Gravity as the constant environmental force
In her 1974 Open Universe class — a public lecture format in which Ida sat with her senior practitioners and answered questions in front of a lay audience — a participant asked what was actually happening between the layers of fascia under a practitioner's hands. The answer, given by one of the senior practitioners present, was experiential: warming, melting, the dissolving of stuck places. But Ida used the question as a hinge to make a larger claim about why those stuck places exist in the first place. The body's stress patterns are not random and not, in her account, primarily psychological. They are the body's accumulated response to a single constant force that acts on it every second of its life. This framing was the bedrock of her teaching across every venue: before fascia, before the recipe, before the ten hours, there is gravity, and the body is always already in conversation with it.
"because gravity is the most constant environmental force for the human body. And so it's in response to gravity that the body avoids pain, you might say, or avoids the buildup of stress in an individual point by trying to distribute it."
Ida frames the development of stress patterns in the body as a response to the one environmental force the body cannot escape.
The corollary of this framing is that the body is not a static object that happens to be subject to gravity. It is a moving thing whose every functional design assumes motion. Ida pressed this point hard in her August 5, 1974 IPR lecture in front of the advanced class. A student had been speaking as though the question of Structural Integration were a question about standing — about how the segments stack when the body is at rest. Ida cut in. The body is not designed to stand around. Stillness, in her account, is not the absence of motion but a momentary balance of opposing tendencies to move. This distinction matters because it determines what the practitioner is actually trying to produce. The goal is not a body that holds a vertical pose; it is a body whose motion through the gravitational field is efficient.
"body, the human body pretty obviously is not designed to stand around, it's designed to move."
Pressed on whether the work was about standing posture, Ida refused the framing.
What follows from this is a peculiar definition of stillness. In the same lecture Ida extended the point: even when a body appears still, what the eye is seeing is balance, not absence of motion. The body has come to a place where the tendency to move in one direction is matched by the tendency to move in the other, and the practitioner reads that balance — the small square inches at the soles of the feet, the column rising through ankle and knee and hip — as the marker of a body that is now capable of receiving gravitational support rather than fighting it.
Walking as the unfinished developmental task
If gravity is the constant force and motion is the body's design, then walking is the meeting point. Ida taught that most adults have never finished learning to walk. They learned a pattern as toddlers — feet spread wide for stability, pelvis tipped forward to clear the belly, knees and torso moving as one undifferentiated mass — and then they stopped learning. The toddler's gait works for a toddler because the toddler's nervous system and proprioception are still maturing. But adults who continue to walk in this pattern are walking inside an inefficient body. In the Open Universe class she identified this as one of two compounding problems: the body accumulates stress from gravity, AND it has learned inefficient methods of movement. The two reinforce each other.
"The other part is that we learn inefficient methods of movement. Some people still walk like the toddler. That is that their legs are spread apart, their pelvis is anterior, and they have never matured or come to a further position. They're stuck there."
Ida names the most common gait pattern she encountered in adults as a developmental arrest.
The second half of the diagnosis was about HOW the muscles in such a body actually move. A toddler-pattern adult does not move with discrete, differentiated musculature. They move with the surface layer of the body — the extrinsic, sleeve-level muscles — all firing together as an undifferentiated unit. There is no countermovement between deep and superficial layers, no sequential engagement, just a forward lean of the whole sleeve. This is energetically expensive and structurally degrading: the deep muscles atrophy because they are never asked to do their work, and the surface muscles accumulate the strain of compensating for them.
"See, the average person moves primarily with Extrinsic muscles, surface muscles, or groups of muscles that are stuck together. We're gonna lean forward. There's little differentiation in the in the movement. And then as you watch as the rofting goes on, you see that the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob. And then you get movement which comes from deep in the body as well as on the surface."
Continuing the developmental account, Ida describes what undifferentiated movement actually looks like under the hands.
The pedagogical implication is significant. The work cannot simply tell the adult to walk differently. The toddler pattern is held in the fascial web; it is structural, not behavioral. Until the practitioner has changed the fascial relationships that lock the pelvis forward and the legs apart, instruction in better walking is wasted breath. This is one of Ida's recurring complaints against the postural-training schools of her era: they taught people to stand up straight without giving them the structural means to do so. The recipe, by contrast, changes the structure first; new movement patterns emerge as a consequence.
The vertical line and the line of weight
The geometric image Ida used most often to describe what the work was for was the vertical line. A body in balance is one whose ankles, knees, hip joints, lumbar vertebrae, shoulders, and ears stack along a line that points to the center of the earth — the line of gravity itself. This image was not original to her; it was, as she frequently acknowledged, the measuring stick used by every twentieth-century school of body mechanics, with the Harvard group at the front of the list. What was original was her claim that the body could actually be brought to that line, because the body was a plastic medium and the fascial relationships that held it off-line could be reorganized by added energy from the practitioner's hands.
"All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium."
Ida names her position relative to the older schools of body mechanics.
But the static stack was only the beginning. In her 1976 Boulder advanced class she walked the students through a live exercise — stand in place, find your center line, now shift your weight to the outer arch and feel what happens. The vertical line is destroyed the moment the weight leaves the inside of the foot. This was not abstract: she was making the students feel what she meant. The center line of the body, she taught, runs down the inside of the leg, not the outside; it connects through the medial arch to the ground; and it can be felt as a unification of the body or, in its absence, as a scattering.
"Your center line is destroyed as weight goes on to the outer arch. Now just turn your toes up and see how that begins to put the weight back again into the center line."
Mid-class, Ida has the students stand and shift their weight to feel the loss and restoration of the center line.
This is the moment in the 1976 class where Ida pushed back against a textbook formulation that some students had brought into the room — the standard recipe-lore claim that weight should pass through the three center toes. She did not deny it; she denied that the abstraction could substitute for the felt experience of where the line actually goes. The textbook claim is a high-order abstraction. The silent level — the body's own proprioception, felt under her instruction — is where the doctrine actually lives. This is characteristic of her late teaching: a refusal to let received formulas substitute for the practitioner's direct observation.
Body in tune with environment
In the same 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida and her senior practitioners worked through the problem of how to explain the work to a skeptical layperson. A student had been pressing her: imagine a prospective client who wants to know why he should pay $350 to be 'aligned with gravity.' What is the actual claim? The exchange that followed produced one of Ida's clearest brief formulations — not of the mechanics, but of the consequence. The claim was not merely structural; it was about the body's relationship to its environment as a whole.
"if the body is more in line with gravity, then our belief is that the person is more in tune with his environment."
Pressed on the broader meaning of vertical alignment, Ida names the claim simply.
In the same exchange Ida walked the student through a fuller explanation. Gravity, she explained, acts as a field with a constant force directed vertically toward the plane of the earth. A body that is vertical within that field receives support; a body that is randomized within it receives the same force as a destructive load. This is the missing link, she said, in the standard academic story: gravity does break down a random body, but the same gravity supports a balanced one. The practitioner's job is to take the body out of randomness and bring it into vertical relationship with the field.
She was insistent in this exchange that the formulation be precise enough to carry conviction. Three or four sentences, properly delivered, should be enough — a layperson cannot quarrel with the statement that gravity is constant, that the body either receives it as support or as load, and that the difference is structural alignment. Ida used the moment to remind her senior students that they needed to be able to translate the work into language that did not require the listener to already believe in it.
The toddler's wide stance and the upside-down pendulum
The body that has not finished its developmental walk shows up in a particular geometry. The legs are spread, the pelvis tilts anteriorly, the weight rolls to the outside of the foot, the knees and torso lurch as one. Ida's diagnostic eye scanned for these features the moment a person walked into the room. In the same August 5, 1974 IPR lecture, she sketched the alternative — the body that has come to balance on the small square inches of the soles of the feet, where every overlying segment stacks in a line that the vertical can actually traverse.
"Why do you suppose you have 200 or 170 pounds of human being standing on those few square inches of the soles of the foot. You have to be in balance and those souls have to act almost as points. This is the whole story of the upright human being. Now you saw how when we started working on people we laid them flat on their back. Why? Because there was not within them the mechanical possibility of balancing on a point at that time. So you took gravity out of the picture as much as you could by laying them flat so that you had at most 10 to 12 inches of gravitational pull. But they're big boys and girls now. And in order for them to stand on top of those square inches of the soles of the feet and to balance on top of the number of those square inches that constitute the ankle, you have got a degree of balance in that body now that permits a vertical line to come up through the ankles, through the knees, through the hips, through the bodies of the lumbars, through the shoulders, through the ears. Have you all got this picture of progression? Because this is the message of the morning. This progression that a human being is getting from a wad of stuff that's slopping all over the place to a form, a precise form, which acts as though it were built around the line."
Ida walks the class through the geometric problem of standing on so little ground.
One of the engineers in the 1974 Open Universe class had been thinking about this differently. He pressed Ida on whether the soft tissue actually held the body up, or whether the bone column took the compressive load while the soft tissue merely tensioned things into the correct alignment. The exchange is characteristic of Ida's classroom: she did not require her interlocutors to share her metaphysics, only to think clearly. What mattered was that something had to keep the body from collapsing into the gravitational field, and whatever that something was, it operated through the fascial-bony complex she had spent her life learning to manipulate.
"One way is if you think of the body as a of the body's segments individually as upside down pendulums. And you'll find that in almost all the segments the center of mass is high and it pretty much acts like a like something that's being balanced on a point. Maybe a rather broad point, but even so, the mass is high and it has that sense of balancing of bloom, for instance. The closer you get to the balance point, the less force it takes to keep it there. The closer you get to the balance point, the more potential energy is stored in that segment. And so one way of thinking of that is that gravity potentiates the structure. It provides maximum potential energy. At any moment you can just let go and fall and convert that potential energy into kinetic energy. And if that fall is directed, then this is almost like instant energy, instant available energy. Also, as the segments are aligned along the gravity reference, the moment of inertia of the system is smallest which means that you have, that you can rotate more quickly, can turn. And man, according to Feldenkrais at least in his agitation, man has the smallest moment of inertia of any animal."
Al, an engineer-trained student, develops the upside-down pendulum model Ida had been pointing toward.
What this model captures, in language Ida did not herself use but accepted from her colleagues, is why the well-aligned body is also the most mobile body. A segment near its balance point has stored potential energy that can be released into motion in any direction at any moment. A segment held off-vertical by chronic muscular bracing has its potential energy already committed to maintaining the off-axis position; nothing is available for fresh motion without first releasing the bracing. The well-walked body is the body that has not pre-committed its energy.
The ankle, the foot, and the horizontal hinge
If walking is the test, the foot and ankle are where the test is administered. Across the second-hour material in her 1976 Boulder class and the recipe lectures of 1976, Ida worked through what a foot must do to actually carry walking weight. There is not one hinge in the lower extremity but two: the ankle joint and the joint across the dorsum of the foot. Both must be horizontal — perpendicular to the body's vertical line — and both must actually move. People can walk on a frozen forefoot, dragging the foot as a single rigid plate, but they cannot walk well. The second-hour work is the first opportunity in the recipe to address this directly.
"And those of you who were real smart realized that not only must you get movement in the ankle joint, but you must get movement in the foot and as I usually express it in this room you must get hinge joints horizontal hinge joints and you get the first and the lowest one across the dorsum of the foot. Sometimes it's pretty hard to get in. It's always easier to get movement in the ankle joint because they have had, if they're going to be mobile at all and walking at all, they've got to have movement in that ankle no matter how core it is or how distorted it is. They've got to move at the ankle. But they don't have to move at the dorsum of the foot. They can walk around that joint. They don't walk very well, but nevertheless, they move. And they're never aware of the fact that they ought to be walking better. Because as far as they're concerned, this is a foot, this is foot, this is a foot, and it's my foot, and therefore, it's a normal foot. This isn't so."
Ida names the two hinges of the foot and ankle and what happens when one of them is missing.
In the 1976 second-hour demonstration, Ida watched a junior practitioner work the foot and ankle of a model who had broken his foot between sessions. The case was harder than usual because the broken foot resisted the establishment of a clean lateral arch. But the underlying principle held: the practitioner must establish hinges that are horizontal — perpendicular to the line of walking — and bring the weight off the outer arch and onto a more balanced distribution. This was not cosmetic. It was the precondition for everything that followed.
"Would you go further with it in terms of total body conduct? I think one of the main things we are looking for when you start working on the foot is to establish a proper hinge. Thinking of the hinge being 90 degree to the x, we want to walk. And as Tom said, we work around the ankle in order to free the ankle joint so that the function of the hitch would be ideal."
Discussing the second-hour goal of establishing a proper hinge across the dorsum of the foot.
The relationship of the two hinges to the line of walking is what makes the foot a foot rather than a flipper. When the hinges are skewed — when the foot rolls inward or the forefoot is fixed off-angle — the body's forward motion has to be generated higher up, in the hip or the lumbars, and the cost in energy is enormous. Ida frequently complained, across many classes, that the postural-training schools had taught generations of Americans to do exactly this: to compensate for unhinged feet with bracing higher in the chain, producing the held shoulders and tucked pelvis of military posture training.
The center line runs through the inside of the leg
Where exactly does the weight pass through the foot? This question came up repeatedly in the 1976 advanced class, and Ida's answers were not always identical — a fact she did not hide. In one exchange a student quoted the textbook claim that the weight should go through the three center toes; in another, she had the class stand and feel the line for themselves. What she settled on was an experiential anchor: whatever the textbook says, the center line as it can be felt in the standing body runs down the medial side of the leg, through the inner arch, to the ground. When the weight rolls to the outside of the foot, the line is lost.
"to put the weight back again into the center line. See what you begin to feel as you begin to feel the establishment of that center line. And where it goes as it goes up into the body and what you are aware of in terms of its lacks and what you are aware of in terms of its ability to help you unify yourself. Realize that when you are standing with your weight flowing down on the outer arch, you are destroying the unity within yourself. Now this is what I jumped on yesterday when I came in and somebody was telling me from some book or other, it might even have been a book of my lectures, That weight has to go through the three center toes. It's true. This is the abstraction. But what is the silent level? You're feeling it right now. The silent level is talking to you. The silent level is telling you how you can get to act at one with gravity. One of the ways you can do it is by turning your toes up so as to run that line up through the middle. Certainly the negative way to do it is not to let the weight go down on the outer arch. Now after you got all of this done then it's time to put it into the high order abstraction."
Ida walks the students through the felt experience of the center line and what destroys it.
This insistence on the medial center line had implications for how Ida thought about pronation and supination, about what the foot does as the body moves forward through space. A body that walks well does not roll along the outside of the foot; it carries the weight through the medial arch, with the foot acting as a hinge that opens and closes around its inner edge. A body that walks poorly is the body whose weight has migrated laterally, and once that pattern is in place, the unification of the standing body is impossible until the practitioner restores the inner arch as the load-bearing line.
The girdles, the eyes, and where a person is in space
Walking is not only a foot-and-ankle problem. The girdles — shoulder and pelvic — rotate as the body moves forward, and the rotation has to be reciprocal: when one side advances, the other turns back, and the spine carries the countermovement. Ida's senior students in the 1976 Teachers' Class were working through how to read the rotation of the girdles in the standing body and how to predict, from the standing posture, what would happen when the person began to walk. A student named the question they were working: what affects the rotation of the girdles?
There are some people that look like they're standing like that, as you know. Doctor Roth was asking us to sort of look at the effect or what affects the rotation of the girdles. And again, I keep saying the same things to apply to different subjects. The tendency."
The senior practitioner walks the class through how rotation in the upper body manifests in the leg as it spins into the pelvis.
The same practitioner pressed on what she considered one of the most underappreciated indicators in the whole diagnostic toolkit: the eyes. Where a person carries their visual horizon — what their eyes have learned to call vertical, what eye-level they expect a room to have — determines whether their newly aligned body can actually be inhabited. A person can be brought, structurally, to a place they have never stood before, and their eyes will tell them this is wrong, because their eyes' calibration is set to the old posture. Walking begins, in this account, in the visual field as much as in the foot.
" The eyes to me are one of the most important indicators of where a person is in space. If they walk into the room and this is vertical to them where my eye level is, you may work on them and they have the capacity to be there. But their eyes tell them in the height of the room that, one, they are only this high when they stand upright, and two, they are back here,"
Continuing the analysis of how a person inhabits new structural space, the practitioner names the eyes as the most important indicator.
The implication for walking is direct. A person whose eyes have not recalibrated to their new structure will, the moment they begin to walk, fall back into the old visual frame and pull the body with them. The work of the practitioner in the late hours of the recipe — and in the structural patterning that follows — includes giving the person tools to inhabit the new space rather than reverting to the old one. The eyes are part of how that inhabitation happens or fails to happen.
The recipe as a sequenced reorganization of gait
The ten-session series is, on one reading, a sequenced reorganization of gait. The first hour begins by mobilizing the pelvis within the envelope of the flesh, lengthening the front to allow the weight to come back onto the heels. The second hour addresses what the first has revealed: that the legs below the knees do not connect the newly mobile pelvis to the floor. The third hour begins the longer work of balancing the front and back of the body and balancing right against left. Each hour is, in part, an answer to the question of why the body is not yet walking well.
"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."
The practitioner articulates the recipe's sequenced logic as Ida had taught it.
By the time the practitioner reaches the eleventh hour — the first hour of the advanced series — the body has been brought to a static verticality that the recipe can produce reliably. What remains is the conversion of that static stack into dynamic motion. This is the work Ida described in her August 11, 1974 IPR lecture: the eleventh hour does not so much add new structural relationships as it converts the structure already established into something the person can use in walking, in working, in the activities of daily life. The gait changes; the stride lengthens.
"The way they walk changes. They begin to stride across here as you've seen with several of your confras here. They begin to use their legs so differently."
Ida describes what she has observed in the eleventh-hour work with her senior practitioners as models.
The full sequence is the answer to a question Ida posed in many advanced classes: how do you take a body from undifferentiated toddler-pattern walking to integrated adult motion? The answer cannot be a single intervention, and it cannot be talk. It is sequential structural work that addresses the foot, the leg, the pelvis, the spine, the shoulders, the head, and the relationships among them, in an order that allows each layer of organization to support the next. By the eleventh hour, the work returns to the legs, but now with everything above them organized to be carried.
Posture versus structure
Across many of her public talks, Ida drew a hard distinction between posture and structure. The schools she had grown up arguing against — the postural-training programs of the early twentieth century, the military drill of shoulders back and chin in — taught posture without structure. Posture, she pointed out, is from the Latin for 'placed.' It is something held by effort, maintained by continuous muscular work. Structure is relationship: it is how the parts of the body are organized with respect to each other, and when the organization is right, the posture follows automatically without effort.
"This constitutes structure. Now posture is something else again. And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed. Somebody has placed something somewhere. Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort. And when you have to make effort concerning anything in your body, it's a very bad sign. You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words. But as I see a man struggling to maintain posture, I know that he is losing his fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other."
Ida explicates the etymology and the doctrinal consequence of the posture-versus-structure distinction.
The implication for walking is direct. A person walking in postural-training mode — shoulders held back, gluteals tucked, chest lifted — is doing the work of maintaining an arrangement that has no structural support. Every step is a small effort to re-impose the arrangement against the body's actual tendencies. A person walking with structural balance is doing no such work; the body's segments find their column automatically because the relationships among them are what they should be. The first body fatigues. The second does not.
"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 walks the class through what military posture-training actually does to the spine and the upper body.
The gravity line through the bones
In her 1974 Healing Arts presentation, Ida walked through a series of anatomical slides showing the gravity line as it passes through the leg of a balanced body versus an aberrated one. In the balanced case, the line meets the ground just in front of the heel, passes through the middle of the knee, and traverses the bony joint of the hip — running through bone, where the bone column can carry the compressive load. In the aberrated case, the line falls forward of the heel, runs in front of the knee, and is forced to travel through soft tissue rather than through the column of weight-bearing bone. The walking body and the standing body share this geometry: where the gravity line falls determines whether the bones carry the weight or the muscles do.
"Here you have something that conforms to those to that series of blocks, that stacking, that stable stacking of blocks, and you can see how the blocks, the bones are one on top of the other as the blocks were. You can almost imagine that they could stand alone without wrapping. Now, notice where the gravity line goes through, right in front of the heel, and if it goes through and meets the ground in front of the heel, it goes through the middle of the knee, it goes through the bony joint of the hip. This is the way we teach our kids in the school to stand. Stand on your toes. Stand on the front of your foot. This is what happens. The bone the line no longer runs through the bones. It runs through the soft tissue and it comes down here way ahead of the place where it belongs, way ahead. Now this is the guy that comes and says, oh, doc, my feet are killing me. And you say, yeah, but what else? Because you see here, weight always has to go through a hip joint if a man is to stand or even to sit. And after that, it has many options of where it can travel to get to the ground, and this is one of them. Now in the next picture, you'll see where with those options what happens as it goes up the line. I take it that this is the aberrated one, John?"
Walking the audience through the gravity-line slides, Ida names the difference between the balanced and aberrated leg.
This is one of the cleaner pieces of teaching in the whole archive on why walking matters structurally. The bones are designed as compressive columns; soft tissue is designed for tension and motion. When the gravity line travels through bone, each tissue does the work it is designed for. When the line is forced through soft tissue — because the foot is loaded too far forward, because the knee is hyperextended, because the hip is anteriorly displaced — the soft tissue is asked to do compressive work it cannot sustain. The result, over years of walking, is the breakdown the medical schools attributed to gravity itself but which is in fact the breakdown of a misaligned body carrying its load through the wrong channel.
The energy economy of walking
Ida's late teaching increasingly framed the whole question of walking in terms of energy economy. A body that walks well is a body that does the work of forward motion with the least input of metabolic energy. A body that walks badly burns energy maintaining its off-axis position before it has taken a single step. This framing was developed by some of her senior collaborators — particularly Valerie Hunt, whose electromyographic studies of subjects before and after the work supplied the empirical anchor — but the conceptual frame was already in Ida's teaching from her 1973 Big Sur class forward.
"How much work does your body have to do in order to affect what it is that you're being paid to do. Something of an oversimplification, but I think you get what I'm doing. As we turned to come down here this morning here out in the rain, it's a well meaning young student jogging. I looked at him and I thought to myself, Well, he's got lots of goodwill, he's got lots of rage, but there was no way in which he transmitted the movement from his legs up into his torso. It just stopped right there. Was he doing what he was supposed to do? Namely getting blood and circulation and energy around in his body? Because he didn't know how to make the connection."
Watching a jogger from her car window, Ida names what was missing in his gait.
Valerie Hunt's electromyographic findings — presented to Ida's advanced class in 1974 — gave this framing experimental substance. Hunt had measured the muscular patterns of subjects before and after the ten-session series and found a consistent shift: less co-contraction (one muscle firing against another to prevent motion), more sequential contraction (agonist followed by antagonist in the pattern actually required for motion). The pre-work subject was using muscles all the time and everywhere; the post-work subject was using them specifically to the task at hand.
"If you're doing very, very fine work, such as writing for long periods of time or work with your eyes, work with your hands, it requires co contraction. You know how fatigued you get. You get tremendously tired from using one muscle against another muscle to keep you from moving any great distance. And so, in fine control, we know that there is co contraction. But the type of skills which I asked for in this particular study was not fine skills but gross skills. And these are far better done using the agonist followed by the antagonist, the agonist and not the agonist and antagonist simultaneously. This is tremendously expensive in human energy, is to use one muscle against another. It's like accelerating your car and putting on the brakes simultaneously. It is exhausting. Efficiency then with less tension. Another finding: before structural integration, there was what I called widespread excitation, which was unrelated specifically to the particular task at hand. This means, for example, that people write with their bottom, and their bottom gets very tense when they write. And that is not the specific task at hand."
Hunt summarizes her electromyographic findings before Ida's advanced class.
The clinical consequence is the difference between a body that arrives home from a day of walking exhausted and a body that does not. Same number of steps, same distance covered, same gravitational field. The difference is what the body had to do at each step: whether it was fighting its own bracing patterns and the field at once, or whether the bracing had been released and the field had become support. This is the difference, in Ida's framing, between the body that loses its fight with gravity and the body that has been brought into relationship with it.
Coda: gravity as therapist
Ida's most quoted summary of her own work was the phrase 'gravity is the therapist.' She used it in classes, in interviews, and in writing. The point of the phrase was to displace the practitioner from the center of the therapeutic claim. The practitioner does not heal the body. The practitioner changes the fascial web so that gravity — the constant environmental force the body has been negotiating with since its first day in the womb — can do the work it has always been trying to do. Walking, in this final framing, is what gravity produces in a body that has been brought into relationship with it. A well-walked body is a body whose gait is the daily expression of the gravitational field flowing through it as support rather than load. This is what the recipe is for, and this is why every hour of it touches, in some way, the question of how the person moves.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Mystery Tapes CD2 (IPRCON1) — additional 1971-72 reflections on gravity as therapist and the historical development of Structural Integration from its art-form origins through to its scientific articulation. IPRCON1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA1 public tape (RolfA1Side1) — Al's articulation of the upside-down pendulum model and Ida's response, locating gravity as the dominant force creating compensation patterns within the body. RolfA1Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Teachers' Class 02 (T2SA) — extended discussion of gait analysis through iliac structure and primate anatomy, comparing how various animals walk in terms of pelvic geometry and what this reveals about the erect human body. T2SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Rolf Advanced Class 1976 (76ADV41, 76ADV42) — extended classroom passages on walking, the toddler pattern, the recipes for foot placement taught by different schools, and Ida's argument with the inherited postural-training tradition. 76ADV41 ▸76ADV42 ▸