The full key: the floor of the pelvis
Ida opens the second day of the fifth-hour cluster in her 1975 Santa Monica advanced class by asking, almost catechetically, what the fifth hour is. The students offer reasonable answers — releasing the prevertebral structures, continuing the fourth hour, lengthening the rectus to match the position of the pelvis. Steve Weatherwax delivers the most complete version: since the first hour the practitioner has been horizontalizing the pelvis, and by now the back sides have lengthened, the chest has lifted, a midline is beginning to form, and the front of the body is announcing that it too needs to lengthen. Ida compliments him — "a very good job" — and then withholds the full key. The full key, she tells the class, is not the rectus and not the bony pelvis but the floor of the pelvis. The hour is named by what it horizontalizes, not by what it touches first.
"The full key is that this has to do with the floor of the pelvis. And you were talking as though you were dealing with the bony. One is equivalent to the other practically, but nevertheless, I'd like to get this into your imagination. That this fifth hour has to do with the horizontalizing of the floor of the pelvis."
After Steve Weatherwax has offered the recipe-level summary of the hour, Ida names the structural target the class has not yet found words for.
The distinction matters because the practitioner who imagines the bony pelvis as the target will work the rectus abdominis and the pubic ramus and consider the hour finished. The practitioner who imagines the floor of the pelvis as the target will continue past those structures into the psoas, into the inside of the iliac bone, into the relationship between the pubic ramus and the ischial tuberosity, and into the relationships among the levator ani, the obturator, and the rotators that line the pelvic bowl from beneath. Ida is careful to locate the fifth hour inside a three-hour block. The fourth went up the legs from below; the fifth turns the floor up in front; the sixth comes in from behind through the rotators. All three hours horizontalize the same structure from different directions.
"We talk about pelvis. We are really talking about the floor of the pelvis. And you see in this fourth hour, we went up the legs giving that pelvis enough support that it would be able to horizontalize."
She immediately frames the fifth hour as the second beat of a three-hour pelvic-floor sequence.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth as one piece of work
Ida's most consistent claim across the transcripts is that the fifth hour cannot be evaluated as a standalone hour. It is the middle term of a three-hour expression of a single structural problem — the horizontalizing of the floor of the pelvis. In the same Santa Monica class, after a student named Mr. Soupen begins to talk about the obturator and the rotators, Ida pulls him back into sequence. The rotators belong to the sixth hour, she says — but only in the sense of when they will be the primary target. The floor of the pelvis is the floor of the pelvis throughout, and what differs across the three hours is which direction the practitioner approaches it from.
"The fourth, the fifth, and the sixth hour are all hours that have to do with the horizontalizing of the elders and specifically of the floor of the pelvis."
Ida states the architecture of the middle of the recipe in a single sentence.
The teaching beat here is consequential. A practitioner who treats the fifth hour as the rectus abdominis hour, full stop, has missed the architecture. Bob, working through the same material in a different Santa Monica session, describes the fifth as the hour where the unification of top and bottom is first felt — the moment where the practitioner's own experience of being in two pieces, an upper half and a lower half, begins to give way. He locates the unifying work in three muscles: the quadratus lumborum in the back, the psoas in the middle, the rectus abdominis in the front. The fifth hour is where those three muscles are first brought into a working relationship to each other.
"The relationship there from middle and back that is really created in the fifth hour and that's to me the heart of the fifth hour process is that. Just for the sake of conceptual looking at bodies, I said this the other day, I'd just like reemphasize it. That four and five can be looked at as one hour. If you sort of pull your perspective back and see what happens in four and what happens in five, you get a sense of sort of a three dimensionality of the inside of the body and the outside of the body and that you're sort of starting to work on the idea of organizing one with respect to the other and that four and five are a continuum. Yeah, I really don't like that because of the idea of adding six. Like to speak to that issue for a second. We're different there because I see six and seven as being paired and not tied between five and six."
Bob describes his own experience of what changed in his body across the fifth hour.
Bob's framing — quadratus in back, psoas in middle, rectus in front — turns out to be a working diagram of the hour. The fourth hour gave the practitioner permission to approach the pelvis from below; the fifth gives the practitioner permission to approach it from above and inside. In the RolfB6 public tape, Ida elaborates the upward consequence. By the fifth hour the work is reaching through the abdominal organs, through the diaphragm, into the position of the heart and the stress on the heart. The practitioner is not just lengthening fascia; the practitioner's hand, in organizing the psoas, is reaching into the lumbar plexus and affecting the innervation of the entire abdominal cavity.
"And in your organization of the psoas, you are almost reaching with your hand into the lumbar plexus and affecting the characteristics of the lumbar plexus, the inner the the structures which are innervated by the lumbar plexus. So that you see you get into all of that abdominal all those abdominal organs."
Ida states what the fifth-hour hand is actually reaching toward when it organizes the psoas.
Turning the floor up in front
The image Ida returns to most often for the fifth hour is the pelvic bowl whose front edge has to be picked up. In most random bodies the bowl tips forward — the pubic arch dropped, the contents of the abdomen spilling toward the front of the body, the rectus abdominis lengthened beyond its useful range and the psoas shortened in compensation. The fifth hour's mechanical task is to reverse this: to shorten and organize the rectus so that it picks the pubic arch up and supports the abdominal organs from in front. Until this happens, the pelvis remains a bowl tipped over and the work of all later hours rests on an inadequate foundation.
"And you see your fourth hour has taken on the positioning of the floor of the pelvis. And the fifth hour begins to turn it up in the front so that it has support under the abdominal organs."
She names the architectural difference between fourth-hour and fifth-hour pelvic work.
The structure that does this turning-up is the rectus abdominis. In her RolfA3 public-tape teaching, Ida is unusually direct about what the practitioner is actually working toward. The clavicle, the costal arch, the upper attachments — all of it is preparatory. The real target, the thing that holds up the pelvis from the front, is the rectus. Everything else done in the hour is in service of getting the rectus into a position where it can do its job.
"The rectus abdominis. And anything anything else that you do up around the clavicle or what have you, you are only doing to assist that rectus to get into position to do its stuff of holding up the the pelvis pelvis from the front. That's all you're doing."
Pressed by a student to say what the hour really aims at, Ida is uncharacteristically direct.
Ida continues the same RolfA3 passage by walking the rectus's actual anatomy — its two halves on either side of midline, its narrow inferior attachment broadening into the fan at the fifth, sixth, and seventh ribs. The picture she draws is of a muscle that, when working, lifts the pubic arch toward the sternum and holds the basin level. When it fails, the basin spills forward. The hour's strategy follows from this geometry: the practitioner has to clear the rectus along its full length, find its attachments at both ends, and at the inferior end find where the pubes have ended up, which is often nowhere near where they belong.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB4 public tape — an extended walk through the practical mechanics of finding the pubic attachment, balancing rectus against psoas, and the surprising places "pubes" turn up when the front of the body has long been disorganized. RolfB4Side2 ▸
Where the shortness shows: between the pubes and the sternum
By the fifth hour, Ida observes, the work has already done a great deal — superficial fascia loosened, back lengthened, ankles organized, adductors freed, sides opened. What now becomes visible is what was always there but could not yet be seen: a deep core shortness in the front of the body, between the pubes and the sternum, that involves the rectus but also runs deeper into the psoas. The shortness does not announce itself in the first hour because the surface tissue is doing too much hiding. By the fifth, the surface has given way and the core is finally visible. This visibility is itself the body's announcement of what wants to be worked next.
"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."
A student summarizes what becomes visible when a body arrives for its fifth hour.
Ida's RolfB4 teaching elaborates the practical search. The pubes may turn up almost projecting outside the abdominal wall, or so deeply retracted into the body that the practitioner has to search with the fingers to find them. Either way, the fingers learn to differentiate between rectus attachment and psoas transmission, between bone that belongs in the midline and bone that has migrated. The reliable signal that the work has succeeded is a midline along which the practitioner's hand finds the pubic structure cleanly, the rectus organized to either side of it, and the psoas balanced against the rectus from behind. The voice of the top dog, as Ida puts it, says: get those things up where they belong.
"Let your fingers talk to you. Now the funny part of it is that you will find pubic pubes in the strangest places. They may be almost literally projecting outside the abdominal wall, and they may be so deep in that it's all you can do, searching with your fingers to find them. You say, my god. The guy's lost his pubes. And it may take a considerable search to find it. And either of those situations, when you have cleared the psoas and the rectus, either one will come to a midpoint, to a balance at a midline where you find it easily with your fingers and it talks to you and it's clean and your fingers can differentiate between rectus attachment and psoas transmission. Sometimes you'll find that the the pubes seem to be that the whole pubic structure just dives down on one side."
Ida describes what the fifth-hour hand actually does as it searches the front of the body for the pubic structure.
The psoas as the operative structure of the fifth hour
The psoas is not strictly the named target of the fifth hour — the rectus is — but Ida's transcripts repeatedly insist that the fifth hour cannot be done without the psoas being organized. The rectus and the psoas are agonist and antagonist with their leverage points so close together that one cannot be settled without the other being addressed. The same RolfB6 passage that names the lumbar plexus also names the psoas as the muscle through which the practitioner reaches the lumbar plexus. The fifth hour is the first hour in the recipe in which the practitioner's hand actually penetrates to the psoas with real intention, rather than touching it only incidentally through the pelvic lift.
"I've stressed them just now. The sartorius, the rectus femoris, and the fascia lata, of course, the tensor. And you can see how the next thing to do is to go down to the slightly deep deeper level, and all those adductors are really a little more central. So then you come on further, and you go into that next level, you have started to free the psoas. To free the psoas, not to place the psoas. That original pelvic lift you see was placing the psoas as best you might at that level. And always pelvic lifts are placing the psoas as best you may at the level that they that you are at the moment. But now you go into the deeper level, is freeing the pelvis itself, the bony structure itself, to shift enough to give you a different relationship now between with respect to the psoas. And your different relationship depends to a large extent on the floor of the pelvis and how well organized it is."
Ida describes the layered approach to the psoas — earlier pelvic lifts placed it; the fifth hour finally frees it.
The deterioration Ida looks for in the fifth-hour psoas is at the crossing — where the muscle leaves the lumbar spine and descends across the inside of the iliac bone toward its insertion on the lesser trochanter. When the psoas is short and bound at this crossing, the groin cannot clarify. The leg cannot move freely on the pelvis. The pelvis cannot horizontalize from the front. In her T10 1975 Boulder teaching, Ida names the clarification of the groin as the chief power of the fifth hour — the visible result that tells the practitioner the work has been done.
"that, the chief power should emphasize the clearing up of the groin, the clarification of the groin. And you see the groin is kept from clarifying by the deterioration of the psoas as it crosses as it crosses and and goes into its insertion of the lesser And if between the lesser trochanter and the crest and the pubic arch, you don't have an adequate resilience for that psoas, you're going to have a very jammed up groan."
Asked what the fifth hour should emphasize, Ida names the clarification of the groin and the psoas at its crossing.
The fifth-hour psoas work is impossible without the preparation of the third and fourth. In her 1973 Big Sur class, Ida is blunt about the dependency: the normal psoas works together with the rectus femoris and lengthens; it only shortens when the pelvis is not yet ready to receive its work. The fourth hour gave the pelvis the support it needed; the fifth begins to use what the fourth made possible. This is why the fifth cannot be done out of sequence and cannot be evaluated in isolation.
"The normal psoas works together with the recti feminis, it lengthens. The only time it shortens is when it is not balanced to get it correct by the pelvis. Now this is ridiculous and this is the way it is. So you see your fourth power and your fifth power are really two halves at one power. Maybe I'll try trying to get that pulse a little more horizontal. And your sixth hour is going to be another one of the same."
Ida names the fifth as the structural counterpart of the fourth — the two halves of a single pelvic hour.
Width across the iliac crest, and the lumbar consequence
The fifth hour's work in the abdomen has an immediate effect on the iliac crest — the bony rim of the pelvis where the quadratus and lumbar fascia attach above and the psoas crosses below. Ida is precise about the consequence in the T10 teaching: when the area around the crest is cleared, the iliac bones fall into a wider space. This is not a result the practitioner imposes; it is what the body does on its own when the holding tissues stop preventing it. The wider iliac stance immediately changes the sacroiliac relationship and, with it, the position of the lumbars.
"there was any room for the psalis. You see, one of the things that the establishment teaching can't understand is that if you get this cleared up around that crest of the ileum, all of a sudden you get a widening of the iliac bones. They fall into a wider space. And this seems to an establishment sequence impossible. Yeah. That obviously affects the sacroiliac I can't really think of much else to say about the Fifth Element."
Ida names a consequence of fifth-hour work that the establishment teaching has trouble accepting.
A practitioner working the fifth hour will accordingly attend not only to the rectus and psoas but to what the lumbar vertebrae do as a consequence. The pelvic lift at the end of the fifth hour goes higher up the lumbar than it has in any previous hour, because the deep work of the fifth has reached lumbar tissue that earlier hours did not. The lumbar is being asked to rearrange itself in response to a newly horizontal pelvic floor. The pelvic lift is the practitioner's way of taking advantage of that rearrangement before sending the body out the door.
"It's also true. Okay. Again. And you're paying a lot of attention to what you're doing with the lumbars, you know, like you're going up a little bit higher than you may have gone already on the pelvic lift. And that's because you've done, you know, some pretty deep work on the lumbar. So you wanna get as much for your money as you can out of a really good pelvic lift in this hour. Any law against getting that kind of a pelvic lift in the first hour of its leaving? No. No. Every time. No. As much for your money as you can get. As much for their money as you can get them."
Ida explains why the fifth-hour pelvic lift goes higher than any previous lift.
Width of the legs and the dependency on the fourth
Ida includes a minor but practical goal in her RolfB4 description of the hour: the legs frequently need to be brought to a proper width. The fourth hour worked the medial line of the legs from below; by the fifth, with the pelvic floor beginning to horizontalize, the practitioner can see whether the legs are tracking too close together. Adjusting their lateral position is part of consolidating what the lower-half work has been building toward. The transcripts also contain a warning, often repeated, that the fifth cannot be attempted without an adequate fourth. The pelvis will refuse to be picked up from in front if the medial line below it has not been organized.
"But you see, if you're going to get a horizontal pelvis, the only way you can get it is by picking it up in the front and making that front balance the rest of it. You gotta pick it up in the front. Now when you freed the a beautiful picture of the horizontal pelvis up here. The guy didn't know what he was saying. The chapter. Mhmm. I can't remember. Now If you try before the fourth hour has been accomplished to pick up that pelvis and make it horizontal, you can't do it. Now maybe if I'd been a real bright girl, I would have known all these things, and I'd have gone on a head trip and said this is the way we're gonna do it."
Ida explains the structural dependency of the fifth on the fourth — and confesses how it took her time to see it.
The dependency runs in both directions. The fourth hour needed the third — the work along the iliac crest and the quadratus that finally gave the practitioner access to the deeper level of the pelvic basin. The fifth needs the fourth. The sixth, by extension, needs the fifth. Across the 1973, 1975, and 1976 transcripts Ida returns to the same image: each hour preparing the body to accept the next, each hour finishing in a particular place because the next hour requires it to start from there. The fifth hour's position in the middle of the recipe is the position of a hinge — the hour where the lower-body work begins to be used to reach upward into the trunk.
Reaching upward: the diaphragm, the heart, and the lumbar plexus
Ida's most expansive claim about the fifth hour is that it begins to use what the lower-body work has built to reach upward into structures whose well-being depends on the pelvis. The diaphragm is reached through the psoas; the solar plexus is reached through the diaphragm; the position of the heart is reached through both. The fifth hour is therefore the first hour in the recipe in which the practitioner can speak honestly about visceral consequences without overreaching. The lumbar plexus, the autonomic chain, the abdominal organs — all of them sit on or near the structures the fifth hour is finally able to reach.
"You're also affecting the diaphragm. And through the diaphragm, the solar plexus. And through the diaphragm, the position of the heart. Mhmm. The behavior of the heart and the stress on the heart. And so in this fifth and fifth hour, you're working your way upward out of the pelvis into the structures whose well-being depends upon the positioning of the pelvis. And you see your fourth hour has taken on the positioning of the floor of the pelvis."
Ida traces the upward consequence of fifth-hour pelvic work — through diaphragm to heart.
What the practitioner is reaching toward, in other words, is not only structural balance but a downward effect on the autonomic nervous system. The structures Ida names — the lumbar plexus, the solar plexus, the diaphragm — sit in a region innervated by the sympathetic chain that runs anterior to the lumbar vertebrae. The classical osteopathic literature she sometimes references made the same observation in different vocabulary. Her contribution is mechanical: if the psoas is short and the diaphragm is bound, the autonomic structures lying on the lumbar bodies cannot be at rest. The fifth hour's reach into the abdomen is therefore also a reach into the autonomic balance of the trunk.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA1 public tape — on the relationship between freeing the diaphragm at the costal arch and the chest moving as a unit in respiration, with discussion of how upper-thoracic preparation supports the deeper fifth-hour work. RolfA1Side1 ▸
The continuity argument: each hour the second half of the previous one
Across the 1975 Boulder transcripts, a recurring teaching of Ida's is that the ten-hour recipe is fundamentally one continuous piece of work that has been broken into hours only because no body can take the entire process in one session. Norman, in the same Santa Monica class where the fifth-hour discussion begins, recalls Ida saying at Big Sur that the fifth is simply the second half of the fourth. The practitioner who internalizes this stops thinking about hours as discrete units and begins thinking about a single arc that the body's tolerance for input has forced into ten installments. The fifth hour is a particular point on that arc, not an island.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies."
A practitioner summarizes the continuity argument as it had been taught to him.
The continuity argument has a practical consequence for the fifth hour. A practitioner who treats the fifth as a self-contained unit will end the hour by lengthening the back a little and doing some neck work, as if these were finishing touches. A practitioner who understands the fifth as part of the arc will end it differently — using the closing work to set up what the sixth hour will need to find. In Ida's RolfB6 teaching the same logic governs the sixth's relationship to the fifth: the rotators that the sixth hour will address are reachable only because the fifth has cleared the way.
"It's not a little bit of something that's going to add up to something some other time. It's this opportunity that you have to grab right then and complete that particular Something that helped me clarify that way of thinking was like going back to the second hour, when we were working on the back and bringing those erectors in, like having the option of continuing the work on the neck, continuing that organization up through the neck before doing the pelvic lift. Like to keep that impression of organizing the erectors all the way into the neck and then doing the pelvic floor after that. Somebody else want to take this on? One thing I see almost with every hour is you're through with the hour with the majority of people and there's a real sense of non connection between the head and the pelvis."
Ida insists that the closing work of an hour is not filler — it is the specific structural opportunity of that moment.
What the fifth hour gives that nothing else can
Stepping back from the mechanics, the fifth hour occupies a unique position in the ten-session series. The first three hours worked the envelope of the body; the fourth went up the legs from below; the sixth will come into the pelvis from behind; the seventh through the tenth will address the upper body, the head, and the final balancing. Only the fifth hour reaches directly into the abdomen from in front. Only the fifth hour brings the rectus, the psoas, and the deep tissue along the lumbar bodies into a working relationship simultaneously. Only the fifth hour establishes the front-side balance that allows the trunk to be lifted off the pelvis without the pelvis spilling forward.
"And realize that in the first hour, you have gone to the diaphragm, not specifically, but to the fascia that is determining diaphragmatic posturing. And you've organized it, and you've gone to the psoas. See, always you have this polarity going on between the diaphragm and the psoas, that's what keeps the body upright. That's what keeps a trunk organized, this relation between the diaphragm and the psoas. And when you come right down to it, that pelvic lift, every time you come to it, is relating the psoas to the diaphragm. Through the limbus, through the sacrum, etcetera, etcetera. But one of the things I'm trying to emphasize here is a relative simplicity when you come right down to it as to what goes structurally wrong with the body. If you can organize, so I said, hi, Fran. You have made."
Ida names the polarity that the entire trunk depends on, and that the fifth hour finally addresses.
The teaching beat of the fifth hour, then, is this: the body has two ends and a middle, and the middle is the pelvis. The fourth hour gave the pelvis support from below. The fifth gives it support from in front. The sixth will give it organization from behind. After the sixth, in Ida's account from the RolfB6 lecture, the body has two feet on the ground, legs over the feet, thighs over the legs, and pelvis over the thighs. The fifth hour is the structural moment that makes that final stacking possible by turning up the front of the pelvic bowl so the abdominal contents have something to rest on.
"But at any rate, this is what I want to do today, and I would like some volunteers from the only way I could figure out doing this is to get some of you gals and try it with them too early on the piece and see if we get really better and all accomplished. The fourth hour was in the context of general preparation of the entire structure of the body, lengthening, loosening, widening at a most superficial level. By the end of the fourth the loosening and the freeing has taken place. And as well the thing that emerges as the fifth was the only area that hadn't been worked on, that is the anterior aspect of it. That's a major part of the work in the fifth. Well now, wait a minute. Which what hours, for instance?"
From an earlier teaching, Ida names what changed between the work before the fourth-hour synthesis and the work after it.
Coda: the front of the body finally working
When the fifth hour has gone well, what the practitioner sees is a body in which the front has finally begun to do its share. The pubic arch has lifted. The rectus abdominis is in position to hold up the trunk from in front. The groin has clarified — neither jammed up nor collapsed, but available to the leg. The lumbar has straightened, modestly, in response to the deep work along the iliac crest. The diaphragm moves more freely because the psoas is no longer dragging on it from below. The body is not yet finished — the sixth hour and everything that follows remains to be done — but the fifth has accomplished what nothing else in the recipe can accomplish. It has turned the floor of the pelvis up in front. The practitioner who has internalized Ida's teaching has stopped thinking of the fifth as the rectus hour and has started thinking of it as the hour in which the front of the body becomes structurally available to the rest of the body for the first time.
"Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
A senior practitioner names the energetic logic that runs across the work — including the fifth hour's release.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA2 public tape — on the third-hour preparation (quadratus and twelfth rib) that makes the fourth and fifth possible, and the way the recipe's sequence encodes a structural dependency rather than an arbitrary order. RolfA2Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB3 public tape — on the floor of the pelvis as defined by the pubococcygeus and the coccyx's role as a sympathetic-nervous-system indicator, material that becomes relevant when the fifth hour's anterior work is followed by the sixth hour's posterior work on the rotators and sacrum. RolfB3Side2 ▸RolfB6Side1a ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Santa Monica T11 advanced-class discussion of the four-five continuum — Bob's account of perceiving the fourth and fifth as a single three-dimensional reorganization of inside and outside. T11SA ▸T7SA ▸