Naming the competitor
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida had been working through a roster of historical body-training systems — Prussian military drill, Swedish gymnastics, the chest-up shoulders-back regimen of the U.S. Army — when she arrived at the figure she most needed her students to be able to refute. Madame Bess Mensendieck was a Dutch-American physician of Ida's parents' generation who had built a corrective-exercise system in Europe and brought it to Yale University around the turn of the twentieth century. The system was respectable, institutionally placed, and taught explicitly as posture correction. Ida wanted her advanced students to know they would be asked, in their own careers, what made Structural Integration different from Mensendieck's method. The naming itself is part of the lesson — she is not dismissing an obscure rival but pointing to a serious figure whose work occupied the same cultural space that Structural Integration was trying to enter.
"There was dear old Madame MensenDeek who was oppression by birth and who had been brought up in that system and who came over and had the energy to go up to Yale University and to persuade those good old conservative New Englanders that they wanted to put this kind of a system into their physical education program."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida introduces Mensendieck by name and by route of arrival in America:
What Ida acknowledged in Mensendieck — energy, persistence, the ability to push a corrective system into an Ivy League physical education program — she also acknowledged in the broader nineteenth-century European tradition of military and gymnastic body training. The 1976 lecture walks her students through the Swedish drill instructor Lund whom Frederick the Great brought into the Prussian army to turn peasant conscripts into a fighting force. The point of the survey is not historical antiquarianism. It is to show advanced students that posture-correction systems are a well-established cultural product, that they have answered specific institutional needs, and that they have done so at the cost of asking the body to be held in a position rather than to find one.
"Now realize that there were teachers who taught that and the guy that taught that stuff was a Swede and was brought down into Germany by Frederick the Great to train these peasants whom Frederick had managed to induct into his army. And Frederick recognized the fact that he didn't have an army. He had a mob, a gang, and they didn't know how to do anything. So he sent up to Sweden where they put a little more attention on this and he brought down a guy by the name of Lund. And Mr. Lund put this kind of thing into the German army and the German concept. And by golly, he did a good thing from some points of view. He got that mob of peasants transformed into an army who went over and licked the French, which was just what he wanted to do. But did they do it with the least expenditure of energy? You hear what I'm trying to bring down to you. The point of Rolfing is that you are studying how human beings can operate within the gravitational field with the least expenditure of energy with the greatest effectiveness energetic effectiveness. Don't get yourself mixed up about this because five years from now there's going to be a lot of people asking about Rolfing. And this is the kind of thing they're going to throw at you. Well, have been lots of systems around. What have you got that makes it so damn good?"
Just before naming Mensendieck, Ida traces the lineage that produced corrective body training in the nineteenth century:
The same patient, two different goals
The heart of Ida's quarrel with Mensendieck was not technical but conceptual. She and Mensendieck could look at the same body — a person with a curvature of the back, say — and disagree about what would constitute help. Mensendieck's answer was instruction and repetition: tell the patient to stand straight, give them an exercise, send them home to do it, increase the dose if the curvature persists. Ida's answer was that the curvature was not a habit to be drilled out but a structural relationship to be reorganized. The two practitioners were not, in her phrase, looking at the same place as the same goal. This is the clearest single statement of the contrast in the entire archive, and it comes immediately after the historical naming passage in the 1976 lecture.
"The thing is that she and I didn't see the same place as the same goal. I never knew. And when somebody came in with a curved curvature of the back, for example, Madame Mensenby thought that she could cure that curvature of the back by telling them to stand straight or to do such and such an exercise. The next week they came in and they looked just as bad, and she says, Well, go home and do it twice as many times every day."
Ida states the difference at its conceptual root:
The doubling-of-the-dose anecdote is the part of the passage Ida lingered on, and it is worth attending to as a piece of clinical observation. Mensendieck's instinct, when the exercise did not work, was to prescribe more of it. Ida is reporting this as a category error: a method premised on instruction will always respond to failure by intensifying the instruction. There is no exit from the loop, because the loop has misidentified the target. The curvature is not in the patient's effort. It is in the tissue. No volume of correctly-performed exercise will reach a fascial layer that is shortened and held. The clinical message Ida wanted her advanced students to carry into their careers is that they should be able to name this category error when they encountered it in other movement-education systems — and they would encounter it constantly.
"Now you must understand if you are going to be promophis of Rolfing, you must understand what it is we're promoting. We are promoting energetic efficiency in bodies. I don't mean the kind of thing by energy that some of you are thinking of. I mean, it's not this, this, this, Oh, he's so energetic. Not that at all. It's the kind of energy as is measured in a physics laboratory. How much work does your body have to do in order to affect what it is that you're being paid to do."
Having named the disagreement, Ida tells her students what they are actually selling instead:
The jogger in the rain
The example Ida reaches for, immediately after naming the criterion of energetic efficiency, is one she had observed that very morning on her way to the Boulder class. A young man was jogging in the rain, full of evident commitment to his exercise. From Ida's vantage, the exercise was not doing what it was meant to do. His legs were moving, but the movement was not transmitting upward into his torso. He was, she says, working hard but failing to circulate the work through his body. This is not a critique of exercise as such — Ida did not oppose jogging or athletics. It is a critique of the assumption that performing a movement repeatedly will improve the body that performs it. The jogger could run all day and not connect his legs to his trunk, because the connection is structural, not behavioral.
"Something of an oversimplification, but I think you get what I'm doing. As we turned to come down here this morning here out in the rain, it's a well meaning young student jogging. I looked at him and I thought to myself, Well, he's got lots of goodwill, he's got lots of rage, but there was no way in which he transmitted the movement from his legs up into his torso. It just stopped right there. Was he doing what he was supposed to do? Namely getting blood and circulation and energy around in his body? Because he didn't know how to make the connection."
The jogger is Ida's living illustration of the energy criterion:
What Ida wanted her students to take from the jogger story was not contempt for the jogger but a way of seeing. The young man was doing the thing his culture told him would make him healthier, and from his cultural framework he was right. He was getting his heart rate up. He was getting outside and moving. He was demonstrating commitment. But Ida's observational vocabulary asks a different question: can energy travel through this body? Can the impulse generated by the legs reach the torso, the shoulder girdle, the head? In the jogger's case, no. The connection had to be made structurally before any amount of jogging would put it to use. This is the same observation she makes about Mensendieck's curvature patient. Both are doing the prescribed activity correctly. Neither has been given what their body actually needs.
"And it is you people who are going to have to go out and say to your demonstrations and your demonstrators the sort of thing that I am saying to you now. The point about Rolfing is that your body begins to learn how to move within the gravitational field instead of fighting gravity. Now some of you here are old enough and some of you are to have been through the routine of these various methods of training bodies. To have been through the routine by which we as Americans train our young men, partly in high school through games, etc, but still more through their period of service in the Army. Shoulders back. Glut in. What happens when you put your shoulders back? Come on, where are the advanced ropals? Are they all asleep still? Chest do, sir. Yeah, what else? Dorsal spine goes you can't talk too good. Spine goes forward, you can't talk too good. The spine goes forward. That is the big key there. The spine goes forward."
Ida turns from the jogger to the military posture training her students would have lived through:
What "posture" actually means
The deepest layer of the contrast with Mensendieck is etymological. Mensendieck's system was a posture-correction system, and Ida had reasons — explicitly Latin reasons — for refusing the framework. The word posture comes from the past participle of the Latin verb to place. Posture is what has been placed. Someone has set the body in a position, and the body is being held there. The word itself, Ida argues, gives away the game. Any system whose goal is posture is committed in advance to the project of holding a body in a position — which means committed to the expenditure of energy to maintain that position against the body's actual structural arrangement. This was the move she had been making since at least the early 1970s, and it explains why she replaced the word posture with the word structure in her own teaching.
"And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed. Somebody has placed something somewhere. Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort. And when you have to make effort concerning anything in your body, it's a very bad sign. You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words. But as I see a man struggling to maintain posture, I know that he is losing his fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good."
Ida unpacks the word posture itself:
Once posture and structure are separated, the contrast with Mensendieck becomes precise rather than rhetorical. Mensendieck was teaching her patients to perform a posture — to place themselves in a position and to hold it. Ida was reorganizing the structural relationships underneath the posture so that the position would emerge without effort. The two practitioners were not offering competing techniques for the same problem. They were operating on different levels of the body's organization. This is why Ida's response to the question what is your goal? in the 1971 interview is not a description of better exercise but a description of bringing the human toward the vertical so that the gravitational field itself becomes supportive.
"Wait a minute. Wait a haven't asked you yet. Doctor Rolfe, can you explain briefly what is the goal of Rolfe? Well, in the broader sense, of course, what we're trying to do is to give an individual the better, the best possible use of his body and therefore, incidentally, of his mind. But, of course, the answer to that is as we see it, that we must bring a man or a woman, a human toward the vertical. It is only when he is related to that vertical stance that I described before that he is able to have the best use of his physical body and its appurtenances, a mental body and an emotional body, if one wants to use those metaphors. And this, of course, is what we have in mind to produce. In other words, what we are saying is, what we are claiming is that we can bring any man much nearer to the vertical. And that is where the head is when he to the vertical, he looks at us with amazement and he says, I feel so much better. I feel so much lighter. I move so much better. I do so much more work. What have you done to me? And all we can say is we haven't done a thing except to prepare your body so that the field of energy of the earth, the gravitational field, is able to support, work through your body and support it, instead of tearing it down. You probably heard in school that the problem with all human beings is that they are standing and operating on two legs and they were designed to operate on four. But the message of Rolfing is that human beings are not static entities."
Asked in 1971 to state the goal of the work, Ida gives the answer that distinguishes it from all corrective-exercise systems:
The plastic body
There is one more philosophical move Ida had to make to position her work against systems like Mensendieck's, and it is the move that her audiences in the 1970s found hardest to accept. She had to claim that the body could actually be changed — not its behavior, not its strength, not its flexibility, but its structural arrangement. Mensendieck's exercise system implicitly assumed the body's structure was fixed, and that improvement had to come through behavioral training around that fixed structure. Ida's claim was that the body is a plastic medium. The fascial envelopes that hold the body's shape can themselves be reorganized. This claim is what makes the Mensendieck contrast more than a difference of preference. It is a claim about what the body is.
"But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
Ida states the structural claim that distinguishes her work from all behavior-modification approaches:
The plasticity claim has a specific anatomical target: fascia. Ida understood the connective tissue web as the organ that holds the body's shape, and she understood structural change as the physical reorganization of that web through the addition of energy by manual pressure. This is the doctrine that makes her work intelligible as something other than exercise. Mensendieck could not change a curvature of the back by telling the patient to stand straight, because the curvature was held by shortened and adhered fascial relationships that no instruction would reach. The fascial body is what Mensendieck did not know to address. It is also, in Ida's account, the organ on which the entire premise of Structural Integration rests.
"And this is indicative merely of the fact that we are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita, and trying to find out what changes in that body are going to develop into what changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance."
Ida names what her work is actually doing at the tissue level:
Why exercise cannot do this
Ida's colleague Valerie Hunt, whose UCLA laboratory was measuring the neuromuscular effects of Structural Integration in the mid-1970s, framed the contrast with exercise systems in her own scientific vocabulary. Where Ida said the body is a plastic medium and only the work changes its structure, Hunt said the patterns of muscular activation in subjects who had received the work looked different from those of untreated subjects in ways that exercise could not produce. Specifically, Hunt found that after the work, muscle activation became sequential rather than simultaneous, and that the body recruited fewer extraneous muscles for any given task. These are not changes you can train someone into by drilling them with corrective movements. They are consequences of reorganized structure.
"Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction. What do I mean by sequential and co? If you're doing very, very fine work, such as writing for long periods of time or work with your eyes, work with your hands, it requires co contraction. You know how fatigued you get. You get tremendously tired from using one muscle against another muscle to keep you from moving any great distance. And so, in fine control, we know that there is co contraction. But the type of skills which I asked for in this particular study was not fine skills but gross skills. And these are far better done using the agonist followed by the antagonist, the agonist and not the agonist and antagonist simultaneously. This is tremendously expensive in human energy, is to use one muscle against another. It's like accelerating your car and putting on the brakes simultaneously. It is exhausting. Efficiency then with less tension. Another finding: before structural integration, there was what I called widespread excitation, which was unrelated specifically to the particular task at hand. This means, for example, that people write with their bottom, and their bottom gets very tense when they write. And that is not the specific task at hand."
In the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Hunt explains why sequential muscle activation is structurally cheaper than the co-contraction patterns exercise systems train:
Hunt's findings give the Mensendieck contrast a measurable form. The exercise patient, no matter how diligently she repeats her postural drill, is recruiting muscle in patterns that cost the body more energy than necessary. She is co-contracting where she should be sequencing. She is using extraneous muscles for tasks that do not require them. These habits are not a failure of effort. They are consequences of an unintegrated structure. Telling such a patient to stand straight will at best produce a momentary postural improvement at the cost of more co-contraction. It cannot produce the underlying change in motor patterning that Hunt was documenting in subjects who had completed the ten-session series.
"Another finding: before structural integration, there was what I called widespread excitation, which was unrelated specifically to the particular task at hand. This means, for example, that people write with their bottom, and their bottom gets very tense when they write. And that is not the specific task at hand. After structural integration, the contractions were quite specific to the task. I monitored other areas and found that there was no overflow, that you used those areas of the body that were paramount in accomplishing that particular task, but you did not use all the muscles in the body when these were unnecessary. Again, it constitutes less hyperactivity, less tension, less tension in their muscular system. And it confirms the statement which I've heard Doctor. Rolfe make so many times, and that energy output no longer is random but is specific to the requirement. That is quite readily confirmed. And then one about a global pattern."
Hunt describes the difference between trained tension and structural relaxation:
Two paths to the same vocabulary
One of the strangest features of the Mensendieck contrast is that the two systems used the same vocabulary. Both Mensendieck and Ida talked about the vertical line — ears over shoulders over hips over knees over ankles. Both used before-and-after photographs. Both spoke about alignment, balance, and the relationship of body parts to a gravity line. The contrast was not in the language. It was in what the language meant. For Mensendieck, the vertical line was a target to be reached through performance. For Ida, the vertical line was a description of a body that had been structurally reorganized. The same words pointed to opposite theories of how the body got there.
"We have every reason to believe that this project will lend itself to measurement. Her findings seem to be saying loud and clear that as a man approximates the vertical, that is ears over shoulders, shoulders over hips, hips over knees, knees over ankles, certain very significant changes occur in the kind of neuromuscular behavior, can and these changes can be registered and they can be recorded by electromyographic and electroencephalographic measurements. Ralfas in general are not sufficiently scientifically sophisticated to demand measurements. They're willing to settle with contour, with form, without with recognizing the outward form of contour."
Ida names the shared vocabulary and then names the difference inside it:
Ida's awareness of the shared vocabulary made her especially insistent that her advanced students be able to articulate the difference in concrete terms. It would not be enough, when they encountered skeptics in their later careers, to say they were producing better alignment. Mensendieck's patients were also being told they were getting better alignment. The students would need to be able to name the difference at the level of mechanism: their work changed the fascial relationships physically, while exercise systems trained the body to hold a position around unchanged relationships. This is why Ida spent so much time in the advanced classes on terminology, on the difference between posture and structure, on what the body actually is.
"Now realize that you cannot get balance except you relate that physical material body into a gravitational field. This is what we offer you that none of the more classical systems of manipulation have ever offered. None of these older systems have ever taken into consideration that you cannot get so called posture except as you have structure. Structure is relationship. It's relationship wherever you use the word structure, you are really talking about a relationship. You talk about this beautiful structure, you are talking about the way the top relates the middle, relates to the floor, the shape of the ground. All of this is implied when I say, I was in a beautiful structure tonight. Structure, wherever you use it, is relationship, and it is particularly relationship of parts in a body. This constitutes structure. Now posture is something else again. And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed."
Ida lays out the conceptual machinery — structure as relationship, posture as placement — that her students must master:
The body as energy machine
Beneath the vocabulary contrast and the mechanism contrast, there was a third layer to Ida's argument against Mensendieck, and it had to do with energy. Mensendieck's system, like all corrective-exercise systems, conceived of the body as a unit that needed to be made stronger, more flexible, more disciplined — a unit whose performance could be improved through training. Ida conceived of the body as an aggregate of energy-generating subsystems whose total output depended on how well they were related to one another. Adding strength to one subsystem did not necessarily improve the whole. In an unintegrated body, increased strength in one place could be canceled by drag from elsewhere. The integration came first, or the exercise was building energetic inefficiency.
"Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according to you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately. You get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole. If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body which might be doing reasonably well, you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going and the answer is you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy. But remember that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some of them are going to be minuses unless you are very well stacked. Now you can add to that energy by the stopping. If you set those blocks properly, you can get maximum efficiency in the way that the body works. But you have to stack your blocks properly. As soon as your blocks get unstacked, then you begin to lessen the efficiency. Now, as I told you before, in structural integration, we think in terms of we work in terms of the stacking of the blocks which are part of the myofascial system, the connective tissue system, the collagen system. And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks."
In her 1973 Big Sur class, Ida explains why the body's parts add up algebraically rather than arithmetically:
The algebraic-sum framework is what makes the Mensendieck contrast more than an aesthetic preference. If the body's total energy state is the sum of its subsystem outputs, and if many of those outputs subtract from one another in an unintegrated structure, then exercising one subsystem harder does not necessarily produce a net gain. It can produce a net loss. The strengthened muscle may now be pulling against an antagonist that was already too tight. The improved cardiovascular capacity may now be feeding a torso that cannot circulate its energy upward, as in the case of Ida's jogger. Until the relationships are reorganized, addition of energy to any individual subsystem is gambling against the algebraic sum.
"Now, Rolfing, have already heard something of the genesis of Rolfing and how it came about. And this becomes a fairly important idea to have in mind because that genesis has influenced the entire development of the idea. In those of us who are even now working with the human body are aware that we're working in something of a dichotomy. We are working within the framework of an old medicine and of a new medicine. And we become aware of the fact that the new medicine has gotten its greater acceptance by virtue of some new ideas which it has interjected into the cultural background. There are two of them that are outstanding. One is the idea of one is the idea of environment and the effect of environment. This is an idea. The other is an idea of structure, and both of these ideas are relatively new ideas as in our history."
In her opening remarks to the 1974 Structure Lectures, Ida names the dichotomy her work sits inside:
What students will be asked
The 1976 Mensendieck lecture has a pedagogical purpose that is easy to miss. Ida was not teaching her advanced students intellectual history for its own sake. She was preparing them for the conversations they would have for the rest of their working lives. Practitioners in the late 1970s and early 1980s were going to meet skeptics — physicians, physical therapists, dance teachers, athletic trainers — who had been raised in the corrective-exercise tradition. Those skeptics would ask the same question Ida is asking the students in the lecture: what does your work do that we do not already do with our exercises? The students needed an answer they could give without hand-waving.
"You hear what I'm trying to bring down to you. The point of Rolfing is that you are studying how human beings can operate within the gravitational field with the least expenditure of energy with the greatest effectiveness energetic effectiveness. Don't get yourself mixed up about this because five years from now there's going to be a lot of people asking about Rolfing. And this is the kind of thing they're going to throw at you. Well, have been lots of systems around. What have you got that makes it so damn good?"
Ida frames the lecture as preparation for the skeptical conversations her students will have:
What Ida wanted her students to be able to do, when they encountered a skeptic who had been trained in a Mensendieck-style framework, was to refuse the question's premise. The skeptic would ask whether the work produced better posture than corrective exercise produced. The student needed to be able to say: I am not in the posture business. I am in the structure business. Mensendieck and I are not competing to produce the same outcome better. We are producing different outcomes. This is a hard rhetorical move because it requires the practitioner to insist on a vocabulary the skeptic does not yet share. But Ida considered the move essential to the survival of the work as a distinct contribution rather than as one more posture method among many.
"And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there. And I think and trust that all of you are willing to subscribe to that claim and to spread it."
In an early-1970s IPR talk, Ida names what the work is uniquely doing — the claim her students will have to defend:
Sequence over repetition
If Mensendieck's response to a recalcitrant curvature was to double the dose of exercise, Ida's response was to follow a sequence. The ten-session series she developed had an architecture: each hour prepared the next, and the order in which the work was done mattered as much as the work itself. This too was a structural contrast with exercise systems. A drill repeated more times is still the same drill. A session that follows from a previous one is a different kind of intervention. Her students in the 1975 Boulder advanced class spent considerable time mapping how each hour set up what came after — language that would be foreign to a Mensendieck practitioner because the underlying theory of change was different.
"I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration. And she still does that. And she's still Her body is still her her whole being is integrated towards into structural integration."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a student articulates the sequential logic that distinguishes the work from a drill:
The sequential logic also explained why Ida's students could not simply borrow techniques from exercise systems and graft them onto the work. The order in which the connective tissue was addressed determined what each subsequent hour could reach. A movement-education prescription, even if useful, did not slot into that sequence — it sat outside it, addressing a different layer of the body's organization. This is why her senior students in the 1975 Boulder class kept returning to questions of why a particular hour started where it did, why the chest was addressed before the pelvis, why the first hour had to be the first hour. The questions only made sense inside a sequential framework. Inside a repetition framework, they would not even arise.
"Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
Another student in the 1975 Boulder class articulates how horizontal change in one part of the body propagates structurally to another:
What practitioners say to their first clients
Ida's students did not only have to defend the work against trained skeptics. They had to explain it to the people walking through their office doors for a first session — people who had heard of the work but had no idea what it was. In the 1974 Open Universe classes in which practitioners worked openly with members of the public, a recurring exchange would unfold: the client would ask whether what was happening to them was being learned, whether they were being taught to move differently, whether the change would last. The practitioner's answer had to articulate the same Mensendieck contrast in lay terms — to distinguish what the work was doing from what an exercise teacher would do.
"I'm not sure it's all learned. So how have you found that they have learned to live differently so that the same condition does not be done as time goes on again? There's a lot of learning that goes on in the Rolfing session about body movement and especially the experience of proper movement while, as Valerie said, the field of the rolfer is present and the movement that he elicits and so on. And in addition to that, we do have structural patterning which continues that work of eliciting and applying that in daily life. That one day I was talking with a woman who iced cakes, And you can imagine the movement. She iced these great big cakes all day long. Well, that's a determinant in her life. And if she was going to continue that, she would have to make some kind of application to the balanced system so that she could do that in a balanced way as Roffer's doing doing this work. Okay. And in fact, that's really the origin of structural patterning, which was built by Judith Aston, a student of doctor Harter and doctor Roth, that she found herself, her body breaking down with the stress of this work and other authors doing the same thing and developed a technique to help reinforce that or teach and to to evolve the pattern of the Roth body or the Roth line."
In a 1974 Open Universe class, a practitioner answers a client's question about whether the changes are learned, and locates the work's relation to movement re-education:
The Aston development is itself a piece of evidence about the Mensendieck contrast. Aston's structural patterning was not a return to corrective exercise; it was a movement vocabulary built downstream of structural change, designed to support a body that had already been reorganized. The logical order matters. In a Mensendieck framework, the exercise comes first and the body is supposed to follow. In Ida's framework, the structural change comes first and movement education can then reinforce it. The two models look superficially similar — both involve teaching the client to move differently — but they sit on opposite sides of the question of where change originates.
"And our goal is to bring that bowl horizontal so that the contents of the torso sit in the bowl properly. So part of the training is to see the result of process. As well as to see what you do next in the process. You see the genius of Doctor. Rolf, part of her genius is in developing a sequence in which the onion can be unpeeled without disordering. In other words, so that you can take layer by layer in a sequential way each hour bringing in a level of organization. She says, well, it's easy to take a body apart, but it's not so easy to put it together. And that's that's the key to it. We're all being said in each hour, you're adding order. Bringing it forward and back. Forward and back."
Asked about the criterion of a good body, a practitioner names what the practitioner is actually looking for:
The energy-flow model behind the contrast
The mathematical scaffolding behind Ida's contrast with Mensendieck was articulated most precisely by her colleagues in the scientific community surrounding the work. In the public-tape lecture series, the model of the body as a network of energy sources connected by viscous and elastic elements gave the energetic claim a physical-engineering form. If exercise increased the energy a particular subsystem could generate but did not change the elastic-versus-viscous balance of the network connecting that subsystem to the rest of the body, the additional energy would be dissipated rather than transmitted. This is the engineering version of Ida's algebraic-sum argument. It is what Mensendieck's exercises could not address, and what manual work on the fascia could.
"Specifically, we have a mechanical system of joints, articulations, energy sources springs and viscous damping forces Action at a joint is then represented by a lever powered by an energy source driving a spring and dashpot parallel. These various module organs would be interconnected by networks of parallel combinations of elastic and damping components. Considering first action of a single joint, we see that the viscous elements greatly outweigh the elastic ones, motion will be impeded and energy wastefully dissipated. The problem is compounded when one realizes that all of the individual energy sources are interrelated through myofascial investments. If we examine a simple act such as walking in the light of this model, it is apparent that for maximal efficiency these various energy sources must operate in precise, synchronous, often reciprocal patterns. If the interconnecting networks are overly viscous, then no one joint can be moved without dissipating energy throughout the entire system. If by some process the viscous elements could be changed into more elastic ones, what would the model predict? Clearly, an increased capacity for energy flow between joints is to be expected. Know that this itself will affect an overall change toward more rhythmic efficient energy flow is not true."
A scientific collaborator on the RolfB3 public tape lays out the engineering model of the body as a network of energy sources, springs, and dampers:
The engineering model also makes precise why Mensendieck's escalation strategy — go home and do the exercise twice as many times — could not have worked even if the patient had complied perfectly. Doubling the input to a single energy source in a network with overly viscous interconnections does not improve the network's overall energy flow. It just dissipates more energy as heat and friction. The patient gets tired faster. The curvature does not change because the curvature is held in the viscous interconnections themselves, not in the strength of any single muscle. This is the formal version of what Ida said in plainer language: the body is a plastic medium, the fascia is the organ of structure, and exercise cannot reach the layer where the structure is actually held.
"Does it give us a framework with which to eventually explore the physiochemical basis of these changes? I believe that there is just such a precise objective integration integrating notion that can aptly applied to this problem. It is the concept of energy. In physics, long before the molecular statistical mechanical explanation, the gross properties of matter were described by the laws of thermodynamics. It is one of the most striking testimonies to a parsimony in nature that two simple mathematical formulations were able to describe most of the properties of matter and provide a framework with which to understand these phenomenon on a molecular level. These laws, the first and second of thermodynamics, describe change or flow and ordering of energy respectively. Are these not the very same concepts that one intuitively invokes to describe the process of structural integration? Mainly that the person's structure has become more ordered and that he is more alive, that his energy is more flowing and that he somehow has more of it."
The same scientific collaborator names the thermodynamic frame in which the work and its contrast with exercise become measurable:
What members of the public see
Ida's students in the Open Universe classes had to translate the Mensendieck contrast for people who had never thought about fascia. In one such class in 1974, a member of the public asked the practitioner to describe what was happening physiologically between the layers of muscle. The answer the practitioner gave — that something stuck between the layers seems to release as pressure is applied, that there is a warming and a melting sensation — is not a clinical description. It is the kind of phenomenological report a practitioner can offer to a layperson who is watching a session. But the report contains the essential structural claim: something physical is changing in the connective tissue, not just something behavioral being learned.
"You know, all I know is what I experienced and that is that oftentimes there's a warming, like a melting feeling that the place that was stuck or the place that wasn't moving, all of a sudden it gets warm and starts moving. That's my point. You're moving something. They get stuck partially by hardening or there's a fluid substance that seems like that has been hardened and isn't reabsorbed in the flesh. Time of injury, time of sickness. And it seems like whatever it is that is that stuckness between the layers of the fascia is what's reabsorbed at the time when our pressure is or energy is is placed on the body. And I don't know what further to say except that that's the way I feel what's going on. And, of course, the development of that stress pattern or of those places that are immobilized and hardened, we think is primarily related to the way the body deals with gravity because gravity is the most constant environmental force for the human body. And so it's in response to gravity that the body avoids pain, you might say, or avoids the buildup of stress in an individual point by trying to distribute it. And the fascial system is the way of distributing stress from those points. And so, as doctor Rolf said in the first talk, there's really no cause, one to one cause with the pattern. It's an accumulation of person to the pattern that they presently have. The other part is that we learn inefficient methods of movement. Some people still walk like the toddler. That is that their legs are spread apart, their pelvis is anterior, and they have never matured or come to a further position. They're stuck there."
In a 1974 Open Universe class, a practitioner answers a public observer's question about what is happening between the layers of fascia:
The practitioner's answer is also important for what it does not say. She does not promise the client a posture. She does not give them exercises. She names a phenomenon — warming, melting, release — that the client can verify in their own experience during the session. The honesty of the description is itself part of the contrast with Mensendieck. An exercise teacher promises an outcome the client will work toward over time. A practitioner of the work describes a change that is happening now, in the tissue, under pressure. This is what the work is. It is not what exercise is, no matter how superficially the vocabularies of alignment and balance overlap.
"It's it it it begins in one small area and expands. It's it's almost like well, it is it's vibrations, wavelengths, or expanding. Like energy going? Energy. See, that's what we want to find out is the relationship between this soft tissue change and the change in the energy field. Now lift both your arms up. So you can see now that the rib cage works as one and it's got an undulating movement to it as it breathes. Okay. Bring your arms back down. Take your legs down, one at each hand. Rock them back and forth this way. Again, here we're watching for the movement, the differences in movement from the two sides. Okay. Turn put your feet back down. Turn over onto your left side. Bring your arm back up under your head."
Later in the same 1974 class, a practitioner names what she is watching for in the body during a session:
Coda: the shared respect
It is worth ending where Ida ended in the 1976 lecture: with respect for Mensendieck. The contrast she drew was sharp, but it was not contemptuous. Mensendieck had been a serious woman who had built a serious system, had crossed an ocean to bring it to America, and had persuaded a major American university to install it. Ida acknowledged the achievement before she drew the disagreement. She also acknowledged that her own students would, for the rest of their careers, be operating inside a culture shaped by Mensendieck-style assumptions about the body. The exercise tradition was not going away. Ida's instruction was that her students should know what they were offering instead, name it clearly, and be able to point to the structural mechanism — the plastic body, the reorganized fascia, the algebraic sum of subsystem outputs — that exercise could not reach.
"Now you see what I am talking about really is just part of the general history of ideas and their development, their application, ideas in general. A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator. At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not."
Late in an IPR conference talk, Ida places her work in the broader history of ideas — including the ideas she was differentiating against:
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt's UCLA neuromuscular studies (CFHA_03), which provide the scientific vocabulary for distinguishing structural change from exercise-induced change, and Hunt's energy-field studies (CFHA_04) extending the contrast into measurements of human energy patterning. CFHA_03 ▸CFHA_04 ▸
See also: See also: Ida's 1971-72 interview on the goal and method of the work (PSYTOD1, PSYTOD2), which gives a general-audience version of the contrast with movement-training systems. PSYTOD1 ▸PSYTOD2 ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur advanced class (SUR7301) for Ida's most detailed exposition of the body-as-energy-machine framework that underlies the Mensendieck contrast. SUR7301 ▸