From December 2015 to December 2021, across six years, twenty-one days. I studied a method called IMAC with Hiroki Sato — everyone calls him Hiro — in Osaka.
There were two and a half years away in the middle. I took the Basic courses twice. What follows is what I learned in twenty-one days.
The record of each course is in its own article.
What IMAC Is
IMAC stands for Integrative Movement Assessment & Conditioning, a method Hiro developed himself.
Hiro runs TEN ~the space for your Life & Body~ in Kitahama, Osaka. He is an athletic trainer (NATABOC certified), a Certified Rolfer, a certified specialist in Muscle Activation Techniques®, and a certified SourcePoint Therapy® instructor. He is also the teacher of Akinori Ito, the Rolfer from whom I received my own Ten Series.
I met him for the first time in May 2015, just after finishing the basic training in Munich.
It Began From Three Questions
Where IMAC came from is something Hiro has written about on the IMAC site (in Japanese only). What surprised me on reading it was that it did not begin from a system or a theory. It began from three questions.
First. In a Rolfing session, approaching the neck for integration would sometimes produce a left-right difference in hip rotation that had not been there before he touched the neck. Why?
Second. With MAT, muscle output would rise, and then sometimes return as soon as the person took weight and moved. Concentrate too much on one place and the whole body loses its balance. Why?
Third. At a seminar on visceral manipulation in osteopathy, working on the fascia around the caecum raised the range of motion of the hip and the output of the psoas. How are the viscera and the musculoskeletal system related?
Out of these clinical observations and questions, he writes, various pieces of information were gathered and organized, and what came together was IMAC.
The starting point is a question, not an answer.
Six Sources
The same page lists six therapies and bodies of thought that have shaped IMAC.
From athletic training: objective assessment through functional anatomy and biomechanics. Looking not only at injury and pain but at performance, prevention, and health as a whole, including what has not yet become illness.
From Rolfing: anatomy seen through fascia. The midline of the axis and the appendages. Seeing a place in relation to the rest, rather than as a part.
From MAT: the idea that a restriction in range of motion occurs because the muscles involved in that movement are inhibited.
From Source Point Therapy: the concept of geometric balance and information. Hiro writes that it was because of this concept that exploring the particular ranges of motion of each muscle group three-dimensionally led him to a sense of what a body close to its own balance looks like.
From osteopathy: the relationships between the spine and the autonomic nervous system and the organs, and the neurolymphatic reflex points. A way of understanding the wholeness and interrelation of the body from the workings of development and function. The cranial field, biodynamics, craniosacral therapy, visceral manipulation, somatovisceral reflexes.
From East Asian Medicine: the pathways and locations of the meridians, and their relation to yin-yang and the five phases. Not only the twelve primary meridians but their relation to the eight extraordinary vessels.
Of these six, only the first four had entered the course by the time I began, in 2015. East Asian Medicine came in during 2019.
Magnets and a Map
There is a point in IMAC where magnets are used. Place a magnet on the Yuan-Source point of a meridian and the range of motion associated with that meridian changes. The Kidney meridian and the Yin Motility Vessel among the eight extraordinary vessels respond to the north pole; the rest respond to the south.
What is interesting is how the discovery was used. Hiro writes that finding this effect of magnets made it possible to create restrictions deliberately, and that this in turn made it possible to build a map.
The magnet was not a tool for treatment. It was a tool for making a map. If you can create a restriction artificially, you can work through the ranges of motion and the muscles that correspond to that meridian, one at a time.
Working from that map, moving all the muscle groups related to each meridian later became M3 — the Meridian Movement Method.
The Name Keeps Changing
Over the six years I was taking it, IMAC’s formal name changed three times.
When I took it in 2015 it was Integrative Movement Assessment Courses. By 2019 it was Center of Integrative Movement Assessment, and from 2020, Integrative Movement Assessment & Conditioning.
The first name has now returned as the name of a course group. Integrative Movement Assessment Courses on the assessment side, Integrative Manual Approach Courses on the manual side.
The changes in name were changes in content as well.
The Courses I Took
| # | Dates | Days | Class |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | December 6, 2015 | 1 | Introduction |
| 2 | March 26–27, 2016 | 2 | Upper Limb |
| 3 | April 2–3, 2016 | 2 | Lower Limb |
| 4 | November 17–18, 2018 | 2 | Viscera |
| 5 | January 27, 2019 | 1 | EROM |
| 6 | March 16–17, 2019 | 2 | Lower Limb |
| 7 | April 13–14, 2019 | 2 | Upper Limb |
| 8 | November 7–8, 2020 | 2 | Spine and Viscera |
| 9 | November 28–29, 2020 | 2 | Head and Neck |
| 10 | December 19–20, 2020 | 2 | Integration |
| 11 | December 11–13, 2021 | 3 | Post-Integration |
I took the lower limb and upper limb courses twice each.
At the time, the course ran in two stages, Basic and Advanced. Complete the three Basic courses (EROM, upper limb, lower limb) and the two Advanced ones (spine and viscera, head and neck), and you could join the integration class. The prerequisites were set as stages. Only those who had finished the integration class could enter the post-integration class.
The record of each course is here.
- IMAC (1) — The Introductory Course: Assessing the Body Through Range of Motion and Anatomy
- IMAC (2) — The Upper Limb: In What Order Do You Take Range of Motion, Test, and Work with Fascia?
- IMAC (3) — The Lower Limb: Not Loosening What Is Tight, but Finding Where Information Is Not Reaching
- IMAC (4) — The Viscera and the Muscles: How Does Muscular Function Affect the Organs?
- IMAC (5) — EROM: Learning How to Assess Range of Motion from the Ground Up
- IMAC (6) — The Lower Limb: Where Anatomy Meets the Meridians, and What Range of Motion Reveals
- IMAC (7) — The Upper Limb: Range of Motion and the Meridians — Reading the Organs and the Autonomic Nervous System
- IMAC (8) — The Spine and the Viscera: Learning to See Them Through Embryology
- IMAC (9) — The Head and Neck: Working with the Body Through the Meridians of the Head and Neck
- IMAC (10) — The Integration Class: Seeing Twenty Meridians Through a Western Index, Range of Motion
- IMAC (11) — After the Integration Class: What Is a Healthy Body? — What Happens When You Do Nothing
What I learned
A Means of Assessment
The largest thing was getting hold of a way to check before and after.
Basic Rolfing training puts its weight on sensation and on the balance of the body. How to look at a body is returned to again and again. But a way of confirming from outside whether that looking was accurate barely appears in the curriculum. We were told, throughout, to treat anatomy textbooks as reference only.
The reason, I think, was that looking too closely there means seeing a person as a machine and missing other important signals. And at the stage of cultivating sensation, that was right.
But as the sessions accumulate, something else becomes necessary. When it does not work, what do you change? To know that, you need a means of measuring whether anything changed at all.
That is what learned from IMAC.
You take a joint’s range of motion. It is separated muscle by muscle, and each can be confirmed on its own. Take it before the work and take it again after. If it has changed, you can narrow down what did the work. If it has not, you look somewhere else.
And that same measure can be turned on other things. How glasses, a mouthguard, a smart device are affecting the body. What changed before and after a Source Point session. And the state of the meridians.
Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, I would be taught the framework of test, intervene, re-test. Check before you do anything, and check again afterward. That was when I learned the name; what I had been doing was the same thing. And what I had received in IMAC went deeper and finer.
Putting Things Into Words
Workshops usually teach textbook material. What made IMAC different was that Hiro worked from clinical experience, putting into words what he had arrived at in practice.
You are not provied with a procedure; you are provided with a principle. Which means you can explore on from there by yourself.
This is also about the receiving side. What cannot be put into words cannot be verified. Nor can you tell what to change when something has not worked. Getting hold of a means of assessment in IMAC was also getting hold of a means of putting sensation into words.
Neutrality
In December 2021, in the post-integration class, what I learned was doing nothing.
Look on at the body as a whole. Observe where your own attention goes. Do not chase the changes in the system. Until then I had been working with the intention of doing something. Hold the intention of doing nothing, and the other person’s body finds a healthy state of its own accord. After three days of practice, I was startled by how dramatically range of motion changed before and after the work.
I have the teaching materials for that class. They are dated December 8, 2021, three days before the course. In them is a section headed practical: neutral, with three exercises following.
Three years and four months later, in April 2025, I took the Advanced Training. At the center of those twenty-four days was neutral.
The word neutral sits at the center of biodynamic craniosacral work. Ray McCall, who taught the Advanced Training, holds an instructor qualification in biodynamic craniosacral therapy and has taught alongside Bob Schrei, the founder of Source Point Therapy. Hiro is a certified Source Point Therapy instructor, and his biodynamic osteopathy comes from Jim Jealous.
Both of them stand on the same line.
The teachings and learnings from IMAC
Hiro was not someone who pushed his own view. He taught while acknowledging what you already had.
Once, I had taken a word the wrong way. I had written “myofascial release” in an article. Hiro did not address it in the room or to me directly; he wrote on his own blog about his discomfort with the idea of loosening, of releasing, what is tight. Whether it was read was left to me.
I do not think that way of handing things over was a matter of personality. Hiro is a certified Source Point Therapy instructor and has interpreted for osteopathy courses for more than fifteen years. On his own profile he writes that from the osteopaths he has learned not only knowledge but a way of being.
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.
What Continues in IMAC
IMAC today is again something other than the form I took.
It has been reorganized into two streams of courses, assessment and manual approach, and muscle testing has become a class of its own. The spine and viscera course has been divided as well, into the assessment side and the manual side.
And a method called M3 has come into being. The Meridian Movement Method: moving all the muscle groups related to each meridian, in the order of the Chinese clock, as a form of self-care.
Hiro has written about why it was made. To know each of these movements in detail requires a good deal of knowledge of functional anatomy, and learning that is what IMAC is for. But look at functional anatomy in too fine and complex a way, and almost no one can do it. So in M3, rather than muscles, he describes the movements and positions those muscles produce, without using anatomical terms.
The work of making something transmissible has happened in two stages. First, the meridians — hard to get hold of — were turned into range of motion, which anyone can measure. Then, when IMAC itself became too fine to hand on, a form without the language of anatomy was made.
Conclusion
Six years, twenty-one days.
If I had to name one thing that I learned, it would be a means of assessment. I became able to confirm what changed before and after the work, somewhere other than in my own sensation. Because that is there, there is a next move when something has not worked.
And because that measure is there, other systems can be measured too. The meridians were one. What had been called invisible has been given a form in which it can be seen, through a Western index: range of motion.