The picture that walks in the door
Ida insisted that her senior students learn to read a body the moment it entered the room. Every hour of the ten-session series has a characteristic pre-picture — what the body looks like before that hour's work begins — and the fourth hour's pre-picture is unusually consistent. The person has had three hours; the trunk has been opened, the back has been lengthened, the lateral line has been organized. What remains, and what becomes visible only after the first three hours have done their work, is a particular shortness and twist running up the inside of the legs and into the belly. In a 1975 Boulder session, Ida pressed her students to describe what they saw walking through the door for a fourth hour, and a senior practitioner named Tom answered with the language that would become standard in her teaching.
"The what we usually see when a person comes in after a third hour is that there's a shortness in the midline of their legs. There's a cockeyed crookedness in the leg. There's a corkscrew effect on the leg itself and there's also a shortness and there's a bunching up up around the ramus sometimes."
Tom, opening the fourth-hour discussion in the 1975 Boulder advanced class:
The pre-picture is not merely descriptive — it is diagnostic. The shortness, the rotation, and the ramus bunching together announce that the legs are not yet under the body. They sit cockeyed in relation to the pelvis, and until that relationship is corrected, the pelvis cannot horizontalize from below. In the 1976 Boulder class, Ida summarized what every fourth-hour body shares, and pressed her advanced students to name the signature that links all of them.
"And looks like if you turn that loose, then the hips would come out in front of you. Okay. So it would flatten. Okay. So what's wrong with that? Out. You got more to go. Why can't you be proud of your answer, but I don't. Well, you know, I was gonna set Now you people who are in the advanced class, at this point, should realize that everybody that comes in for a fourth hour shows one picture. They show a picture of lack of length in that midline. Most of the time, this lack of length is advertised by the crookedness of the medial line of the legs. And by golly, if somebody comes in for a fourth"
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, summing up what the fourth-hour pre-picture announces:
Making the medial line
The teaching beat of the fourth hour is direct: the practitioner is going to make a midline on the inside of the body that the third hour made on the side. The third hour established a lateral line — the vertical organization of the side body via the quadratus and the twelfth rib. The fourth hour does the same operation but on the medial aspect. It is a structural parallel, and Ida and her students named it explicitly in the 1975 Boulder transcripts.
"And so what we're doing then in the fourth hour is we're creating the midline as we did in the third hour. On the inside. On the medial aspect of the lid."
Tom, describing what the hour is doing, with Ida confirming:
But the medial line is not merely a parallel to the lateral. It runs further. It does not stop at the leg — it continues up into the pelvic floor and the front of the spine. This was the point Ida pressed her students to see: when you follow the inside of the thigh vertically, you do not stop at the pubic ramus. You go up into the belly, up the front of the spine, and the shortness you see in the medial leg is the visible bottom of a shortness that runs all the way up. In the 1975 Boulder class, she walked a student through this realization in a Socratic moment, asking him to track the line with his eye.
"Okay, but if you follow the inside of the thigh vertically, where does it go? It's going into the belly. It's going right up the front of the spine and that's where you see the shortness, is through that whole aspect of the body inside."
Ida, pressing a student to follow the line vertically:
This reframing is the central doctrine of the hour. The legs are where the practitioner works, but the legs are not the goal. The goal is a continuous medial line from foot through pelvic floor up into the belly. The shortness the student sees on the inside of the thigh is the same shortness that, higher up, has the rectus jammed against the pubes and the psoas unable to lengthen. The fourth hour establishes the bottom of a line whose top the fifth hour will complete.
The adductors, the ramus, and the rotation
What the practitioner actually works on, anatomically, is the adductor group and the soft tissue at the ramus. The adductors run from the pubic ramus down the inside of the femur. Their fascial sheaths, Ida observed, are often stuck together — the muscles cannot differentiate from each other, cannot operate independently, and the result is a leg that moves as one undifferentiated unit. The fourth hour separates these sheaths and at the same time addresses the rotation that almost every leg shows when it arrives. Tom, continuing in the 1975 Boulder session, gave a clean account of the move.
"midline in an attempt to establish a more vertical line in the leg and we're also trying to get the rotation of the leg out. And we're releasing the tile up in the ramus of of the abductors, mainly the abductor group."
Tom, naming the operative moves of the hour:
The adductors are not just shortened — they are stuck. Their fascial sheaths have lost their independence. In the same 1975 session, Tom went on to describe what the practitioner is actually trying to do once the hands are on the tissue. The aim is not to lengthen muscles in isolation but to separate sheaths from each other, so that each adductor can act on its own and the group can act as a group when it needs to.
"Also, what's found during the fourth hour is that the muscles that well, the adductor muscles are oftentimes, I guess we're stuck together, the fascial sheaths are stuck together. What we're trying to do is we're trying to separate these so that they're able to move independently and then as a group in a sense. I'd like to add to that."
Tom, continuing — what the separation of sheaths actually accomplishes:
The rotation question is more delicate. A leg arriving for a fourth hour is rarely straight. It corkscrews — the femur rotated one way, the tibia another, the ankle compensating. Ida did not have students treat each rotation in isolation; she taught them to see the rotation as a single phenomenon running up the line, and to take it out by establishing the vertical that the leg had been substituting for. The rotation, in her teaching, is what a leg does when it cannot find a vertical line through its medial aspect. Establish the line, and the rotation has nothing left to do.
The cue: the leg sets back
Ida wanted every student to have a single visible cue that told them the fourth hour had landed. Not a feeling, not a metric, but a thing the practitioner could see when the model stood up and walked across the room. In the 1975 Boulder class, Tom — having described the technique — named the cue, and Ida confirmed it by walking across the room herself so the junior class could see what the cue actually looks like in a body.
" To the extent that my vision of the fourth hour, sort of my cue that I've done it, is when I see the whole leg begin to set back with relation to the pelvis."
Tom, naming the visual cue that signals the hour is done:
The cue is mechanical. Before the fourth hour, the leg sits forward of the pelvis — the body's weight rolls onto the front of the foot, the pelvis tips anteriorly to compensate, and the medial leg line takes the strain. After a good fourth hour, the leg sits under and slightly back of the pelvis, and the pelvis itself is now free to move forward over the leg in walking. Ida demonstrated this herself in the 1975 class, asking the younger students to watch her walk so they could see what she was talking about.
"Have you ever noticed how when I walk at the end of a really good fourth hour, the leg sets back with each step? Mhmm. And the pelvis is and the pelvis really begins to come forward then as it's"
Ida, walking across the Boulder classroom to demonstrate the cue:
This walking demonstration matters because it locates the doctrine in a kinematic fact rather than a postural snapshot. Verticality, in the static sense, is something the recipe is always working toward. But the fourth-hour cue is dynamic — it appears in motion, in the gait, in the relationship between the swinging leg and the advancing pelvis. The hour has landed when the practitioner sees the leg trail and the pelvis lead, not when the body looks straight standing still.
Tissue direction: toward or away from the midline
One of the genuine disagreements in Ida's late teaching concerned the direction the practitioner takes the tissue in the fourth hour. The older instruction had been to move tissue away from the midline — spread the adductors laterally, open the inside of the leg outward. But by 1975 and 1976 Ida was correcting this, telling her senior practitioners that the adductors often need to come toward the midline rather than away from it. The point was not a new rule but the elimination of an old one. In the 1975 Boulder class, the matter came up directly between Ida and a senior student.
"Did you conceive of moving the tissue toward the midline? At this point? Right, I could conceive of it, but I'm not sure that, I mean, I think I've looked, I see that as an exception. When I worked on Roxanne, part of the work on her lower leg from here down was moving tissue to the midline. Because the body asked for that."
Ida, pressing a student on tissue direction in the fourth hour:
The doctrine that emerged is procedural rather than directional. The practitioner is establishing a midline, and to establish it, tissue may need to come from outside or it may need to spread from inside. Either move can serve the line. The mistake — and Ida named it as the mistake she had spent five years correcting in herself and her students — was to fix the direction in advance rather than read what the body was asking for. In the same session, a senior practitioner admitted to having spent years moving tissue away from the midline before realizing why some bodies never quite resolved.
"That'll be something in your repertoire to understand that fourth hour. And we're talking about I mean, I spent five years moving tissue away from the midline. And all of a sudden, I'm finding out that, you know, I'm seeing these bodies where it just didn't quite happen. And now now I know why. Well, I would like to save you that trouble again. I'm I'm still, you know, seeing that I'm stuck somewhere with the idea that you have to move it away. Well, what you're doing again is establishing midline."
A senior practitioner, confessing the years he spent moving tissue the wrong way:
The deeper teaching here is about chevrons. The shortness in the medial leg line, viewed as a pattern, looks like chevrons running down the body toward the midline. The hour does not move tissue in one direction; it interrupts the chevron pattern by relieving the downward pull and re-establishing horizontal segments across the leg. Sometimes that means going laterally; sometimes that means going medially; sometimes, in the same leg, both. The practitioner reads the chevrons and works the line.
The pelvic floor is the end of the road
The single most-debated question about the fourth hour in Ida's classroom was whether the goal was the adductors or the pelvic floor. Senior practitioners argued both sides — some teaching that the pelvic floor was the operative goal and the legs were merely the route, others teaching that the adductors and ramus tie-ups were the operative goal and the pelvic floor was the consequence. Ida's late position resolved the dispute with characteristic structural precision: the pelvic floor is not an alternative goal, it is the end point of a road. If you do the medial line, you will have done the pelvic floor.
"And lengthening. The fourth hour is in terms of pelvis and lengthening the medial line of the body if you would. And the pelvic floor. It isn't an and the pelvic floor. If you really establish the medial line of the body, you will have established the pelvic floor."
Ida, settling the adductor-vs-pelvic-floor dispute in the RolfA2 public tape:
This is a characteristic move in Ida's thinking. She rarely accepted that two goals were competing for the practitioner's attention; far more often, she revealed that one was the consequence of the other and the dispute was a failure to see the structural chain. The medial line runs from the foot up through the adductors, across the ramus, and into the pelvic floor — the pubococcygeus, the levator ani, the obturator fascia. To organize the legs medially is to take the pull off the floor of the pelvis from below. The floor cannot be addressed directly through the legs, but it can be released through them, because they share fascial continuity at the ramus.
In a 1971-72 mystery-tape session, Ida and a senior practitioner worked the same point out. The fascia that wraps the adductors does not stop at the leg — it continues up between the rami, blends with the fascia covering the obturator internus, and becomes part of the floor of the pelvis itself. Releasing the legs changes the tone of the floor not as a side effect but as a direct fascial consequence.
"Yeah. 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. You're on the way, I think. You haven't quite made it."
A senior practitioner, naming the fascial continuity from adductor to pelvic floor:
How three hours prepare the fourth
The fourth hour cannot be done before the third hour. Ida pressed this point in the RolfA2 tape with unusual force — the third hour is not merely a prior step in a sequence, it is the structural precondition without which the fourth hour has nothing to work on. The first three hours have peeled the body progressively deeper, and the third hour in particular has gone deep enough at the quadratus and along the iliac crest to free the lateral attachment of the pelvis. Only then can the practitioner enter from below and ask the medial line to organize.
"Because we wanna go into the pelvis. We're going into the pelvis, which is part of the core. Yeah. But how did we get into what was the particular key that we used to open the pelvis? In the process of lengthening the sides in the third hour of the thorax, we also freed up the twelfth rib and the quadratus lumboid. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. Because, you see, be very clear in your mind that at that point, you're beginning to get deep as you haven't before at all. At that point, you're beginning to get to a deeper level."
Ida, in the RolfA2 tape, naming the chain from first hour to fourth:
The chain is cumulative and not optional. In the 1976 advanced class, Ida pushed her senior students to articulate what each of the first three hours had contributed to the horizontalization of the pelvis — because the fourth hour, she insisted, is the summation hour. It is the fourth hour, not the first hour, and the practitioner cannot evaluate it in isolation.
"Well, I came up with a theory that because there was a lot of work on adductors, there were sort of fascial lines of stress that went towards the center of the body, towards the midline, towards the deep parts of the thorax where we experienced more emotions. Then Chuck sort of led me back to see that what the fourth hour was, was a lengthening of the midline and a straightening of the medial aspect of the leg which led to a more horizontal flexion of the knee. Did it occur to you perhaps that the fourth hour was a summation hour. That is, it was the fourth hour, not the first hour you'd go on in these structures. Therefore, you could expect to get evaluate don't the fourth hour independently. Oh, I see what you're saying. Rather than mean comparatively to the other hours. Yeah, I mean it's in addition to the other hours."
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class, naming the fourth hour as a summation:
What each hour has contributed, as Ida insisted in the same session, is a different approach to the same problem. The first hour took the trunk off the pelvis from above; the second hour came down through the back and the lower legs to support it from below; the third hour freed it on the sides at the quadratus and iliac crest. The fourth hour comes up from inside the legs — the only direction not yet used.
"Yes, you can start further back in relationship to anything, in relationship to the ground mostly. Well, in the fourth hour we released it from below. In the third hour we released it from where? From the side, we separated it from the lateral aspect. Yeah, we released it from the bottom of third hour. Yeah, and the second we did some radial releasing of the foot during the horizontal"
Ida and a senior student, mapping the directions each hour has used to reach the pelvis:
Working the hour: legs, hamstrings, lift
The technique of the hour, as it was taught in the 1975 Boulder class, has a clear sequence. The practitioner begins with the foot and the ankle, addresses the relationships at the knee, works up the medial leg through the adductors, cleans around the ramus, then has the model turn supine for hamstring work and a pelvic lift. The leg work itself is bilateral — the practitioner moves to the second leg only when the first is sufficiently organized that the work translates upward through the pelvis. A senior practitioner described the move in the 1975 Boulder transcripts.
"Well, you don't have to describe the second leg. Move along. Okay, having done both legs, if you were to stand a person up after doing both legs, you'd see their hamstrings really grabby. And so the next thing is to work the hamstrings. 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."
A senior practitioner, walking through the hamstring portion of the hour:
The hamstring work in the fourth hour also serves as a diagnostic. With the model supine and the knees pulling toward the chest, the practitioner watches the ischial tuberosities — whether they spread, whether they move fluidly, whether one is closer in than the other. The hamstrings as they pull up should broaden, not stay glued together. The tuberosities should move. If they do not, the pelvis is still tied at the rotators, and the hour will not complete from the legs alone.
"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."
Continuing — the diagnostic the practitioner watches at the tuberosities:
The pelvic lift then often follows the hamstring work as the final integrating move. A practitioner in the 1976 class described what she felt: nothing fully translated through the pelvis until the pelvic lift was given at the end of the hour. The lift consolidates the medial-line work and lets the change travel upward through the lumbars. Without it, the leg may be organized but the line does not yet run.
"That movement begins to translate through the pelvis, particularly I found the pelvic lift very valuable in the court. Ah, what did you feel? For myself, I didn't get up and walk until I'd had the pelvic lift. So I'm talking now more from watching other folks. Did you do a pelvic lift at the fourth time? Yeah. Oh good. Yeah, like it was, in my case, the last link to put it together. Like the movement would just stop right at the, I don't know, third lumbar, third lumbar probably would stop right there."
A practitioner in the 1976 class, describing what the pelvic lift accomplishes at the end of the fourth hour:
Tibia, fibula, and the knee
Ida's late teaching paid unusual attention to the relationship between the tibia and the fibula in the fourth hour. The fibula, like the twelfth rib in the third hour, is one of the most vulnerable structures in the body — easily displaced, often posterior or rotated, and a frequent source of the corkscrew the practitioner sees in the leg. The fourth hour addresses the tibia-fibula relationship as part of establishing the vertical medial line, because if the fibula is mispositioned, the medial line cannot run cleanly to the foot.
"the tibia and the fibula relate to each other in the way the tibia relates to the femur. Often you'll have a situation where the tibia is, for example, too far posterior with relation to the femur. Situations like that will determine which way you take the tissue on the leg. For example, if the tibia is too far posterior, you might want to get in from both sides right behind the tibia and even behind the fibula and kind of lift the tissue along that whole leg. You want The tissue in front of the leg, tibia, anterior and so forth fascia, you generally want to take up and in as we mentioned because it's migrated too far down and too lateral."
A senior practitioner, describing how the tibia-fibula relationship determines tissue direction in the lower leg:
The knee is the hinge that this work passes through. The fourth hour addresses the knee not in isolation but as the transmission point between the foot-ankle complex below and the adductor-ramus complex above. The practitioner asks for knee movement during the work — knees in, knees out, foot up — so that the tissue is being asked to organize while the joint moves through its range. The hour also tests whether the knee can move horizontally; horizontal flexion of the knee is one of the cues that the medial line has organized along its full length.
Where the fourth hour points: the fifth
The fourth hour does not stand alone in the recipe — it points directly into the fifth. The fifth hour comes back to the pelvic floor from above, working the psoas and the rectus abdominis to complete the line that the fourth hour has begun from below. In the 1975 Boulder class, the question of how to get out of the fourth hour and into the fifth was a sustained discussion: what has the fourth done that makes the fifth possible?
"But the fifth hour is no less important because by the fifth hour, you are beginning to utilize what well, like in all of these hours, you are beginning to utilize what you have made in the fourth hour in terms of balance and in terms of freeing. You are beginning to use this to go up into the body, into the rest of the body, and relieve tension on organs. And you're doing this through the ir relationship, is other thing own. Muscle, which is is really concerned with the horizontal organization of the pelvis. But primarily you are doing it by virtue of the fact that you are organizing the psoas. 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. You're also affecting the diaphragm."
Ida, in the RolfB6 public tape, naming how the fifth uses what the fourth has made:
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida pressed her senior practitioners on exactly what the fourth hour contributes to the seventh — because the fourth-hour adductor work is what permits the fifth-hour psoas work, and the psoas work is what frees the lumbars enough for the seventh hour to land at the head. The chain is unforgiving: skip the fourth-hour length on the inside of the legs, and the practitioner will fail to establish the psoas balance two days later. A senior practitioner working through this chain in the mystery tapes named it cleanly.
"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. That's what I see as the fourth hour from the point of view of the seventh hour. You got any comment on, Mr. Peter? Just the fourth hour it seems to me establishes not only, and I didn't hear this exquisitely, you said that it establishes length all the way up through the body, not just through the inside of What do you think it establishes that length all the way up through the body? When releasing the tie ups at the bottom of the pelvis at the pubic ramus, you seems to allow an extension of the prevertebral."
Ida, naming what the fourth-hour adductor work makes possible in the fifth and seventh:
In the 1975 Boulder class, a senior practitioner named Steve gave Ida the answer she was looking for: the fifth hour is the continuation of the fourth. They are not two separate hours but a single operation done from two directions — from below in the fourth, from above in the fifth — and the goal of both is the floor of the pelvis.
"And we've gotten to the place now, we've uplifted the chest, lengthened the back sides, opened up the sides, and we started to establish a midline. And now we see that the front is beginning to need to be lengthened also. How come? From the pull of the thorax and the position of the pelvis. And the pelvis has to come up more anteriorly And by lengthening the rectus, we begin to get that and we begin to get a more total integration between the upper half and lower half. It's a very good job. A very good job. Compliment to you. And this is the answer, only Steve didn't give you quite the full key. The full key is that this has to do with the floor of the pelvis."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, naming the fourth-fifth pair as a single operation:
This pairing is why Ida insisted that the fourth hour be evaluated in light of what it makes possible rather than what it does in isolation. A fourth hour is good if it sets up a fifth hour. A fourth hour that frees the legs but does not enable psoas work two days later has not done its real job. The medial line must be continuous; the floor must be reachable from below before the practitioner can reach it from above.
Coda: the fourth hour as sexual and structural recognition
Ida did not separate structural work from psychological consequence, and in her later teaching she increasingly named the fourth hour as the hour where physical data about sexual adjustment became available to the person on the table. The medial line of the legs and the floor of the pelvis are not merely anatomical landmarks — they are the structural region whose disorganization expresses itself in how a person holds themselves around their own sexuality. In the RolfB6 public tape, Ida named this directly.
"longer sitting on the fence and and now to the place where they have the data which enables them to make up their mind. This is what have the physical data. This is about what it's about. And so you see that whole fourth hour is very intimately wound up with the whole problem of sexual adjustment and recognition. And so it becomes an extremely important hour in that sense. But the fifth hour is no less important because by the fifth hour, you are beginning to utilize what well, like in all of these hours, you are beginning to utilize what you have made in the fourth hour in terms of balance and in terms of freeing."
Ida, in the RolfB6 public tape, naming the psychological register of the fourth hour:
She was careful, as always, not to make the practitioner a psychotherapist. The fourth hour does not adjust anything in the person's psychology directly. It releases a structural region whose chronic shortness has been part of how the person has held a question about themselves. With the shortness released, the question becomes available — and what the person does with it is their own. The practitioner's job is to make the medial line and to verify, by watching the leg set back when the model walks, that the line has been made. The rest belongs to the person on the table.
See also: See also: RolfA3 public tape (RolfA3Side1) — Ida's extended account of pelvic-lift technique and its role at the close of fourth-hour and fifth-hour work; and the 1976 advanced class (76ADV61, 76ADV71, 76ADV81, 76ADV91), where Ida walks her senior practitioners through the full prepared-by chain from first hour through fourth, and through the adductor-and-pelvic-floor question at the close of the hour. RolfA3Side1 ▸76ADV61 ▸76ADV71 ▸76ADV81 ▸76ADV91 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class — extended fourth-hour discussion across multiple sessions including T1SB, T5SB, T9SA, T9SB, B2T8SB, B2T9SA, and T11SA, where senior practitioners and Ida work out the tissue-direction question, the adductor-vs-pelvic-floor dispute, and the relationship between fourth and fifth hours. T1SB ▸T5SB ▸T9SA ▸T9SB ▸B2T8SB ▸B2T9SA ▸T11SA ▸
See also: See also: 1971-72 mystery tapes (72MYS141, 72MYS111) and Big Sur 1973 (SUR7314) — earlier formulations of the fourth-hour rationale, including the fascial continuity from adductor through obturator internus to the pelvic floor. 72MYS141 ▸72MYS111 ▸SUR7314 ▸