On July 2, 2017, the three-day workshop came to a close. I wrote about the first day in “What Purpose Does a Technique Serve?“
Day one covered the shoulder and the region of the neck; day two was a session with an invited client; day three took up the iliopsoas, the hamstrings, and the skull, each in detail. That a three-day workshop still made room for working with an invited client is valuable in itself.
What ran through all three days was that we were given a guide for how to look at a body.
Before a client session began, for instance, there were guides: which part of the curve of the spine is restricted; when the body cavities are divided into four, which one is restricted. Working from those, we all did body reading on each client together, and then Peter explained the salient points and, in fine detail, how to go into the session.
Some people can look at a body and grasp intuitively, on the spot, what needs doing. Not everyone can. What anyone can do, he said, is sharpen the sensitivity of the hands and learn to approach the body accurately.
Take how you clarify the problem in a frozen shoulder. After two simple tests: which muscles are in the shoulder, and what kind of contact addresses them. You start from the large muscle, the latissimus dorsi, and work toward the finer muscles around the scapula — supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres major, serratus anterior — making the approach explicit. What impressed me was how simply he laid out where the effective places are, the ones that are less well known than you might expect, on the basis of many years of clinical work.
At the end, we learned what the Advanced Training covers and what would be worth studying beforehand.
What I had not expected was his saying it is better to arrive with an understanding of where the organs sit and how to approach them.
The shoulder, for example, is connected through fascia by way of the psoas, the kidneys, the liver, and the diaphragm, so a restriction anywhere shows up as a restriction in movement. By looking at the body as a whole, you can have an impact on the whole without ever putting a hand on the shoulder. Along the way he showed ultrasound images of how far the kidneys travel up and down — further than I would have guessed — and used a real pelvis to show how fascia and ligaments bind together. It brought home how much the understanding of the viscera matters.
This workshop is positioned as preparation for the Advanced Training. Two weeks of training in Vienna bring you to the point of being able to construct a single session. Then, after an interval, three weeks in Bologna to construct that session divided into three. Five weeks in all. A great deal is covered, but the theme is how to construct a session efficiently without loading your hands.
Peter teaches the Advanced Training roughly once every four years, and whether he will teach it again is undecided. I am looking forward to next year.
Note, August 2026
Something Peter said in this post reveals a position on education.
Some people can look at a body and grasp intuitively, on the spot, what needs doing. Not everyone can. What anyone can do is sharpen the sensitivity of the hands and learn to approach the body accurately.
On the question of how to teach seeing, I wrote in the Bone Work posts. The answer Sharon relayed from Ida was to throw someone in the water and let them swim or drown. Ida saw what others could not, and without a method for teaching it, she demanded it all the same.
RISI tried to fill that gap with a system. After the split in 1989, material including Jeff Maitland’s philosophy was added, and a two-stage structure became three. The 2025 Advanced Training handed over five principles and a Taxonomy of five categories.
Peter’s answer differs from both. He transfers seeing over to the hands. You need not see. Raise the precision of your contact and you will get there.
So what was handed over across those three days was concrete. Which part of the curve of the spine is restricted. Which of the four body cavities is restricted. Two tests for the frozen shoulder. In from the latissimus dorsi, on to supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres major, serratus anterior. Where the effective places are, the ones less well known than you might expect. Procedures drawn straight out of long clinical experience, laid out in order.
A way of teaching that does not presuppose seeing is kind to the person being taught. A path anyone can travel is set out.
In the previous post I wrote that across those three days I decided not to take the training. But at the time I could not put into words what the discomfort was about. It received a name eight years later.
In the 2025 Advanced Training, Ray McCall introduced Jeff Maitland’s three paradigms. Relaxation, corrective, and holistic — three frames within which how you see a body diverges. Relaxation aims at easing tension. Corrective addresses symptoms and rests on a mechanistic footing. Holistic aims at integration, at order, at raising the function of the whole person. And the three form a hierarchy: work from the deepest and the layers above are reached as well.
Read through that frame, much of what those three days covered belongs to the corrective layer. Which symptom, which test, which muscle. The precision is extremely high.
That is not to say Peter stood only there. The shoulder is connected through fascia by way of the psoas, the kidneys, the liver, the diaphragm, so a restriction anywhere shows up as restricted movement; look at the body as a whole and you can affect the whole without touching the shoulder. That is talk from the holistic layer.
So the frame cannot place Peter in a single layer. The three paradigms are Maitland’s ordering, and they came from the RISI side. Measuring someone who stands in a different lineage with one system’s categories is not fair to him. Peter studied with nearly the whole first generation and has had contact with teachers on the Guild side as well.
What can be said is only that I already had an inclination about which layer I wanted to work from. In the previous post I wrote that Sharon’s approach was closer to mine. What that closeness consisted of, I could not explain at the time.
Eight years later, having received the classification, I can explain it. But the classification did not come first. The discomfort came first, and the name arrived afterward.
This article also sets out the structure of the Advanced Training I did not take. Two weeks in Vienna, then, after an interval, three weeks in Bologna. Five weeks. The first half brings you to constructing a single session, the second to constructing it divided into three. The theme is building a session efficiently without loading your hands. What to study beforehand: where the organs sit, and how to approach them.
What I took eight years later ran twenty-four days in Tokyo. The number of days is much the same.
Still, at the end of this article I write that I am looking forward to next year. I did think that learning from someone with a different approach mattered, and the anticipation was real. In the previous post too, I wrote that learning a different approach matters.
Feeling that something does not fit and judging that there is value in learning it are compatible. Three days, I would take. Whether to commit five weeks was a separate judgment.
And the visceral work described here I would end up receiving by another route: the methods of Jean-Pierre Barral, with whom Peter studied for over thirty years. What I took in Jonathan Martine’s workshop the year before had come partly from Barral. Konrad Obermeier, who taught anatomy in Munich, works with the viscera and with embryology as well.
Not taking a given course does not mean the content it covers stays out of reach. A lineage runs through more than one channel. Deciding not to go did not necessarily mean moving away from what was taught there.