourth hour as something more than a leg session. In the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, in conversation with the students about whether the fourth hour really did more than work the legs, Ida finally articulated the connection in full.
"Well the fascia that wraps the adductors and the inside of the leg extends right up inside the pelvis and covers the What do you mean by inside the pelvis? It comes up between the rami and then blends with the fascia that covers the obturator internus and becomes part of the floor of the pelvis. So by releasing the legs you change the tone of the floor of the pelvis."
Ida names the fascial continuity between the adductors and the floor of the pelvis:
In an IPR lecture given on August 11, 1974, Ida walked through this fascial geography in greater detail, drawing for the room a map of the pelvic interior. The iliac fascia covers the iliacus and the psoas; it is continuous with the transversalis fascia above, with the fascia of the quadratus lumborum, with the obturator fascia behind, and — by way of the iliopsoas tendon — with the fascia lata in front. The pelvis, in her account, is not a separate compartment but a node in a single continuous fascial web that runs from the lumbar above to the adductors below. This is the picture the fourth hour exploits. The practitioner does not have to enter the pelvis to affect the pelvis. The continuity of fascia means that work on the adductors arrives, by tissue logic, at the obturator internus, the iliac fascia, and the floor.
"I think it's what certainly in the general population we usually think of as the pelvis and we forget this deep part here which is the part we're of course most concerned in with because that's where the pelvic floor is. Starting up here then, we would have the whole internal lining of iliac bone aligned by the iliac fascia which is of course going over the iliacus and also covering the psoas. This is going to be continuous with the transversalis fascia of the transversus muscle up in the abdominal region. It will also, as I indicated in the brief talk last time, be continuous with that fascia of the quadratus lumborum. It will be continuous below and posterior with the fascia of the piriformis, which is coming from the sacrum. It will be continuous with the fascia of the iliacus, the obturator fascia. And then by the attachment of the combination of the tendon of the iliacus and the psoas, of the iliopsoas tendon be continuous with the fasciata. And also probably, yeah, would be from the side continuous with the fascia of the pectineus. So actually, we may never, Tom did to me the other day, but frequently in the first ten hours we don't get to the iliac fascia."
In an August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida walks through the fascial map of the pelvic interior:
Below the pelvis, through the adductors
In a 1971-72 Mystery Tapes session, Ida had already begun to articulate the parallel between the third hour and the fourth. The third hour reaches the pelvis from above by working the side body and the quadratus; the fourth hour reaches the same pelvis from below by working the adductors. Both hours converge on the floor of the pelvis from different vectors. The fourth hour is not a fresh start but a continuation — the same target approached from a different angle. This is why Ida resisted the students who tried to abstract the fourth hour into a single new principle. It belongs to a sequence; it answers a question the third hour raised.
"terms, you're going to find yourselves dividing into two classes in the fourth hour. There's a bunch of guys that get on the ankles and are completely unhappy unless they can get the foot and the lower leg lined up. You move along a road. And you move along the road of organizing the leg, you are now organizing practically all of the leg beneath the pelvis. And then the pelvis clicks. Why? Because the floor of the pelvis connects with the leg and connects with the spine."
Ida frames the fourth hour as the continuation of the third hour, approached from below through the adductors:
Notice the warning that closes the passage. Ida saw two failure modes in the fourth hour. The first was the practitioner who got caught on the ankles and the lower leg and never made it up to the adductors at all — who treated the hour as a foot-and-ankle session and missed the medial column entirely. The second, implied throughout the 1976 transcripts, was the opposite: the practitioner who reached for the adductors without first preparing the lower leg and the knee, and produced no lasting change because the leg below was still pulling the adductors short. The fourth hour required the practitioner to organize the whole leg — ankle, knee, adductors, rami — as a single column, with the adductors as the operative target but the lower structures as the necessary preparation.
Choosing the ankle or the knee as the doorway
Standing in the 1976 Boulder room with a young woman named Pat as the demonstration model, Ida pushed Peter Melchior to make a choice about where to begin. The fourth hour, she said, offers two doorways into the leg: the ankle joint or the knee joint. The choice is not arbitrary. It depends on where the tie-up is most central, where the shortness is most primary, where the practitioner can find purchase to lengthen the medial column. With Pat, Ida saw the primary problem at the knee and above — a shortness in the thigh between the knee and the pelvis, exacerbated at the ischial tuberosity — and so the work had to begin at the knee, with the practitioner gathering tissue to lengthen upward. The principle was that you start, in Ida's phrase, at a more vulnerable place — somewhere the tissue will admit the work and let you build from there toward the harder target above.
"Now what are you going to do, Peter? Well, I'm while she was standing there I made a choice to begin working at the knee. Why do you have to make a choice? Mean, all these people haven't heard of it. There's at the fourth session you've got two major places where you can begin. You can either begin at the ankle joint or the knee joint. That's right. And in this case I see a lot more tie up at the knee and a lot more central or primary tie up there. There is certainly, as somebody remarked, there's a you can see the line the shortness of the line down to the ankle. Sure. But I really see that as secondary. I have not I noticed that her have no complaint about what you see. I noticed that her weight was was not traveling through the knees at all, It's too severe to really hold on. I see something else that says, yes. You should begin with the knee. I see a shortness in the thigh between the knee and the pelvis that is exacerbated up there at the iliac ischium tuberosity. And you can't get to it with the ischial tuberosity. You've got to start further down and get yourself some stuff to lengthen that. So that you've got to start, presumably, at a more vulnerable place."
With Pat standing in front of the class, Ida walks Peter through the choice of where to begin the fourth hour:
The instruction about vulnerability was characteristic of Ida's later teaching. She had grown wary of practitioners who tried to attack the hardest tie-up directly and produced no result. The tissue at the ischial tuberosity in Pat's case was holding too much; it was not, in Ida's phrase, holding itself wide open for help. The practitioner had to begin further down the leg, lengthen the adductors, and arrive at the tuberosity only after the surrounding tissue had been organized. This was the same logic she applied throughout the recipe: you do not reach the hardest target directly; you organize the territory around it until the target itself becomes available. The fourth hour applied the principle to the medial column.
Two camps in the fourth hour
Ida noticed early that her students divided themselves into two camps in the fourth hour. One camp got onto the ankles and the lower leg and stayed there. They were happy organizing the foot, the relationship between tibia and fibula, the placement of the tibia relative to the femur. Roger Pierce, in the 1975 Boulder transcripts, walked the class through this lower-leg work in careful detail — how to take the anterior fascia up and in, how to handle a tibia that has migrated too far posterior, how to work around the knee. The other camp moved more quickly up the leg, organizing it as a single column toward the adductors and the rami. Ida did not condemn either approach, but she insisted that both led to the same destination: the pelvis. The leg, in her geometry, was a conduit. To organize the leg was to organize the pelvis, because the floor of the pelvis connected with the leg and the leg connected with the spine.
"There's a bunch of guys that get on the ankles and are completely unhappy unless they can get the foot and the lower leg lined up. You move along a road. And you move along the road of organizing the leg, you are now organizing practically all of the leg beneath the pelvis. And then the pelvis clicks. Why? Because the floor of the pelvis connects with the leg and connects with the spine. Because the little leg connects with the spine. You see, around and around and around we go, around and around. And all other systems of therapy that I know And I go back and I go back back and I go back and I go back to the first hour, the second hour, the third hour, the fourth hour, the fifth hour. Always hitching them together, because the lesser trochanter, the trochanters change."
Ida describes how organizing the leg below the pelvis leads, eventually, to the pelvis clicking into place:
The lower-leg portion of the fourth hour, in Roger Pierce's 1975 Boulder account, was less about the adductors than about ensuring that the leg below the knee did not pull the adductors short. The tibia and fibula had to relate properly; the anterior fascia had to be taken up and in; the knee had to be released both above and behind. Only then would the adductor work above land. Pierce noted that he had seen Ida work the quadriceps in the second hour and then heard her deny that the quadriceps belonged in the second hour at all — a small example of how the doctrine was still in motion, with Ida revising her own statements between classes and her senior students keeping track in their notebooks.
"I don't think there are any general rules there but I'm relating what seems to be the case in many people. So you work that area and get it as good as you can and get to the knee and try to get, again, a relationship between the knee and the ankle by working around the knee. And at the knee you use another motion of knee up and down as well as a foot up and down motion. You might wanna work behind the knee as well, in some cases releasing. Sinaida release behind the knee, the attachments of the hamstrings and so forth. And when you finished the knee, I've also seen people work on the quadriceps in the second hour and I heard someone ask Ida a question about that. I think Norman asked her about it in relation to people in Aspen. And Ida said that she didn't think that quadriceps could be worked in the second hour. And I looked back in my notes and there was a second hour where she worked on somebody's quadriceps. So I'm not clear about that. I've seen work on the quadriceps in the second hour, extensive, but some work above the knee, usually just above the knee. So apparently you can do that in the second hour if it's needed. And in the second hour it's also appropriate if the person needs it to work the anterior superior spines. They have it buried. Let's go to the next region then. Okay, the back is the next region. If you were to stand the person's knee, you see a lot of shortening in the back."
Roger Pierce describes the lower-leg work that prepares the fourth-hour adductor sequence:
Cleaning the rami
Once the practitioner had organized the leg from ankle through knee to adductors, the final fourth-hour target was the pubic ramus and the ischial tuberosity — the bony arch where the adductor tendons attach. In Roger Pierce's 1975 account, the practitioner cleans off the rami: methodically frees the adductor attachments along the pubic and ischial rami until the bony arch is no longer encrusted with shortened tendon. The result is a particular quality of movement and freedom in the area. The leg is no longer hanging from the pelvis as a shortened tether; it is now suspended from a bony arch that has been freed of its medial tie-downs. This is the territory the fifth hour will need.
"So you've gotten the whole leg. You've gotten the lower leg, the knee, the adductors. You've cleaned off the the rami. And at this point, you've gotten the kind of movement and freedom in that area that you want"
Pierce describes the moment the fourth-hour leg is complete:
Ida pushed back, in the same 1975 Boulder discussion, against the tendency to think of the fourth hour as purely a leg session. Yes, she said, you can afford to think of the legs in the fourth hour — but the muscles that go into the floor of the pelvis are being affected, and so are the muscles that go up the back to the occiput. The fourth hour, in her teaching, was a whole-body session that happened to use the legs as its handle. The practitioner who thought only about the medial column missed what the work was doing further up the chain. This is why she resisted Jan's framing when Jan said his understanding of the fourth hour was still too leg-focused — and why she immediately corrected him toward a broader picture.
"and the upper attachments go to the pelvis. Right. Remember this. Mean, this does offers a great deal of clarification. And I'm awfully glad that Jen brought it up at that time, but let's perpetuate it and spread it around. I think my statement shows my view of the Fort Daher is still one-sided because I'm still thinking of the fourth hour too much in terms of the legs and saying that really helps me to see what I'm doing. The fourth hour You can afford to think of the legs in the fourth hour. That's what comes in. Yeah. But, yeah, you are affecting those the muscles that go into the floor of the pelvis. You're also affecting the muscles that go up from the neck to the occiput. I'm right down the back. Okay. Keep going. Okay. So you've gotten the whole leg."
Jan Sultan acknowledges his fourth-hour framing is too leg-focused, and Ida corrects him:
From below and inside, freeing the pelvis
In the 1975 Boulder transcripts, Bob Phillips articulated what he called the vision of the fourth hour: it frees the pelvis from below. Ida corrected him at once. It is not only freeing the pelvis from below, she said — it is putting support under the pelvis so that the pelvis can be free. The distinction matters. To free the pelvis from below is a release; to put support under the pelvis is a structural reorganization. The fourth hour does both. It releases the adductor fascia and the attachments to the rami; it then leaves behind an organized column of leg that supports the pelvis from underneath. The pelvis is not merely unburdened from below — it is now sitting on something.
"And so you wanna you wanna free all the attachments to the ramus into the ischial tuberosity and lengthen the hamstrings some more."
A student offers that the fourth hour frees the pelvis from below; Ida corrects the framing:
The mandatory closing — freeing the attachments to the ramus, freeing the ischial tuberosity, lengthening the hamstrings — is the moment the fourth hour ties off. The adductors, the hamstrings, and the bony arch of the rami and tuberosities form a single complex at the bottom of the pelvis, and Ida's instruction was to leave all three components organized in relation to each other. The hamstrings work that closes the fourth hour is not the same as the first hour's hamstring work. In the first hour, the practitioner releases the fascial envelope; in the fourth hour, having now opened the medial column, the practitioner reaches the hamstrings themselves and works them in coordination with the newly lengthened adductors and the cleaned rami.
"You work them with the person laying on their back, pulling their knees up to their chest. Your goal, I think the goal is a little bit different in the fourth hour than it was in the first hour, if I'm not mistaken. In the first hour, it seems that you're releasing that fascial envelope. Of course, you are on the hamstrings, but I tend to think of the first hour more as releasing the envelope and the fourth hour work on the hamstrings is getting really getting in and really getting the work done on the hamstrings themselves. It raises fascia as well as muscles. The envelope should have been released in the first hour and in the fourth hour you have them pull their legs up and you see what's happening. You see how ischial tuberosities are placed with respect to each other, see if they're too close to the other or too wide or maybe one is too closer than the other. You see if their gluteals are spreading as they pull their knees up to their chest as they should."
Pierce describes the hamstring work that follows the adductors in the fourth hour:
Energy in the adductors
In a 1976 Boulder session with a model named Pat, Ida diagnosed an absence she saw at a glance: Pat had no energy in the back of the thighs, and no energy in the top of the adductor structure. The observation was clinical and immediate. Energy in this context was Ida's term for the visible tone, the vitality of the tissue, the sense that the structure was alive and supporting the body rather than hanging slack. An adductor compartment with no energy at the top — at the rami, at the attachments — could not transmit any organized support upward into the pelvis. The fourth hour, in such a case, was not merely about lengthening; it was about restoring the capacity of the tissue to carry load.
"And let's not go in today into this whole discussion of why we have poor structures in subject. Sunday, not today. Pat, would you be good enough to stand up again with your back toward them and look at what you see of those abductors from the back? Some of you were here yesterday when I was complaining about a girl who was in here and I said she has no energy in the back. Pat has no energy down there on the back of the thighs, does she?"
Ida asks Pat to turn so the class can see the back of her thighs and the top of her adductors:
The absence of energy in the adductors was, for Ida, often paired with the cultural pattern of the tight pelvis — what she elsewhere called, with characteristic bluntness, the tight ass. In the 1976 dissection-room sessions, while the class was looking at a specimen, Ida sketched a theory about how the chronic sucking-in at the anus and the gluteal mass pulled the pelvis posteriorly in a way that prevented the legs from coming forward and prevented the lateral rotators and the medial structures from developing their full range. The theory was speculative — she said so — but it pointed to her conviction that the adductors and the pelvic floor were a single behavioral unit, expressing together the holding patterns of a particular culture and a particular life.
"happens when the leg swings forward or back. Because you don't ever make a simple rotation anywhere. There is almost no way you can do it. You are going to abduct some or you are going to flex some or we don't make those kinds of moves in isolation. So they're over, yeah. Lacking to be. Well yes I do have a theory. Goes along with a tight ass. It's a tight ass. As you are sucking in at the anus and therefore at the, on the gluteus and so forth, whichever starts it, you are pulling out this way all the time which is where we came from anyway and so in a sense it may be that the legs never came forward to allow the space for the lateral rotators to develop to their fullest. Just made it up so I'm not."
Looking at a dissection specimen, Ida offers a speculative theory about the cultural pattern of the tight pelvis:
The adductors and the pelvic floor as a system
Late in her teaching, Ida warned her advanced students against thinking of the pelvic floor as a discrete set of muscles. In a passage from one of the RolfB public tapes, she insisted that the pelvic floor was not the half-dozen muscles named in anatomy texts but a system of articulations — the sacroiliac, the joint between fifth lumbar and sacrum, the joint between fourth and fifth lumbar. Any change in the lumbar relationships produced a different pelvic floor. Any athletic habit that shortened the hamstrings without antagonist support distorted the pelvic floor. Any postural habit that spread the knees wide shortened the adductors and altered the hamstring relationship and again distorted the pelvic floor. The pelvic floor, in her later teaching, was a behavioral consequence of the structural relationships above and below it — and the adductors were one of the principal levers.
"It's not those half dozen muscles which we named the other day as being the pelvic floor. Not at all. It's the sacroiliac articulation. It's the articulation between the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. It's the articulation between the fourth lumbar and the fifth lumbar. See what I'm telling you? Just as soon as you shift any of those lumbars back on any of those lumbars, you're going to get a different relationship in that pelvic floor. Just as soon as you take on the type of athletic training which shortens and tightens the hamstrings to the exclusion of the antagonists of the hamstrings, you're going to interfere with that pelvic floor. Just assume as you do any of these habitual postures that spread the knees wide, thereby shortening the brassless and altering the hamstring relationship in there, you're going in feel that pelvic floor. So if there is a vast terror incognito in there for each and every individual about how he developed these various physical attitudes and therefore mental attitudes."
Ida redefines the pelvic floor as a system of articulations rather than a set of muscles:
This is why the fourth hour mattered structurally and not only locally. The adductors were not a body part to be lengthened for its own sake. They were one component of a system that included the hamstrings, the lumbar articulations, and the obturator fascia, and the fourth hour was the hour in which the practitioner adjusted the adductor contribution to that system. After the adductors were lengthened, the lumbar articulations sat differently; after the obturator fascia was released through the adductor route, the floor of the pelvis carried itself differently. The fifth hour, with its work on the psoas, would now find a pelvis whose floor was prepared to receive deeper work.
"In the fourth hour, you're still concentrating on light structures. You're affecting core, but you're not going But in the fifth hour, you're really literally digging for the, which is probably true. And you dig for the by virtue of getting the rectum so organized that you can get by it. It? Ron's paper talks about, is that the body isn't a compression model and it's more of a tension. Right. And that's working out. So by doing that, it would free it."
Ida distinguishes fourth-hour from fifth-hour territory:
Listening to the tissue, not the preconception
One of the practical surprises Ida emphasized in the 1975 Boulder discussions was that adductor tissue often moved more easily toward the midline than away from it. The instinct of younger practitioners was to take adductor tissue laterally — to spread it away from the line of the pubis. But several of Ida's senior students reported that when they reversed direction and moved the tissue toward the midline, the tissue felt unmistakably right. It was easier to move it the way of order than away from it. The lesson Ida drew from these reports was the larger one she returned to throughout the late teaching: the practitioner must listen to the tissue, not impose a preconception. The fourth hour, like every hour, demanded that the practitioner read what was actually there before deciding what to do.
"Did you have some I just wanted to add to what you were describing your experience of having always moved the tissue away from the midline and then experiencing moving it toward the midline. And I had that experience too and what made it really quick for me was that the tissue felt very different. Mean, it was right, it was unmistakably right. Easier to move it the way of order than it is away from it. Six hundred and first 10. In this business early on I said it looked like I wasn't working very hard and how come I would swear? I'm beginning to see that it's because I wasn't doing it. I wasn't listening to the body enough. It was the space between my preconception and what was actually there to see that had me swaying. Go ahead. Well, really what I was gonna say next was that what I see you doing or, you know, with us doing is is really free the pelvis from below in this fourth hour. And so that you, you know, can then begin the the vision I have is that Realize that it isn't only freeing the pelvis from below."
A student reports the experience of moving adductor tissue toward the midline rather than away, and Ida names the larger lesson:
The principle had a particular bite in the fourth hour. The adductors run along the midline, and the practitioner's working surface is largely the medial face of the thigh. The temptation to spread laterally, to widen, to open the leg outward, was strong. But the actual tissue, in many bodies, wanted to gather toward the line. Ida's instruction was to follow the tissue's preference and not the geometric assumption. This is what she meant by the space between preconception and what was actually there — the space in which most failed sessions lived.
The trochanter, the rotators, and the adductor compartment
Ida's treatment of the adductors was always positioned in relation to its anatomical neighbors: the lateral rotators on the outside of the hip, the gluteal mass behind, the trochanter as the bony fulcrum. In a 1976 Boulder dissection session, looking at a specimen with the gluteus maximus removed, she described the fascial continuities around the greater trochanter — the quadratus femoris, the vastus lateralis, the medius — and the fan-like arrangement of the rotators on the inside of the pelvis. The adductors lived on the medial face of this arrangement; the rotators lived on the lateral and posterior face; and together they expressed the rotational and translational behavior of the leg in the hip socket.
"So I'm thinking now, I feel that the turn lateral rotator is something that's gotten us into trouble and I would hope ultimately we can using that because I see this as like a often a fan like arrangement of muscles, each of them having a particular function in terms particularly here of the origin of the piriformis on the inside of the sacrum, the origin of the obturator internus on the inside of the pelvis. But I see in terms of function on the femur, the gluteus minimus as just an extension of the rotators. If you say that doesn't rotate it laterally, well it does some but if we get away from that terminology of lateral rotators, it makes it a lot easier because you are usually overusing part of one of these anyway or two of these and not using them all in a balanced way and that includes the minimums. Yeah, I think that the idea of rotation begs the question of what happens when the leg swings forward or back. Because you don't ever make a simple rotation anywhere. There is almost no way you can do it."
In a 1976 dissection-room session, Ida sets out her view of the lateral rotators as a functional fan:
The implication for the fourth hour was indirect but real. If the leg never moves in pure rotation but always in coupled patterns of rotation, abduction, and flexion, then the adductor work the practitioner performs medially is always also affecting the rotators behind and the abductor structures laterally. The fourth hour does not isolate the adductors any more than the leg uses them in isolation. The whole hip complex — adductors, rotators, trochanter, ramus — moves together, and the fourth hour, by addressing the adductors as its primary handle, reorganizes the entire complex. This is part of why Ida resisted the muscle-by-muscle language her students sometimes lapsed into.
"There it is. Okay. So now, Peter, call our attention as you work to what you are seeing in terms of that place that is the most in trouble, namely the escape to velocity? And you people who love to show that you know the name of muscles. Don't let me hear you talking about muscles here because it is really in systems that we are working. You see, this is"
Ida warns the class against naming muscles in the fourth hour:
The rotators and the obturator route to the pelvic floor
In a 1973 Big Sur session, Ida laid out the second route by which the practitioner reached the pelvic floor — not through the adductors, but through the rotators and the obturator fascia. The obturator internus originates inside the pelvis, comes out through the greater sciatic notch, and inserts laterally on the femur. Its outer surface is wrapped in a thickened obturator fascia, and the iliococcygeus muscle of the pelvic floor attaches to that fascia. By working on the obturator fascia through the lateral rotator approach, the practitioner can affect the tone of the pelvic floor from the outside. The fourth hour, working through the adductors, and the lateral-rotator work, working through the obturator fascia from behind, converge on the same target by different routes. The pelvic floor has two fascial doors, and the practitioner must know which one to use when.
"And that's one of the reasons that makes this whole thing so very important. Now when you come right down to it, the psoas also comes. From The this operator internus comes from way in here out to here and the operator fascia which is almost a thickened fascia around the operator internus is actually the attachment of the iliotoxicis muscle. So you're affecting an awful lot of things when you start working these rotators and that's something you have to keep in mind when you're not just working on a muscle, you're working on an awful Go of back to your obturator fascia and say it again. The obturator internus, first of all you don't really have a hole here, you have fascia that covers up this entire foramen. The obturator internus originates all in here, comes out through this greater eschatic notch that attaches to help rotate the femur. But it's covered on the outside by a thickening of fascia called the operator fascia and that's that operator fascia that the iliopoxygus muscle is attached to. So you can actually affect tone of the pelvic floor by just working on that one particular fascial reflex. That fascia extends all the way up from above by the transversal fascia that comes all the way down. Actually join right there. Well, now, do you remember yesterday how much emphasis I put get into."
Ida describes the obturator-fascia route to the pelvic floor:
The adductor route and the rotator route are not redundant. They reach the pelvic floor from different angles — medial versus posterolateral — and produce different effects on its tone. A pelvic floor whose medial attachments are too tight will respond best to the adductor route; one whose posterolateral attachments through the obturator fascia are too tight will respond best to the rotator route. The skilled practitioner reads the body and chooses. The fourth hour is the hour in which the medial route is structurally indicated, but Ida wanted her students to understand the parallel and to recognize that the fourth hour was not the only access to the floor — only the access that the recipe placed at that point in the sequence.
Coda: what the fourth hour leaves behind
What the fourth hour leaves behind, in Ida's account, is a leg organized as a single column from ankle to ramus, with adductor fascia lengthened, rami cleaned, hamstrings released along their actual muscle bellies rather than only their envelopes, and the floor of the pelvis carrying a different tone because the tissue continuous with it has been changed below. The fifth hour, looking at this prepared territory, will be able to do what it could not have done before — reach the psoas. Without the fourth hour's preparation, the psoas remains protected by the shortness of the medial column and the tension of the obturator fascia. With the fourth hour complete, the psoas becomes available, the rectus can be organized against it, and the lumbar can finally escape the dominance of the lower girdle. The adductors are not the climax of the recipe. They are the doorway the recipe has to pass through to reach the climax.
"Okay, the person When the person comes in for the fifth hour, if I'm ready to move on to that, Now the shortness really deep in their body is beginning to show and it's in the core and the place that it shows up the most spectacularly when they come in for the fifth hour is between the pubes and the sternum, I'd say, and the mid chest. There's usually a good deal of shortness in the very front part of the body which of course is deep, is not only shortness in the rectus but also deep down shortness in the psoas and the locus. So the fifth hour works on these areas."
Pierce describes what the client looks like arriving for the fifth hour after the fourth has been completed:
Ida did not romanticize the fourth hour. She called the feeling after the third hour chunky — stacked up with glue on it — and she said the fourth hour was what unstuck the stack by going to the midline. The adductors were the operative target because they were where the midline lived in the leg, and because their fascia was continuous with the floor of the pelvis above. But the work was unglamorous: inside the leg, between the rami, around the ischial tuberosity, under the hamstrings. It produced no dramatic moment. It produced, instead, the conditions under which the fifth hour's drama could occur. The fourth hour was the hour of preparation, and Ida's last word on it, again and again, was that you cannot organize the floor of the pelvis without first organizing what lies below and inside it.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 Boulder advanced class (76ADV52) — a discussion of the trochanter as the place where the pelvis turns on the legs, and the relationship of adductor work to the anterior superior spine and the iliotibial tract; included as a pointer for readers tracing the connection between the medial column and the lateral structures Ida addressed elsewhere in the recipe. 76ADV52 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 Boulder advanced class (76ADV21) — dissection-room observations on infant fascial patterns and how leg rotation alters the fascial pulls into the pelvis; relevant background for Ida's account of why adult adductor and rotator patterns develop as they do. 76ADV21 ▸