The hour where depth first enters the work
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, with senior practitioners ringed around her, Ida pressed a student named Jan to name what made the third hour structurally different from the two before it. Jan offered the lateral line, the side body, the establishment of midlines — all of which Ida accepted as partly true but kept pressing. The first hour had unwrapped the superficial fascia of the chest. The second hour had lengthened the back and brought formation to the legs. Both hours, in her vocabulary, were still working the periphery — the outer envelope of the body. The third hour is where the practitioner first goes beneath that envelope. It is the first hour where depth, not coverage, becomes the operative principle. The teaching beat she wanted from Jan was that the third hour is the moment the practitioner stops peeling the onion and starts cutting into it.
"In the third hour, you begin to get deep to that superficial fascia. And I think if you really want to understand the third hour, this you must understand that you're peeling around and around, and now you're beginning to get down to the level where the peeling is going to do something drasti"
Boulder, 1975, after Jan has gestured at the third hour as a 'completion of the first step':
The image of peeling matters. Ida used it across many classes: the body as an onion, the practitioner working layer by layer from outside in. The first two hours peel the outermost layers — superficial fascia of the chest, superficial fascia of the back, the lumbar fascia across the trunk. None of these reach the quadratus. The quadratus sits deeper, against the inside wall of the abdomen, attaching from the iliac crest up to the twelfth rib. Until those outer layers have been softened and freed, the quadratus is simply not available to be reached. The third hour is therefore not arbitrary in its position in the sequence: it is the first hour at which the quadratus has become accessible at all. The earlier hours have made the third hour possible.
"In the third hour you're doing just some more of this. Right. There's also the connection which I had just, as you were talking I was making the connection of the lumbar fascia that had been affected in the second hour and when you go back and you add to that, you have more to it in the third hour of my working done through crest of the ilium and the quadratus beginning to penetrate to a deeper level because now you're down as deep as the quadratus, which you haven't been able to get near at an earlier stage."
From the 1976 advanced class, walking through the continuity of hours two and three:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Boulder 1975 (T1SB) — an extended discussion in which a student frames the first hour as 'the beginning of the tenth hour' and the third hour as 'the second half of the second and first hour,' a continuation rather than a new beginning. T1SB ▸
The quadratus as the key
If the third hour has one operative structure, in Ida's teaching it is the quadratus lumborum. She returns to this muscle again and again across the advanced classes. The quadratus spans from the iliac crest to the twelfth rib and the transverse processes of the upper four lumbar vertebrae. Its position determines whether the rib cage can lift off the pelvis or stays jammed down upon it. Most people, Ida observed, walk into a first hour with the thorax too close to the pelvis — the side body collapsed, the waist indented, the lower ribs riding low into the iliac crest. The earlier hours had begun to address this from above and from below, but the structure actually responsible for the collapse, the quadratus, could not be reached. The third hour is the practitioner's first encounter with it.
"What else did the second hour do? What But there is a something else that you need to look at. In the third hour you are starting to go deeper. One of the things you need to look at in of rolfing technique is that you start with the periphery of the body and work in. Did you ever hear that, you thought? And when did you hear that you got a little deeper? Yeah. When you're affecting the quadratus, you're affecting all those structures on the inside the diaphragm and the psoas and Oh, the okay. When you begin to get to the quadratus, which you are doing in that third hour, that is essentially what you are doing in that third hour is allowing the quadratus to take its place within the structure. And when that happens, the structure is now able to come to a different relationship within itself. Because you are beginning, this is the first step toward getting the inside out. Where does what is the origin of the quadratus and what is its insertion? It's the iliac crest, inserting to the quadrhythm. The bottom part of the And the transverse process of the first four lumbar. What's that? The transverse processes of the first four lumbar. No."
In her 1976 advanced class, Ida walks the group toward the doctrine through Socratic questioning:
What does it mean to say the quadratus 'takes its place'? In her vocabulary, a muscle takes its place when it stops doing work that doesn't belong to it and starts doing the work it was designed for. A quadratus that hangs onto the twelfth rib — pulling it down, holding it in against the lumbars — is not supporting anything. A quadratus that sits where it belongs supports the twelfth rib from below, frees it to elevate, and lets the trunk lengthen. The shift is from the muscle as a downward drag to the muscle as a supporting span. The work the practitioner does in the third hour, in her teaching, is precisely this re-positioning of the muscle from drag to span.
this will be the first hour where we do any deep work when we start to work with the attachment of quadrats and bone to the pelvis and the twelfth rib. only to lengthen the sides, but it's then it's now short relatively since we've lengthened the front and back in one and two. But because we, again, wanna do everything we can for the future to free up the pelvis. the quad quadratus seems to be one of the keys, I haven't got this real clear in my head yet, but it's one of the keys of really getting the pelvis into a position where we can work with it and place it in a functional position. Well, wait a minute. That word relatedness that you liked before, it also comes in here. Only here your relatedness gets to be between one segment of the body, the trunk, the thorax, and the other segment of the body, the pelvis. And this whole quadratus has to do with establishing that relatedness through establishing the appropriate span of the tissues. add anything to your idea? Yeah. Clarify it. It. Mhmm. Alright. Alright. And almost"
From the RolfA3 public tape, working out the third hour's logic in front of trainees:
Notice the moment of self-correction in that passage — 'I haven't got this real clear in my head yet.' This kind of admission is characteristic of the advanced-class transcripts. Ida did not present her own teaching as finished. She presented it as a working understanding still being refined. The quadratus doctrine, in particular, was something she was still articulating across the mid-1970s; the language she used in 1973 at Big Sur is not identical to the language she used in 1976 at Boulder. The article preserves this. What stays constant is the structural claim: the quadratus is the muscle that determines whether the rib cage lifts off the pelvis. What varies is the framing — sometimes she calls it lengthening the sides, sometimes establishing the relatedness of the two girdles, sometimes preparing for the fourth hour's entry into the pelvis.
"Because the quadratus is the key to that whole business of whether you can get the shoulder girdle up and the pelvic girdle down. And it is the key through the mechanism of the twelfth rib, plus the eleventh rib, plus the tenth rib, because the eleventh and tenth aren't going to be where they belong if the twelfth You isn't where it see, it establishes the kind of spanning which gives you the length you need."
From the RolfA2 public tape, the strongest single statement of the quadratus-twelfth-rib mechanism:
The twelfth rib as anchored base
In Ida's anatomy, the twelfth rib is not just the lowest rib. It is the foundation rib — the one on which the entire upper rib cage is built. Unlike the upper ten, which articulate both with the spine in back and with the sternum (directly or through cartilage) in front, the eleventh and twelfth are floating; they have no anterior attachment. The twelfth is held in place by the connective tissue of the deep posterior abdominal wall, by the quadratus, and by the diaphragm's posterior attachments. This makes it, in her phrase, anchored — but anchored to soft tissue, not to bone. If the soft tissue is shortened, the rib is pulled down and in. If the soft tissue is lengthened and balanced, the rib floats up into a position from which it can support the ribs above it.
By the time you begin to get the quadratus where it belongs, you begin to release the twelfth rib if the twelfth rib has in danger at some point. And it very often is because, as I've said before in this class, the twelfth rib fibula are about the most vulnerable structures that is inside the skin."
From the 1976 advanced class, naming the twelfth rib's vulnerability:
The pairing with the fibula is worth noting. The fibula, like the twelfth rib, is a small bone in a region dominated by a larger neighbor — the tibia in the leg, the lumbar spine in the back. Both, in Ida's view, are easy to overlook anatomically but structurally decisive. The fibula governs the integrity of the lateral line of the leg; the twelfth rib governs the integrity of the lateral line of the trunk. Both can be 'in danger' — her word — when the surrounding soft tissue collapses around them. The third hour's deep work along the iliac crest and into the quadratus is, among other things, an effort to restore the twelfth rib to a position from which it can function as an anchored base.
Because the position of that twelfth rib anchored there in that connective tissue sturdy base on which the upper ribs And you see as you look at this rib cage, you begin to need to understand that sturdiness is not necessarily Sturdiness can be and is just as much as it is
Continuing in the 1976 class, she names what the twelfth rib does when it is where it belongs:
The phrase 'sturdiness is not necessarily solidity' is one of her recurring formulations across the advanced classes. It is the connective-tissue alternative to the orthopedic image of a skeleton stacking up bone on bone. In her account, no rib actually rests on the rib below it; each rib hangs in soft tissue, related to the others through the connective-tissue web. When that web is balanced, the rib cage behaves as a single sturdy unit — even though no part of it is solid. When the web is shortened or tangled, individual ribs collapse into the cracks. The third hour's work on the twelfth rib is, in this view, restorative not of the rib itself but of the connective-tissue relations that hold the rib in its proper anchored position.
"the crest of the ileum and the twelfth rib, you get it stand out by your very effortful work there. What else happens? The the thing that I'm thinking about is it begins to do its function of supporting the twelfth grip instead of hanging on to it. Something else very important comes in there. Fritz, you wanna help me on? I think I'm still caught in this twelfth rib too or freeze the twelfth rib so that which is so important in the abdominal function and in the allowing the trunk to lengthen. How does the trunk lengthen? How does the trunk lengthen? What is the mechanism? Organizing the quadratus, the twelfth rib becomes more elevated. Elevated. And then? Well, let's do this together. The trunk lengthens by straightening the spine. Yes. So the You see, stretch the soft tissue and then the the hard tissue, the tent pole can go into place. Oh, okay. And if it's gone Now if the tent pole is in place, place, then you begin to get an entirely different functioning in your autonomic nervous system which is dependent on the tent pole, as well as your central nervous system."
From the RolfA3 public tape, the conversation goes from the twelfth rib to the autonomic nervous system:
The two girdles and the spanning between them
Across the advanced classes, Ida often spoke of the body in terms of two girdles — the shoulder girdle above and the pelvic girdle below — and the trunk that spans between them. The aim of the recipe, in this framing, is to get the shoulder girdle up and the pelvic girdle down so that gravity passes cleanly through the body's vertical axis. But you cannot move the girdles in opposite directions unless the spanning tissue between them is long enough to allow it. If the quadratus is short, the twelfth rib is pulled down toward the iliac crest, the lateral line collapses, and the two girdles are stuck close together. The third hour, then, is the hour in which the spanning tissue is first restored to a length at which the girdles can move apart.
"The direct the direct path into the core from the third hour. Because we wanna go into the pelvis. We're going into the pelvis, which is part of the core. Yeah. But how did we get into what was the particular key that we used to open the pelvis? In the process of lengthening the sides in the third hour of the thorax, we also freed up the twelfth rib and the quadratus lumboid. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. Because, you see, be very clear in your mind that at that point, you're beginning to get deep as you haven't before at all. At that point, you're beginning to get to a deeper level. Up until this point you've been dealing with levels like the lumbar fascia, for instance, if you went down the back and lengthened the lumbar fascia. But you never got as deep as the quadratus before."
From the RolfA2 public tape, looking back from the start of the fourth hour to ask how the third hour got us there:
The image of the two girdles tracks through to later hours. The fourth hour will enter the pelvis from inside the legs. The fifth hour will continue up through the psoas into the lumbar plexus and the diaphragm. The sixth will balance the sacrum. The seventh will bring the head onto the vertical line. All of these later moves depend on the spanning achieved in the third hour. Without the lengthened lateral line, the shoulder girdle cannot rise; without the freed twelfth rib, the diaphragm has no settled base from which to work; without the quadratus taking its place, the pelvis cannot horizontalize. The third hour, in this view, is the structural pre-condition for everything the recipe will do from the fourth hour onward.
"I'm not coming up with a key. You're not coming up with the key. You are talking about freeing the girdles. And lengthening. How can you free the what is it that's holding the girdles? What is it that is failing to support the appropriate length of the girdles? Again, I mean, twelfth grade comes to mind, the tent pole action, but I hope this is what you're after. Go ahead. And Doesn't hurt any of these people to be scratching around in their heads for the answer either. And bring the deep tissues at their anchorages to lengthen Like what? Quadratus lumborum? Yes. The quadratus lumborum particularly. Because"
From the RolfA2 public tape, pressing a student to name the key the third hour delivers to the fourth:
The student's hesitation is instructive. Even senior practitioners, after years in the work, did not always arrive at the quadratus on the first pass. They thought of the girdles, the lateral line, the tent pole, the freeing of the pelvis — all plausible answers, all partially right. But the structural cause of the collapse was the muscle they kept circling around. This is one of the reasons Ida's transcripts read as Socratic dialogues rather than lectures. The doctrine was not obvious. It had to be arrived at by sustained attention, by pressing students past their first three or four answers until they reached the muscle that actually held the relation.
"It's 02/08/1975. The advanced golfing class with doctor Ryder Rolfe in Santa Monica, California. Who wants to start the discussion off by talking briefly about the first hours and working their way from number six? I will. Great. Well, in the first hour, what we wanna do is to free the pelvis from above and below. Mhmm. So we start and and start bringing the ribs and and lifting the thorax. And then we go and You had to say there were three main structures up there that you'd wanna work on. What are they? The shoulders. Well, three muscular myofascial structures. The pectoralis. The One or both? Both. The lentissimus. Mhmm. Oh, in the in the first hour or about First hour. And then. Then. You were right. You know, we're at the tenths in the first hour. Two pectoralsis and locusis. Balls included on two pectoralsis. And okay. So then you go on down to the And then you go down to the of the elen and start cleaning that and bring that against the ribbon there. And then you want to lengthen the hamstrings. And give a pelvic lift, do some work over that and lengthen the back a little bit. Suppose rather than describe the move, like give a pelvic lift, lengthen the hamstrings, that you abstract it to what you are doing to the body in space by virtue of what you're doing with your Well, lengthening the lumbar."
From the Boulder 1975 advanced class, building the third hour up from the first two:
Continuity and revision: how the hours connect
Ida revised her own framing of the hours over the course of the 1970s. In one Boulder 1975 conversation she stated bluntly that the first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour, the second hour is a follow-up of the first, and the third hour is the second half of the second and first — meaning that the ten-session series is not a sequence of discrete events but a single continuous process broken into ten sessions only because the body cannot absorb so much work at once. Read this way, the third hour does not introduce something new; it simply reaches a depth at which the earlier work can finally take. The quadratus was already implicit in what the first hour did to the chest; the twelfth rib was already implicit in what the second hour did to the back. The third hour is when the practitioner's hands finally arrive at the structures the earlier work had been preparing.
"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 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 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. Right. put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration."
From the Boulder 1975 advanced class, a student articulates the continuity doctrine:
This continuity framing matters when reading the third hour in particular. If the third hour is the second half of the first and second, then the quadratus is not a new target; it is the deeper layer of what was being approached all along. The first hour worked the superficial fascia of the chest. The second hour worked the back and the legs. Both were already aiming at the same outcome — a freed pelvis, an elevated rib cage, length in the trunk. The third hour does not change the aim; it changes the layer at which the aim is pursued. From the third hour forward, every subsequent hour goes deeper still.
"And in all these earlier hours, what you are seeing is the need for a generalized And in the third hour, you're still working with that length. And you're still working with the lengthening of the side, and now you are beginning to go in to get the rigid holdings, you see, at a deeper level So here at the end of the second hour, you again you have a milestone that says, yes. This guy has had his second hour. And on that milestone, it talks about the feet. It talks about the extent to which the ankles have been horizontal. It talks about the extent to which the external malleolus is no longer dragging in the dust. It talks about where are the knees. Do you remember all of you? The look of Malcolm as he came in here with respect to his legs and his knees. What a perfectly ghastly walk. He wondered how he could support the his his trunk on those cockeyed legs, but god knows the world is full of them. And by the end of the second hour, those legs were talking to you and saying to you, well, we are seeing a light. And you were getting some movement in the back, and you weren't getting any movement in his chest
From the RolfB6 public tape, looking back over hours one and two as preparation for the third:
See also: See also: Mystery Tapes from 1971-72 (72MYS171) — an early advanced-class discussion in which Ida reviews how the sixth hour builds on the lumbar lengthening that began in the third, and explains the secondary curves of the cervical and the lumbosacral region. 72MYS171 ▸
The third hour and the dorsal hinge
Beyond the quadratus and the twelfth rib, the third hour in Ida's later framing also addressed the lumbodorsal junction — the hinge between the upper back and the lumbar spine, the area where so many people collapse into a sharp indentation at the waist. The same connective-tissue work that frees the quadratus also begins to free this hinge. With the quadratus shortened, the lumbars are pulled anteriorly into the body and the dorsal-lumbar junction kinks forward. Lengthen the quadratus and the lumbars settle back; the hinge opens. This was a doctrine she returned to with increasing emphasis in her 1975 and 1976 advanced classes, and several practitioners noted that she was placing more and more weight on the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge as her teaching matured.
"You should hang on there for what else happened? Well, the ribs also come laterally and rise. When I got off the table at the end of the third hour, I had that really solid feeling of organization. Say, by the way, where are all the people who were good enough to come in yesterday to be models for us? And I had to send them home because we had to full schedule, and I hope they come back today. Are they here? I think a couple of them would be coming at 10:00, though. Asked them to come at ten. When we get people like that, it's so much smarter to get them in before 10:00. Because I would have a lineup here. Alright. What else did we show up in the third hour? Well, I didn't notice it so much in my model, but what my head is telling me is that Careful with that. I know. Well, it's stuffed up, so maybe it won't be so bad. Okay. Okay. If we look at the quadratus being here and the spine behind it, in terms of verticals and the sternum in front of it, if you lengthen the quadratus and allow I'm trying to say that my hunch is that the lumbars aren't pulled quite so anterior in the insulating. That is true. That is very true. And that's not the answer. It's not the answer. It's not a wrong answer. Okay."
From the 1976 advanced class, the morning after the third hour was discussed:
The image of the indented waist is one she returned to often. A man with a sudden inward indentation at his waist, she said, is showing you a quadratus that has lost its span. The tissue from the lower ribs to the iliac crest has shortened; the connective tissue is no longer making for the appropriate spanning. The third hour's work along the iliac crest is, in this view, an attempt to restore the spanning that the indentation is advertising as lost. Restore the spanning and the indentation softens; the side of the trunk lengthens; the lumbar curve eases.
"So lengthen the lateral line. The other thing we wanna do in the third hour the the other important point in the third hour, as I said, is the three and we breathe. We work on the lumbodorsal and then we What are you likely to get the most helpful, the lumbodorsal fascia? Crest. Right. And this doesn't do one darn thing for you. You have got to be on the iliac crest as that diagram in the paper which I showed you the other day tells you. Why do we bother to to do that? Go after the twelfth list anyway? Why do we bother to to do Comes the light. And the light comes like in things for me like, I look at a man, that somewhere around his waist there is a sudden indentation. That when a man starts here and then, or a woman, and It's only by making for this spanning, like we make for the spanning of the rectus abdominis"
From the Mystery Tapes of 1971-72, an early statement of the spanning doctrine:
Teaching the third hour: Ida's Socratic method
One striking thing about the third hour material in the transcripts is how often Ida taught it through questions rather than statements. She would ask a student what the third hour did. The student would answer with the lateral line, or the side body, or the establishment of midlines, or freeing the girdles. Ida would say something like 'that is true, but it is not what I am looking for.' She would press until someone named the quadratus, the twelfth rib, the spanning, the depth. The teaching was deliberately incremental: she wanted the practitioners to arrive at the doctrine through their own observation rather than receive it as a fixed formula. In this sense the doctrine of the third hour was, in her classes, less a teaching transmitted than a teaching elicited.
"You have done the third hour and the first hour? What have been seeing in third hour bodies is that somehow where the holding is through the thorax. Somehow you're working with thorax. Well, it's one way of expressing it, Carol. It's one way of expressing it. At this particular moment, I'd like emphasis on another aspect of this. Can somebody give it to me? It seems necessary to relate those two big girdles more directly so they feel a quality of actual interaction with each other and it seems we've allowed that to happen in the first hour by changing that whole shift from the energy of the structure from coming up and back and down in front and you've started to turn that around so it comes up and front and down and back which in turn allows us to pick that energy up at the feet and kind of, you know, send it up through, but there's something between the two big actions of the pelvis and the shoulders which needs contact. Okay, that's another way of looking at it. I've been seeing it as a phenomenon of weight in a way that we're looking for three sessions at a body that's tending to distribute the weight toward the outside. And we're looking a good to create a base so that you can narrow that. So what did you do in the first and third hour that furthered this goal? I think what I see it as when you get those two girdles, they're weight bearing functions relating to each other, you're tending to be able to see the weight going more through the middle of the body. That we haven't been able to see anymore, does it go? It goes okay. Well, that's all I was going to say is"
From the 1976 advanced class, Ida pressing the class on what the third hour adds:
The same Socratic style appears in the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, where she pressed a student named Peter who had done a third hour with both hands on one side of the lateral line. She told him that he had effectively done an eighth hour in third-hour position, and that this was structurally wrong — there is only one time you can do the third hour, and that is after the second hour and before the fourth. The constraint matters. The third hour is not a generic intervention along the lateral line; it is a specific intervention at a specific moment in the sequence, after the first two hours have prepared the field and before the fourth hour enters the pelvis from inside the legs.
in earnest, started picking on Peter because he was doing a third hour with his two hands on one side of the lateral line. And I said, tomorrow, we will discuss the third hour and what I mean when I say. But if you do the eighth hour on the third hour, you cannot do the third hour on the eighth hour. But there's only one time you can do the third hour, and that's after the second hour and before the fourth hour. And what am I talking about? What do you do in the third hour? you wanna talk to that question. I mean, I know that it's a reality. Right. And I want to convey to you people who are going to be processors that you are dealing with the reality there. But I can't send you to the book and say, look. And this is what I'm trying to Yeah. Get out in the open between you and me here. Yeah.
From the Mystery Tapes 1971-72, Ida correcting a student named Peter:
From the third hour into the fourth
The third hour's deep work at the quadratus and the twelfth rib is, in Ida's framing, the practitioner's first entry into the pelvis as a structural unit — even though the hands have not yet touched the floor of the pelvis or the inside of the legs. By freeing the quadratus, the pelvis becomes free at its lateral attachment to the lower trunk. By freeing the twelfth rib, the diaphragm gains a stable posterior base. Both of these moves prepare the fourth hour, in which the practitioner will enter the pelvis from inside the legs, addressing the adductor compartment and the pelvic floor. Without the third hour's lateral freeing, the fourth hour has nowhere to land; the pelvis is still pinned laterally to the lower ribs.
"But you never got as deep as the quadratus before. So now in order to get to the cause situation in the pelvis, you go into the in as far as the depth of the quadratus, and that's the third hour you see. Then there's another element in that third hour that you need to be quite sure of in order to have things prepared for your fourth hour. What is that? I haven't put an awful lot of stress on it, but it's right in there. Therefore, I'm stressing it now. So I remember seeing something yesterday, and I thought, oh, yeah. That's getting ready to push. Yesterday. More nibbling on the anterior superior spine? Right. Exactly right. And you see, you have to do this"
From the RolfA2 public tape, naming the depth-shift that distinguishes the third hour from the second:
There is a second element in the third hour that prepares the fourth: the work along the anterior iliac spine, where a number of muscles hook into the pelvis and need to be loosened before the fourth hour can enter from inside the legs. The third hour, in this framing, is preparing two adjacent regions at once — the lateral wall of the trunk through the quadratus, and the anterior pelvis through the iliac spine. Both freings are needed before the fourth hour can land. The third hour is, in this sense, a two-handed preparation for a major entry.
"The anterior anterior iliac spine, are a number of number of muscles which hook into this particular area and as a preparatory procedure for getting into the pelvis in the lab in the next hour, it's a matter of freeing up these structures or beginning free up, I should say, along the anterior spine. Now actually, you have answered my question which said take the second half of the third hour. But there's one point in there which I which is a key to the third hour, which you haven't brought in. And, my question didn't ask for it, because I want to be sure that you understand it as a key to the third hour. I don't know if you want a chair that isn't walking around. I don't know if the kitchen's right here. I can't be chatting. Right. When I think of the third hour, I am trying to think of the keys that you might be asking for. I'm thinking of the the girdles in terms of the That's right. The 12 rib. Alright. Okay. Go on. Right in there. Go on. And in terms of freeing up the pelvis Okay. In Yeah. Doing two abstract and abstraction. Yeah. I'm not coming up with a key. You're not coming up with the key. You are talking about freeing the girdles. And lengthening."
From the RolfA2 public tape, opening a discussion of what the third hour prepares for the fourth:
What the third hour is not
Just as important as what Ida said the third hour was is what she said it was not. It was not an eighth hour. It was not a generic lateral-line move. It was not a place for the practitioner to fall in love with one side of the body and forget the other. It was not the moment to start addressing the head or the neck or the diaphragm directly — those would come later. In her teaching, the third hour had a specific structural target — quadratus, twelfth rib, lumbar spine, anterior iliac spine — and the discipline of the practitioner was to stay on that target. Wander too high and you are doing an eighth hour. Wander too deep and you are doing a fifth. The third hour, in her insistence, is the third hour and nothing else.
"But again, said the fascia under the exterior is like the fascia and the peroplano of the leg, the reala The pectoralis and the leptisomy go from the trunk to the arm. The pectoralis is pushed pushed onto the chest. That's the arm. Again, motion, breathing. Okay. So the tisternut, maybe not quite as clearly, but still, scheduler. Something's gotta pull that scheduler back before you begin to really get that balance, getting something back. Yeah. Okay. That's Okay. Okay. So lengthen the lateral line. The other thing we wanna do in the third hour the the other important point in the third hour, as I said, is the three and we breathe. We work on the lumbodorsal fascia. And and then we What are you likely to get the most helpful, the lumbodorsal fascia? Crest. Right. And this doesn't do one darn thing for you. You have got to be on the iliac crest as that diagram in the paper which I showed you the other day tells you."
From the Mystery Tapes 1971-72, naming what the third hour does at the lumbodorsal fascia:
The discipline of staying on target was something she taught directly. The image of digging into the iliac crest cleanly — flesh organized along its full depth — recurs across the transcripts. A practitioner who skims the surface of the crest, she said, has not done the third hour. A practitioner who reaches the full depth of the crest and the quadratus that attaches there has. The depth is what makes the hour the hour. It is also what makes it tiring, painful at times, and rewarding when done well. The third hour, in her teaching, was the first hour in which the practitioner felt, in their own hands, the sensation of having reached a level the earlier hours had only circled around.
"And it is the first time that you've really gone deep into that body. You see, you've taken that body and like an onion, as I've said before, you have peeled it from the outside. Mhmm. But never have you peeled very deeply yet. But in the third hour, you begin to peel more deeply. And you emphasized the the depth you need to go to along the iliac crest That's right. Really free up the gumbo That's right. And look at your look at your skeleton there and realize that you've gotta get the whole depth of that crest clean. And by clean, I mean the flesh so organized that it can stretch as it is demanded. As you make the demand on it to stretch, it is able to stretch."
From the RolfA2 public tape, naming the depth as the body of the third hour's signature:
Coda: the third hour as the body's first deep word
Reading across the advanced-class transcripts from 1971 to 1976, the third hour emerges in Ida's teaching as the body's first deep word in the conversation between practitioner and recipient. The first two hours had been the practitioner's opening — questions about breath, length, the chest, the back, the legs. The third hour is the moment the body itself answers from beneath. Reach the quadratus and the twelfth rib lifts. Lift the twelfth rib and the upper rib cage finds its anchored base. Find the anchored base and the trunk can lengthen. Lengthen the trunk and the lumbar curve eases. Ease the lumbar curve and the autonomic chain can run. None of this is mystical; it is mechanical, in the connective-tissue sense of the word. But it begins, in her teaching, with reaching the quadratus — and the quadratus can only be reached in the third hour.
"And I think if you really want to understand the third hour, this you must understand that you're peeling around and around, and now you're beginning to get down to the level where the peeling is going to do something drastic to the structure and it lengthens the structure. practice when I'm working with people, when I get to the end of the third hour, I tell them, If you're gonna get off, get off here. after this, I want a commitment that I'm going to be able to And do 10 sessions on so three to me serves as a place, you know, okay, you've had the experience, you know by now whether it's your cup of tea and what I want is a contract that we're going all the way if you go past this place. It's really good. You've got to evaluate the person. You know whether they're receptive to the work, whether you can get rapport with them, So the third hour to me is a mile post. You brought them to a place where you can never touch them again and they've profited from what you've done And, you know, if you're going further, you're going deeper. Yes, but I think that if you want to understand idea behind this, you have to understand this deepening that the third hour is bringing in."
From the Boulder 1975 advanced class, Ida and a student arriving at why the third hour matters:
The article's claim, then, is straightforward. In Ida's teaching across half a decade of advanced classes, the third hour is the practitioner's first deep entry into the body, the quadratus is the structural target of that entry, and the twelfth rib is the consequence — the small floating rib that, once freed, becomes the anchored base on which the entire upper rib cage finds its position. The doctrine was not always cleanly stated. She revised it across years, pressed students into it Socratically, admitted at moments that she did not yet have it entirely clear in her own head. But the core of it stayed constant. Reach the quadratus, free the twelfth rib, and the body lengthens. That, in her advanced classes, is what the third hour does.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 advanced class on chest work and superficial-fascia reflexes (76ADV31) — context for understanding how the first hour's chest work establishes the conditions the third hour's quadratus work later exploits. 76ADV31 ▸
See also: See also: Santa Monica 1975 advanced class on the fifth hour (T7SA) — Ida defining the fifth hour as a continuation of the fourth and tracing how the lengthening achieved in the third hour through the quadratus and twelfth rib carries forward into the work on the floor of the pelvis. T7SA ▸
See also: See also: Boulder 1975 advanced class on the breathing pattern and the rib cage (T1SB) — Bob and others discussing how the first hour's release of the chest pins establishes the four-way breathing pattern that the third hour's twelfth-rib work then carries deeper. T1SB ▸