The hamstrings as the lock on pelvic rotation
Ida's central doctrine on the hamstrings is structural, not local. The hamstrings are not a problem of the back of the leg — they are a problem of whether the pelvis can do its work. The pelvis sits on the femoral heads; for it to organize itself in gravity, it must be able to rotate around the hip joints. The hamstrings, running from the ischial tuberosity down to the lower leg, are the tether that prevents that rotation when they are short. In a public-tape lecture she made this explicit, refusing to let students treat the hamstrings as a separate concern from the work around the hip joint itself. The freeing of the pelvis from below, she insists, includes the hamstrings as a structural element of the hip-joint complex, not as an afterthought.
"that the pelvis can't turn around the hip joint if the hamstrings are too tight. This is not a separate situation. This is still a freeing around the hip joint."
From a public-tape lecture, on why hamstring work belongs to the work of freeing the hip joint:
The doctrine has a corollary that ran through her teaching of the recipe's middle hours: when a practitioner looks at a pelvis that will not horizontalize, that will not rotate forward and down to let the lumbars come back, the hamstrings are often the reason. Athletic patterns make this worse. Running, cycling, the kind of training that emphasizes the back of the legs without their antagonists, builds a hamstring tightness that the body cannot resolve on its own. In a RolfB4 public lecture, Ida placed this point inside her broader argument about how the lumbosacral articulations are determined not by the few small muscles of the pelvic floor proper but by the larger structural pulls from above and below.
"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."
From a RolfB4 public-tape discussion of the determinants of pelvic-floor relationship:
Three places, and only three
In a 1971-72 Mystery Tape session, Ida laid out the mechanical fact that made the hamstrings such a difficult muscle to address. Unlike the erectors of the back, which are interrupted muscles — segmented, with attachment points at each vertebra that let the practitioner work them piece by piece — the hamstrings are uninterrupted. They run from the ischial tuberosity to the lower leg without segmental relief. This anatomy means the practitioner has only three points of structural access, and of those three, one matters more than the others. The teaching beat here is simple and consequential: where you cannot get in, you cannot change anything.
"There's just three places where you can affect the hamstrings. One, the ischial tuberosity. One and most important thing, the ischial tuberosity. Of those elements of the hamstrings in the middle of the thigh."
From an early-1970s Mystery Tape advanced session, on why the hamstrings are so intransigent:
The consequence Ida draws from this anatomy is that shortened hamstrings do not stay in the back of the thigh. The shortening around the knee disorganizes the entire peroneal side of the leg, sending strain down to the foot. The structural reach of a tight hamstring is therefore much greater than its visible territory. This is the kind of cause-and-effect chain Ida built repeatedly in her advanced classes — a local shortness that, because of how connective tissue distributes strain, becomes a whole-leg and whole-pelvis problem. The practitioner has only three points of leverage, but those three points must serve a much larger structural reorganization.
The ischial tuberosity is the work
When the recipe arrives at the fourth hour and the practitioner has done both legs from below, the next move in the teaching protocol is the hamstrings — addressed not from behind but with the client supine, knees pulled to the chest. In a 1975 Boulder advanced class, a student named Jen walked through the sequence and Ida intervened to refine and correct. The setup matters: with the knees drawn up, the practitioner can see whether the ischial tuberosities are properly spaced, whether the gluteals spread as they should, whether there is fluid movement of the tuberosities, and whether the hamstrings grab. The visual diagnosis happens before the manual work.
"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."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a student walking through the fourth-hour sequence with Ida present:
Jen continued the description and arrived at the operational claim that mattered most to Ida: the work around the ischial tuberosity is not adjacent to the hamstring work but constitutive of it. The practitioner uses one tool on the body of the muscle — the fist, the elbow — and another on the bony attachment, the knuckle or fingers cleaning around the tuberosity itself. The two are done together because the hamstring is anchored there, and freeing the body of the muscle without freeing its origin produces no lasting change. The visible signs that the work has landed are spreading of the gluteals, movement of the tuberosity as the client draws the knee up, and a broadening of the hamstring itself.
"You have to really clean around that ischial tuberosity as part of the hamstrings. And you just keep at it until you have that spreading of the gluteals and the movement of the pelvis, especially the initial tuberosity as they pull the knee up in the proper length and definition of the hamstring string."
Continuing the same fourth-hour walkthrough, on cleaning the ischial tuberosity:
The image of the hamstrings becoming "broader" — no longer glued together — appears repeatedly in the transcripts. The hamstring group is three muscles, but in a disorganized body they behave as one welded mass. Part of what the fourth-hour work accomplishes is the recovery of differentiation between them. This was the same principle Ida applied throughout the body: muscles that should function as independent units have, through habitual misuse and connective-tissue gluing, become a single thing. The work of structural integration is, in part, the work of un-welding.
The strap that holds them down from above
In 1976, working with Louis Schultz's cadaver dissections in the Boulder advanced class, Ida saw something she had not understood before. The hamstrings, at their origin on the ischial tuberosity, pass underneath a connective-tissue strap — a wide, tough band that sits superficial to them and holds them down. Slide after slide, Schultz showed the strap, and Ida built the structural argument in real time: practitioners had been working too high, too superficial, and were therefore not reaching the hamstrings at all. The work she had been teaching for years had been frustrated by an anatomical fact nobody in the room had named.
"This is a wide strap literally holding them down and it's, as I say, when you start working up here on the ischial tuberosity and on the insertion of the hamstrings, often they're starting too high so that we're not affecting what's too broad and weird."
In the 1976 Boulder cadaver lectures, watching Schultz's dissection slides:
Schultz himself, narrating one of the slides, gave the anatomical context. What had appeared in earlier teaching to be the lower edge of the gluteus maximus was in fact the strap — a separate connective-tissue structure that sits on top of the maximus and ties the gluteal fold down. The gluteal fold, the visible crease at the back of the thigh, is not the contour of the gluteus maximus muscle. It is the contour of the strap. This realignment of the anatomy reorganized how Ida thought about the whole region and why the work there had been so unreliable.
"This is the upper part of the hamstrings. This is the gluteal fold here. Now that piece of what looked like muscle that we saw, have now removed. So beneath that, here is the strap. So this is the greater That's not adipose. No. It's tougher now. Really? Yeah. And this, it just sort of blends into the fascia covering the greater trochanter here and just goes right into the tough covering. In fact, it ends up here. It comes completely along the rami and ends up in front. So it's a pull from here to out here that ties this whole thing down. So that's another reason I think that often we don't get to this region again for our own uptightness in our own bodies and therefore we can't help other people through that and I think that's another reason we can't get to the hamstrings because much of the holding down is in the frontal."
Schultz, narrating his 1976 cadaver slides for the Boulder advanced class:
The implication Ida drew from the strap was operational. The hamstring work at the ischial tuberosity has to begin lower and reach deeper than the practitioner's hand naturally wants to go. Going too high — staying at the level of the gluteal fold or above it — means working the strap, not the hamstrings. The strap is in continuity with the iliotibial tract laterally and with the rami anteriorly; it ties the whole posterior pelvis together as a unit. Loosening it is not the same as loosening the hamstrings, though both are needed. The revised picture made sense of why so much hamstring work had felt thorough but produced incomplete results.
And the adductor magnus that holds them down from beneath
The 1976 dissections gave Ida a second revelation about the hamstrings, this one even more consequential than the strap. The hamstrings, she discovered by watching the slides, were glued down on their deep surface to the adductor magnus. The adductor magnus, which her practitioners had been thinking of as an inner-thigh structure, actually extended underneath the hamstrings for most of their length and attached over near the vastus lateralis. The hamstrings, in other words, were not free muscles with adductors next to them. They were bound to the adductors along their entire deep surface, and could not move until they were lifted off.
"say, the hamstrings are literally glued down on the other side to the adductor magnus. And we've been talking about that for years but I didn't realize how they're totally, that the adductor magnus is totally underneath the hamstrings"
Continuing the 1976 cadaver discussion, on what lies beneath the hamstrings:
The two findings — strap above, adductor magnus below — converged into a single operational doctrine. The hamstrings are held in place by a connective-tissue envelope on both sides: the strap pulling them down toward the ischium from above, the adductor magnus binding them on their deep surface. To free them, the practitioner has to address both. This is why simple work on the body of the hamstring rarely produced lasting length. The muscle was not short by itself; it was held in a sleeve. In a 1975 Boulder session, working with the lecture coming on the fifth hour, Ida reflected on why some hamstring problems were so persistent.
"You're talking about the fifth is a something which connects with hamstrings to the people because it's the hamstrings that get you into more trouble with pelvis. But most anything else, I'd love sure you in trouble with pelvis, I guess this is not as intransigent. I mean, you pick the head thing today and tomorrow it's right back where it was before. These are if and they're uninterrupted muscles. You take the extensors of the back are interrupted muscles. They attach here and they attach there."
From a 1971-72 Mystery Tape advanced class, on why the hamstrings dominate the trouble at the pelvis:
The strap and the body's own tightness
Schultz, in the 1976 cadaver class, added an observation that Ida endorsed and elaborated. The reason practitioners had so much trouble reaching the hamstrings was not only the strap and the adductor magnus. It was also that the practitioners' own bodies were tight in the same region. A practitioner who could not access the hamstring-tuberosity-strap complex in their own body would have difficulty addressing it in a client. This was not a mystical claim about embodiment; it was a practical one about which tissue planes the practitioner could feel and which they could not. The work on someone else's hamstrings began with the work on one's own.
"So it's a pull from here to out here that ties this whole thing down. So that's another reason I think that often we don't get to this region again for our own uptightness in our own bodies and therefore we can't help other people through that and I think that's another reason we can't get to the hamstrings because much of the holding down is in the frontal."
Schultz, continuing the 1976 dissection commentary:
The cadaver work also clarified the topography of the strap itself. Looking at the dissected pelvis from behind, with the gluteus maximus split open and reflected, the strap appears as a tough sheet superficial to the maximus, tying the maximus down onto the ischial tuberosity. It blends into the fascia over the greater trochanter and continues into a slick complex of connective tissue that Schultz described as in continuity with the fascia from the quadratus femoris, the vastus lateralis, and the gluteus medius. The whole posterior hip is therefore one connective-tissue field with many tributaries, and the hamstrings emerge from underneath the most superficial layer of it.
"The next thing I knew I had a total series of lectures and a life's work. Really? Two life's work. Now this is with some of that fat cleared out so this now is the gluteus maximus reflected back. The greater trochanter would be about in this region. This is showing the sciatic nerve and this is showing the origin of the hamstrings. So you see here how they literally are held down and sort of coming underneath that strap and then coming up over the adductor magnus which is right here. This is adductor magnus. Yep, because here it is immediately adjacent to the vastolateralis. And they look like they have a common tooth. Right, they're right on the bone together, right?"
From the same 1976 dissection lecture, describing the cleared field beneath the gluteus maximus:
Hamstrings and the first hour: the fascial envelope
Hamstring work first appears in the recipe in the first hour, but its purpose there is different from what comes later. In the first hour the practitioner addresses the fascial envelope — the outer wrapping of the hamstrings — not the muscle itself. The goal is to release the superficial layer, to begin the lengthening that the rest of the series will extend. By the fourth hour, with the envelope already released, the practitioner can move to deeper work. A 1975 Boulder advanced-class student articulated this distinction clearly, and Ida let it stand.
"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."
From the 1975 Boulder fourth-hour discussion, a student distinguishing first-hour hamstring work from fourth-hour hamstring work:
The relationship between first hour and fourth hour on the hamstrings was, for Ida, an instance of a larger principle: each hour of the recipe is a continuation of the previous one. In a 1975 Boulder discussion, she put this in its most general form, talking about the first hour as the beginning of the tenth. The hamstrings are touched in the first hour because the work has to begin there; they are returned to in the fourth because the envelope is now soft enough for the practitioner to reach the muscle itself; they are returned to again in the sixth and seventh hours as the pelvis settles around the changes.
"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."
From a 1975 Boulder class discussion, on the continuity of the ten sessions:
Fourth-hour hamstrings: support under the pelvis
In the same 1975 Boulder fourth-hour discussion, a student attempted to summarize the hour as freeing the pelvis from below. Ida corrected the framing. The fourth hour does not only free the pelvis from below; it puts support under the pelvis so that the pelvis can be free. The hamstrings, the adductors, the work along the rami — these are not just releases. They establish the structural base on which the pelvis can finally rest in a new relationship to the hip joints. The teaching beat is that release and support are not opposites; they are the same act, viewed from different sides.
"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. It's putting support under the pelvis so that the pelvis can be free. This is so little. Would you say organized support?"
From the 1975 Boulder fourth-hour discussion, correcting a student's framing:
The same passage continues with a practical sequence Ida endorsed: free the attachments at the ramus and the ischial tuberosity, lengthen the hamstrings, then lengthen the lumbars, then balance the work by attending to the cervicals and the back. The hamstrings sit in the middle of that sequence not because they are most important but because they are the structural pivot — what comes before prepares the access to them, what comes after takes advantage of the length they have allowed. In another 1975 Boulder session, a senior student described how the work on the hamstrings opens into the pelvic lift that follows.
"Okay, Jen, was trying to cover everything, but I'll move faster. Yeah. Having done the hamstrings, you're ready for usually a pelvic lift will be next. It's something the body needs right at that particular time, the lumbars back, lengthen the fascia, then you work on the neck to bring the cervicals back, set the head on the body, soft tissue back. Do some work on the back. If I'm not mistaken, I may have seen Ida do one or two port areas without working on the back, but I'm not sure."
Continuing the fourth-hour sequence after the hamstring work:
Hamstrings in the seventh hour: support for the work above
By the seventh hour, the recipe has moved into the head and neck, but the hamstrings are still part of how that work holds. In a 1971-72 Mystery Tape session, Ida and a senior practitioner traced backward from the seventh hour to identify what the fourth hour had contributed. The answer was length on the inside of the legs — adductor length — and through that, the ability of the psoas to balance with the rectus and free the lumbars. But the hamstrings underwrite that whole chain. Without their length, the inside of the legs cannot establish their own; without the inside of the legs, the psoas cannot rebalance; without the psoas rebalancing, the work above never holds.
"asked them to raise, that you would know whether you had this Because if you have balance, the knee will go straight sealing it, at least in the beginning. Beginning right. If you have the balance, you shorten the rectus femoris and fold up. You see, all of these little crypts will tell you what's going on. Providing you know enough to look for it. So that you're perfectly right, Bob, You can look back and see in each hour how you've contributed. To that seventh hour. To that seventh hour. And you can go back to the fourth hour."
From a 1971-72 Mystery Tape session, tracing the fourth hour's contribution to the seventh:
In a 1976 Boulder class, working with three male models in a fourth-hour demonstration, Ida pressed the room to see what the bodies were telling them. The students named various things; she pulled them back to the single observation that mattered. Every one of the bodies had short hamstrings. It was, she said, a universal — she could not remember the last body that had come in without short hamstrings. The question was not whether the hamstrings would need work but what to make of the cultural pattern that had produced them so reliably.
"You cannot have a cubicle or a routing room and still see the body you're working on. Well, there you are, Peter. I've been here. I wanted to add Where have I been? Just in there. Would like to add that the one thing that one thing I saw that they all share a short hamstring. That's that's a universal. When did you ever see a body come in without a good hamstring? I don't think so either. And I don't know whether this is our cultural pattern or what we do to our kids or what. I don't know. You practitioners, why do you see?"
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, a fourth-hour demonstration with three models:
Hamstrings and the man with shortened hamstrings
In a 1976 Boulder class, Ida turned the hamstring teaching toward a practitioner named Chuck whose own hamstrings she had been observing. The point she wanted to make was psychological as much as structural — though for her the two were never separate. A man with shortened hamstrings, she said, develops a subconscious accent on the hamstrings. He does not know why; he just does. The body's awareness of its own restriction becomes a fixation, and the fixation reinforces the restriction. The work is not just on the muscle; it is on the silent attention the person pays to the muscle.
"You think you can forget the hamstrings after all this? You see, as a matter of fact, and I'm not fooling, The man who has shortened hamstrings subconsciously gets a much greater accent on hamstrings. He doesn't know why he does, but he does. And this is a great part of your problem that your hamstrings are very much too short. You probably know this. You probably know it with your head. But I'm not talking about what you know with your head. I'm talking about what you're aware of on that silent level. And that silent level is screaming to your hamstrings, so you're screaming out of your mouth hamstrings, whereas this is really little to do with the case. In fact, those short hamstrings of yours have a great deal to do with your entire problem. Now, hey. Come on. Get going, mister Chuck. You never heard of coffee? Good heavens. Do you wear your wristwatch?"
From a 1976 Boulder class, addressing a practitioner directly about his own shortened hamstrings:
The same passage gives one of her clearest operational statements about the pelvic lift and its relationship to the hamstrings. The pelvic lift, she insists, allows the lumbars to come back so that the sacrum sits properly under them. Without this, the first hour has failed; and if the first hour has failed, every subsequent hour has probably failed too. But the pelvic lift does not stand alone. It works because the hamstrings, having been lengthened, have stopped pulling the ischial tuberosities down and forward. The pelvic lift opens the door the hamstring work has unlocked.
"It it allows the lumbars to move. That's the answer. It allows the lumbars to come back so that the sacrum is fitting now under the lumbars. And that is the key to the first hour. And believe me, if you forget it, you failed your first hour. You may have failed all the other hours all the way along the line because you have not positioned the lumbars where they belong. Is this thoroughly clear in your mind? Now you've got something else you can do."
From the same 1976 Boulder class, on the pelvic lift's relationship to the lumbars:
The lateral strap and the iliotibial complex
The hamstring work also has a lateral dimension that the 1976 dissections made visible. The strap that holds the hamstrings down at the ischial tuberosity is continuous with the iliotibial tract on the lateral side of the thigh. Schultz's slides showed this in detail: what appears in the textbooks as a discrete iliotibial band is in fact part of a larger connective-tissue sheet that wraps around the trochanter, ties down the hamstring origin, and continues forward along the rami. The hamstring work therefore connects to lateral-leg work in a way that is not visible in the standard anatomy. Ida had long taught this functionally; the dissection gave her the picture.
"slides over the trochanter, It's in continuity with the fascia from the quadratus femoris. It's in continuity with the fascia from the vasta lateralis. It's in continuity with the fascia from the medius and it all just sort of rolls. As you know, we felt that. It sort of rolls over the top of that greater trochanter and there's tunnels in there. That dark area, the resection of that strap, you call this? Here is where the strap was. What's that dark area above it? Here? Yeah. That's the cut edge of the maximus. Of the maximus. So that the, I think ischial tuberosity is about here. So you see it's fairly high above the edge of the maximus. And it had its own slipperiness. It's like a tendon on the underside of the gluteus maximus tying the gluteus maximus down onto the tuberosity."
Schultz, in the 1976 Boulder dissection lecture, on the strap's continuity with the surrounding fascia:
The functional consequence of this continuity is that hamstring work, done properly, changes the lateral leg and the rotators at the same time. Conversely, restriction in the iliotibial complex or the lateral rotators can prevent the hamstring work from landing. This is why the fourth-hour sequence does not isolate the hamstrings but works them in the context of the adductors below, the rotators behind, and the rami in front. The hamstrings are one tributary of a larger structural problem, and they can only be addressed inside that larger field.
Why the body resists hamstring work
In a 1973 Big Sur class, Ida observed that the hamstrings are one of the muscle groups practitioners themselves most often struggle with — not just to address in others but to inhabit in their own bodies. The reason is the strap and the holding-down on the front of the body that Schultz would later document in 1976. Practitioners are tight in the rami and the front of the pelvis; this tightness reflects back into the strap region; and a practitioner who cannot feel what release in that region is in their own body has difficulty producing it in someone else. The work on the hamstrings is therefore as much about training the practitioner's perception as it is about acting on the client.
"In fact, it ends up here. It comes completely along the rami and ends up in front. So it's a pull from here to out here that ties this whole thing down. So that's another reason I think that often we don't get to this region again for our own uptightness in our own bodies and therefore we can't help other people through that and I think that's another reason we can't get to the hamstrings because much of the holding down is in the frontal. And this is just, we really wanted to get a picture of the strap this time."
Schultz, in the 1976 cadaver lecture, on why the region is so hard to reach:
The back of the legs is also where the second-hour work first meets the hamstrings as a structural unit rather than as a fascial envelope. In a 1975 Boulder advanced class, a senior student walked through the second-hour sequence and noted that work behind the knee — at the attachments of the hamstrings as they descend toward the lower leg — was sometimes warranted, though Ida's position on this varied. The lower attachments are the third of the three access points Ida named in the Mystery Tape lecture; they connect the hamstring problem to the lateral-leg and ankle work that follows.
"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."
From a 1975 Boulder second-hour walkthrough, on work behind the knee at the hamstring attachments:
The teaching beat that emerges from Ida's hamstring doctrine, taken whole, is structural and not local. The hamstrings are the strap by which the pelvis is tethered to the lower leg, and through that tether they determine whether the pelvis can rotate around the hip joints and let the lumbars come back. They are uninterrupted, so they can only be addressed at three points; of those three, the ischial tuberosity is the most important. They are held down from above by a connective-tissue strap and from beneath by the adductor magnus, so the practitioner who reaches them must reach through both. The work begins in the first hour with the fascial envelope, deepens in the fourth hour with the muscle itself, and continues to underwrite every later hour up through the seventh and beyond. Every body that comes in for the work has short hamstrings; the question is never whether to address them but how to reach what is actually holding them.
Coda: the hamstrings and the floor of the pelvis
Ida's deepest claim about the hamstrings linked them to the floor of the pelvis itself. The fascia that wraps the adductors, in continuity with the connective-tissue sheet that holds the hamstrings, extends up between the rami and blends with the fascia of the obturator internus — which is part of the floor of the pelvis. To free the hamstrings, then, is to change the tone of the pelvic floor. This is not metaphor; it is fascial continuity, demonstrated in the dissection room. The hamstrings, the adductors, the obturator internus, and the floor of the pelvis are one connective-tissue field. A practitioner who reaches the hamstrings reaches all of it.
"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. You should've made it more now than anyone else. I would think that also that fascia then in turn blends with the iliac fascia and distal. That's a really good picture in Grants of that."
Closing the 1971-72 Mystery Tape session, on the fascial continuity from adductors to pelvic floor:
This is the structural claim that organizes everything Ida taught about the hamstrings. They are not the back of the leg; they are the lower edge of a connective-tissue field that includes the pelvic floor, the obturator complex, the adductors, the rotators, and the strap. To work them is to enter that field at one of its accessible margins. The three places where the practitioner can reach the hamstrings — the ischial tuberosity, the middle of the thigh, the knee — are also entry points to the whole structural region the hamstrings inhabit. The teaching she returned to across years was that the practitioner who treats the hamstrings as a local problem will fail at them, and the practitioner who treats them as the structural lock on the pelvis will at least be working on the right thing.
See also: See also: a 1973 Big Sur lecture (SUR7322) in which Ida discusses the obturator internus and the obturator fascia as the fascial attachment of the iliococcygeus muscle, extending the same chain of pelvic-floor continuity from a different angle. SUR7322 ▸
See also: See also: a 1971-72 Mystery Tape session (IPRVital1) in which Ida warns against over-focusing on the iliopsoas as a single muscle and pushes practitioners back to the broader structural picture in which the hamstrings, rotators, and pelvic-floor relationships all interact. IPRVital1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class (T1SB), in which Ida frames the doctrine of recipe continuity — the first hour is the beginning of the tenth — that organizes how hamstring work recurs across the ten-session series. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: a 1975 Santa Monica advanced class (T9SA) covering the first- and second-hour sequence in which the hamstring envelope is first addressed and the back is prepared for the deeper hamstring work that comes in the fourth hour. T9SA ▸