Sunday, April 3, 2016. An early flight from Haneda to Itami, and on to Osaka. TEN ~the space for your Life & Body~ again, a week after March 26.
The training is IMAC — Integrative Movement Assessment Courses — and this is my third time. It 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“) and the upper limb last month, on March 26 and 27 (“IMAC (2) — The Upper Limb: In What Order Do You Take Range of Motion, Test, and Work with Fascia?“).
How can what I have been doing by feel in a Rolfing session be brought down into anatomy? IMAC is said to have developed out of the question of how to move through the Ten Series efficiently. Either way, it is a valuable place to work out what I ought to be taking home.
In the introductory course I struggled to grasp the concept of IMAC and what it meant. The teaching was largely theoretical, and perhaps because I had not been a Rolfer for long, none of it settled into place. That shows in what I wrote last month about the upper limb, where I used the phrase “myofascial release.”
Around the time the upper limb course ended, Hiroki Sato — everyone calls him Hiro, and he runs TEN — seems to have noticed. He shared a post on his blog about his discomfort with the idea of “loosening, releasing what is tight.”
To quote from that post:
Rolfing is not done in order to loosen the body. By recovering the correct position and balance, the body loosens as a result. MAT works on places where neurological feedback is not lacking, starting from where range of motion is restricted; movement improves, and the surrounding tissue that had been tense loosens as a result. In IMAC, which is based on those two theories as well, we consider that a place that is hard and restricted is a part of the body where feedback is absent — a dysfunction caused by a displacement from the body’s correct position. In other words, we look for the places where the brain or the body is saying “I don’t really want to move that” or “it’s pitch dark over there, I can’t tell what’s going on,” we grasp what condition those places are in, and we supply the body with the information it needs there. And then, strangely enough, change occurs at the level of the system — in the body as a whole.
What is problematic about the intention to loosen is that, once it comes first, you start hunting for hard places and trying to loosen them indiscriminately.
- IMAC is the process of searching the whole body for the parts where there is no neurological feedback — the parts the brain does not recognize within the body, the parts that cannot be moved.
With that as background, the lower limb course began with an introduction to the fascia theory that Robert Schleip proposes. I had heard this theory in the introductory course, and hearing it again here, before the practical work that followed — dense work on the various muscle groups and fascia of the lower limb — I think I understood the importance of grasping it as an approach to fascia rather than through the simple phrase “myofascial release.”
The lower limb is easier to follow than the upper limb, since the movements are simpler. As with the upper limb, working with the fascia changed my own body noticeably between the start of the course and the end.
Hiro says that understanding advances far more if you take the lower limb before the upper limb, and that was my impression too. What is remarkable is that combining the two makes it possible to see how much a Rolfing session can improve. It also occurred to me that I might become able to observe what is happening in Source Point Therapy, and that makes the sessions ahead something to look forward to.
Two weeks of Rolfing-related training, after a long gap. I hope to keep weaving Source Point and IMAC into my Rolfing sessions, and to be of use to as many people as I can.
Note, September 2026
What worked hardest on me in this course did not happen in the classroom.
After the upper limb course ended, Hiro wrote a post on his blog: his discomfort with the idea of loosening, of releasing, what is tight. He seems to have noticed that I had written about it using the phrase “myofascial release.” That is what the article says.
I was not named. Nothing was said in the classroom. Something written in another place reached me.
In the note on the previous course I wrote that Hiro was not someone who pushed his own view, that he taught while acknowledging what you already had. Here is the concrete shape of it. He noticed a student had taken a word the wrong way, and rather than address it in the room or to the person, he wrote it on his own blog. Whether it is read is left to the other side.
What was handed over was that the order was reversed. You do not hunt for hard places and go loosen them. You look for the places where information is not reaching, and you deliver information there. The loosening is the result.
As grounds for this, the lower limb course opened with an introduction to Robert Schleip’s fascia theory. I had heard it in the introductory course as well, so this was the second time.
What I could receive then went as far as swapping the words. Call it an approach to fascia rather than myofascial release. That is what the article says. What exactly had been swapped for what was not yet filled in.
Ten years later I wrote an article on Schleip’s 2003 paper. Four sensory receptors embedded in fascia: Golgi, Pacini, Ruffini, interstitial. Each answers to a different kind of touch and returns a different response. And much of what is generally called myofascial release — slow, sustained work — is thought to engage the Ruffini and interstitial receptors.
The practitioner is not physically stretching stiff tissue apart, I wrote there, but is in dialogue with a nervous system that senses, answers, and regulates itself. It says the same thing Hiro had written in clinical language in 2016.
Which means I arrived by myself, ten years later, at something that had already been handed to me.
I do not think it was wasted, receiving it as a swap of words. Because I held the word first, I could tell where the content belonged when it came.