Saturday, March 26, 2016. An early flight from Haneda to Itami, and on to Osaka. My first visit to TEN the space for your Life & Body since December 6 of the previous year, three months earlier.
The training is IMAC again — Integrative Movement Assessment Courses. Where Source Point Therapy worked with energy that cannot be seen, this works at the level of anatomy and the physical body, which can. It connects how the body functions to how it is built, and that makes it a good place to learn things that carry directly into a Rolfing session.
IMAC runs as an introductory course followed by upper limb, lower limb, spine, and trunk and integration. I took the introduction in December 2015 (“IMAC (1) — The Introductory Course: Assessing the Body Through Range of Motion and Anatomy“).
This time it is the upper limb, with the lower limb the following week, on April 2 and 3 — two weekends in a row. About three months have passed since the introduction, and in that time I have given close to 180 Rolfing sessions. A good moment to find out what I have been missing.
Hiroki Sato — everyone calls him Hiro — runs TEN. He has said that IMAC developed out of a question: how do you move through the Ten Series efficiently? Learning from a Rolfer, directly, how another Rolfer has made his own sessions more efficient is worth a great deal.
Until now my Rolfing has rested on what I learned in the training: follow the sequence, work by feel. That alone has produced dramatic changes in body and mind.
Hiro says that in his first three years as a Rolfer he was giving eighty sessions a month. At this stage I have been prioritizing the number of sessions in order to develop my sense of touch, and staying away from courses as much as I can. Not eighty, but I have worked up to a pace of fifty sessions a month.
I want to keep refining what I feel with my hands. But when it comes to explaining, anatomy is the shared language of the body, and the better I understand it, the more convincingly I can describe to a client what is happening.
During the introductory course I struggled to grasp what we were even doing, and the sheer volume of information was overwhelming. In the upper limb course things became specific, and I could feel my understanding speeding up.
The upper limb course works through the muscles of the shoulder girdle, the arm, and the shoulder joint, taking each muscle in the same order: how to take its range of motion, how to test it, how to approach the fascia, how to release it.
Pectoralis major and minor, the rhomboids, trapezius, supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres major and minor, and many more. We worked in groups of three — twelve of us in all — touching each one in turn while also learning the movement, and the format is designed so that you improve quickly. You could test it on someone tomorrow, and their body can change dramatically.
There was a great deal to notice. How do you take the force out of your hands while releasing fascial tension? Wait for the change. Feel the heat coming out of the muscle. When your hands are working, keep your attention on something far away. Hiro gave feedback directly while we practiced. This is going to be useful when I build my own sessions.
The upper limb course also works through the major muscles, so your own body reorganizes as you go. If you look at me before the class and after, the change is visible.
Hiro said it amounts to about four Rolfing sessions, and the result made that easy to believe.
IMAC is worth looking into not only for bodyworkers but for anyone teaching yoga or Pilates, since it lets you learn anatomy together with movement.
Note, September 2026
What I received in this course was a method for assessment. How to take a range of motion, how to test a muscle, how to approach the fascia and release it — one muscle at a time, in that order.
Basic Rolfing training does not much teach you how to confirm, from the side of anatomy, what changed between before and after a session. The weight falls on sensation and on balance. How to look at a body is returned to again and again, but a yardstick for checking from the outside whether that looking was accurate barely appears in the curriculum.
That is what Hiro handed over.
This is also where he differs from Peter Schwind, even though both look at the body from the side of structure. Seeing structure and holding a means of confirming what a session did are two different things.
Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, I was taught a method of assessment as well. Test, intervene, re-test. Check before you do anything, and check again afterward. But it did not go as deep or as fine as what Hiro had handed over. The ranges of motion in this article are separated muscle by muscle, and each one can be confirmed on its own.
The article from this period also says that I was staying away from courses as much as I could, prioritizing session numbers in order to develop my sense of touch. That I took this one anyway was not for my own sake. When explaining to a client, anatomy is the shared language of the body, and understanding it better makes the words land. What was missing was not sensation but the language for describing it.
Having written this far, I want to add something to what I wrote about the previous course.
I came to feel uneasy with IMAC partway through, and that unease became distance. The following year I felt the same kind of unease about Peter Schwind, and I never went back to that. I could not explain, last time, why the outcomes were opposite.
Hiro was not someone who pushed his own view. He taught while acknowledging what you already had. That is why I could stay with it despite the unease, and why it resonated. It is also why I could return after two and a half years.
I do not think that way of handing things over was a matter of personality. Hiro is a man of anatomy and range of motion, and equally a man of energy work and osteopathy. He is a certified SourcePoint Therapy instructor, and he has interpreted for osteopathy courses for a long time. On his own profile he writes that the philosophy, the way of seeing the body, and the way of being that he absorbed in those courses have shaped him deeply.
Both of those bodies of work place the practitioner’s neutrality, and the setting down of oneself, at their center. What is taught and how it is taught come from the same place. A person who teaches neutrality is neutral in the room where he teaches. That is what made it comfortable.
The same profile says something else. After studying all of it, his conclusion is that the body is wiser than any technique or approach or health regimen a person could devise. Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, I would receive the position that the client is wiser than the practitioner, under the name of intentionality. Before it had a name, the same thing was being done in front of me.
What I could not receive was not a fault in the handing over.