The strap and the rib it pulls down
In her 1976 advanced class, Ida walked a group of practitioners through what the third hour is actually trying to do. She had begun with the side body — the lateral line drawn between the head of the humerus and the trochanter of the femur — and then, almost immediately, she went underneath it. The third hour, she told the class, works the same territory as the second, but at a deeper layer. The strap that runs down the back of the body in the second hour has a sibling, deeper, that runs in the same direction but spans from the iliac crest to the twelfth rib. That deeper strap is the quadratus lumborum. The image Ida used to describe it was visceral: the muscle, in most of the bodies she had touched, was about like a piece of dried leather. And when it had dried in that way, it had done a specific piece of damage — it had yanked the twelfth rib down.
"two, that strap that comes down in the back except going into a deeper lever layer of that strap, quadratus lumborum, which goes right from the rest of the ileum right up to the felt rib. And that muscle often seems to be about like a piece of dried leather, and the twelfth rib really gets yanked down sometimes."
Ida to her 1976 advanced class, naming the deeper layer of the third hour:
Read the passage carefully and what Ida is doing becomes clear. She is not introducing a new muscle — she is naming the structural reason for everything the practitioner just did on the surface in the second and early third hour. The lateral line is the visible frame; the quadratus is the muscle whose contracted state makes that lateral line impossible to find. The image she returns to again and again in the 1976 classes is leather: tissue that has lost its capacity to lengthen, that holds two bony landmarks closer together than they belong, that has to be persuaded back to span rather than cut or forced. Get the quadratus to spread out, she tells the class, and you have related the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle to each other — because the quadratus is what was holding them in their wrong relationship in the first place.
The twelfth rib as consequence
In the Boulder advanced class of 1975, working through the same territory with Jim Asher and a group of senior practitioners, Ida pressed a student named Steve to name why work on the quadratus would have such a profound effect on the psoas and the structures around it. Steve offered the right answer: it is because the twelfth rib is stuck to the quadratus. Ida confirmed and elaborated. The quadratus inserts on the twelfth rib. If the muscle is aberrated, the rib it inserts into is aberrated. And because the twelfth rib is a floating rib — anchored only in connective tissue, not articulating forward to the sternum — there is nothing on the front of the body to balance it back against the pull of the quadratus. The rib goes where the muscle takes it.
"The quadratus is inserts from the two to the twelfth rib. Now if your quadratus is really badly aberrated, your twelfth rib is aberrated, your eleventh rib is probably aberrated. Those are floating ribs, and that quadratus would have brought them down, brought them toward the pelvis. Consequently, you don't have what this guy likes to call spinal."
Ida to Steve in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, tracing the mechanical consequence:
What is happening in this exchange is a small piece of doctrine being firmed up in real time. Steve names the mechanism, Ida endorses it, and then she lets a student offer the phrase that crystallizes the whole picture — 'spinal length.' Ida loves it and adopts it. The exchange shows how her advanced classes worked: doctrine emerged dialogically, with students supplying language and Ida testing it against what her hands had taught her. The substantive point is that the twelfth rib's position is not a free variable in the body. It is downstream of the quadratus. You cannot reorganize the lumbar region by going at the rib directly; you have to reach the muscle that is anchoring it down, and the muscle that is anchoring it down is the quadratus.
"Now if your quadratus is really badly aberrated, your twelfth rib is aberrated, your eleventh rib is probably aberrated. Those are floating ribs, and that quadratus would have brought them down, brought them toward the pelvis. Consequently, you don't have what this guy likes to call spinal."
Ida in the same Boulder exchange, stating the consequence in its tightest form:
Hearing the claim a second time, in its tightest form, makes a piece of Ida's teaching visible that the longer passage softened. The aberration is not localized to one rib. The twelfth and eleventh ribs are both floating, both unbalanced on the front side, both downstream of the same muscle. When that muscle shortens, it does not pull one rib out of place; it pulls the whole floating-rib region toward the pelvis. The third hour's work, in this account, is not the freeing of a single bony landmark. It is the reopening of a vertical span that two ribs and a muscle had collectively closed.
"By the time you begin to get the quadratus where it belongs, you begin to release the twelfth rib if the twelfth rib has been in danger at some point. And it very often is because, as I've said before in this class, the twelfth rib and the fibula are about the most vulnerable structures that is inside the skin."
Ida in the 1976 advanced class, on what the released quadratus releases in turn:
The passage continues a thought Ida developed across many of her advanced classes: that certain structures in the body are vulnerable not because they are weak but because they are unbalanced. The twelfth rib floats. The fibula is held only by ligament and membrane to the tibia. Neither has a counterweight on the opposite side, the way most of the rib cage and the femur do. So when something goes wrong in the body's organization, these are the structures that get pulled out of place first and recover last. The practitioner who reaches the quadratus in the third hour is, in Ida's framing, recovering one of those vulnerable structures — letting the twelfth rib come back to where it belongs by releasing the muscle whose contraction had been holding it down.
The third hour is the first hour that goes deep
Throughout the 1976 advanced class, Ida used the third hour to teach a structural principle she considered foundational to the recipe: the work proceeds from the periphery of the body inward. The first hour opens the breath at the surface. The second hour extends the back musculature and works the lumbar fascia. The third hour is the first hour where the practitioner is reaching past those surface layers and contacting a deeper one. The quadratus, Ida told the class, is essentially what the third hour is about. Allowing it to take its place within the structure is the first step toward what she called 'getting the inside out' — beginning to work from the body's deep planes rather than only at its surface.
"When you begin to get to the quadratus, which you are doing in that third hour, that is essentially what you are doing in that third hour is allowing the quadratus to take its place within the structure. And when that happens, the structure is now able to come to a different relationship within itself. Because you are beginning, this is the first step toward getting the inside out."
Ida defining the third hour to her 1976 advanced class:
Notice how Ida arrives at this formulation. The transcript shows her pressing student after student — Pat, Marlin, others — to name the answer, accepting each suggestion as partly right but continuing to press. Lateral line, midline, weight-bearing relationship between the girdles — all of these are true things that the third hour does, but none of them is the answer she is waiting for. The answer is the muscle. The teaching beat she is trying to land is that the third hour is not a list of effects; it is a single structural intervention with cascading consequences. Free the quadratus, and the rest follows.
"And everything that you have done during four hours has And in the third hour you started getting in deeper. You started getting to the quadratus lumborum. And that short, distorted quadratus you found had determined the fact that the bony pelvis was pipped probably up in the back. Probably the lumbar were forced forward in the back. Two sides were different with respect And in the fourth hour he discovered that there was a central line for that place. And that that central line was determined by end of this structure. So let's go"
Ida in the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, summarizing the third hour for an earlier cohort:
The 1973 Big Sur passage is worth dwelling on because it shows how stable this teaching was across Ida's late career. Three years before the 1976 advanced class, in a different setting on the California coast, she was giving the same account: third hour means going deeper, deeper means quadratus, and the quadratus is what had been determining the position of the pelvis all along. The two sides of the pelvis tend to be different, the lumbars get forced forward, and the bony container of the trunk sits in whatever position the shortened quadratus allows. Across the 1973 and 1976 transcripts, this is one of the most consistent pieces of structural doctrine in the recipe.
Fascia: the compartment shared with the psoas
On August 5, 1974, Ida gave an extended IPR lecture on the lumbodorsal fascia, working at the blackboard with cross-sectional drawings and walking the audience through the fascial architecture of the lumbar region. The lecture is one of the most carefully diagrammed presentations of fascial anatomy in the archive. She begins with the spine of the vertebra, the transverse process, and the centrum — the three landmarks of a lumbar vertebra in cross-section — and arranges the muscles around them in space. The erector spinae sits behind, in the gutter between the spine and the transverse process. The quadratus lumborum sits just lateral to and below the transverse process. The psoas fills the space between the transverse process and the centrum, in front.
"Just below the transverse process and extending out from it at this point then would be the quadratus lumborum. And filling in the space then the remaining space between the transverse process and the centrum is the psoas."
Ida at the blackboard in the August 1974 IPR lecture, locating the three muscles in cross-section:
The lecture continues into the fascial architecture, and this is where the quadratus stops being just a muscle and becomes a node in a larger network. Ida traced the lumbodorsal fascia as it reflects back between the erector spinae and the quadratus, attaching to the transverse process, and then sends another septum down between the quadratus and the psoas. The result is that the two anterior muscles — quadratus and psoas — share a fascial compartment, divided internally but enclosed by a continuous sheet. This is the anatomical claim that underwrites everything she says elsewhere about how work on the quadratus affects the psoas.
"and it partially splits to enclose the quadratus lumborum. Now I've never heard that anywhere before. That's interesting. If you cover that anterior surface of the quadratus the posterior. The posterior. And then it hooks onto the Splitus process. Right. No. Every other foot with the lumbar dorsif lexion."
Ida in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, reporting an unexpected finding from Hayes's 1948 PhD thesis:
What the Hayes thesis offered Ida was an anatomical picture in which the quadratus and the psoas share a single fascial envelope, with internal subdivisions that separate them but do not isolate them. The conventional anatomical view, as she noted, places the backside of the quadratus directly against the erectors. Hayes's dissection suggested instead that a layer of fascia runs between them, making the quadratus and the psoas one compartment and the erectors a separate one behind. Ida found this more sensible — and more in line with what her hands had taught her, namely that work on the quadratus inevitably affects the psoas.
"He thinks it's a separate that there's two separate sheets. That's more sensible because that puts the quadratus and the psoas in the same compartment and the and the erector's posterior. Well, I don't think it puts the psoas in the same compartment. Splits It the side layer. It it splits and closes psoas, but then the psoas has its own fascia covering within that covering. What did he say? And he also said he's done very fancy dissection to prove that. And he got us from, you know, starting out with embryological data and, you know, doing microscopic type of sections."
Ida and a student working out the implications of the Hayes finding for practical work:
The collaborative quality of this exchange is characteristic of Ida's late-career teaching. A student offers a simplified version of what was just said; Ida tightens it; the student adjusts. By the end of the back-and-forth, the class has a working picture that everyone can hold in mind: a single sheet of transversalis fascia wrapping around the body, opening into two internal compartments, one for the psoas and one for the quadratus, with the erectors in a separate compartment behind. The practical consequence is that when the practitioner's hand contacts the quadratus, the fascial pressure travels through the shared envelope to the psoas as well. Work on one is, structurally, work on the relationship between the two.
Working on the quadratus affects the psoas
Given the fascial architecture, the question that naturally followed in Ida's classes was practical: when you work on the quadratus, are you also working on the psoas? Her answer was layered. You are not yet reaching the psoas as a discrete intervention — that comes in the fourth hour. But you are profoundly affecting the space the psoas lives in, the envelope it shares, and therefore its capacity to function. In the 1975 Boulder class, this conversation became one of her clearest statements of how the muscles are nested.
"While working on the quadratus, you must be affecting the psoas somewhat or beginning to affect that space around it. Steve, by any chance, do you know what I'm dying for? I'll I'll give it a try and say that I think it's because the twelfth rib is stuck to the That's right. That's right. The quadratus is inserts from the two to the twelfth rib."
Ida and Steve, opening the 1975 Boulder discussion of how the quadratus and psoas relate:
Steve's intuition — that work on the quadratus reaches the psoas through the twelfth rib's involvement — is partially right and partially incomplete. What the fuller picture adds is the fascial envelope. The quadratus and the psoas do not just communicate through bone; they communicate through the shared sheet of connective tissue that wraps them both. Ida's answer to the practical question of whether the third hour 'gets to' the psoas was characteristically careful: no, not directly, but yes, in the sense that you cannot reach the quadratus without changing the conditions in which the psoas operates. The psoas is the meat in the middle of the sandwich, with the quadratus on one side and the erectors on the other.
"Can I ask you for I'd like to put feedback on on what I said about when you are working on the quadratus and, you know, what I said about affecting the psoas or that area around it? I don't think you get to the psoas at this stage. Well, I don't think you get to it, but I think that, you know, in terms of getting I think you're really affected profoundly because of the just the fascial relationship from the from the spine outward is this big bundle of which I'm not arguing that. The quadratus is sort of the meat in the sandwich. You You know, you got erectors behind, quadratus in the middle, and psoas in the foot. You can just as well talk about the ankle as affecting your foot probably and it does. I mean, for the same reason."
Ida fielding a student's question about whether the quadratus work reaches the psoas:
The sandwich image is one of the more memorable pieces of Ida's late teaching about the lumbar region. It gives the practitioner a way to think about the three muscles as a stack rather than as three independent structures. And it explains why the iliac crest, where the quadratus originates, was so important a contact point in the third hour — pressure at that bony landmark transmits through the whole stack, affecting not only the muscle whose origin it is but also the muscles in front of and behind it. The third hour, in this framing, is not a one-muscle intervention. It is a one-muscle entry into a three-muscle compartment.
Before the quadratus can span: freeing the shoulders
Ida's teaching about the quadratus was not only about going deeper in the third hour. It was also about what had to be true elsewhere in the body for that work to take. In the 1975 Boulder class, in the middle of the same discussion of the quadratus and the psoas, she made an unexpected pivot. Before you can get the quadratus to span properly, she said, you have to free the shoulders from the thorax. The shoulders weigh down on the rib cage, the rib cage weighs down on the lumbar region, and the quadratus has to hold all of that compression. Until the shoulders are off the thorax, the muscle cannot lengthen.
" Before you can get that quadratus to span properly, you have to free the shoulders from the thorax because they're still weighing"
Ida pivoting to the upstream condition in the 1975 Boulder class:
The remark gives the recipe its underlying logic. The first hour opens the breath and begins to lift the shoulder girdle off the rib cage. The second hour extends the back and begins to free the pelvis from below. Only after both of these have happened can the third hour go after the quadratus, because only then is the rib cage light enough on top of the quadratus for the muscle to release. Ida did not always make this dependency explicit, but when she did — as in this Boulder remark — the architecture of the recipe became visible. Each hour creates the conditions for the next, and the third hour requires the shoulders to have already been moved.
What the pelvic lift feels like in the third hour
Ida often used the pelvic lift — a contact at the lumbar spine with the client supine, hands cupped under the back — as a diagnostic moment in her teaching. The same physical move, performed at different hours, told her different things. In the first and second hours, the pelvic lift gave her information about the surface of the back and the general organization of the lumbar curve. By the third hour, after the quadratus work, the same move felt different in her hands — not because the move had changed but because the structure underneath it had.
" When I gave a pelvic lift on the third hour, very, very different from a pelvic lift on the first and second hours in terms of playing those lumbar, you get separation of function. You just feel it the experiencing the difference difference in in balance, balance except for the fact that the quadratus can really crush that the back of the thorax and the"
Ida describing the diagnostic feel of the third-hour pelvic lift in the 1976 advanced class:
Two phrases in this passage are worth holding onto. 'Separation of function' is Ida's name for the experience of the lumbars moving as individuated segments rather than as a fused block — the felt sense that the structural work has reached the spine itself. And 'crush the back of the thorax and the back of the pelvis together' is her name for what an untreated quadratus does to the body, compressing the entire posterior trunk into a shortened column. The pelvic lift in the third hour is the diagnostic that tells the practitioner whether the work has succeeded: either the lumbars articulate, or the quadratus is still doing its crushing.
"Well, I wish that had worked. I got somebody with a real nice scoliosis, and I went wailing away on the quadratus, and it didn't work the balance very much at all. Even though I got the quadratus, I got that to come out, but I don't think I'm gonna get it until psoas. Begin to get it until psoas. You're getting there. I mean, there's quadratus on each side of the spine. Keep going, though. Well, you gotta balance those two."
Ida fielding a question from the 1976 class about whether quadratus work alone resolves a scoliosis:
This is one of the moments where Ida's teaching refuses to be tidied. The doctrine of the third hour is that the quadratus is the key — but here she is acknowledging that in a body with a serious scoliosis, getting the quadratus is not enough to balance the two sides. The deeper structure that holds the rotation is the psoas, and the psoas is the fourth-hour muscle, not the third. The student was not wrong to work the quadratus hard; he was right to do so. But Ida is also telling him that the recipe is sequential for a reason, and some problems do not yield until the next hour reaches what the current hour cannot.
Balance, not symmetry: what the two quadrati do
A practical question that came up repeatedly in the advanced classes was whether the quadratus needed to be thought of as one muscle or two. Anatomically, of course, there is a quadratus on each side of the spine. But Ida's interest was not in counting muscles; it was in how the two sides functioned together. When the two quadrati pull unequally, the pelvis tilts, the twelfth ribs sit at different levels, and the lumbar spine rotates. Balance, in her teaching, did not mean that the two muscles were the same length; it meant that they were holding the rib cage and the pelvis in a relationship that allowed the spine to come through the middle.
"They have slips that go over to the transverse processes of the lumbar, so you wouldn't want the wrong direction. You got one on each side of the spine. Right? Yeah. Talk a little more about that. I got X rays of one of my people the other day, and one of the 12 ribs is definitely pulled down more than the other one. So I can see the for balance there. I I don't see the special significance in balance of quadratus except as it relates to the spine. If you're gonna have one pulled up, you're gonna be pulling the spine Okay. Over Shit. In rotations. You can have all kinds of rotations pulled up. Sure. Just, you know, one side of the pelvis is higher than the other."
Ida discussing two-sided quadratus aberration and its visible consequence in the 1976 class:
The phrase 'horizontalize the pelvis' is Ida's compact name for the third hour's main result. The pelvis, in most adult bodies, sits in a tilted position — one side higher, often with anterior or posterior rotation as well. The first two hours soften the bed for change but do not directly resolve the tilt. The third hour, by going at the two quadrati and persuading them toward similar length, gives the pelvis the chance to settle into a horizontal orientation. The visible test is in the iliac crests; the structural test is in the twelfth ribs.
The lumbar-dorsal hinge
The 1976 advanced class spent considerable time on what Ida and her students called the lumbar-dorsal hinge — the junction where the lumbar spine transitions into the thoracic spine, roughly at the level of the twelfth rib. This hinge is where the quadratus matters most. The muscle inserts at the twelfth rib, just at the level of the hinge, and its shortening pulls the hinge closed. In a body where the quadratus is short, the hinge cannot articulate; the rib cage and the lumbar region move as a single block rather than as two coordinated regions.
"So by working on the quadratus, kind of a key area, maybe you can do the best you can to horizontalize it with the third hour. It also seemed to have an effect on the dorsal lumbar junction up there. It was really, really pulled down. It was hard for that. The dorsal lumbar? Yes. Oh, lumbar dorsal. Okay. Okay. It's hard for that hinge to work. The quadratus is really short. You've got the beginnings movement in that hinge, but the lumbar gets as bad. It might be in I guess it's too soon to do that now, but to trace the hours through in terms of the lumbar dorsal hinge."
A student in the 1976 class reports what the quadratus work did to the lumbar-dorsal hinge:
The student's suggestion to trace the hours through the hinge is the kind of analytic move Ida encouraged. The recipe is sequential, but the practitioner does not always think of each hour in terms of its single named intervention. Sometimes it is more useful to pick a structure — the pelvis, the hinge, the diaphragm — and ask what each hour does to it. Traced through the hinge, the third hour is the hour where the hinge first becomes available, because the quadratus is what was holding it shut. The fifth and sixth hours will continue the work, but the third is where the door opens.
Connecting the girdles through the side
Throughout the 1976 advanced class, Ida pressed her students to articulate a goal she considered central to the recipe: relating the shoulder girdle and the pelvic girdle to each other. The two girdles are the body's main weight-bearing rings; if they are not in relationship, the trunk is not organized. The first two hours work on each girdle from above and below; the third hour is where they begin to be related through the side. The quadratus is the structural bridge — it spans between the rib cage (and therefore the shoulder girdle above it) and the iliac crest (and therefore the pelvic girdle below).
"what did you do in the first and third hour that furthered this goal? I think what I see it as when you get those two girdles, they're weight bearing functions relating to each other, you're tending to be able to see the weight going more through the middle of the body. That we haven't been able to see anymore, does it go? It goes okay. Well, that's all I was going to say is that I mean, I just see that you're actually creating an area in which the weight can go through, you know, in the middle. How are you creating By providing expansion in the, between the crest and the ribs and then the lumbar area that goes, you know, going clear to Come on, your children, pick up something that's easy, will you?"
Ida and her 1976 class working out how the third hour relates the two girdles:
The exchange shows Ida's pedagogical method at work. She does not state the answer; she circles the class around it. The students offer pieces — relating the girdles, weight through the middle, expansion between crest and ribs, lateral line — until the assembled picture is something every student can hold. The teaching beat is that the third hour is the hour where the side body becomes a competent structural connector. Until then, the two girdles have been worked on as separate pieces; now they begin to act as parts of a single whole, connected through the territory the quadratus occupies.
The quadratus, the rectus, and the psoas: a system
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, a student named Roger asked Ida directly whether the quadratus should be included in the basic system she was describing between the psoas and the rectus abdominis. Ida's answer surprised some of the class. She declined to include it. The quadratus, she said, could be very badly aberrated and the rectus-psoas relationship could still hold a functional, operational agreement. The two halves of the system that stabilized the lumbar spine were the rectus in front and the psoas behind it. The quadratus mattered for quality of performance but was not part of the same antagonistic pair.
"That the quadratus and the rectus are balancing the spine from the outside and the psoas flows from the inside and down out of that stabilizing I don't think so. I don't think so. I think the quadrators can be very badly aberrated in the sense of going toward the side, and you can still have a functional operational agreement, so to speak, between the rectus. I don't think so, and I could be wrong there too. I do say that you're not going to get really quality performance between the psoas and the rectus and have a quadratus that's way out of line. I I thoroughly agree with you on that, but it's it's, again, this whole trip of naming these muscles Yeah. I really tends to aberrate your thinking."
Ida declining Roger's invitation to include the quadratus in the rectus-psoas system, 1975 Boulder:
This is one of the more nuanced moments in Ida's teaching about the lumbar region. She is not saying the quadratus is unimportant — she has spent hours of the same class arguing for its centrality to the third hour. She is saying that the rectus and psoas form a particular kind of relationship (antagonist pair, web in front of the spine, rectus pulling the front down) that the quadratus does not share. The quadratus shortens the side; the psoas holds the lumbars back; the rectus, if it shortens against an unsupported psoas, pulls the lumbars forward. The three muscles act on the spine, but they do not all act the same way. Conflating them, Ida thought, would aberrate the practitioner's thinking — make them less able to see what each muscle actually does.
The third hour and the lateral line
If the deeper structural target of the third hour is the quadratus, the surface organization it produces is the lateral line. Ida defined this line in the 1976 advanced class as the line drawn between the head of the humerus and the trochanter of the femur — the body's side, visible from a lateral view, that should run as a clean vertical. Before the quadratus is released, this line is broken: the shoulder pulls down toward the pelvis or the pelvis pulls up toward the shoulder, and the side body collapses. After the quadratus is released, the line declares itself.
"Or that whole area could be pulled up into, say, the armpits or it could be pulled down into the pelvis. So you work on the sides? You work on the lateral line between the humerus, the head of the humerus and the trochanter of the femur to establish a lateral line With respect to the front line and the back line of the body, establish a lateral line down the side of the body on each side. You begin going in deep. We're talking about the same area that we were talking about in number two, that strap that comes down in the back except going into a deeper lever layer of that strap, quadratus lumborum, which goes right from the rest of the ileum right up to the felt rib."
Ida defining the lateral line for the 1976 class:
The pivot in this passage — from naming the lateral line to naming the depth required to establish it — is the structural logic of the third hour in miniature. The line is the visible goal; the muscle is the structural means. A practitioner who works only at the surface, trying to create the line through lateral work on the side body alone, will not get the line because the quadratus underneath is still pulling the shoulder and pelvis together. The line emerges only when the muscle releases. This is why Ida insisted on the third hour being a deep hour: the surface work cannot produce the surface result without the deeper intervention.
Sturdiness rather than solidity
One of the larger ideas Ida built around her teaching about the quadratus and the twelfth rib was her distinction between sturdiness and solidity. The rib cage, she told the 1976 class, is not balanced on bones. It is balanced on the relationships between bones, and those relationships are determined by connective tissue. The cage is not a solid container; it is a sturdy one, and sturdy means balanced. The practitioner who has freed the quadratus and let the twelfth rib find its place has not made the rib cage more solid — has, if anything, made it less so. What they have made it is more relationally organized, with each rib finding its place against its neighbors.
"Because the position of that twelfth rib anchored there in that connective tissue is the sturdy base on which the upper ribs sit. And you see as you look at this rib cage, you begin to need to understand that sturdiness is not necessarily solidity. Sturdiness can be and is balanced just as much as it is solidity. Your rib cage isn't being balanced on bones. It's being balanced on the relation of bones which is determined by connective tissue. And the fact that it isn't solid is literally advertised by the number of things that go wrong in the cracks. One with closing in on another, one with getting on top of another, one with going much deeper than it belongs, etc, etc. And yet when you relate these properly, when you get all these ribs related each to each with appropriate connective tissue relations between, you have something that is reliable. You also, what happened to Lareen and I, the other day, no you didn't know, some of them. So what does she do? She goes and has x rays of her neck paper."
Ida in the 1976 advanced class, on what the third hour's work produces in the rib cage:
The passage extends Ida's teaching about the quadratus into a more general claim about how the body works. The twelfth rib that the quadratus pulls down is part of a larger arrangement of ribs whose stability is relational rather than fixed. When the practitioner reaches the quadratus in the third hour, they are not just freeing one muscle from a wrong contraction; they are restoring the conditions under which the entire rib cage can hold itself in relation. This is what Ida meant by the body being a 'plastic medium' — the cage is not a fixed object whose parts have been displaced and need to be moved back. It is a relational system whose parts have lost their connections to each other and need them restored.
Coda: the recipe's center of gravity
Across the 1973, 1974, 1975, and 1976 classes, Ida's teaching about the quadratus settled into a stable position. The muscle is the operative structure of the third hour. Its origin at the iliac crest and insertion at the twelfth rib make it the bridge between pelvic girdle and rib cage. Its shortening pulls the floating ribs down, crushes the back of the thorax against the back of the pelvis, and prevents the lumbar spine from finding its place. Its fascial envelope is shared with the psoas, which means that working on it reaches a deeper structure than itself. And its release is what makes the lateral line, the lumbar-dorsal hinge, the pelvic horizontality, and the girdle-to-girdle relationship all possible. The third hour, traced through any of these structures, comes back to this one muscle.
What this teaching gives the practitioner is a single point of focus in an hour that could otherwise feel diffuse. The third hour does many things — it organizes the side body, it relates the girdles, it begins to horizontalize the pelvis, it opens the lumbar-dorsal hinge, it prepares the body for the psoas work to come. But all of those effects, in Ida's account, flow from a single intervention: persuading the quadratus to take its place within the structure. The hour is sturdy rather than solid, in the same way the rib cage is — its many goals are held together by a single underlying relationship. That, in her teaching, is what makes the third hour the recipe's first true center of gravity.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA2 public tape — an extended public-lecture treatment of the rectus, psoas, and lumbar mechanics that gives the broader systemic context for her remarks about the quadratus in the advanced classes. RolfA2Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB6 public tape — a session in which Ida walks through the relationship between the third and fourth hours, including the anterior superior spine and the iliacus-psoas tendon, as the structural sequel to the quadratus work. RolfB6Side2b ▸
See also: See also: Jim Asher's 1975 Boulder discussion of the psoas envelope (B2T9SA) — a complementary anatomical treatment of how the psoas attaches to the lumbar vertebrae and relates to the diaphragm above and the iliacus below, framing what the third hour's quadratus work approaches but does not yet reach. B2T9SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 advanced class (76ADV71) — a Socratic exchange in which Ida presses students to name what the third hour does beyond lengthening the quadratus, working through the lateral rise of the ribs, the position of the lumbars, and the diaphragmatic consequences as further effects of the quadratus work. 76ADV71 ▸