What rounded shoulders actually are
Before Ida names a corrective move, she insists the practitioner see what the pattern actually is. The naive picture — shoulders are too far forward, push them back — is precisely the picture she spent her career dismantling. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, demonstrating on a student named Jan, she walked the room through the actual anatomy of the forward shoulder: the scapula has been pulled forward and out, the teres group is short and wide, and the rhomboids on the opposite side have lost the tone to balance it. The visible roundness is the consequence of an imbalance between an over-recruited muscle group and an under-toned antagonist. The corrective is not to push the shoulders back but to restore the antagonist pair.
"Except as you bring the the scapulae back toward the spine. So if you're going to get a lateral line, just spontaneously, you will have brought those those scapulae nearer to what would be the normal relation."
Ida, opening her demonstration in the 1975 Boulder class:
Having stated the relationship, Ida turns to the anatomy itself — naming the teres group, the rhomboids, and the body image of the male athlete whose proud back wings are, in her reading, a structural deformation rather than a sign of strength. This is one of her recurrent rhetorical moves: take a culturally celebrated body and show the student that the celebration depends on not understanding what the body is actually doing.
"Where you begin to recognize the fact that those that that scapula is pulled forward and out as you see in in athletes' sides where they get these huge big back wings, and they're so darn proud of them. And you realize that what they're doing is shortening and drawing out the the whole tiries group here. But you also begin to recognize the fact that you can affect the tiries group by going to its antagonist. And the antagonist is the rhomboids. And when these boys have pulled this thing way out here, they have practically thrown the rhomboids out of the picture. And some children, many children, these children with these winged scapulae are really as you look at them, you recognize the fact that it is the rhomboids which have so little tone that they are unable to to balance the teres group. Look at them."
Ida, continuing in the same demonstration, on what the rounded-shoulder pattern actually involves:
The third hour as the shoulder girdle's hour
In the structural recipe Ida had developed by the mid-1970s, the third hour is where the shoulder girdle gets its first serious structural address. The first hour has loosened the superficial fascia of the trunk and freed the breath; the second has lengthened the back and brought the erectors closer together. By the third hour, the practitioner has a body whose sides have been pulled down by the front-and-back work of the first two hours, and now the lateral line — the side body — must be established. The shoulder girdle is the upper anchor of that line. In a 1976 Boulder class, Ida pressed her students to articulate what the third hour was actually doing, and the answer she was after was the relationship of pectoral major to latissimus dorsi.
"Now if you organize that shoulder girdle properly in the third hour. Through what mechanism are you getting it into the body, so to speak? Getting it the way you can use it? Through what mechanism? Remember that your girdle is your doing apparatus. Either girdle is a doing not a being apparatus. You can live without either girdle. And the answer is that as you organize that third hour, what you are really doing is relating the pectoral to the metissimus. It's that simple. That is what is going to be the most superficial balancing mechanism of that shoulder girdle. The pectoral tulatus luminous. Those of you who have known me down through the years, I'm talking about Pat, of course, realize that down through the years I scream and I scream and I scream and I scream and I scream and my screaming is, let your elbows come straight out. And while I'm screaming, you do, by gum. And as soon as I get my mind on somebody or something else, you go right back to where you're carrying it. Right back."
Ida, in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, drawing out the third hour's mechanism:
The pectoral and the latissimus are antagonists wrapped around the humerus from opposite sides — the pectoral pulling the arm forward and across, the latissimus pulling it back and down. When the pectoral wins, the shoulder rolls forward. When the two are balanced, the elbow points laterally and the shoulder girdle floats at its proper width. Ida's image is mechanical and unsentimental: how do you counterweight a garage door? You set the spring on the opposite side. The shoulder girdle is no different.
"And all doing apparatus tends to be peripheral apparatus. And it tends to work with very little interjection of basic energy. That's its first working. So if you're going to balance the shoulder girdle, you've got to go and find the shoulder girdle. And what's lying there in front of you screaming at you? A pectoral, the major. Where does it attach to the humerus? How can you counterweight it? Why by the latissimus that's on the other side of the other back of the body? How do you counterweight your garage door? It's that simple. But until you get that arm so that the elbow, no matter what movement of the arm occurs, the elbow starts out, you do not and cannot balance those two big, beautiful, superficial muscles. Now where do they insert? They both of them insert into the upper arm. Now this is the mechanics of that shoulder the basic mechanics of that shoulder girdle."
Ida, continuing in the same class, on counterweighting the shoulder girdle:
Ida's broader pedagogical claim here matters. The shoulder girdle is not a being apparatus — it is not what holds you up. It is a doing apparatus, what you use to reach, to lift, to manipulate. Pelvis is for walking; shoulder girdle is for doing. Both girdles work peripherally, with very little basic energy, and both depend on superficial antagonist pairs being properly counterweighted. When the pair is out of balance, the work the girdle is asked to do gets routed through the trunk, and the trunk pays the price.
Freeing the shoulders from the thorax
But before any of the third-hour pectoral-latissimus work can land, there is a preliminary mechanical condition: the shoulder girdle has to be liberated from the rib cage it is sitting on. In a forward-collapsed body, the shoulders are not floating on the thorax — they are pressed down onto it, weighing on the upper ribs, compressing the apex of the chest. Until that weight is lifted, the deeper third-hour work on the quadratus lumborum and the lateral line cannot land. In a 1975 Boulder discussion of the ninth hour, Ida circled back to make this principle explicit.
"Before you can get that quadratus to span properly, you have to free the shoulders from the thorax because they're still weighing down and it's not going to help much if you don't get that going."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, on the prerequisite for getting the quadratus to span:
A student offers the teres group; Ida accepts and extends, naming the pectoralis as the other half of the imbalance, and then names the latissimus as the great sheet that covers the back like wings. Her image of the latissimus as a bird's wing-down muscle is one of her most vivid anatomical analogies — and it makes the corrective intuitive. The latissimus has to come back to length; the teres has to release laterally; the rhomboids have to take up the medial tone. Only then does the scapula return to its proper relation to the spine.
"The teres. The teres and the and the pectoralis, the imbalance with those. It goes from it's it just it's a big sheet that just covers the whole back like wings. In fact, in birds, the the latissimus ends up at the elbow and it's the it's the thing that brings the wing down. Way they use their shoulder, and we see that it's usually pulled too much too far forward. In order to get it back, you have to take the tissue and put it back. And in order to get it to put the stuff back, you have to also hang on and bring something forward."
Ida, in dialogue with a student in the 1975 Boulder class, on the teres, pectoralis, and latissimus:
The scapula and the spine: the relationship that has to be observed
In Ida's reading, the scapula is not an independent unit — it is part of a system whose distance from the spine indexes the length of the whole body. As the body shortens, the scapulae drift apart; as they drift apart, the body shortens. The two are aspects of one fact. In a 1975 Boulder discussion, she pressed this point repeatedly: the second hour's work, which brings the spiny erectors together and lengthens the back, also pulls the scapulae back toward where they belong. The medial drift of the scapulae is a consequence of length, not an isolated correction.
"Now everyone in this room, in the course of his second hours, has seen this, but it used to be nothing short of a revelation. You see how when you brought those two strands together, all of a sudden, you had length in the body. And you see this is telling you something else. It is telling you what to do next. Because you find, as you look at these bodies, that as the body has shortened, the scapulae have come apart. The converse is also true. As the scapulae are pulled apart by poor use of the shoulder girdle, the body shortens. Consequently, in order to lengthen the body, you have to get the scapulae in where they belong. The relation of spine and scapulae has to be observed. The normal relation has to be observed."
Ida, teaching the second-hour-into-third logic in the 1975 Boulder class:
She returned to this point a few minutes later in the same class, distilling it into a single sentence. The relation of spine to scapula is not optional knowledge for the structural worker — it is the operative observation. Without it, the practitioner cannot read what the shoulder girdle needs.
"you something else. It is telling you what to do next. Because you find, as you look at these bodies, that as the body has shortened, the scapulae have come apart. The converse is also true. As the scapulae are pulled apart by poor use of the shoulder girdle, the body shortens. Consequently, in order to lengthen the body, you have to get the scapulae in where they belong. The relation of spine and scapulae has to be observed. The normal relation has to be observed. And"
Ida, distilling the principle a moment later:
Reading two bodies side by side
Ida's classrooms were laboratories. Rather than teach the rounded-shoulder pattern as an abstraction, she had students stand together at the front of the room and made the senior practitioners describe what they saw. In a 1975 Boulder class, she lined up Chuck and Jim and asked the room to articulate the relationship between Chuck's shoulders-back posture and Jim's shoulders-forward one — and then made clear that both are versions of the same underlying problem. Chuck's apparent military posture and Jim's collapse are two compensations for the same loss of rib-cage support beneath the scapulae.
"Supposing you're putting that down on paper. There's certainly a relationship between his shoulders being back and his head being forward. Yeah. He's also Left with him. Shorter on the left. Now stand Jim up beside him. What allows Jim's shoulders to come forward that much? Jim, would you turn around so that they see the scapula in the back? Turn around two wide scapula. Around all the way around? Yeah. It's more like the lower cervicals coming forward to me than the width between this gap, sixth and fifth and I don't see him able to adjust it at the the. Alright. Now some of the rest of you get up there. You, Jen, do get on that line too. Those are two sides of the same coin, aren't those? Rhomboids and cervicals forward? Well, cervix can't be forward except the rhomboids out here. Jan's is even more clearly in the lumbar side than Jim's is. It's a little higher in the lumbar. I'm not asking you anything about the lumbar right now. I am trying to make you see heads and you insist on seeing lumbar partly because I taught you to."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, working with the room to read two student bodies:
The exchange continues with one of Ida's recurrent insights into the so-called military or held-back shoulder: it is not the opposite of the rounded-shoulder pattern but a secondary compensation for it. The person whose erector spinae have already migrated laterally — whose deep back support has been lost — cannot let the shoulders settle without feeling that they are slumping. So they pull the shoulders back into a held position that has no support beneath it. Both patterns share the same missing structural element.
"I was formulating the question in my mind is, what about the the the opposite picture with the scapula? Do you find people who are drawing their scapula together. They have they have practically no one voice. Well, what what I answered my own question in that the shoulders back is a secondary compensation because when you ask those kind of people to let go of their shoulders, they invariably say, but that's slumping. And someone has come along and said, stand up straight in the then, this the erector spinae have already migrated laterally. So they start drawing back the shoulders to get what they think is straight. So it's like, it's a secondary They don't know how to get support out so that the ribs are under the scapulae. The ribs are always too far forward in those cases. Jana's also sort of settled anger that breaks that back to I mean, that that's primary situation."
Student and Ida, in the same Boulder discussion, on the so-called military-posture pattern:
The shoulder girdle as the male tie-up
Ida had no hesitation about naming gender patterns in the body. In her observation across decades of practice, the shoulder girdle was where the male body characteristically tied up — the locus of compression and rigidity that practitioners would reliably encounter. The pelvic girdle was where the female body characteristically tied up. This was not a moral observation but a structural one, and she taught the practitioner to know what to expect when a male body walked into the room.
"anatomy and how you are getting down to deeper levels at this point. And in the shoulder girdle, which is where you find the principal tie up in the males of the species, You have to settle back. You have to coax those warmoids to take on more toll."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, naming the shoulder girdle as the male tie-up:
What is striking in this passage is how immediately Ida links the shoulder girdle to the pelvic girdle. The same sentence that names the rhomboids needing tone names the quadratus lumborum needing to come back from the crest of the ilium. In her reading, the upper-body collapse and the lower-body disorganization are aspects of one continuous problem, and the work moves between them. The third hour, which establishes the lateral line, addresses both girdles through the side body that connects them.
The arm as a trunk-driven mechanism
Ida's most insistent classroom refrain about the shoulder girdle — the one she said she screamed at students for years — concerned the position of the elbow. If the elbow does not start its movement laterally, no antagonist pair can balance. The arm is not driven by the arm; it is driven by the trunk muscles working through the arm. And the trunk can only drive the arm cleanly if the arm is hung in a position from which the trunk's mechanical input can reach it. This is why she returned obsessively to elbow orientation across years and venues.
"Now how does it get away from floating around the horizontal plane? And God knows you all could not find out. I I don't bother you. On working on you're working on through your arm because you do not work. You are no longer working with your arm. They are working by the trunk muscles working through the arms. And those arms must be far enough away So there you get the actual index of the elbows going straight out and straight in on horizontal lines as being the index of the relation of the pectrogirdle to the trunk."
Ida, in the early 1970s, on why the arm must be hung so that the trunk can work through it:
She made the same point in the 1976 Boulder class, where she had students try to let their elbows go straight out by an inch — and most of them could not. The inability is not a muscular weakness; it is a learned pattern in which the humerus has not been allowed to rotate in its socket. When the humerus turns in the glenoid, the elbow finds its lateral position automatically. When it doesn't, no amount of force on the upper arm will produce the result. The shoulder pattern resolves itself when the humerus is allowed to find its rotation.
"And you work like the very Dickens trying to get it there. Seems like it seems like they are crooked. Now turn around and let these people see your back and see how those arms fit into the shoulders and see why he uses that foot. They are footed. One of them is much further out than another. Now let those elbows go straight out by an inch. Just the elbow. No movement below the elbow. No movement above the elbow. Just the elbow points its way out by an inch. I'll settle for a half an inch. Maybe a quarter inch. Even a quarter of an inch I'll settle before. I'm a reasonable woman. Not many people in this room that will subscribe. It's not in the belief system. It's not in the common The shoulders are in order to Yeah, but you see if you will turn around the way your mate has, you people can see why he has to work so hard to relax in the shoulders. Because all those shoulder extensors are too far from the spine. All the back extensors are too far from the spine and in order to conduct any movement whatsoever he first has to adjust those muscles to a position where he can ask them to work. Now are you beginning to get a light on the subject? Are you beginning to get a greater understanding of the fact that this is the essence of ropey? To get all of those mild fascial patterns to the place where you don't have to add energy to them to move. Conscious energy. The back should be the right width. The shoulders need to be the right width."
Ida, in the 1976 Boulder class, on the humerus rotating in its socket:
The shoulder girdle floats — or fails to
The end-state Ida names for the shoulder girdle is a floating one. A properly organized shoulder girdle is not held in place; it sits at appropriate width on a rib cage that supports it from below, and it moves with every breath. The shoulders widen and drop with each inhalation. This breathing-shoulder relationship is her touchstone for whether the third-hour work has actually landed. If the shoulders do not move with the breath, the work has not gone deep enough.
"The job is to get the girdle happy. And then as you get the girdle happier and you get into the subscapularis and you get into the insertions of the pectoralis minor, the pectoralis major, mostly the major of course, and the latissimus, then you begin to get freeing of that shoulder girdle, at least spacing, more appropriate spacing of that shoulder girdle, it's no longer jammed like that. You've seen it on, Michael, you've seen it on Don. You get the spacing of the shoulder girdle where you get an appropriate width of shoulder. And you begin to get an appropriate behavior of shoulders and the appropriate behavior of shoulders is that shoulders move with every breath. They become wider and they drop. And this is your touchstone. Have I done the work? Haven't I done the work? And then you see you're stuck with the fact that now you've gotten the two girdles into fairly good shape. Now you have got to get the trunk into the kind of shape where those girdles can relate to it. Now look what you're saying."
Ida, in the August 1974 IPR lecture, on the appropriate behavior of shoulders:
She continues by naming the next mechanical layer: even when both girdles have been brought into reasonable shape, the trunk between them may not yet permit them to relate to it. A distorted first, second, or third rib will not allow the shoulder girdle to sit at proper width no matter how skillfully the soft tissue has been addressed. The practitioner must then go in and lift those ribs one by one. The shoulder girdle's floating depends on the rib cage's lift, and the rib cage's lift depends on the lumbar's freedom beneath it.
"And then you see you're stuck with the fact that now you've gotten the two girdles into fairly good shape. Now you have got to get the trunk into the kind of shape where those girdles can relate to it. Now look what you're saying. You're saying that every person who has a distortion of the first rib or the second rib or the third rib is having the kind of situation which will not allow that shoulder girdle to become appropriately placed. And you're going to have to go in there one way or another. You're going to have to get in there and lift those ribs one by one. And you've seen various techniques of various degrees of, shall I say, violence to get that done. Certainly you can say difficulty. And the simplest is simply going in with your fingers and just jacking up as the dial lies on the side."
Ida, continuing in the same IPR lecture, on what comes after the girdles are addressed:
What the third hour is, at the level of girdles
In the 1976 Boulder class, Ida pressed her students Socratically to name what the third hour was doing at a higher level of abstraction. They named the lateral line, the quadratus, the spanning of the body front-to-back. Ida accepted all of these and then named the answer she was after: the third hour is the hour in which the practitioner begins to deal with girdles. The shoulder girdle and the pelvic girdle, having been part of an undifferentiated trunk in the earlier hours, now begin to separate from the trunk and become their own structural units.
"There's no question about that. The span front and back, you're also affecting the span. You're creating a situation where a body starts to look like it spans through itself. Okay. Can you tell me why it looks as though it's standing through? Spanning through. Spanning? It's starting to look like it wants to have depth in the way it distributes the way it looks. Okay. Okay. Keep going. Keep looking. I can tell you the answer, but after I've told you the answer, you won't really know it as you will if you tell me the answer. What is one of the very fundamental observations that you might make about the third hour? Yeah. Happened in the first hour too. Keep going. Yes. Yeah. Because other things got stronger, and now all of a sudden, what you didn't work shows up. Shows up. Yeah. Okay. And that's sort of a negative result rather than the positive. Well, one of the answers that I'm trying to bring out, one of them, is that in that third hour, you start dealing with girdles. You start dealing with girdles. Now if you organize that shoulder girdle properly in the third hour."
Ida, in the 1976 Boulder class, drawing the third hour's structural definition out of her students:
Don, a senior practitioner, then asks Ida a clarifying question: he has a gut understanding of separating the shoulder from the trunk but not the same understanding for the pelvic girdle. Ida's response is to send him back to the cross-section anatomy at the third or fourth lumbar, where the fascia of the back is continuous with what wraps the psoas and the prevertebral structures. The work on the crest of the ilium, she tells him, affects all the deep structures of the lower trunk. Both girdle separations are structural events that happen as much through fascial release as through bony repositioning.
"But you're not gonna get another chance. Do all of you understand my statement that the third hour begins the separation of shoulder girdle and lumbar and pelvic girdle from the trunk. You really have a gut understanding. I have I have a gut understanding of it separating the shoulder from the trunk, but I don't have such a clear understanding of it separating the pelvic girdle from the trunk. The understanding I do have is related to the quadratus and separating, you know, like getting Not on any quadratus. Did you look at the picture in place that showed you all the stuff that was attached on the crest of the alien? Because you should have been working with every last little bit of a molecule that's attached to that. Okay. Yeah. Also, look at the cross section anatomy at about the third or fourth lumbar, and you see that the fascia that lays across the back is continuous with what wraps the psoas and all the prevertebral structure. Yeah. So when you start working on the crest, you're affecting all of the deep structures as well. Okay. Okay. Now how about some coffee? Fine. No. Well Not now. Let let's do it when the room's empty because it's too The other thing that is so clearly noticeable is the compression in the left shoulder girdle as opposed to the right."
Ida and a senior student, in the 1975 Boulder class, on the third hour separating both girdles:
Underpinnings: the lower cervical and the failure of dorsal support
When Ida moved up the body in the late hours, she found again and again that rounded shoulders and forward head are not problems of the neck — they are problems of what is happening (or failing to happen) below. The lower cervical vertebrae pitch forward because the dorsal spine has failed to support them. Working on the cervical spine itself, in this view, will not hold any correction; the practitioner must address the rib cage beneath the cervical, where the actual failure of support lies.
"spinous process of six and seven are just You're talking about cervical. Or just right together. The six and seven cervical are reflecting. That is When on the dorsal Failure of support from the dorsal. This is what I'm trying to get you to look at. It's the underpinnings again. It's the underpinnings. That's right. Anything for the top part of the. I'm looking forward to seeing this as you would create more length on the left side of his neck. I'm looking forward to seeing the way he's using his left knee rotating back I'd like you to come forward here and do a little palpating too as a as a patterner. I want you to understand more about structure, deep in structure than most of them. See, it's one thing to deal with patterning from the aesthetic point of view, and it's a very good place to do it to work from. But some of you need to know structure as under aesthetics. If you will go up through the axillary space, you're going to learn something more."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder twelfth-hour class, locating the cervical problem in the thoracic underpinning:
This reframing changes the practitioner's approach to the head-forward pattern that accompanies rounded shoulders. The forward head is not a habit of head carriage; it is a mechanical consequence of failed rib-cage support. Press the head back, and the body simply pulls it forward again the moment attention shifts. Lift the underpinning ribs into proper relation, and the head comes back of its own accord because there is finally something beneath it to support its weight.
Why pushing the shoulders back fails
Ida's quarrel with conventional posture training was not philosophical but mechanical. When she watched American military and physical-education training of the mid-twentieth century — the shoulders-back, chest-out, gut-in instruction that her generation of men had been drilled with — she saw a structural disaster being imposed on bodies that had no support for it. The dorsal spine goes forward; the breath gets compressed; the speech gets strained; the body fights gravity rather than receiving its support. In a 1976 Boulder class, she walked the room through what happens when the shoulders are pushed back without the underlying work that would let them sit back of their own accord.
"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, in the 1976 Boulder class, on the shoulders-back instruction:
The alternative Ida names is not a corrective exercise but a structural condition. The shoulders go back when the rib cage has been lifted off the pelvis, when the back extensors have come closer to the spine, when the scapulae have found their proper distance from the spine, when the humerus can rotate in its socket. None of these can be achieved by instruction or effort — they require the soft-tissue work that the recipe sequences. The shoulder pattern is the visible signature of the body's whole structural state.
The breath as the test
In the first hour, before any direct shoulder-girdle work has been done, Ida and her senior colleagues already saw the rounded-shoulder pattern beginning to release through the chest work. Bob, teaching in the 1975 Boulder class, traced how the freeing of the ribs reorganizes the shoulder motion almost immediately. The four-way breathing pattern — up and down, side to side, front to back, the Venetian-blind effect — cannot establish itself while the shoulders are weighing on the upper ribs. As the chest work loosens the rib cage, the shoulders begin to move with the breath, and the pattern starts to come apart on its own.
"This is also indicated by the motion of the shoulders, how much tension the person is having. And as you breathe the fascia, the shoulder motions change, which is important in itself, it's also important because it lets the patient be aware that his body is changing, which I think is very important To conceive the fact that his body is changing and functioning better by working, again, on the first on the rib cage, along the sternum, the cost of sternal junction, and corresponding areas of the back, Pectoralis group muscles. And then paying attention to the attachments of the diaphragm along the lower rib cage which is again important in respiratory mechanism. When this is accomplished, there is an evidence of treatment of chest, GC, and feel. 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."
A senior practitioner, on a Rolf public tape, describes the first-hour chest work:
Bob makes the same point a moment later in the 1975 Boulder class. The first hour's work on the chest is not really aimed at the erectors — it is aimed at the pins in the back that are tying up the breathing, and at the chest itself. As the breathing pattern normalizes from abdominal back into thoracic, the rib articulations behind the spine begin to free, and the entire spinal mechanism — and with it the support beneath the scapulae — begins to come back online.
"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. We don't really work on the erectors in the first hour. We do free them, but that's not the goal. It's you're going for the pins in the back. They're tying up the breathing. You should be able to see them from the front. That's the Aida doesn't look at the back much. She just lays them down. She can see through the body, see where the pins are to release those pins. 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. 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."
Bob, in the 1975 Boulder class, on the first hour's chest work as breath reorganization:
The shoulder girdle in maturation
In the 1976 Boulder class, looking at dissection photographs of infant tissue with Ron Thompson, Ida and her students made an observation about shoulder maturation. In an immature shoulder, the deltoid acts essentially as a continuation of the trapezius — the muscle groups are not yet differentiated into separate functional units. The whole scapula goes wherever the arm goes; there is no separation of function at the shoulder joint. Structural maturation, in this reading, is precisely the process of differentiating these muscle groups so that they can balance against each other rather than acting as a single block.
"Here's the sternocleidomastoid and the pile up of stuff on the clavicle. And you can see then how things pull together here toward the clavicle. And you can see, often I've been thinking more and more that in the immature stage the deltoid acts just a continuation of the trapezius and that again what we need to do is get a separation of function of those two areas. This is the back somewhat dissected. We decided we didn't even have a long view of the back of the adult so we just took this picture to give some idea of complexity. Like the latissimus has gone here and trapezius is in place here. You can see how the trapezius is glued down onto the tissue that is, I mean you can't even see scapula here, but it's here. But this is the heavy band that ties the trapezius to the edge of the scapula. Obviously then rhomboids underneath are not much. I agree that the sheets, I think I can do it in less than ten minutes, at least as far as I can go right now, is that the sheets that are happening, the straps, the thicknesses, the whatever, are not only going around the body but are going deep into the body at all different ways. So that in the process of working on superficial fascia you're doing some very deep work because it's, or it may be the lack of, a better tone or something like that."
A senior practitioner, presenting dissection photographs in the 1976 Boulder class:
The same logic appears in another dissection-slide passage from that class. The mature shoulder uses the glenoid fossa as a true joint; the immature shoulder moves everything together as a unit. The rounded-shoulder pattern, in this framing, is not a pathology imposed on a mature body — it is the persistence of an immature pattern that the body never grew out of. The work's task is to finish the maturation that the body began but never completed.
"had not been embalmed, the scapula would move right with it. There was no separation of function at the shoulder joint and one of the things that I feel we're doing on the shoulder joint as well as the hip joint, I feel this is an immature pattern that where people move and the goes every place the arm goes, that somewhere maturity relates, a mature shoulder relates to using the glenoid fossa and mature pelvis relates to using the acetabulum because so many people are just moving with the whole pelvis instead of letting the leg swing which you saw yesterday in the first hour. We start to affect that and indeed we're affecting this part in the first hour so we're really getting to what I feel is the two points of what I consider changes in an immature body. At any rate, with the arms straight out to the side in this fashion then, you can start to see some of the pulls of the fascia going all the way down to the pelvis and below."
A senior practitioner, continuing the dissection presentation:
What the practitioner watches for
In a 1976 teachers' class, Ida and her senior colleagues described what they look for in a properly organized shoulder. The shoulder should look like a shoulder throughout any movement — not become something else as the arm rises. In a well-organized body, the shoulder maintains its identity as the arm moves; in a disorganized body, the shoulder collapses or hikes or pulls forward to accomplish what the arm cannot accomplish on its own. This is a movement-pattern observation that requires the practitioner to watch how the shoulder behaves, not just how it sits.
"more organized, well, a long way more organized than most people, you will notice that the shoulder will always stay looking like a shoulder through any movement. In other words, as they go forward, it will not become something else. Their body will support that movement and it continues to look like a shoulder. Many people who are, when we were talking about the degree of movement, they overshoot the mark by reaching this way or they don't shoot the mark at all. It's less than it should be. And this is a good indication of what kind of work we need to do. Many times dancers will do a forward row and they'll come up here and then settle their shoulders down. If their body is truly working in a kind of cooperative coordination, then as they get up there in the gravity field, the shoulders will be in place. Oh, really? So going on. I wanna review first hour."
A senior practitioner, in the 1976 Teachers' Class, on what an organized shoulder looks like in motion:
The same passage names a second indicator: the angle of the ribs, which determines whether the chest is too narrow side-to-side or too shallow front-to-back. The narrow upper chest with no place for the shoulders to rest, the neck disappearing into hiked-up shoulders, the pear shape — all of these are visible signs of the same underlying mechanical situation. The practitioner who learns to read the rib angle reads the shoulder-girdle problem from a single observation.
The first hour is the beginning of the tenth
Ida's recurring statement about the recipe — that the first hour is the beginning of the tenth — applies with particular force to the rounded-shoulder pattern. The work on the shoulder girdle does not happen in one session. It begins in the first hour with the chest work that frees the breath. It continues in the second hour as the back lengthens and the scapulae come toward the spine. It takes its primary form in the third hour as the pectoral and latissimus are balanced and the lateral line is established. And it continues into the late hours where the rib-by-rib work and the cervical integration confirm what the earlier hours have made possible.
"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. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. 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."
A senior practitioner with Ida, in the 1975 Boulder class, on the recipe's continuity:
The implication for the rounded-shoulder pattern is that no single intervention will resolve it. The pattern is the visible signature of the body's whole structural state, and it resolves as the structural state resolves. The third hour is the hour in which the practitioner most directly addresses the shoulder girdle, but the result of that work depends on what the first two hours have prepared and what the later hours will confirm. The shoulders find their place when the body finds its line.
Coda: where the work lands
In the closing logic of the recipe, the shoulder girdle settles when the trunk beneath it has come into balance and the antagonist pair that holds it has found its counterweight. Ida's image is consistent across years: the shoulders widen and drop with every breath, the elbows point laterally, the scapulae sit closer to the spine, the head finds its position over the trunk because the trunk has finally given it something to sit on. None of this is achieved by addressing the shoulder pattern as a posture problem. It is the consequence of a structural reorganization in which the shoulders are one consequence among many.
"One thing I see almost with every hour is you're through with the hour with the majority of people and there's a real sense of non connection between the head and the pelvis. If you look at them right after the hour, you know, say it's a third hour or fourth hour, the sides are long, they look good, but somehow the pelvis and the head doesn't connect. And the pelvic lift and the network is what the body needs. Is what connects the knee. Right. There's something else too. Like in thinking from say, first hour through, the work on the back not only lets you organize the back and complete the inhaler, bringing integration to the spine, but also what I'm beginning to see is like how you feed into what's coming up. Like how you feed in preparing for the second hour and doing the back work on the first hour and how particularly in the second hour, how by grabbing hold of that latissimus tendon, the edge of it and bringing in that you're beginning to open up the doorway to the quadratus and how when you're doing that, that work on"
A senior practitioner, in the 1975 Boulder class, on how the shoulder work feeds into what comes next:
The rounded-shoulder pattern, in Ida's teaching, is finally not the subject of any single hour. It is one of the visible signs by which the practitioner reads the body, and one of the visible signs by which the practitioner confirms that the work has gone where it needed to go. When the shoulder remains a shoulder through movement, when it moves with the breath, when the elbow finds its lateral position without effort — the work has landed. Until then, the work continues.
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, where Ida traced the third-hour move from back to side and described the structural consequence of having lengthened the front and back but not yet the sides — a transitional state in which the back looks worse before the side body has been established. SUR7313 ▸
See also: See also: the Open Universe Class of 1974, in which Ida and senior colleagues discussed how the shoulder girdle's response to chronic injury or emotional stress appears throughout the body — a pointer for readers interested in the broader pattern of upper-body collapse. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 advanced class discussion of how the third hour addresses the pelvic girdle as well as the shoulder girdle through related fascial layers — the iliac crest work that affects all the deep prevertebral structures. 76ADV91 ▸76ADV71 ▸