Why the psoas is the central muscle
Ida did not arrive at the psoas as a favorite muscle; she arrived at it as a structural conclusion. In her 1975 Boulder advanced class she pressed the students in front of her — David, Mira, Steve — to name what made the psoas indispensable, and she accepted partial answers (spinal integration, horizontal pelvis, lumbar plexus) only as steps toward a larger claim: that the psoas-rectus pair is a single biological system, and that no other pair in the body carries comparable structural weight. The claim is unusual because Ida frames it not as an anatomical observation but as a systems statement. The body's well-being depends on the integrity of one specific reciprocal mechanism. When that mechanism is broken — and in the random body it is almost always broken — every structural problem above and below is downstream of that single failure.
"And the importance of your work on the recti is in order to so organize the rectus and the psoas to make one mechanism of it, one system of it. Up to this point in the random body, it is not one system. And more and more, I would like you people, particularly you people who have looked at systems mathematically, to recognize the presence of biological systems operating to do a job. And here you have that system par excellence. There is no other single system in the body that is as important to the well-being of the body as this psoas rectus combination."
From the 1975 Boulder class, Ida states the systems claim plainly:
The students in the room pushed back, as Ida wanted them to. Mira tried to locate the psoas as a mediator between front and back; Ida corrected her — the psoas lies anterior to the spine, deep in the middle of the body, not in any simple front-back relation. David offered the structural-integration answer: that the psoas keeps the spine aligned and that nothing above or below can be addressed until it is released. Ida accepted David's framing as the closest to her own position. The exchange is characteristic of her late-career teaching: she would not let the doctrine arrive without the students working through the geometry, because the geometry — psoas in front of the spine, crossing the pubes, attaching to the femur — is what makes the muscle's function so unusual.
"Well, it's a the psoas is such a key structure to keeping the spine properly integrated and aligned that, you know, if too short and if it's overwhelmed by the rectus abdominis, you're just gonna have structural problems all the way up and down. And until you release that, you're not gonna do anything about those structural problems."
David offers a structural answer; Ida endorses it:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes (71MYS22) — a parallel argument that the psoas is what makes the lumbars able to drop back, and that the psoas's vital importance is independent of every other muscle of the leg. 71MYS22 ▸
Origin, attachment, and where it gets stuck
Before the doctrine can become operative the practitioner has to know where the muscle actually attaches, and Ida's 1975 Boulder class spent some time on this. The psoas originates on the upper lumbar vertebrae — Ida had taught the first lumbar but in this class corrected herself downward, to the twelfth thoracic in some bodies, the second lumbar in most. It crosses the rim of the pelvis at the pubes and inserts on the lesser trochanter of the femur, sharing a common tendon with the iliacus. The trajectory is not a straight line: the muscle zigzags, and the zag across the pelvis is where it most often becomes adhered to the bone behind it. Ida wanted the practitioners to feel for the attachment, not memorize it from the textbook, because the doctrine she was building required them to know by hand where the muscle was stuck.
It originates on the first first lumbar and and the the spines of the upper upper lumbar vertebra, I believe the twelfth thoracic. Actually, drop it down one day. In in practically all bodies, the psoas extends as far as the second lumbar. In some bodies, it goes as high as the first. But what I'm the answer I'm trying to get you to make real is how the psoas really connects with the vertebra."
Ida walks the class through the origin and corrects the textbook:
The next move in that same class was to name the consequence of the attachment. A muscle that originates on the front of the lumbar spine and stays glued there cannot do what a healthy psoas does — keep the lumbars back, span across the pelvic rim, mediate the action of the diaphragm. When it deteriorates it shortens, and in shortening it pulls the lumbars forward and jams the vertebrae together. The structural problem in the lumbar spine, in Ida's framing, is not primarily a problem of the lumbars; it is a problem of the psoas that has welded itself to them.
"And probably it also gets stuck to those vertebrae. And that condition of being stuck in that whole area prevents it from acting freely as well as it should should to keep those lumbars back."
The stuck psoas drags the lumbars with it:
Where the muscle gets stuck a second time, Ida and her students agreed, is at the pubic rim — the place where it crosses from inside the pelvis to outside, from spine to femur. In her 1975 Boulder discussion she walked the class through the fascial planes at this junction and named the place under the inguinal ligament where the practitioner's hand has to reach. She also named what the work feels like: not a release of a single muscle but a freeing of a fascial knot, with consequences that propagate up to the diaphragm and down to the floor of the pelvis.
"Now in practically all the all the random bodies that you will come to, particularly in the random bodies of males or of females who've made something of a fetish of athletics or dancing or something of the sort. That psoas is just stuck as it crosses the cubes. And how can you get into play? There's no stretch to it."
Ida describes the most common adhesion site:
Psoas and rectus as one mechanism
The deepest move in Ida's psoas teaching is the claim that the rectus abdominis is the psoas's antagonist — a claim she acknowledged sounds wrong, because the two muscles lie almost on top of each other at the rim of the pelvis. Conventional kinesiology assumes antagonists span opposite sides of a joint. Ida's position is that in an organized body the rectus and the psoas balance reciprocally regardless of their geometric adjacency: as one lengthens, the other adjusts. The relationship is not a tug-of-war but a coordinated mutual accommodation. When it is working the body walks from the psoas; when it is broken the body walks from the recti. This is the diagnostic Ida returned to most often in her advanced classes, because it is something the practitioner can see in the room.
"The rectus abdominis. In a rough body, as you walk, the flexion bringing the leg forward should be in the psoas. In an unrulved body, the flexion is in the recti. The flexion is distributed between the rectus abdominis and the rectus femoris."
From the 1975 Boulder class, the diagnostic move:
The visible consequence of this substitution is the dancer's thigh and the gymnast's belly — the over-developed quadriceps and rectus abdominis that Ida's classes saw repeatedly in the bodies that came to them. The athletic body is not, in her framing, a balanced body; it is a body whose superficial flexors have been recruited to do the job the deep flexor abandoned, and whose training has compounded the imbalance rather than corrected it. Ida did not consider this a controversial position. She considered it visible. The 1975 Boulder transcript shows her pointing at it directly.
"Now this is the reason why when you go and you look at skiers, for example, they have these enormous thighs. Many of our dancers have. Do you remember? Thighs out of all proportion to their body size. And you see, they started their dancing or they started their skiing or they started their water skiing, of Takashi. They started with relatively imbalanced structures, and they got a hold of the one they could get a hold of. And the one they can always get a hold of is that rectus femoris, that quadriceps structure of the legs. And in addition to that, they can get the rectus abdominis. And they are conscious of this, and they see this. And in gymnasiums and places where people are trained in sports, such a huge percentage of the talk is about this kind of training of those two anterior muscles. Now what do they do to balance it? Not one thing. Not one thing, and the more exercise they put themselves through, the more imbalance is in there. Now you fellows, in the first hour, when you have that person lying on the floor, you have done the thorax, and you've done a good deal on the legs, and you have that fellow lying on the floor and your hand goes onto his abdomen, and what happens to it? In anything that even resembles balance in the body, your head, depresses the belly wall."
Ida points at the dancer's and skier's bodies as the visible record of the substitution:
The corrective move is also named. When the belly wall finally falls back under the practitioner's hand, the psoas has taken its place in the abdominal picture — Ida's exact phrase, repeated across years. The pelvic lift at the end of the first hour is the first invitation to the psoas to resume its position. It does not yet free the muscle; it places it, as best as can be done at that level. The freeing comes later, when the practitioner has earned the depth to reach it.
"The rectus abdominis. Now just as soon as you begin to get relaxation in the rectus abdominis and the belly wall falls back, the psoas takes its place in the abdominal picture of what is going on in movement. And when you give that pelvic lift, you are evoking the activity of the psoas. You are putting it into a new position. You are allowing the lumbars to go back and the psoas to exercise its webbing effect in front of it."
Ida names the moment the psoas re-enters the picture:
By the fifth hour the agonist-antagonist relation is the explicit subject of the work, and Ida's teaching here is unusually direct about the conceptual difficulty. Conventional anatomy resists the idea that two adjacent muscles can be antagonists. Ida acknowledges the theoretical problem and presses through it: whatever you want to call the relationship, the rectus and the psoas adjust reciprocally in an organized body, and the practitioner's job in the fifth hour is to organize the psoas so it can fall back and resume that reciprocity.
"There's another function in there which we need to get into. And that is the fact that the rectus balances with the psoas. And this is the first time we've talked about the psoas. And yet the psoas is possibly the most important structural unit in the body. One of the reasons why the psoas is such an important structural unit in the body is because it goes from the leg and it's outside the trunk, it crosses into the trunk and function and and really originates. I'm getting you balled up. I should say it originates in front of the lumbar spine, the upper lumbar spine. And it zigzags across the, mostly zags and not zigs, across the pelvis so that it can cross the line of the pubes and then it attaches to the legs which you see are independent. Now as somebody brought up a few minutes ago, Janet was, the muscles that go from the inside to the outside of the body are few and far between and have very significant functions. And the primary one of them is that psoas."
From the 1975 Boulder Hour 7 transcript, Ida states the fifth-hour doctrine:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB4 public tape (RolfB4Side2) — an extended development of the agonist-antagonist anomaly and the connection of the psoas to the autonomic nervous system through the lumbar plexus. RolfB4Side2 ▸
The psoas in the recipe — third, fourth, fifth hours
Ida's teaching on the recipe is consistent on one point: the psoas is not reached in the early hours, and the attempt to reach it before its time is what makes a practitioner's first hours fail. The first hour places the psoas through the pelvic lift; the third hour begins to free the structures around the pelvis that will, eventually, give the practitioner access. By the fifth hour the practitioner is finally working on the muscle itself. In her RolfB6 public tape, Ida walked through this sequence with unusual precision, naming what each hour contributes to the project of restoring psoas function.
"getting any movement in his chest still, or you were getting more movement than would have been there before the first hour, which we didn't see at all. And then in that third hour, you're going up, and you're, again, trying to relate those same old two things, the diaphragm and the psoas. And you're realizing, you're recognizing the amount of tie up that there is in that diaphragm that deals with the length of the sides, that is anchored by the length of the sides. You can't get the diaphragm where you want the diaphragm until you have length enough in the sides to stick that thing in where it belongs. And that diaphragm, after all, attaches down as far as the second lumbar. So you see, one of the things you've gotta do is to start getting those lumbar back in order to give yourself the place where the diaphragm can fit. Imagine this guy gets up from the third hour. You look at him and you say, that anterior superior spine is really in a mess. If I come back and try to do a fourth hour with that anterior superior spine caught up like this, I'm gonna have trouble. And perhaps you prepare it some for that fourth hour because you see you can't get the cellulite pelvis turned up. You can't get the psoas back where it can play back and forth with that diaphragm until such time as you have this degree of movement and that pelvis can be kept tremendously immobilized by those five muscles that attach there at the anterior superior spine."
From the RolfB6 public tape, the third-hour preparation for the psoas:
The fourth hour, Ida taught, is the hour that establishes the length on the inside of the legs that will be needed in the fifth. Without the adductors freed and the floor of the pelvis given room to organize, the practitioner cannot get the psoas to fall back. The fourth hour is therefore preparatory in a literal sense — not because it does less but because what it does becomes operative only in the hour that follows. In the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes Ida is explicit about this dependency.
"Fourth hour, I would say, gives you that, what that fourth hour does is it gives you that length that you need on the inside of the legs, on the inductors, in order to get that freedom that you're going to need in the fifth hour. In other words, if you don't establish the proper length of those adapters in the fourth hour, then you're never going to be able to establish the working of the psoas and the balance of the psoas and the rectus in order to free that lumbar section of the influence of that lower girdle. That's what I see as the fourth hour from the point of view of the seventh hour. You got any comment on, Mr. Peter? Just the fourth hour it seems to me establishes not only, and I didn't hear this exquisitely, you said that it establishes length all the way up through the body, not just through the inside of What do you think it establishes that length all the way up through the body?"
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, Ida names the fourth-hour contribution to the fifth:
By the fifth hour the practitioner is finally inside the abdomen on the muscle itself. Ida's instructions on the technique are anatomically specific: under the rectus, in along the fascia, up toward the origin near the diaphragm, and on the iliacus afterward, since the two muscles share their lower tendon. She also warned against rushing: in more than half the population the psoas has not worked in years, and the practitioner cannot simply ask it to resume. The work is one of permission, slowly given.
And on the psoas, they're they're breathing freeze. They get more movement in that diaphragm and the costal arch and so forth from work on the psoas. And it's important, I think, working at the psoas to also not only get it in the lower part of the abdomen but also in the upper part near its its origin."
From the 1975 Boulder class, the practical instruction on working the psoas:
Ida's RolfA3 public tape gives the practitioner-side account of this work: the goal across many sessions is to get the psoas doing its stuff, and in more than half the population it has not been doing so for years. The practitioner cannot simply demand the function. The work is peripheral first — freeing the rectus, the fascia, the legs — and then central, when the depth has been earned.
"Well, always keep in mind that one of the places where you're going is to get the psoas doing its stuff. And in more than half the population you'll find that psoas has been working in years. So you can't just go in there and say, come on, let's get this thing working. We've got bring it up, bring it up. More movement left the area, get more metabolism. So again it's a case of working on peripheral structures with the goal of going deeper later. Yeah, but it's the idea well, actually, in that fifth hour, if you've done a good job, you can usually get right down to the sewage by going in under the rectus. Yeah. But you see, you've got to do a lot of work in here first just to free that it free that psoas as it goes across It's all part of that picture of getting the psoas and the rectus working together, which they haven't been able to do. See, every time a kid is put through push ups and so forth, he is shortening and thickening the rectus. And in shortening and thickening the rectus, he is throwing the psoas out of the picture and permitting encouraging deterioration in the solar."
From the RolfA3 public tape, the patience the work requires:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes (72MYS131) — Ida discusses the Ilio-Psoas literature, the Zebra Symposium, and the 2,500 pounds of force the psoas can exert when the pelvis is in a tipped alignment. 72MYS131 ▸
The psoas, the diaphragm, and the autonomic nervous system
The psoas does not act alone. Its upper attachment is intimately related to the crura of the diaphragm — in theory there is space between them, Ida acknowledged, but in practice the two structures become tied together. The consequence is that work on the psoas changes breathing, and work on the breath changes the psoas. The 1975 Boulder transcript shows Ida making this connection without hedging.
"I hope we all So anyway, that's part the lifting ceiling which of course is the releasing of the stubbornness to the vertebrae. It seems to me that the psoas anatomically, I don't know, I haven't dissected the psoas diaphragm area of a cadaver but it seems to me that the psoas must get tied up to that diaphragm because the curve of the diaphragm come down to those Yeah. Those are actually in theory at least there's some space between the crura and the psoas. In theory. Yeah. But in practice, as you know, when things get aberrated, they move around and they get random and they get Yeah. Anyway, see the psoas work freeing the diaphragm. I I see that happening as people are are worked."
From the 1975 Boulder class, the psoas-diaphragm connection:
Beyond the diaphragm, Ida connected the psoas to the autonomic nervous system through the lumbar plexus, which she described as practically embedded on the surface of the muscle. The implication of this connection is one Ida insisted the practitioners take seriously: work on the psoas is not only mechanical. The lumbar plexus innervates the abdominal organs, and the solar plexus sits close enough that anything happening in the psoas has reflections there. This is part of why she considered the muscle so consequential.
"You should have been getting acquainted for at least two hours before they start through. You should have been getting acquainted since the fifth hour. Now visualize. Visualize into your fingertips. What happens when a psoas is out of condition and out of commission? And the answer is it gets glued to the front of the lumbar spine and it shortens. As it deteriorates, it shortens. And in shortening, it's going to pull some of those vertebrae folds and it's going to jam all of those vertebrae together. So the first place you go is the lumbar spine. Will you get that lumbar spine really viable. Making a lumbar spine out. Making it something that just isn't a piece of connecting wood then you see you begin getting a different level of physiological operation in that And if you've got a different level of physiological physiological operation in that psoas, you're going to have a different level of physiological operation in all those lower pixies. You've got to get it in the lumbar. You will unquestionably get it in the solar plexus, which doesn't lie in the psoas on it, but is close enough, neighboring enough, that anything that happens in the psoas is going to have a reflection there. Anything that happens in the psoas, anything that happens to the core of the diaphragm has to reflect."
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, the psoas and the plexi:
The 1971-72 Mystery Tapes contain Ida's most extended development of the energetic and physiological consequences of psoas work. The psoas is unusual not only because of its geometry but because of its embedded relationship to the autonomic plexi. American exercise — push-ups, sit-ups, the development of the showy anterior muscles — works against the muscle that mediates the autonomic-skeletal connection. The deterioration is therefore not only structural but visceral.
"And here you begin to find your psoas in streams. Now by this fifth hour, if you've done your job properly, even if they've got a nice, great, big, deep, And there aren't that many abdomens around where in the fifth hour, if the work has been Now look what happens next. You get your hands in there, and by this greatest of all flesh stimulus, you get more energy into that solar. And lo and behold, the lumbar can drop back because it is the psoas rude on the front. The psoas unable to do its stuff. The psoas unable to battle with the everlasting heaving and hawing of the red eye. That is what is holding. I didn't say it was causing them. I said it was holding. And until you get some resilience in that so and, you can't get your love to do that. Now is this picture clear? You realize that heretofore, comparatively, we have been talking about lifeless dreams when we talked about the muscles of the leg. Compared with the life and the change and the vitality and the importance the vital importance never independent of the record. Now there's another reason why that psoas has such a vital importance. Because it doesn't make any difference what kind of exercise Americans take. Is dependent on those plexi suffer. And this"
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, the fifth-hour energization:
Walking from the psoas
The clearest functional teaching Ida offered on the psoas was the walking test. In a body where the psoas works, the leg swings forward from the deep flexor; in a body where it doesn't, the leg is recruited from the rectus femoris and the rectus abdominis. The practitioner watches the groin during walking and sees, or doesn't see, the action there. Ida used this test repeatedly across her advanced classes as a way of teaching students to read bodies in a room — not to count muscles but to see whether the deep mechanism is firing at all.
"You can get these people up around here and I suggest Peter, where's Peter? I suggest to you to bunch up, we can't do it with as many people as we have here up there, and let them just walk and let each one of them observe other people in terms of what is going on at the groin. And you will find that just about all your auditors will have nothing going on or very little going on. And as people have a history of more and better walking, then you begin to see the acting at the groin. And you begin to see the psoas as sweeping the thigh forward as far as the knee. And there the psoas stops acting and you stop flexing. You don't try to handle your leg. You only go as far as the activity of the goes. And the activity of the psoas goes from the twelfth dorsal to the knee. And that's a long way. And you can see it holistically. And it doesn't fold by shortening, it folds by lengthening, by falling back and letting that groin have length to turn."
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, the walking diagnostic:
The technical question that follows from the walking test is whether the psoas shortens or lengthens during the swing — a question one of Ida's IPR lectures took up at length. The student in the room had felt, repeatedly, that the muscle's release was a lengthening, not a contraction. Ida pressed against the conventional concept that flexion always means shortening. The psoas, she argued, is sophisticated enough that in an organized body its flexion is a lengthening — the muscle falls back and gives the groin its length. This is one of the places where Ida's teaching most explicitly broke with kinesiological convention.
"Yeah, but the letting go is in a direction this way, perpendicular to you. In other words, if it is compressed, there is a lot of pressure out lateral. When it lets go, there is a longitudinal release. I agree. Which does have an energy or force component to it. Alright, I'm not arguing that. But what I am arguing is that this concept that every time you flex a muscle it shortens is not so in the case of psoas. As a matter of fact, it isn't so in any case. As those muscles get more and more sophisticated, more and more ordered, more and more related, more and more roughed, They lengthen, they don't shorten when they flex. Now this is something that you people are going to have to think about for many hours before it becomes realistic to me. Doctor. Up, there is one concept that just occurred to me and I have no, it's only a point I am wondering about, is that from the direction and sort of the way that the psoas curves, we always think of muscle fibers as going straight then there has to be some kind of curve in there and what may happen is that there may be a change in the curve in the relative positioning of the fibers whereby the muscle doesn't become, it may become narrower for instance but it may not become shorter. It may be, it's just typically something that's shifting. Right. Something happened to the liver. Right."
From the August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida revises the contraction concept:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes (72MYS111) — an extended discussion of whether the psoas can be called an extensor or flexor of the spine, with Ida concluding the question is misleading and that the psoas's zigzag geometry resists agonist-antagonist categorization in any simple form. 72MYS111 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1971-72 Mystery Tapes (71MYS41) — Ida's instruction to visualize into the fingertips what happens when a psoas is out of condition: it gets glued to the front of the lumbar spine, shortens, jams the vertebrae, and the practitioner's first move is to make the lumbar spine viable again so the physiological operation of the psoas — and through it the lower plexi — can shift. 71MYS41 ▸
The literature and what it gets wrong
Ida read the available literature on the iliopsoas — Arthur McFarland's book, the Zebra Symposium, the chiropractic accounts — and her assessment was characteristically mixed. The symposium she considered the best thing available; McFarland's book she warned the practitioners away from. The problem with the books, in her view, was not that they were wrong about the anatomy but that they treated the psoas as a thing to know rather than a structure to feel. A practitioner who learns the iliopsoas from books, she warned, knows the iliopsoas and not the body.
"Arthur McFarland. That's the guy you mentioned yesterday in the morning. He's just written a book on the iliopsoas and which I I have a Listen. Stay away from those books on have them in. Speaking of the iliopsoas muscle, when I was taking my audition class, I think the brains are in the pubococcius muscle and when in doubt say psoas. But Well, I really I really mean what I say. You get to know so damn much about that iliopsoas that you don't know anything about a body. Although he talks about reducing spinal curvatures by balancing the psoas."
From the IPR Vital tape, Ida's warning about the iliopsoas literature:
The Zebra Symposium contained one finding Ida did endorse: that the psoas, in a tipped pelvis, can exert force of more than a ton. The number itself she found memorable — twenty-three to twenty-five hundred pounds — because it gave the practitioners a sense of why an aberrated psoas matters so much. The muscle is not small. Its leverage is enormous. When it pulls in the wrong direction the structural consequences are correspondingly large.
"things, like one of the things for instance he shows, the kind of thing I'm interested in, is that if you, when you have the pelvis in a tipped alignment, that the forces acting through the psoas sometimes accumulate to more than a ton. And there's something on the order of 23 to 2,500 pounds of force exerted by the psoas. It's no little muscle. I mean it's a huge, mighty mover if you get it into an aberrated I don't remember that. I don't remember that being in that book. Was it I'm sure it must have been that book. There haven't been two books on this. Well there is and this guy's written two books, the other one was called Birth of a Health Therapy and that was the one that was in the reader's digest and it's much more All was right, okay. I still say there is relatively little available material on this side. See and his claim is that through these forces with time the lower doses is actually affected through continued spasm and stress. So of course it is. Pulling through psoas Certainly on the anterior it is, but you see what he has failed to say is that the psoas doesn't pull on that spine with back pressure under any circumstances because it's always acting with reference to other agonist antagonist combinations, one of which will be post verbal."
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, the force number from the literature:
Ida's larger point about the literature is that the recipe is the only body of knowledge that takes the agonist-antagonist relation as its operative principle. Other accounts of the psoas describe what the muscle does but offer no method for restoring its reciprocity. Her 1971-72 Mystery Tape passage on the fifth hour names this directly — the practitioner's job is to so organize the psoas that it can fall back and act with the rectus, and this is the gospel the practitioner has to teach to anyone informed enough to understand they have both muscles at all.
"Away here, feed 25 tons of as the psoas boils back. That's what's done as achieving emptiness, right? Achieving emptiness, that's right. It's achieving balance and this is a concept that they just plain don't have. So right here what we're talking about is the fact that in that fifth hour, your job, aside from director, in addition to directors, your job is so organizing the psoas that it is able to fall back and act with the rectus has a reciprocal if you don't like the word antagonist. Now, This is the gospel that you people have to teach to anybody that's informed enough to understand that he has a psoas and he has erectus. Before you can teach that gospel, you've got to know that gospel. This is what makes the fifth hour so important because that whole nerve situation depends on the ease of the psoas."
From the same Mystery Tape, Ida names the fifth-hour doctrine in summary form:
The iliacus, the rotators, and the floor of the pelvis
The psoas is not the only member of its family. The iliacus shares its lower tendon and lines the inside of the iliac bone; the two muscles are commonly named together as the iliopsoas, though Ida preferred to treat them sequentially in the work. Once the psoas is done, the iliacus is worked the same way — ideally on both sides with both hands, though her senior students Jim and others noted that the sensitivity and hand strength to do this took years to develop. The relationship between the two muscles is anatomical and functional: they share an attachment and they share a job.
"So you have to go in almost under the cusp of origin, it seems like, to really get that. Having done the psoas, you'll get the iliacus. The psoas is done both sides of the lungs with both hands of the lungs. I think the iliacus is also ideally done the same way."
From the 1975 Boulder class, the iliacus follows the psoas:
The deeper relationship is between the iliopsoas tendon and the fascia of the floor of the pelvis. In her August 1974 IPR lectures Ida walked the class through the fascial continuity inside the pelvis: the iliac fascia covers both iliacus and psoas, is continuous with the transversalis fascia above, with the quadratus fascia laterally, with the piriformis fascia posteriorly, and with the obturator fascia below — and through that fascia, with the floor of the pelvis itself. The iliopsoas, in this account, is not just a flexor of the hip but a participant in the fascial organization of the entire pelvic basin.
"I think it's what certainly in the general population we usually think of as the pelvis and we forget this deep part here which is the part we're of course most concerned in with because that's where the pelvic floor is. Starting up here then, we would have the whole internal lining of iliac bone aligned by the iliac fascia which is of course going over the iliacus and also covering the psoas. This is going to be continuous with the transversalis fascia of the transversus muscle up in the abdominal region. It will also, as I indicated in the brief talk last time, be continuous with that fascia of the quadratus lumborum. It will be continuous below and posterior with the fascia of the piriformis, which is coming from the sacrum. It will be continuous with the fascia of the iliacus, the obturator fascia. And then by the attachment of the combination of the tendon of the iliacus and the psoas, of the iliopsoas tendon be continuous with the fasciata. And also probably, yeah, would be from the side continuous with the fascia of the pectineus. So actually, we may never, Tom did to me the other day, but frequently in the first ten hours we don't get to the iliac fascia. We are making a definite change in it by the work on the crest which would be affecting probably more the transversalis fascia than that of the iliacus but again considering this as being continuous by the work that we do in the piriformis and by the work that we're doing down here on the psoas. Now, extending in front of this then is the inguinal ligament. In a sense then, not just in a sense, what happens is that this psoas tendon then is going underneath the inguinal ligament down to the lesser trochanter."
From the August 11, 1974 IPR lecture, the fascial continuity:
Ida's 1973 Big Sur teaching draws the same connection from a different angle. The obturator internus, the piriformis, and the psoas all participate in the fascial organization of the pelvic basin, and work on any one of them affects the others. The psoas is not isolable — its function depends on the rotators, on the obturator fascia, on the iliacus tendon. The recipe's progressive depth is, in part, the progressive integration of these structures.
"Now when you come right down to it, the psoas also comes. From The this operator internus comes from way in here out to here and the operator fascia which is almost a thickened fascia around the operator internus is actually the attachment of the iliotoxicis muscle. So you're affecting an awful lot of things when you start working these rotators and that's something you have to keep in mind when you're not just working on a muscle, you're working on an awful Go of back to your obturator fascia and say it again. The obturator internus, first of all you don't really have a hole here, you have fascia that covers up this entire foramen. The obturator internus originates all in here, comes out through this greater eschatic notch that attaches to help rotate the femur. But it's covered on the outside by a thickening of fascia called the operator fascia and that's that operator fascia that the iliopoxygus muscle is attached to. So you can actually affect tone of the pelvic floor by just working on that one particular fascial reflex. That fascia extends all the way up from above by the transversal fascia that comes all the way down. Actually join right there. Well, now, do you remember yesterday how much emphasis I put get into."
From Big Sur 1973, the rotators and the psoas share fascial territory:
The psoas and the rhomboids — a single line of control
One of the most distinctive teachings in Ida's late lectures is the pairing of the psoas with the rhomboids as a single line of vertical control. The two muscle groups sit on opposite sides of the spine — psoas anterior, rhomboids posterior — and Ida considered their balanced relationship the structural mechanism by which the body achieves verticality. In her August 1974 IPR lecture she walked a senior class through this pairing, presenting it as the place the recipe finally arrives at after working through outside-of-body relationships in earlier hours.
"I'm bringing out and you see the thing that's unique about this is that one of those groups is on one side of the spine, the rhomboids are on the back of the spine and the psoas is in the front of the spine. This is a unique junction, no other junction is like this. Both also relate to girdles. Yeah, it relates to girdles but after all of a sudden you can't have your girdles just flapping around in the grooves. I also feel that when those two points come into proper relationship Hold on a minute, when those two areas, areas come to improper relationship, you also feel, you don't feel that one is on the back and one is on the front, you feel like No, we are on top of each it's all part of the spinal structure. Right, it doesn't really feel inside and outside of itself. That's right. On top. That's right. But you see I was trying to say, you can get a hold of the rhomboids on the outside and draw them down. But you can also get a hold of the psoas on the inside by using it as that hinge that we've been working with for the last long time. So that both of these are under conscious control. Now some of you are either have or are going to be going after false gods and running down to see what they do with this biofeedback thing. And they'll tell you, they will not know that this is part of that mechanism and you can get a hold of it consciously, providing you've had wealthy. You see, they wander all over the map trying to get this chain in conscious control, but there it is. Now look again at this and realize how strange this is that that whole rhomboid section, but particularly the lowest part of it, can be drawn down to balance against the psoas and thereby you get a vertical line. You see, you've gone the whole trip round. You've started in your first hour on the outside of the body and in your second hour you've gone through the ankles and you're dealing with outside muscles, always outside muscles."
From the August 5, 1974 IPR lecture, the psoas-rhomboid pair:
The August 1974 lectures are also the place Ida most explicitly takes up the psoas as an organ of breath and central nervous innervation. A student raised the question of whether the muscle is centrally or autonomically innervated; Ida's answer was that whatever autonomic strands it has, it must be centrally innervated because it is too involved in walking to be otherwise. Voluntary control of the psoas is part of what Structural Integration is for.
"And it seems that possibly what we are doing is putting a balance between those tiny little muscles between the vertebra and the larger ones like the psoas and the rhomboids. Does that make sense? It makes sense in a certain sense but you've got to realize that when you're bringing out these ideas, you have to not merely look at this thing as a balance between muscles, but as a balance between nervous systems. Because those tiny little muscles that you're talking about are autonomic, autonomically innovated. Now I don't know what the innovation of the psoas is, but I certainly know what the innovation of the rectus is. And I think that psoas is also centrally innovated, and that whereas it may have some autonomic strands, that it's got to be centrally innovated because it is too much involved in the act of walking. You have got to get central innovation and voluntary control of anything that does as much as said. I'm still struggling trying to explain the experience in terms of that feeling of strength in the extension."
From the August 5, 1974 IPR lecture, on innervation:
The psoas and the quadratus — the third-hour neighborhood
The 1975 Boulder advanced class spent considerable time on the relationship between the psoas and its neighbor, the quadratus lumborum. The quadratus spans from the iliac crest to the twelfth rib and lies in the same neighborhood as the psoas — Ida called it the meat in the sandwich, with the erectors behind and the psoas in front. The practitioner working the quadratus is in the psoas's neighborhood without being on the psoas yet, and a student asked Ida whether the work on the quadratus reaches the psoas. Her answer was no, not at this stage — but the question was the right one.
"And you can take it to your doctor and see what lucky you have. 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. Yeah, but when you lean on that iliac crest, whole body goes like that because of what's above and below it."
From the 1975 Boulder Hour 9, the quadratus-psoas neighborhood:
By the fifth hour the shortness Ida saw in the bodies that came to her was already showing in the deep front of the abdomen — between the pubes and the sternum, in the rectus and behind it in the psoas and iliacus. The fifth-hour transcript from Boulder 1975 names this directly. The work has earned its way to the deep core, and the shortness there is the next thing to address.
"Okay, the person When the person comes in for the fifth hour, if I'm ready to move on to that, Now the shortness really deep in their body is beginning to show and it's in the core and the place that it shows up the most spectacularly when they come in for the fifth hour is between the pubes and the sternum, I'd say, and the mid chest. There's usually a good deal of shortness in the very front part of the body which of course is deep, is not only shortness in the rectus but also deep down shortness in the psoas and the locus. So the fifth hour works on these areas."
From the 1975 Boulder fifth-hour discussion, the deep core shortness:
Coda: the psoas as the recipe's spine
Across the transcripts surveyed here — Big Sur 1973, the IPR lectures of 1974, the 1975 Boulder advanced class, the public tapes from the early 1970s, the Mystery Tapes — Ida returned to one structural conclusion more often than to any other: the psoas is the muscle the recipe exists to restore. The first hour invites it back into the abdominal picture. The third hour prepares the diaphragm and the sides that will let the practitioner reach it. The fourth hour establishes the adductor length and pelvic-floor organization that will let it fall back. The fifth hour is the hour the muscle itself becomes the practitioner's territory. The sixth hour works the rotators that share its fascial neighborhood. The later hours integrate the function the earlier hours have made possible. The recipe, in this view, is not a sequence of independent tasks; it is a single project distributed across ten sessions, and the psoas is its spine.
"And you can see how the next thing to do is to go down to the slightly deep deeper level, and all those adductors are really a little more central. So then you come on further, and you go into that next level, you have started to free the psoas. To free the psoas, not to place the psoas. That original pelvic lift you see was placing the psoas as best you might at that level. And always pelvic lifts are placing the psoas as best you may at the level that they that you are at the moment. But now you go into the deeper level, is freeing the pelvis itself, the bony structure itself, to shift enough to give you a different relationship now between with respect to the psoas. And your different relationship depends to a large extent on the floor of the pelvis and how well organized it is. And in turn, the floor of the pelvis and the way in which it becomes organized is a function of the adductors. And everything depends on everything else. And so you begin to be freeing that very key muscle of psoas, and enough of you have been looking around and enough people under enough circumstances and at enough times to have seen the ways in which this thing varies, the ways in which half the people that you know, I suspect, have deficient function of the psoas and therefore structure of the psoas. They are not able to reach that psoas. They are not able to control that psoas. And if they can't if they don't have the appropriate balancing function of the psoas, the psoas diaphragm thing is going to be off."
From the RolfB6 public tape, the freeing of the psoas as the recipe's central work:
The teaching is not without its loose ends. Ida revised her own positions on whether the psoas is a flexor or an extensor, on its innervation, on how literally to take the agonist-antagonist framing with the rectus. She acknowledged the literature she found valuable and dismissed the literature she found misleading. She trusted what her hands had taught her over what books said. The doctrine that emerges across the late transcripts is not tidy, and Ida did not pretend it was. What is consistent is the structural priority: of all the muscles in the body, the one whose restoration matters most is the one that connects the spine to the leg, mediates the diaphragm, lies on the lumbar plexus, and walks the body when it is doing its job.
"It's not those half dozen muscles which we named the other day as being the pelvic floor. Not at all. It's the sacroiliac articulation. It's the articulation between the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. It's the articulation between the fourth lumbar and the fifth lumbar. See what I'm telling you? Just as soon as you shift any of those lumbars back on any of those lumbars, you're going to get a different relationship in that pelvic floor. Just as soon as you take on the type of athletic training which shortens and tightens the hamstrings to the exclusion of the antagonists of the hamstrings, you're going to interfere with that pelvic floor. Just assume as you do any of these habitual postures that spread the knees wide, thereby shortening the brassless and altering the hamstring relationship in there, you're going in feel that pelvic floor. So if there is a vast terror incognito in there for each and every individual about how he developed these various physical attitudes and therefore mental attitudes. And what we are doing here, of course, is to take the outermost layer of those attitudes and sort of organize them and relate them to a place where the attitudes themselves are less constricting, are less compelling than they otherwise have been. And where as a result of the lesser compulsion that is in the muscle, you can get a lesser compulsion in the mind in terms of certain attitudes. And you can begin to look around and see some other things."
From the RolfB4 public tape, the integrative view at the close of the fourth hour:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1975 Boulder advanced class (T6SA) — Ida tells a student observing one psoas as shorter than the other that the practitioner is beginning to develop the trained eye that reads the muscle's asymmetry from across the room. T6SA ▸