Sturdiness is not solidity
In the 1976 advanced class, working through the third hour with a student named Lareen at the table, Ida pressed on what makes the rib cage actually function as a structure. The conventional picture — ribs as bones, sternum as a plate, spine as a column — gives the impression of an architectural box. Ida rejected this. The rib cage, in her teaching, is twenty-four bones whose relation to each other is held by connective tissue, not by bony continuity. The fact that ribs are constantly closing in on each other, riding on top of each other, going deeper than they belong, is the everyday evidence that the cage is not solid. What makes it reliable is the appropriate span of fascia between each rib — when the connective tissue relations are right, the relation of the bones is right, and the cage functions as a sturdy but mobile structure. This is the doctrine the third hour is built around, and it is also the doctrine that explains why the practitioner must think about the rib cage as a fascial problem before thinking about it as a bony one.
"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."
Ida, third-hour demonstration, 1976 advanced class:
Having named the problem, Ida then named the resolution. The cage becomes reliable only when the practitioner has gotten all the ribs into their appropriate connective-tissue relations with each other. This is not a matter of forcing bones into position. It is a matter of restoring the spans of fascia between the ribs to the lengths and tensions they were designed to have. The word she chose — reliable — is worth noting. She did not say strong, did not say correct, did not say healed. Reliable: something the rest of the body can count on. The pelvis underneath, the shoulder girdle above, the spine running through the back — all of these depend on the rib cage being a trustworthy relational structure rather than a collapsing pile.
"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."
Ida, continuing the same demonstration:
The twelfth rib as the sturdy base
If the rib cage is a relational structure rather than a bony one, then the question becomes: what is it relating from? Ida's answer, repeated across her advanced classes, was the twelfth rib. The twelfth rib is anchored in the lumbar fascia at the level of the iliac crest, held there by the quadratus lumborum, and it forms the bottom course of the rib stack from which all the upper ribs take their position. If the twelfth rib is not where it belongs — and Ida emphasized that the twelfth rib and the fibula are the two most vulnerable structures inside the skin — then no rib above it can be where it belongs either. This is why the third hour, which is the first hour to penetrate the quadratus, is also the hour in which the twelfth rib is finally released. The mechanism is mechanical and exact: free the quadratus, and the twelfth rib comes back to its anchoring position; restore the anchoring position, and the upper ribs have a base to sit on.
"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, naming the third-hour mechanism in the 1976 advanced class:
In an earlier public-tape lecture, Ida had already laid out the same mechanism in slightly different language. Speaking to a class about the sequence of the recipe, she described the third hour as the first hour in which any genuinely deep work happens, and she located that deep work at the attachment of the quadratus to the pelvis and the twelfth rib. The point was not to lengthen the sides for the sake of side-length. The point was to restore the relation between two body segments — the thorax and the pelvis — by establishing the appropriate span of the tissues between them. The quadratus, with the twelfth rib at its upper anchor and the iliac crest at its lower, is the muscle that holds the relation. When she said the third hour begins to go deeper via the quadratus, she was naming the place where the cage finally finds its bottom.
"And all the time we're working in this area, we've done VDI training on the pelvis just down below which is where we're going this summer. Again, this will be the first hour where we do any deep work when we start to work with the attachment of quadrats and bone to the pelvis and the twelfth rib. Not only to lengthen the sides, but it's then it's now short relatively since we've lengthened the front and back in one and two. But because we, again, wanna do everything we can for the future to free up the pelvis. And the quad quadratus seems to be one of the keys, I haven't got this real clear in my head yet, but it's one of the keys of really getting the pelvis into a position where we can work with it and place it in a functional position. Well, wait a minute. That word relatedness that you liked before, it also comes in here."
Ida, public-tape lecture (RolfA3), describing the third hour and the quadratus:
Four motions of the ribs
If the twelfth rib gives the cage its base, breathing gives it its life. Across the 1975 Boulder transcripts and the public-tape recordings, Ida and her colleagues kept returning to a four-part description of how ribs actually move: up and down, side to side, front to back, and a rotation around the rib's own axis that looks, when you see it work, like the slats of a Venetian blind opening and closing. The four-motion model was Will Schultz's formulation, drawn from his attempt to read the yoga literature against the anatomy texts, and Ida adopted it in her own teaching because it gave the practitioner four separate things to check in a single rib. Most thoraxes that arrive on the table have one or two of the motions but not all four. The first hour, the third hour, the fifth hour each work some of the motions back in. The thorax that has all four motions available is the thorax that is doing its job.
"Ribs should have four actions and are trying to achieve a an up and down, a fore and aft this way. You say, our MMAF. Or in the math and a rotational struck function. That's like a Venetian blind. It's like a Venetian blind.
Ida, public-tape lecture, naming the four motions:
The Venetian-blind rotation matters because it is the motion practitioners most often miss. The other three — vertical lift, lateral expansion, anterior-posterior expansion — are visible in any decent breathing animation. But each rib also rotates around its own long axis as it lifts, and that rotation is what allows the intercostal spaces to actually open. Without rotation, a rib can lift bodily without changing the volume between itself and its neighbors. Ida insisted that a competent practitioner working a first hour should be able to bring this rotational motion in. It is one of the changes she expected to see in a first-hour photograph that wasn't there in the pre-photograph. In the same public-tape passage, she went further: very often a person on the table has a fore motion but no aft motion, and a practitioner who is any good — with a patient who is any good as a patient — should be able to restore the after movement and the rotation within that first hour.
"And rotation around their axis. Side. Well, can you stop the side? If the floor is coming and the after is coming, then you stop the side. Two different movements. Right? It really is. You most of much of the time, you will find that people have a fore movement, but no after movement. So it is different. And you will if you're any good as a practitioner and the patient's as good as a patient, you'll get your after movement in in that first hour. But more than that, you'll get your rotation of the ribs coming in in the first hour. And this changes the chest."
Ida, continuing in the same public-tape lecture:
Releasing the pins to let the thorax breathe
The first hour, in the Boulder 1975 advanced class, was discussed as the place where this rib-cage doctrine actually becomes operational. Bob, teaching alongside Ida, framed it as a problem of pins — places where the fascia has tied up and prevents the ribs from moving in their four directions. The practitioner, in the first hour, is not really working the erectors and is not really trying to free the back as such. The practitioner is finding the pins in the back and the chest that are preventing the thorax from doing its breathing. When the pins release, the thorax expands, the four-way breathing pattern begins to come in, and the spine itself becomes freed — because each pair of ribs articulates with the spine at two places, giving roughly forty articulations that, once moving, lubricate the spine the way grease points on a car lubricate its joints. This is the through-line that connects rib-cage work to spinal mobility.
"You're releasing the pins to let the thorax out to breathe. And as that happens, you start getting the four way breathing pattern of the chest the up and down, side to side, front to back, and the Venetian blind effect."
Bob, summarizing the first-hour technique with Ida present:
The consequence of restoring rib motion is not contained to the rib cage. Bob continued the explanation to make the spinal payoff explicit. The ribs articulate with the spine at two points each — the costovertebral joint at the body of the vertebra and the costotransverse joint at the transverse process — so each pair of ribs gives the spine four articulations, and the full set of ribs gives roughly forty. When the ribs move, these forty articulations work, and the fluid in the joints maintains itself. When the ribs don't move, the articulations stagnate, and the spine loses both lubrication and the proprioceptive feedback that the rib motion supplies. This is why Ida treated the rib cage as a spinal problem and the spine as a rib-cage problem. They are the same problem from two angles.
"And as that happens, it also frees up the entire spine because the ribs articulate back there in two different places, except for the foyer ribs. So"
Bob, completing the rib-spine mechanism:
The diaphragm and the drawing-in of ribs
When the rib cage is not doing its four-direction work, the body finds a substitute. The substitute, Ida and her colleagues observed across the 1975 transcripts, is hyperflexion of the diaphragm and a slide into abdominal breathing. The diaphragm contracts harder than it was designed to, pushes farther down than it was designed to, and in pulling so hard against its costal attachments it draws the lower ribs inward — creating what the Boulder class came to call the gully under the rib margin. The lungs do not expand properly. The chest does not lift. The breathing happens, but it happens in the belly, because the belly is easier to move than a cage of stuck ribs. In a first hour, when the practitioner releases the pins and the chest starts to do its own work, the abdominal motion decreases and the rib motion increases. This is one of the visible signs that the first hour is doing its job.
"The breathing pattern itself does create a lift because most people don't until we work in a chest, their lungs don't expand properly. Their diaphragm hyperflexes, which has not much to do with breathing at all. Which draws the ribs in. Right. Draws the ribs way in and causes that gully. What do you mean by hyperflex? If you overextend, if you over flex your diaphragm, you're hyperflexing it. And you're there just working too hard. Right. And all that pushing out in here is hyper flexing. The diaphragm should only come down so far and then go back up again. It's not meant to overwork. What you often see in a body where respiration is restricted is that they go toward an abdominal breathing pattern because that's easier. And in the first hour as you begin to see the respiration normalize, you begin to see ribs moving and the abdomen decreasing its movement. So by freeing the chest and working the back, and this is the point you brought the other day, Bob, which I told you you were off on."
Bob and Will Schultz, working through the diaphragm-and-ribs problem with the Boulder class:
The diaphragm story connects directly to Ida's reading of the yoga literature on breath. On a public-tape recording, she was working through a passage from a book on the science of breath — possibly the Ramacharaka volume — and she stopped at the author's claim that breathing in should begin at the abdomen and rise in a wave to the collarbone. The trouble, she pointed out, is that this account does not distinguish between a body with a reversed pelvis and a body with a normal pelvis. The two pelvises produce two different breaths, and the yoga author has conflated them. She also rejected the author's claim that the contraction of the diaphragm forces the ribs upward and outward. That, she said, is simply not what happens — the diaphragm contracts and the ribs do their own work, in their own four directions, and the relation between the two is a structural relation, not a mechanical one.
"Breathing in inspiration begins with the diaphragm, a large domesate muscle under the lower ribs that divides the lungs and rib cage, thoracic cavity from the abdominal cavity. As the diaphragm contracts, it pushes down on the abdominal viscera, stomach, liver, intestines, pushing them outward as far as the abdominal muscles will allow. Now you see this is the reversal exactly of what you people are feeling. And then watch Schutzfeld too when he was in the class. But this he's forgotten because he's been playing with Lowen since then. You see, he hasn't differentiated. The fact that there are two briefings. There is the briefing with the abdomen that with the pelvis this way and the briefing with the pelvis this way. And so many people better have lunch with him and fight and tell you who thought what this is all about. Then they will get around. At the same time, the contraction of the diaphragm, at the same time, see if this is so, forces the ribs upward and outward. This just doesn't doesn't happen. Doesn't make sense. Doesn't make sense. This leads to four motions of the ribs. You see her in this room. They expand from side to side, front to back, up and down, and each rib turns upward like a Venetian fly. No object. The lumen of the ribs and diaphragm expand the two elastic lungs. When the lungs are expanded, a vacuum is created in the lungs and the air from outside rushes in."
Ida, public-tape lecture, reading the yoga breathing literature:
Reflexes between the ribs
The intercostal spaces, in Ida's teaching, were not just gaps to be widened. They were sites of reflex activity that linked the surface of the thorax to the organs underneath. In the 1976 advanced class, she paused her discussion of first-hour superficial-fascia work to make this anatomical point explicit. Between every pair of ribs, she said, there are reflexes to local areas — and the reflexes are sided. Between the ribs on the left, the reflexes run to the heart. Between the ribs on the right, the reflexes run to the liver and the digestive tract. A person with digestive trouble will show stuckness and pain between the right-side ribs. A person with circulatory trouble will show it between the left-side ribs. This is one of the reasons the first hour, which deals with the superficial fascia of the chest, is also a hour of internal reorganization — the surface work is letting the deeper reflexes get going underneath.
"That between every pair of ribs, there are reflexes to local areas. And between the ribs on the left hand side you get reflexes to the heart, and between the ribs on the right hand side you get reflexes to the liver and to the digestive tract in general."
Ida, 1976 advanced class:
The reflex doctrine also explained, for Ida, the otherwise puzzling observation that work on the superficial fascia of the chest produced changes in heart function and circulation that could not be accounted for by the volume of the lungs alone. Earlier in the same passage, she had pressed a student to give her an answer about why a first hour improved the heart's function. The student offered greater lung volume; Ida said that was only part of it. The other part — the part the student did not get to — was that the superficial fascia carries the blood vessels that supply the chest wall, and that working that fascia improves the circulation in the tissues that the heart depends on. The intercostal reflexes lie deeper still, and the surface work allows them to come back online. It is a layered picture: surface fascia, blood vessels, reflexes, organs. The first hour, in working the most superficial layer, gives the deeper layers room to reorganize.
"This is the way we learn. But you see, what you are doing in that first hour is dealing, as I stressed yesterday, with the superficial fascia. But as you deal with that superficial fascia, you are allowing the reflexes that lie deeper and in between the ribs. You're allowing them to get going so that you have a very complicated situation that's really occurring in that first hour."
Ida, completing the reflex teaching in the 1976 advanced class:
Approaching the chest in the first hour
If the doctrine of the rib cage is fascial relation, four motions, and intercostal reflexes, the technique of the first hour is the operational expression. On a public-tape recording describing the technique to a general audience, Ida laid out the sequence. The practitioner begins along the chest wall, front and back, working to free the ribs by loosening the superficial fascia. The aim is to improve the function of the ribs in their four modes. The shoulder motion is a diagnostic — how much shoulder tension a person carries shows the practitioner where the fascia is tied. As the fascia is breathed open, the shoulder motion changes, and the patient becomes aware that their body is changing, which Ida treated as itself therapeutic. The work then moves to the sternum, to the costosternal junctions, to the corresponding areas of the back, to the pectoralis group, and finally to the attachments of the diaphragm along the lower rib cage.
"The technique of approaching this and to approach superficial fascia is to begin along the chest wall, chest and back, to free the ribs as it were, loosen the fascia so you can improve the function of the ribs and get them functioning in their four modes of functioning."
Ida, public-tape lecture, naming the first-hour rib technique:
When this approach has been done, Ida said, the visible result is that the chest has been raised off of the pelvis and the front of the body has been lengthened. This is the structural goal she returned to over and over again in her descriptions of the recipe's opening hours: the thorax must come up off the pelvis before anything below the pelvis can be worked. The legs cannot be organized until the pelvis is free; the pelvis cannot be free until the thorax is no longer pressing down on it. The first hour begins the lift from above; later hours will continue it from below and from the side. But the lift, as a structural change, starts in the rib cage, and the rib cage starts with the four motions coming back into play.
"What you've done, among other things, is you've raised the chest off of the pelvis and you've lengthened the front of the body, raising the whole structure. 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."
Ida, continuing the public-tape technique description:
The cage as two tubes, the ribs as spacers
In a 1975 Boulder session, Jan offered a fascial-architecture image that Ida took up and worked with. The trunk, in Jan's picture, is two cardboard tubes — like the tubes that yardage stores roll fabric on — nested one inside the other, separated by an interface fascial plane. The outer tube is the surface of the trunk; the inner tube is the visceral envelope; the ribs lie embedded in the interface plane between them as spacers. The image was useful because it gave the practitioner a way to think about the rib cage as a structure in the fascia, not as a structure adjacent to it. The intercostals — external and internal — belong to the plane the ribs are in. The ribs are not bony additions to a fascial trunk; they are bony stabilizers within a fascial tube, and what holds them in position is the relation of the fascia they are embedded in.
"Now, let me go back for a moment to the ribs in that, looking at it in the context that I just described. Those two tubes, sort of think about them as those cardboard tubes that roll cloth on in the yardage stores. Side of the rib cage is half of those with another one inside the other direction And there's a plane, a fascial plane separating those two tubes which is the interface plane between those two tubes. And as far as I can see, the ribs belong to that plane. They are spaces in that separating plane, interface plane. Infested in that membrane? The external intercostal belong to"
Jan, working through the fascial-tube model with Ida in the room:
Later in the same Boulder session, Jan extended the two-tube picture to explain why the psoas and the scalenes occupy the positions they do. Where the tube has bony spacers — the ribs — it is intrinsically more stable. Where the tube has no bony spacers — in the lumbar region between the twelfth rib and the iliac crest, and in the cervical region above the first rib — the tube is intrinsically weak. The psoas, Jan proposed, functions as a diagonal prop bracing the unstable lumbar segment, and the scalenes function as the parallel diagonal prop bracing the unstable cervical segment. The rib cage, in this picture, is the region of the tube where the architecture is reliable because the ribs hold the spacing. Above and below the cage, the body has to invent stability through diagonal propping. This is one reason Ida treated the cage as the architectural reference point against which the neck and the lumbar are measured.
"scalians and the splenius muscles. You have this kind of situation too and the ribs are in there as spacers in that tube and I'll come back to them in one. And then you have two regions here where there are no spacers and the tube is intrinsically weak in these two regions. And what I see is a system of of propping that tube up in the sense that if you, you know, if you have a a square that's a unstable structure this way, then what you do is you put a diagonal prop using triangles again to stabilize in this direction. Well, the psoas in here is sort of the diagonal crop in this region where there are no spacers, bony spacers to give more rigidity to the tooth. And in here I see a similar, a parallel structure formed by the scalenes and longus cocci and longus capitis. If you look at the structure in the neck here, you can see the scaling start on the front and end up at this level."
Jan, extending the two-tube picture upward and downward:
Two rib cages: above and below the fifth
In a 1975 Boulder fifth-hour demonstration, working on a man whose rectus abdominis attachments were difficult to free, Ida and a student named David made a structural observation about the rib cage that does not appear in most anatomy texts. Looking at an anatomy book between turns at the table, David noticed that from the fifth rib down, the ribs are tied to each other and to the sternum by costal cartilage in a continuous fashion — they almost function as one cage. From the fourth rib up, the ribs are much more independent of each other; they articulate with the sternum separately and behave structurally as individual elements. Ida confirmed the observation. The fifth rib, in her teaching, is a midpoint — a transitional rib where the breathing pattern itself pivots, and where the practitioner must change technique because the structural situation above and below it is different.
"Well, I see from looking at the book now that it's like from the fifth down, it's almost like you have two rib cages from the fifth down and from the fourth up. That's right. And the fourth up, those ribs are, like, more independent of one another than the ribs from five down. And you see when you get up to two, you begin to go up to the surface structure. Mhmm. Upright. Yeah. This picture shows very well the cartilage connection. It's all right here. And above there, the ribs are just facing. Right? There's also that breathing pattern of the of the ribs. The ribs, like, five is sort of a midpoint for the ribs breathing. They expand out like And you see as you normalize the ribs, you become more this becomes more. See, I caught up with that guy. He's trying not to do too much breathing on."
David, with Ida confirming, working a fifth hour in the 1975 Boulder class:
The two-cage observation is operationally significant. When Ida approached a thorax in the fifth hour with the rectus stuck low on the abdomen, she did not start at the rectus. She started at the top — at the origin of the rectus on the fifth rib, where the structure is safe to work and where freeing creates resilience downstream. To start below, where the two fascial sheaths (the recti and the pectoralis) interweave into what she called a wall, would be to put strain on a fibrous mass that has no give. By the time she had created resilience up high, the lower attachments would let her in. This sequencing — work from the freer region toward the stuck region — is a general principle in her practice, and the fifth-rib midpoint is the architectural fact that lets the practitioner know which region is which in the rib cage.
"They're just one. They're just a wall. You know, Roger, in your earlier class, the story was you start the fifth hour going to the insertion, you know, the origin of the rectus on the fifth rib. And you keep working it, clean it as best you may. Now you see, if you start working down here, what I'm going to do is to put so much strain Mhmm. On those right here that you may contribute contribute to a a separating spreading of herniation of those two pieces. But if you get enough resilience from the top here where it's perfectly safe Mhmm. Then it's safe to go down there lower."
Ida, working the same fifth-hour case in the 1975 Boulder class:
Lifting the thorax off the pelvis
All of the rib-cage doctrine — the fascial relation, the twelfth-rib anchor, the four motions, the intercostal reflexes, the fifth-rib midpoint, the two-tube architecture — comes to a single operational point in Ida's teaching: the thorax has to come up off the pelvis. This is the structural change that makes the recipe possible. In the 1975 Boulder class, Bob put the doctrine in its simplest form. The pelvis cannot become mobile until the load on top of it is reduced. The legs cannot be organized until the pelvis is mobile. The feet cannot be helped until the pelvis can come over the leg. So the entire downstream cascade — pelvis, legs, feet — depends on a single upstream move: lifting the rib cage off the pelvis. Whatever caused the original collapse — a car wreck, a bad marriage, fifteen years of fighting gravity — the operational response is the same. Take the thorax up.
"But as far as I'm concerned, from what I've heard Ida, what I finally got from Ida, the 601 time was that we are lifting the thorax off the pelvis. You can't really help the feet until you get the pelvis moving. It's the mobility of the pelvis to come over the leg that takes the stress off the feet. And you can't get a mobile pelvis until you get the load out off of it. So you're getting the thorax up off the pelvis so it can start having mobility. It's just like if you ever carry somebody piggyback and you get too far over, that's it. You've to get them off your back or your back is going to break. Or you'll fall. Or you'll fall, right? But if you're in line, can handle it for a while. And that's what happens with the stress in the thorax."
Bob, summarizing what he finally got from Ida "the six-hundred-and-first time":
Bob's piggyback image gave the doctrine its clearest physical illustration. Carry someone on your back, and if their weight is in line above you, you can manage it for a long time. Let them tip forward or backward or to one side, and you have to get them off or your back will break. The thorax on the pelvis is the same problem. It does not matter whether the thorax has shifted forward, back, sideways, or rotated — any of these compresses the pelvis and takes its mobility away. The practitioner is not a marriage counselor and cannot undo the original cause. What the practitioner can do is restore the line — take the thorax up off the pelvis so that the pelvis can come back into the relation where it belongs. The rib-cage work is the practical form of this restoration.
"And that's what happens with the stress in the thorax. Doesn't matter whether it goes back or forward or one side or rotates. It causes a compression on the pelvis and therefore the pelvis loses mobility. Now the pelvis could have lost mobility first, but that is going to also let the thorax is going to come down because of the mobility there. It does not matter what caused it. A lot of people say, well, what caused this? It could have been a car wreck. It could have been just psychological stress, you know, crummy marriage. But what what does matter is that you understand But we're not marriage counselors. What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour."
Bob, with the piggyback image and the cause-versus-action distinction:
Correcting what gravity has done
In the 1976 advanced class, demonstrating a first hour on an adult and watching his rib cage respond, Ida turned to the class with a reflection on what they were actually doing. The ribs had not shifted as a whole. They had shifted relatively, piece by piece. What the practitioner had done, she said, was correct — at least partially — what gravity had been doing to those ribs across the patient's entire adult life. The child runs around, has an accident, has a fight, has another accident; a decade or two of arguing with gravity, and gravity wins. The thorax that arrives on the table is the record of that argument. The first hour does not return the patient to a child's body; it returns the rib cage toward where a child's rib cage should be. The greater volume that follows is a structural correction, not a gain — the practitioner is undoing a loss, not adding something new.
"in these ribs. In other words, what you're saying is you shifted the thorax up. Did you shift it as a whole, or did you shift it piece by relatively piece by piece? I would say relatively. So would I. So what you did really was try to correct the way gravity has been pulling down on those ribs all the adult life of those individuals. You have been just shifting back to the place where a child should be, not necessarily is, as a child. Then you see he runs around and he runs around, he has an accident, he has another accident. And he has a fight, and he has another fight. And then eventually, he comes out of it having been arguing and fighting with gravity for ten years, twelve years, fifteen years, and who wins? The fifth make your right hand turn up there at the corner. I didn't turn on stand like that. With the greater volume came a better pattern of respiration Good."
Ida, in the 1976 advanced class after a first-hour demonstration:
The volume that returns to the chest as a result of this correction was, for Ida, one of the most reliable measurable effects of the ten-session series. On a public-tape recording, she recalled working on a tall, thin model who fancied himself a dancer, and being struck not by the inch or two he gained in chest circumference but by the chest volume he gained over the ten hours. Volume — the actual three-dimensional space inside the cage — is what determines what the heart and lungs have to work in. A practitioner who has lifted the thorax off the pelvis, restored the four rib motions, freed the twelfth rib, and balanced the costal cartilage has produced a cage with a measurable internal volume that was not there before. This is the structural change the work is for.
"I don't remember, but I was more impressed with the tape measure there than I was at that time. What was the other the tape measure? Something like he gained two inches more on his chest just through the, I don't ten hours. You don't remember the volume. It was the volume that was just so unbelievable. Okay. The technique of approaching this and to approach superficial fascia is to begin along the chest wall, chest and back, to free the ribs as it were, loosen the fascia so you can improve the function of the ribs and get them functioning in their four modes of functioning."
Ida, public-tape recollection of the dancer-model:
Coda: the rib cage as the body's middle question
What emerges from these passages is that Ida did not teach the rib cage as a part of the body. She taught it as a relation — the relation between the pelvis underneath, the shoulder girdle and head above, and the visceral cavity within. The rib cage is the structure that has to be reliable so that everything else can find its place. Its reliability comes from fascial spans, not bony certainty. Its function is the four-direction breathing that maintains the spinal articulations and lets the diaphragm do its own work without recruiting the abdomen. Its midpoint at the fifth rib divides it into an upper, independent cage and a lower, bound cage that the practitioner must approach differently. Its base at the twelfth rib is the most vulnerable structure in the trunk, and the third hour exists in part to restore it. In Ida's late teaching, the rib cage was the middle question of the body — the place where the pelvis question and the shoulder-girdle question and the visceral question all meet, and where the fascial doctrine she had spent her life developing finds its most concrete operational form.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf and the Boulder class working the fifth hour on a difficult abdominal rectus, T6SA (1975) and T6SB (1975) — extended sessions on rib-by-rib palpation, the second-third-fourth rib aberrations, and the relationship between psoas tightness and rib position. Included as pointers for readers interested in the hands-on diagnostic detail. T6SA ▸T6SB ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf on a public-tape lecture (RolfB1Side2) discussing the structural-versus-functional aim of the first hour, the excretory function of breathing, and her correction of the standard textbook framing of the arms as appendages of the chest. A useful supplement to the four-motion and pin-release passages above. RolfB1Side2 ▸
See also: See also: RolfA1Side1 — Ida's public-tape statement of the sequence by which the pelvis is freed from above (raising the thorax) and from below (freeing the legs and hamstrings). Relevant to the rib-cage doctrine because it locates the rib-cage work in the architectural cascade of the recipe. RolfA1Side1 ▸
See also: See also: B4T6SB — a 1975 third-hour-leftovers session in which Ida describes a thorax with no pelvic store of material to work from and the ribs piled along the sternum. A clinical illustration of the doctrine that the rib cage's reliability depends on the connective-tissue spans below it. B4T6SB ▸