The hip joint as the only place rotation can happen
In a 1975 Boulder session devoted to the third hour, Ida pressed a student to name what actually changes when the pelvis horizontalizes. The student worked through the obvious answers — the lumbars, the thorax, the legs — and Ida kept redirecting him to the single mechanical fact that makes the whole project possible. The earth does not move. The pelvis must therefore rotate around something fixed, and the only fixed thing available is the head of the femur. This is the teaching beat she circled back to in nearly every advanced class: hip imbalance is not a local problem about the hip socket but a structural problem about the body's one available pivot. Every line that crosses the hip joint — the adductors below, the psoas above, the rotators behind, the rectus femoris in front — participates in whether that pivot is available at all.
"And that you need to go down onto the greater trochanter to start to organize the muscles that come to the crest from below and to get this positioning or balance between the flexors and extensors below the Look at something else, say. You've got the right idea, but look at it in this light. In order to horizontalize the pelvis, you have to turn it around something. You can't turn the earth. You have to turn the pelvis. So you have to rotate it around something. You have to rotate it around the hip joint. And that hip joint is tied in in terms of the way the guy has been using himself and his pelvis and his legs just as much as the thorax was tied in. So what you have to do is to go to the strings that tie into that hip joint or and or cross them. You have the stuff that goes into the anterior superior spine. They don't tie into the hip joint, but it crosses it."
In a 1975 Boulder advanced session, Ida walks a student through why the hip joint is the unique site of pelvic change.
The passage above contains the engineering principle that underlies all the rest. Once a practitioner accepts that the hip joint is the operative pivot, the question of hip imbalance ceases to be a question about the joint itself and becomes a question about everything that crosses it. In her first-hour teaching, the elbow goes around the hip joint not to manipulate the joint but to begin freeing the strings that tie it. In the fourth hour the adductors come into play. In the sixth hour the rotators behind. The hip joint is rarely the site of treatment in her recipe — it is the destination of treatment everywhere else.
Freeing the pelvis from above and from below
Ida's first-hour doctrine — that the pelvis must be freed both from the thorax above and from the legs below — is the structural prerequisite for any later work on hip asymmetry. If the rib cage is still pressing down on the pelvis, no amount of work around the hip joint will let the pelvis rotate. If the hamstrings are still pulling the ischial tuberosities under, the head of the femur cannot become a true pivot. In an early public tape recorded with a medical visitor present, Ida lays out the sequence with unusual clarity: free the pelvis from above by raising the thorax, then free the pelvis from below by working around the hip joint, and understand that the hamstrings are part of the hip joint's territory, not a separate concern.
"From here, next we'll go down to the legs. Our core is to organize the pelvis in reference to gravity. So you free the pelvis from above and below. You free it above by raising the thorax off. Now we're down to free the legs on the pelvis by freeing the structures around the hip joints and then around the hamstring muscles to evaluate how where the restrictions are in Brooks, I would like to underscore certain points. You free the pelvis by working around the hip joint. This is right. In order to allow the pelvis to turn around the hip joint. But I want you to be perfectly clear in your mind 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. The hamstrings also The hamstrings because the new hip of the pelvis has got to be around that hip joint. And so you have got to remove all restrictions that are keeping the pelvis from rotating around the hip joint. I visualize the pelvis as floating."
In one of the RolfA1 public tapes, Ida summarizes the first-hour strategy for making the pelvis available.
The pairing of above and below is not symmetric. Above the pelvis, the thorax can be lifted as a unit — the rib cage rises off the pelvic crest and the lumbars are given room to come back. Below the pelvis, the work is more distributed: each tissue that crosses the hip joint must be addressed in turn. This asymmetry of approach reflects an asymmetry in the body itself. The thorax sits on top of the pelvis as a single weight; the legs hang from the pelvis through five or six muscular and fascial chains, each of which can be tight in its own way and each of which can pull the pelvis out of horizontal on its own.
"order to allow the pelvis to turn around the hip joint. But I want you to be perfectly clear in your mind 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. The hamstrings also The hamstrings because the new hip of the pelvis has got to be around that hip joint. Yes. And so you have got to remove all restrictions that are keeping the pelvis from rotating around the hip joint. Yes. Yes. I visualize the pelvis as floating. Know. I need know. To, yes, remove the restrictions on I know. Like, you see in this class, there are all kinds of levels of anatomical understanding. You have been dealing with anatomy for many years. Some others of these people are just six weeks into anatomy."
Continuing the same teaching, Ida insists that the work around the hip joint is the only place the pelvis can be adjusted against the earth.
Mature versus immature use of the joint
In her 1976 advanced class, working from cadaver photographs taken in the dissection that summer, Ida and the senior practitioner presenting the slides developed an analogy between the shoulder and the hip that became central to her late-career teaching on hip imbalance. The shoulder, in immature use, moves as a unit — the scapula goes wherever the arm goes. The pelvis, in immature use, moves the same way: it goes wherever the leg goes. Maturity, in both joints, means letting the joint itself do the work — the glenoid fossa at the shoulder, the acetabulum at the hip — so that the limb swings without dragging the girdle along with it. This is one of Ida's most precise framings of what hip imbalance actually is: a refusal of the acetabulum to function as a true joint.
"relates, a mature shoulder relates to using the glenoid fossa and mature pelvis relates to using the acetabulum because so many people are just moving with the whole pelvis instead of letting the leg swing"
Showing dissection slides in the 1976 advanced class, the presenter draws the analogy between mature shoulder use and mature pelvis use.
The pedagogical force of this framing is considerable. Hip imbalance, in her view, is not primarily a story about injury or compensation, though those play their part. It is a story about developmental incompleteness — a body that never matured into using its own joints. The first hour, she taught, is where this pattern first gets touched. The elbow around the hip joint in the first session is not yet a treatment of the acetabulum but an announcement to the body that the joint exists and is supposed to function. The work continues across every subsequent hour, but the goal is set in hour one.
"understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour."
In the 1975 Boulder transcripts, Ida articulates the doctrine that the first hour already contains the structural intention of the whole series.
Walking in the psoas, not the recti
If hip imbalance has a single anatomical signature for Ida, it is the substitution of the rectus femoris and the rectus abdominis for the psoas as the muscle of forward leg motion. The psoas is the deep flexor — the muscle that brings the leg forward from the spine itself, allowing the pelvis to remain organized while the leg swings. In a body where the psoas has not been recruited, the body finds another way: it flexes from the recti, which lie on the surface and can be trained into hypertrophy through sport. The result is the dancer's or skier's thigh, enormous and over-built, riding on a pelvis that never learned to flex from its core. This is hip imbalance in its most distinctively cultural form.
"The rectus abdominis. In a rough body, as you walk, the flexion bringing the leg forward should be in the psoas. In an unrulved body, the flexion is in the recti. The flexion is distributed between the rectus abdominis and the rectus femoris."
In a 1975 Boulder fifth-hour discussion, Ida names the structural signature of unintegrated walking.
Ida's analysis of this substitution is unsentimental about its cultural origins. Athletic training, she observed repeatedly, makes the imbalance worse, not better. The gymnasium addresses the muscles a person can already feel — the surface flexors — and never the deep ones. Every hour spent strengthening the rectus femoris in isolation is an hour spent further entrenching the failure of the psoas to do its proper work. The first hour begins to undo this by letting the belly wall fall back; the fifth hour digs deeper to reach the psoas itself; but the cultural pattern is what the practitioner is always working against.
"Now this is the reason why when you go and you look at skiers, for example, they have these enormous thighs. Many of our dancers have. Do you remember? Thighs out of all proportion to their body size. And you see, they started their dancing or they started their skiing or they started their water skiing, of Takashi. They started with relatively imbalanced structures, and they got a hold of the one they could get a hold of. And the one they can always get a hold of is that rectus femoris, that quadriceps structure of the legs. And in addition to that, they can get the rectus abdominis. And they are conscious of this, and they see this. And in gymnasiums and places where people are trained in sports, such a huge percentage of the talk is about this kind of training of those two anterior muscles. Now what do they do to balance it? Not one thing. Not one thing, and the more exercise they put themselves through, the more imbalance is in there. Now you fellows, in the first hour, when you have that person lying on the floor, you have done the thorax, and you've done a good deal on the legs, and you have that fellow lying on the floor and your hand goes onto his abdomen, and what happens to it? In anything that even resembles balance in the body, your head, depresses the belly wall."
Continuing the same teaching, Ida traces the consequences of recti-dominated walking through athletic training and the first-hour belly wall.
The pelvic floor and the lumbar shift
In her teaching on what makes the pelvic floor itself imbalanced, Ida pushed students away from the conventional list of six muscles and toward a more structural account. The pelvic floor's behavior is determined not by its own musculature but by what happens at the joints above and below it — the sacroiliac articulation, the lumbosacral junction, and the lumbar segments themselves. Shift any of those, she taught, and the pelvic floor takes on a different shape. Tighten the hamstrings through athletic training, and the pelvic floor changes again. Hip imbalance lives in the relationships between these structures, not in any of them taken alone.
"Just as soon as you shift any of those lumbars back on any of those lumbars, you're going to get a different relationship in that pelvic floor. Just as soon as you take on the type of athletic training which shortens and tightens the hamstrings to the exclusion of the antagonists of the hamstrings, you're going to interfere with that pelvic floor."
In the RolfB4 public tape, Ida reframes the pelvic floor away from its conventional muscular definition.
The mandatory passage above contains the cause-and-effect chain that Ida wanted the practitioner to hold in mind during every session. The pelvic floor is not a target — it is a consequence. Working directly on the pelvic floor without first having shifted the lumbars, lengthened the hamstrings, and balanced the adductors is, in her terms, working on the symptom rather than the structure. Every habitual posture — the wide-kneed sit, the locked athletic training, the tucked tail — registers on the floor of the pelvis. The practitioner's job is to remove the registration by working on the structures that wrote it.
The sacrum tipped to one side
In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class, working with a colleague named Jim who had been describing a particular case, Ida turned the discussion toward a pattern she found nearly universal in disorganized pelves: the sacrum was rarely just anterior, it was anterior and tipped. The rotational component of sacral malposition was, in her experience, the rule rather than the exception. This is one of the most important refinements in her teaching on hip imbalance, because it means that the structural problem rarely lives in the sagittal plane alone. A sacrum that tips also pulls one ilium one way and the other the other; the ropes on either side of the sacrum take on different lengths; the head of the femur on each side sits in a differently oriented socket.
"that often times when the sacrum is in there in anterior position, it's not only anterior, it's tipped to one side or the other. So that at this point, you're affecting literally the rope on either side of the sacrum that position it in the center of the pelvis is going to have profound significance all the way up the line."
In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida names the rotational component of sacral malposition.
Once a practitioner accepts that the sacrum is rotated as well as tilted, the strategy for addressing hip imbalance changes shape. It becomes impossible to think in terms of front and back alone; one must think also of left and right, of the differential tension in the rotators on each side, of the asymmetric pull of the piriformis as it originates on the anterior sacrum. The sixth hour, where the rotators are addressed, becomes the moment where this three-dimensional asymmetry is finally available to the practitioner's hand. Until then, the rotators have been protected by the gluteals and the hamstrings, and the sacrum has been protected by everything.
"The coccyx is the end here and they can also be pulled over to one side or the other and it's all, if it goes one way or the other it's rotated also. It's tied up with tendons but frequently one tendon will be shorter than the other."
Continuing the Big Sur discussion, Ida turns to the coccyx as a further site of rotation and asymmetry.
The rotators and the sixth hour
The sixth hour, in Ida's recipe, is the hour where hip imbalance is finally addressed at depth. The first hour begins the work; the fourth hour approaches it from the inside of the legs; the fifth reaches the psoas. But the rotators, lying behind the joint and protected by the gluteals, are not available until the practitioner has earned them by working up the back of the legs. The piriformis in particular — originating on the anterior surface of the sacrum and inserting on the greater trochanter — is the muscle through which a practitioner can finally affect the anterior sacrum from outside the body. This is the unique anatomical fact that makes the sixth hour possible.
"and if they're both tight or hypertonic or hypotonic, then that sacrum is not gonna move like it should. It's gonna be locked in. Tip that whole pelvis up there."
In the 1973 Big Sur class, a colleague describes what happens when the piriformis and its partners are out of balance.
The teaching that follows this passage in the Big Sur transcript elaborates the structural intimacy of the rotator group. The obturator internus originates inside the pelvis and exits through the greater sciatic notch; the obturator fascia, thickened across the foramen, is the attachment of the iliococcygeus muscle, which means that the tone of the pelvic floor can be reached through the rotators from outside the body. The piriformis comes from the anterior sacrum. Working the rotators in the sixth hour is therefore not a peripheral operation; it is a route into the deepest layers of the pelvic structure.
"Show while we're thinking about this, there's another important reason for working with piriformis and that is it's coming from the inside of the pelvis to the outside and this is why you give them up a lot of physiological changes in people. Yes. And that's one of the reasons that makes this whole thing so very important. Now when you come right down to it, the psoas also comes. From The this operator internus comes from way in here out to here and the operator fascia which is almost a thickened fascia around the operator internus is actually the attachment of the iliotoxicis muscle. So you're affecting an awful lot of things when you start working these rotators and that's something you have to keep in mind when you're not just working on a muscle, you're working on an awful Go of back to your obturator fascia and say it again. The obturator internus, first of all you don't really have a hole here, you have fascia that covers up this entire foramen. The obturator internus originates all in here, comes out through this greater eschatic notch that attaches to help rotate the femur. But it's covered on the outside by a thickening of fascia called the operator fascia and that's that operator fascia that the iliopoxygus muscle is attached to. So you can actually affect tone of the pelvic floor by just working on that one particular fascial reflex. That fascia extends all the way up from above by the transversal fascia that comes all the way down. Actually join right there. Well, now, do you remember yesterday how much emphasis I put get into."
Continuing the 1973 Big Sur discussion, a senior colleague elaborates the structural reach of the rotator work.
The psoas-diaphragm chain
Ida's teaching on the psoas extended well beyond the muscle's role in walking. In one of the RolfB6 public-tape sessions devoted to the fourth-hour transition, she described the psoas as the structural hinge between the floor of the pelvis below and the diaphragm above — the muscle whose tone determines whether the body's two horizontal membranes can function in relation to one another. A pelvis with a poorly organized psoas is a pelvis whose floor cannot balance and whose diaphragm cannot move freely. Hip imbalance, in this analysis, is also breath imbalance, also abdominal-organ imbalance. The psoas is the meeting place.
"psoas, the psoas diaphragm thing is going to be off."
In the RolfB6 public tape, Ida names the psoas's role in linking the pelvic floor to the diaphragm.
The chain Ida names here is one of the clearest illustrations of her structural method. A practitioner who treats hip imbalance as a problem to be solved at the hip will fail; a practitioner who follows the chain — adductors organize the floor of the pelvis, the floor of the pelvis allows the psoas to function, the psoas balances against the diaphragm — has a route to the actual structure of the problem. The fourth hour's work on the adductors, the fifth hour's reach for the psoas, the sixth hour's address of the rotators: each is a movement along this chain, and each requires that the previous step have actually been accomplished.
The lumbars must come back
Whatever else is happening at the hip joints, the lumbars are participating. In her 1975 Boulder teaching, Ida emphasized this with rising insistence, telling students that her late-career re-emphasis on the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge was a response to her own observation that students were forgetting about them. Talking about the pelvis without talking about the lumbars, she found, let students miss the structural fact that the pelvis cannot turn until the lumbars come back. A pelvic lift is not just an organization of the pelvis; it is an evocation of lumbar mobility that then lets the sacrum reposition itself.
"Every time you get wishy washy and people come in and they just want to have their head straightened out, know, they want some emotional release. That's when they take you off that path Their trip. And onto their trip. And then you're not doing them any good or yourself any good. Right. The spectrum also applies to rolting. Each hour is one more step along that spectrum of realigning the pelvis so that it can do its thing. It's actually more than the pelvis, as we see Ida's putting more and more emphasis on the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge and so forth. The reason she's doing that is because in her integration of the educational process, she has seen that by just talking about the pelvis and not possibly reemphasizing the importance of those large lumbars, that people tend to forget that."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Dick Larson articulates Ida's late-career re-emphasis on the lumbars.
Ida's mandatory passage on this point, drawn from the same 1975 conversation, contains her clearest formulation of how the pelvic lift actually works. The lumbars going back is what enables the sacrum to move; the sacrum moving is what enables the pelvis as a whole to turn; the pelvis turning around the hip joint is what horizontalizes it. This is the chain in its fullest form, and it explains why a single pelvic lift at the end of a first hour can produce changes that the previous work alone could not.
"We've talked about the fact that we're interested interested in in horizontalizing horizontalizing the the pelvis. Pelvis. Did I hear you wanting to talk now? I think like with the pelvic lift in the end of the hour that you're beginning to like if they have anterior lumbar, you're beginning to What does the pelvic lift do? It encourages those lumbar to come back into the space that you made available? That's right. It lengthens it. It gives it more space, and then you can turn the sacrum in the greater space that you have. Right. But it's not just the lumbar, but it's also the lumbar. The whole pelvis goes with the sacrum as it moves, but the sacrum can't move till you get the lumbars back. So the pelvis can't move till you get the lumbars back because the sacrum is a part of the pelvis. The lumbars are not. So the lumbars going back enables the pelvis to turn in such a fashion that the sacrum, which is part of it, the base of the sacrum goes back, the apex of the sacrum comes, turns under, comes forward. And this is dealing with the average problem. And you look at them and you say, oh, ain't that beautiful? My, I am smart."
In the 1975 Boulder transcripts, Ida explains the mechanism by which the pelvic lift produces sacral movement.
Asymmetry as the actual condition
Ida was unsentimental about symmetry. The body, she taught, was never built to be symmetrical — the heart sits on one side and the liver on the other; the fibula sits lower than the tibia; the contents of the belly are unequal in mass. True symmetry is anatomically impossible, and the practitioner who pursues it is pursuing a phantom. What the practitioner can pursue is something better described as virtual balance or essential balance: a body that functions as if symmetric without being so. This recognition matters for hip imbalance, because it sets the appropriate goal. The goal is not equal leg length; the goal is a pelvis that functions horizontally across an irreducibly asymmetric body.
"Now, I'm going slowly, I'm pausing, to give you people time to put images into your mind and look at them and see whether those images conform to what I'm saying or would you argue with what I'm saying? I have one question, doctor. There's an asymmetry within the contents of the belly. Always, yes, of course. And that's the reason why it is not possible. It is never possible to get true symmetry in a body. How can you? When you've got the difference between a heart on one side and a liver on the other side. How can you? But you can certainly get something that is better balanced in terms of weight. You know that. You've seen it. But the good Lord never meant for a true symmetrical balance. He apparently means for an essential, a virtual balance. And the asymmetry of the body mostly the the structural the the true structural asymmetry of the body is largely above the pelvis. You see your legs and the lower part of your pelvis. You'll see them, especially in the advanced class and the advanced models. You'll see them coming through. I get a real proof image of a Peter Totter. Well, there isn't too much wrong with that with that visualization, Doug. The only thing that's wrong with it is that your image is being more mobile than any of the facts of life are. It's not worth it. But other than that, it's a perfectly good idea."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida responds to a student question about asymmetry in the belly's contents.
The case study that demonstrates this principle most clearly was discussed in a 1974 Open Universe session, where a student described a man with a leg-length discrepancy resulting from healing after a fracture. The conventional analysis would attribute the shortened leg to bone overlap. The structural analysis, however, traces much of the asymmetry to four months of walking on a cast, to the immobilizing braces that altered the soft-tissue relationships, and to the absence of any follow-up that addressed the resulting compensations. Most hip imbalance, in Ida's account, is of this kind: soft-tissue asymmetry produced by use, and therefore changeable by manipulation.
"You can probably, possibly by now, trace the effect up his spine too. Once you shift the pelvis to one side or the other, what the effect must be in his spine. Just figure that the sacrum is tipped and therefore the spine goes right up. And if you could feel his lumbar in each hour, you would feel the tension and the disorganization that results from that difference in his two legs. And, what I suspect, a difference in the way the legs relate to the pelvis. That's what we're hoping. That a lot of that difference can be changed by organizing the soft tissue. You see the easy hypothesis is that the leg itself is shorter because of the healing, that there is an overlapping of the bone. And people often take that assumption too easily. When a lot of the change is as a result of walking on one leg for several months, is the way the cast was held, the immobility imposed by the cast, and the lack of proper means to return the body to where it was before. So the rolford is really in a unique position to at least make a crack at restoring that proper length. There's an example of this same sort of thing in a person that I worked on in Chicago. The fellow had had ten hours, and that summer was in a judo accident in which he landed on his shoulder and broke his collarbone. And he had gotten good orthopedic work in that he got the bones back together at the right position. But in the course of the treatment, they had to use a brace which had his shoulder way up in the air and backwards."
In a 1974 Open Universe demonstration, a practitioner discusses the case of a leg-length discrepancy following a fracture.
Imbalance read in the line-up
When models presented for a fourth-hour assessment in the 1976 advanced class, Ida pressed students to name the pattern they were all sharing. The students offered various pieces — short hamstrings, displaced rami, gluteal imbalance — and Ida directed them toward the comprehensive answer. The shared pattern was pelvic imbalance itself, registered most visibly in the asymmetry of the legs and the position of one leg in advance of the other. Hip imbalance, in her clinical practice, was something the eye learned to read before the hands ever touched the body. The line-up was diagnosis.
"You people are stuck on the rami right now. Now forget the rami. They're supposed to have a fig leaf over the rami right now. Minute. I want I want the man who was just answering. Well, it puts me head a little bit towards the sixth hour, so it it connotes a a problem and imbalance in the gluteals and the rotators. What it's talking about is an imbalance in the in the whole pelvic structure. A pelvic imbalance. And every last point of them shows it. Where should this support be coming from? The pelvis. The dog. So you're talking about being an adequate pelvis again. Yeah. Now I would like one of you people in the advanced advanced class to sum up what this fourth hour is telling everybody. Doug, would you like to take on that assignment? No. That's fine. I always knew I should was I always knew I shouldn't be polite, Doug. I should say, Doug, take on this."
In the 1976 advanced class line-up, Ida presses students to name the pattern the fourth-hour models share.
The 1975 Boulder discussion of pre-sixth-hour line-ups carries the same point with a different vocabulary. Practitioners stood there with their pelves pulled in, their gluteal dimples too deep, their backs short, falling slightly backward as a row of nearly-tipping figures. The fluidity of the sacrum had not yet come into the back; the back of the leg was too short; the structures that the sixth hour exists to address were all visible from across the room. The diagnostic eye, in Ida's pedagogy, was a discipline rather than a gift. Students learned to read these patterns by being shown them, again and again, in the line-up.
"And you look, you know, you watch him in his breathing and there should be some movement in the sacrum when he breathes also. That's too subtle. Something else to see, which is almost to a person. What I see like in that lineup yesterday, outstanding one of the outstanding characteristics of the poor practitioners in particular, not Takashi so much, was that they all had a it was as though they were falling over backwards. Kind of a pulling in of their whole their whole back centered on the area of the hips. It it seemed as though they were all at the topple over on one of their like a a row of dominators. Was very struck to that. Anybody else? The buns look sucked in and pulled up, also heavy around the pelvis. Yeah. It's that with those dimples alongside the gluteus are almost invariably too deep, which is talking about the structure of your body. Yeah, but I think the characteristic earmark hallmark of the sixth hour is the shortness of the body first. Bum slip past that angle. That's a shallow angle. Well, the whole back of the leg is too short Right. And everything. There's no there's no fluidity in the back. You can see some some movement of the pubes. These you don't see any fluidity of movement in the back."
In a 1975 Boulder pre-sixth-hour line-up, Ida names the characteristic signs of imbalance.
The third hour and the lateral line
Hip imbalance, by the third hour, has been addressed from above and from below but not from the side. The first hour worked the superficial fascia of the trunk; the second hour worked the legs below the knees; together they prepared the body for the third hour's lateral work, which addresses the part of the pelvis that the previous two hours could not reach. The lateral line crosses the hip joint at the fascia lata, the tensor, and the gluteals; until these are organized, the pelvis cannot find its width and the legs cannot drop down off it. The third hour, in Ida's framework, is the hour where the lateral component of hip imbalance is finally available.
"Because that back with its tight extensor, which has been keeping that guy or that gal from falling on its face for years, has now got to get a more resilient stance and a better position and actually a lower back in in order to have something that will integrate with this change in people so you have to And so in the third hour you come snipe up against the back. Now what you haven't lengthened is the sides. What you haven't lengthened are the structures, The outward reflection of which you see at the side. Now listen, that's what you see. But what you know cerebroly is that that pelvis is still very disorganized. Could Harvey have a lot of patients with the breast of the LEA? Yes. Could he have turned the pelvis that tissue gets a continuous workout. It will not be able to heat again. Tissue heaps in place where nothing happens where as you move you wit around the heaping and if you've got the kind of structure that is moving in every direction it cannot So your next job is to get rid of the heaping which has occurred between the ribs and the pelvis in order to make it possible for the pelvis to get closer to the horizontal and then to"
In the 1973 Big Sur class, Ida describes the third hour as the hour of the sides and the lateral pelvis.
A 1974 IPR lecture extends this analysis by linking the third hour's pectoral-latissimus work to the same lateral-balance principle that operates at the pelvis. The shoulder girdle and the pelvic girdle, in Ida's mature teaching, are mirror structures — each requires balanced muscle relationships across the joint, each can fail in characteristic ways, and each addresses the other through the long lines of the trunk. The third hour, addressing both, is the hour where the body learns that its girdles are not separate problems but co-participants in a single structural project.
"screaming, you do, by gum. And as soon as I get my mind on somebody or something else, you go right back to where you're carrying it. Right back. Unless you carry your arm this way, with the elbow in a position where no matter what kind of a movement it starts, it's ready to start straight out, You are not putting it into a place where it can begin to balance front and back. You can't do it. It isn't there. Now, girdles are doing apparatus. You work with your shoulders. You walk with your pelvic girdle. And all doing apparatus tends to be peripheral apparatus. And it tends to work with very little interjection of basic energy. That's its first working. So if you're going to balance the shoulder girdle, you've got to go and find the shoulder girdle. And what's lying there in front of you screaming at you? A pectoral, the major. Where does it attach to the humerus? How can you counterweight it? Why by the latissimus that's on the other side of the other back of the body? How do you counterweight your garage door? It's that simple. But until you get that arm so that the elbow, no matter what movement of the arm occurs, the elbow starts out, you do not and cannot balance those two big, beautiful, superficial muscles. Now where do they insert? They both of them insert into the upper arm."
In her 1974 IPR lecture, Ida draws the parallel between shoulder-girdle and pelvic-girdle balance.
The fourth hour and the floor of the pelvis
The fourth hour is where hip imbalance is addressed at the floor of the pelvis itself. After the third hour has opened the sides, the practitioner can finally reach the adductors — the inner-thigh muscles that connect to the pubic ramus and that determine, more than any other muscle group, the lateral organization of the pelvic floor. In the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, Ida described this with characteristic indirection: the practitioner is not really treating the floor of the pelvis but is treating the legs in such a way that the floor of the pelvis becomes available to itself. The chain is the same as elsewhere — work the periphery, change the core.
"And only secondarily then, because you get your adductors and so forth in the right place. Only secondarily do you finally get the results on the floor of the pelvis. Now in practical terms, you're going to find yourselves dividing into two classes in the fourth hour. There's a bunch of guys that get on the ankles and are completely unhappy unless they can get the foot and the lower leg lined up. You move along a road. And you move along the road of organizing the leg, you are now organizing practically all of the leg beneath the pelvis. And then the pelvis clicks. Why? Because the floor of the pelvis connects with the leg and connects with the spine. Because the little leg connects with the spine. You see, around and around and around we go, around and around. And all other systems of therapy that I know And I go back and I go back back and I go back and I go back to the first hour, the second hour, the third hour, the fourth hour, the fifth hour. Always hitching them together, because the lesser trochanter, the trochanters change."
In a 1971-72 Mystery Tape, Ida describes the fourth hour's indirect approach to the pelvic floor.
The 1975 Boulder fifth-hour session, taught by Ida and assisted by Steve Weatherwax, made explicit what the fourth hour had set up. The fifth hour continues the work of horizontalizing the pelvic floor — which Ida insisted was the true vital structure, more so than the bony pelvis itself. The floor is what the practice is for; the bony pelvis is the housing. Hip imbalance, by the fifth hour, is finally available to direct address because the previous four hours have made the floor of the pelvis approachable from above through the psoas, from the inside through the adductors, and from the front through the rectus.
"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. Now I haven't heard anything in this class nor do I hear much in any classes come to think of it. To indicate that you people recognize the fact that it is the floor of the pelvis, that is the vital structure in this trip. 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."
In the 1975 Boulder fifth-hour session, Ida names the floor of the pelvis as the true vital structure.
The coccyx and the rotator key
In a RolfB6 transcript devoted to the late hours, Ida laid out what she called the key to unlocking the pelvis at the sixth hour: the piriformis, originating on the anterior sacrum and inserting on the greater trochanter. The piriformis is the muscle through which the practitioner finally reaches the part of the sacrum that has been hidden behind everything else — the anterior surface, where the base of the sacrum is too often pulled forward and the apex too often pulled back. When the piriformis releases, the breathing changes; the pelvis begins to pump as the model lies on the stomach; and the sacrum, for the first time in the series, becomes available to the body itself.
"So you look to the rotators and you again, starting at the periphery, which can be the ankles, and coming up the front side of the shin, usually on the lateral side of the shin, there's some tie ups with most people's legs, and you free going up and separating the hamstrings. And you're looking the key to unlock the block on on this pelvis at this hour is the piriformis. And the reason that's so important is because it goes to the or comes from the anterior part of the sacrum, which is the part we haven't been able to get to and usually the part that the the base is anterior and the apex is posterior too much. And so you work in that area, and the key and the hallmark that the way you've known you've done a pretty good job is that the breathing starts. And when the breathing starts, can see the pumping action of the pelvis when they're laying on their stomach. And oftentimes, have to go up to the in the area of the rhomboids or in the lumbar thorax hinge area because it may be held up there. Hold on a worked on that."
In a RolfB6 transcript, Ida names the piriformis as the key to unlocking the pelvis at the sixth hour.
In the same 1975 Boulder tenth-hour discussion where students walked through the recipe, Ida and her colleagues turned to the coccyx specifically. The coccyx, they noted, can be deviated to either side; one tendon may be shorter than the other; the practitioner who learns to read this can address it directly. The teaching beat is that hip imbalance, at its deepest expression, is a question of whether the terminal segments of the spine — the sacrum and the coccyx — are centered and free. The recipe's later hours exist to make this question answerable.
"Which side is the tightest and what side is the most aberrated to your feet, to your touch. If you want to touch it, but you don't have to, you can see it. And all this tells you about the position of the coccyx. And the position of that coccyx is going to do a very great deal in determining the extent to which you're going to be successful in, quote, horizontalizing your pelvis. It will be very important so that you deal with that coccyx at this point having dealt with the rotators and having found that you're not happy with the rotators and you don't just climb on the rotators and stay, you get off the rotators and go and look at the coccyx and see what effect this has on you. And having done as well as you can in organizing that coccyx, then you go and look at the sacrum. And you'll find that the ilii are jammed up against the sacrum in so many instances. And the Sacroiliac Junction is marked by a small mountain range."
In the 1975 Boulder tenth-hour class, Ida directs students to read the coccyx's position before working on the sacrum.
What heaping tells the practitioner
Across her late teaching, Ida returned to a particular sign that registered hip imbalance most reliably to the hand: heaping. Where ligaments and fascia had been chronically shortened, they accumulated into small ridges of tissue — at the iliosacral junction, at the lumbodorsal hinge, around the greater trochanter — that the practitioner could feel as physical mountains in the body's terrain. In a 1971-72 Mystery Tape, Ida and a colleague discussed why this heaping appeared so consistently in the upper sacroiliac region. The answer was that wind-shortening, repeated over years, stopped the fluid exchange in the tissue; the ligament lost its resilience, lost its capacity to pump nutrient fluid, and instead heaped up.
"If you go deep, there's always some strings in there. Just on on the top of the of the sacroiliac joint, so to speak. Why are they? Some of the pupil Why are those strings? And you see they wind shorten, and wind shortening may heat. It's only as you stretch a ligament that you begin to get the other picture, the picture of resilience. But you have it's necessary to have ligaments connecting every bone, every other bone, so there's going to be a ligament between this sacrum and the fifth lumbar, and there's going to be a ligament between the sacrum and the Mhmm. Femurisine. This now, as the body is consistently moved in an aberrant pattern, some of those ligaments are going to consistently shorten and some of those ligaments are going to get more bristle like. And you see, when the ligament doesn't stretch, it's the same old story that we were talking about before. There's no penetration of fluid, nutrient fluid, into the tissue. The pooping action is gone. And so instead of the resilient action, you get a heaping action. You get a consistent shortening that stays short. I don't feel happy with the answer that I've given you because I don't think it omaves to you the answer yet as far as There's something important about that, I mean, to me at least, just in an observational sense, that particular area because it's the thing that I just see in everybody."
In a 1971-72 Mystery Tape, Ida explains the structural origin of heaping at the sacroiliac junction.
The implication for hip imbalance is direct. Where the practitioner finds heaping at the sacroiliac junction or along the lumbodorsal hinge, the body is reporting chronic shortening — and chronic shortening is the soft-tissue inscription of years of habitual postural asymmetry. The heaping itself is not the lesion; it is the record. Address the surrounding structures that locked the ligaments into shortness, and the heaping reorganizes itself. This is one of Ida's clearest statements of the structural method: don't go where it hurts, go where the asymmetry was written.
The sacrum, the lumbar fascia, and the lock
In a brief 1973 Big Sur exchange, Ida used a vivid image to communicate what happens when the lumbar fascia is held too tight: the entire sacrum is pulled forward and the base of the pelvis tips. The image is small but the structural claim is large. The lumbar fascia, in her account, is not merely a wrapping around the lumbar musculature but a structural participant in the position of the sacrum itself. Hip imbalance, by this analysis, can sometimes be addressed not at the hip and not at the pelvic floor but at the lumbar fascia — by softening what is pulling the whole base forward.
"And but as you as that person walks in for the first hour, after a while, you can see that sacrum is is tilted one way or the other, and you can see the cock is going the other way. And that's what you have to start thinking about. Now just a minute. I want you to imagine the lumbar fascia pulled too tight and see what it's going to do. Oh, like that. And putting the whole sacrum Right. The base I think we have to move on. It's twenty eleven. And I think it's I think that's most elegant job we've heard done today, and I didn't do any of it."
In a 1973 Big Sur session, Ida directs a student to imagine the consequences of an over-tight lumbar fascia.
The B2T5SA session in 1975 Boulder turned this analysis toward the practical question of how a practitioner can know whether the pelvic lift has succeeded. The answer, Ida told the class, is the belly wall. If the belly wall falls back under the practitioner's hand, the psoas has been called into its place in the structural line. If the belly wall continues to mount in resistance, the rectus abdominis is still doing the work the psoas should be doing, and the pelvic lift has not yet evoked what it exists to evoke. This is the diagnostic moment by which the first hour's success or failure at addressing hip imbalance can be read.
"In anything that even resembles balance in the body, your head, depresses the belly wall. But this isn't what happens to That belly wall is going to show you how smart it is, how well trained it is, how it can resist you and all the likes of you, etcetera, etcetera. And it keeps that belly wall mounted, and it keeps your hand out. Now just as soon as you begin to get relaxation in the rectus abdominis and the belly wall falls back, the psoas takes its place in the abdominal picture of what is going on in movement. And when you give that pelvic lift, you are evoking the activity of the psoas. You are putting it into a new position. You are allowing the lumbars to go back and the psoas to exercise its webbing effect in front of it. That is what you do when you go into the abdomen if you go in there on the first hour but certainly you're going into it as you give that pelvic lift And as you see that belly wall fall back, you are entitled to say, Eureka, I have made it. Because now you are beginning to call on the psoas to take its place in the line. Now you see there's not there's not a horizontal in this whole trip, awful lot of vertical because you are allowing those anterior lumbars to go back and become balanced lumbars."
In a 1975 Boulder fifth-hour discussion, Ida describes the diagnostic moment when the pelvic lift succeeds.
Coda: the imbalance that recurs
Ida did not promise that hip imbalance, once addressed, would stay addressed. In her 1975 Boulder teaching she warned students with characteristic dryness: you look at a body and say, oh, ain't that beautiful, my I am smart, and then they come back two days later and the whole thing is a mess again. Not a complete mess, but a mess. The recipe is not a cure; it is a sequence of corrections that gives the body a chance to reorganize toward horizontality. The body's habits, its cultural training, its athletic compulsions, all push it back toward the asymmetric position from which it came.
"And they come in two days after, and you're only half as smart as you thought you were. Were. Because the whole thing is a mess again. Not a complete mess, but a mess. Oh, what you just said into a bipolar balancing. It'd be interesting. If you wanna get"
In a 1975 Boulder session, Ida names the practitioner's recurring humility.
The 1976 advanced class line-up made the same point in clinical form. Each practitioner stood with the same characteristic asymmetries the recipe was designed to address; each had been worked on extensively; each still showed traces of the pattern they had come in with. Hip imbalance, in Ida's mature view, is not a defect to be eliminated but a tendency to be counteracted. The work continues because the body continues — eating, walking, sitting, training in its athletic compulsions — and the structural project is therefore one of repeated correction rather than final cure. This is the realistic horizon of the practice.
See also: See also: Ida's 1975 Boulder fifth-hour session (T7SA), in which she presses Steve Weatherwax through the structural logic of how the rectus's release allows the floor of the pelvis to begin horizontalizing; included as a pointer for readers interested in the fifth-hour transition. T7SA ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder ninth-hour discussion (B2T9SA and T9SB), which traces how the practitioner organizes support below the pelvis through hamstring release and ischial tuberosity work; included as a pointer for readers tracing the recipe's later approach to hip-joint mobility. B2T9SA ▸T9SB ▸
See also: See also: the 1971-72 IPRVital1 tape, which contains Ida's wry caution about practitioners who become obsessed with the iliopsoas to the exclusion of the rest of the body; included as a pointer for readers interested in how she protected the structural method against single-muscle thinking. IPRVital1 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 advanced class dissection tape (76ADV22), which documents the fascial continuity of the rotators with the gluteal group and the obturator system — the anatomical basis for the sixth hour's structural reach. 76ADV22 ▸