Where Tonic Function Came From — Part 2 of 3
Introduction
When we are standing, it looks as though we are doing nothing. Inside the body, something is working without pause — making small, continuous adjustments so that we don’t fall over.
In Rolfing, that work has a name: Tonic Function. This article is about what the name actually points at.
Part 1 traced where this way of seeing came from. A French Rolfer named Hubert Godard found it in the dance studio. The same gestural form comes to mean different things depending on the attitude held before the movement begins. He called that pre-movement.
Let me name the sources I’ll be drawing on. The 1992 interview was conducted by Aline Newton and published in Rolf Lines, the Rolfing profession’s journal. The 2005 interview was conducted by Caryn McHose and published in Contact Quarterly, a dance journal. And Newton’s 1995 article — the first attempt to set out Godard’s theory for Rolfers.
What Tonic Function Is
The definition is in Newton’s 1995 article.
Godard calls the body’s ability to organize itself in gravity, “tonic function.”
It is not the name of a category of muscle. It is the name of an ability.
Miss this and everything downstream goes wrong. For a long time I took it to mean “what tonic muscles do.” Muscles that work continuously versus muscles that work in bursts — I thought it was a distinction between those. But the name does not point at muscles.
Newton goes on: tonic function is fundamental, underlying all action, even though we never think about it. It is happening every moment, below the level of consciousness.
Then comes an example.
You are standing, and you raise an arm. Which muscle contracts first? Most people picture the arm and shoulder girdle. The answer is soleus — the muscle that is key to staying upright in gravity. Before the intended movement happens, gravitational function has been secured.
This is the calf example Godard wrote about. Newton cites it as an experiment by the perceptual psychologist Edward Reed. And then —
The experiment reveals what we will call a pre-movement, the movement of the tonic system.
Here the two halves join. The pre-movement Godard named in the dance studio and Tonic Function are not two subjects. They are two names for the same thing.
It Works in the Ground, Not the Figure
Where this ability works is easiest to grasp through the language of looking at a painting. Figure and ground. What you are looking at is the figure; what lies behind it is the ground. A person is the figure, the landscape is the ground.
Godard applies this to movement. Postural attitude and pre-movement are the inevitable precondition of the gesture; against them as a background, the apparent movement is drawn. That is the figure.
Which means: what we see as “movement” is the figure. Tonic Function is working in the ground, in front of it. That is why it is hard to see.
What the Tonic System Refers To
Anatomically, tonic function involves the brain, neural pathways, fascia, muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, and the tonic muscles. Together, Newton writes, these can be called the tonic system — the whole of what coordinates the body’s negotiation with gravity.
And then she adds a caution. A person’s particular tonic organization cannot be adequately described by thinking about anatomy alone. And from the standpoint of movement work, without a wider view you cannot effectively educate anyone’s tonic organization.
Tonic Muscles Are the Reins
Tonic muscles are postural muscles, mainly concerned with holding us upright. Phasic muscles are the ones used for large movements and short, intense activity. Red fibers versus white, oxygen versus sugar, dense spindles versus sparse — there are a number of physiological distinctions.
But what matters here is not the classification. It is the relationship between the two.
For phasic muscles to work, the postural muscles have to release; thereby, they control and shape movement. The tonic muscles are like reins directing the phasic muscles.
The order in which tonic muscles release conducts the work of the rest. In walking, the tonic muscles of the back release first to allow the forward movement; the hamstrings release so the quadriceps can work; the other muscles of the leg coordinate from there.
The refinement and sequencing of this release and tension is what makes coordination. Godard borrows an old term from the movement traditions and calls it kinetic melody — the synergy of all the muscles of the body in space and time.
Two Directions
There is one idea Godard returns to again and again. Two directions.
Before that, a word on why we keep saying “relationship to gravity.”
Gravity is the first thing we meet. In water there is almost no up or down. From the moment of birth we enter a world with a constant above and below. And we spend a long time working out our terms with that world. How we are held, how we are laid down, the whole process of coming to stand. All of it is a negotiation with gravity.
The terms we settle on stay with us. And they can be settled again.
Having passed through Feldenkrais, Alexander, osteopathy, and the Mézières method, Godard studied Rolfing. Asked in the 1992 interview what drew him, he says: he thinks Rolfing’s theory is more advanced, because it has two directions.
In 2005 he puts it differently. When he first read that Rolfing was a way to re-negotiate the relationship with gravity, he was strongly drawn to it. That “re-negotiate” is exactly what I just described. The same point, once from the side of theory and once from the side of encounter.
The 1992 interview also touches on the difference between Feldenkrais and Alexander. The two often used the same task — standing up from a chair and sitting down. But their reference points differ. Feldenkrais: the ground and the pelvis. Alexander: the neck, the chest, and upward. And then: “to have a line, you need both.”
Someone who is all “up” has no ground and cannot push against another person; when things don’t work, they fly off and change location. Someone who pushes stays on the ground and makes the surroundings adapt instead of moving themselves. Either one alone is not enough.
Godard explains the two directions with a bean root.
In space, the roots of a bean grow in every direction. Near the earth, they grow downward. The plant obeys the law of gravity. But it obeys the law of the sun as well. Drawn by the sun, the plant grows up. Geotropism and phototropism: two directions.
To move, the body as a whole — and any single muscle — must have a point of support. People tend to favor either the downward or the upward as their main support. This can also be described as a sense of the inner space of the body versus a sense of outer space and environment.
And the name given to this two-directionality, Palintonicity, is not Godard’s. Heraclitus called the tension of opposites palintonic. It was brought into Rolfing by Jeff Maitland, a Rolfer and philosopher, who offered it as a way to speak about how the joy of structural integration feels and looks — as the notes to Kevin Frank and Caryn McHose’s book record.
The phenomenon of two directions is Godard’s; the word for it is Maitland’s. The same is true of the term Seeing.
As a System That Answers Gravity
From here, what supports that ability.
The Triangle of Support
The body receives its position in gravity through three doorways. The eyes, the feet, and the inner ear. The eyes take in the horizon and up-and-down; the feet take in the unevenness, texture, and temperature of the ground; the inner ear takes in changes in the position of the head. Deep in the ear a layer of crystals shifts, and that shift becomes a nerve signal reaching the brainstem.
Most of the neural work of the feet goes to gathering information from contact with the ground and organizing movement from it. The foot is a place of support and a place of reception at the same time.
That said, the phrase “triangle” is not consistently present in the Godard lineage of material. It does not appear in Frank and McHose’s 2006 book, and the inner ear is mentioned only once, in Godard’s foreword. It looks like a formulation that came later.
Two Ways of Seeing
| Focal vision | Peripheral vision | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Narrow | 180 degrees |
| Color | Color and black-and-white | Black-and-white only |
| Function | Detail, naming, distinguishing | Knowing where you are; locating yourself in relation to gravity |
Reading, driving, looking at a screen. Modern life leans heavily toward focal. Which mode you are in changes how you stand in gravity.
Controlled Instability
An unsupported spine buckles under about two kilograms. We stand not because we are stacking vertebrae.
The segments of the skeleton are built, if anything, to slip easily. That is what lets flexion, extension, and rotation happen smoothly. Instability is an evolutionary advantage. Rather than starting movement by exerting force, we change position quickly by letting go of muscular tone. The Canadian engineer Serge Gracovetsky called this controlled instability.
Hamstrings That Won’t Lengthen
Godard explains how this works in practice with a single example.
Hamstrings. Dancers stretch them every day, and sometimes they don’t respond. Change the perception, re-orient to both the ground and the sky, and they change immediately.
Which is why they are a good example of a tonic muscle, he says. They respond reflexively to the ground and to space. A tonic muscle is a muscle that stabilizes the center.
There is a paired observation. Someone entirely “up,” without ground, holds tension in the knees. Someone organizing from the ground holds it in the hips and hamstrings. Not the knees.
Tonic muscles do not respond to what you do. They respond only to how you build and orient in space. And he defines posture this way: posture is the ability to go in two directions. Fifty percent of an action needs to start from the floor; fifty percent needs to be suspended.
Perception as a Factor
The most distinctive thing about Godard’s thinking is here, I think. He put perception among the things that determine posture. How you feel space, how you take in a situation, changes muscular tone. Perception sits in the same list as skeletal alignment and the state of the fascia.
So what is perception? Not in this article. Perception itself is taken up in We Don’t See the Same Thing: Why Work with Perception?, and the body seen from the side of philosophy will have its own place.
Tonic Muscles and the Movement Before Movement
Muscles that work continuously have a distinctive temporal character. They take about five seconds to switch on, and about five seconds to release. Once on, they work tirelessly — but an accident, an injury, or a trauma can switch them off.
What these muscles handle is pre-movement. Standing and raising an arm forward, soleus goes first. Grasping something, serratus anterior goes before the hand. The tongue resting quietly against the palate keeps the neck and face stable. What Godard wrote in 1995 about the calf shows up, unchanged, in the training room.
Five seconds also means this layer does not go faster. You can try to hurry in a session; the layer has its own terms.
One more thing. In Rolf Movement training, the words “body schema” and “body image” are not used. The same territory is named with Tonic Function’s terms — pre-movement, fixed point. Different words, overlapping subject matter.
How Tonic Function Developed
If Godard is the one who brought it in, the one who organized it as theory and wrote it down is Kevin Frank. Certified Advanced Rolfer, Rolf Movement Practitioner, and Rolf Movement Instructor at the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute. He has worked with Tonic Function since 1991, wrote his first paper in 1995, and continued in 2007 and 2014. He takes the position that Rolfing is a system of information.
One found it; the other put it into words. That relationship became a book: How Life Moves (2006), co-written with Caryn McHose. The foreword is Godard’s.
Godard himself wrote very little. An article in 1994, an afterword to a history of dance in 1995, this foreword, and a short book on breathing in 2021. You can count them. So what was written mattered less than whether you were in the room.
Laid out in order, the writing shows how the theory took shape.
- 1995. Aline Newton set out Godard’s theory for Rolfers for the first time. The definition — “the body’s ability to organize itself in gravity” — is here. The same year, Kevin Frank wrote his first paper
- 2006. How Life Moves, by Kevin Frank and Caryn McHose, with Godard’s foreword. Its first two chapters were translated into Japanese by the Japan Rolfing Association in 2009 and are still available
- 2007 and 2014. Frank’s further papers: perception and coordination, and the psoas
- 2022. Per Haaland wrote the paper that sets out the model in its current form. This is what the European Rolfing Association points to as its account of Tonic Function
Thirty years of writing, a piece at a time. And still being added to.
Coming Next
We now have what Tonic Function points at. The body’s ability to organize itself in gravity. There is a system that supports it, and the order in which it releases makes coordination.
But a question is still open. Why, when we talk about this ability, do coordination, perception, and meaning come up alongside structure?
Part 3 takes that up. What does Tonic Function see?
※ Sources for this article: Aline Newton, “An Interview with Hubert Godard” (Rolf Lines, Winter 1992); Aline Newton, “Basic Concepts in the Theory of Hubert Godard” (Rolf Lines, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, March 1995, pp. 32–43); Caryn McHose, “Phenomenological Space: Interview with Hubert Godard” (Contact Quarterly, Summer/Fall 2006, pp. 32–38); Per Haaland, “Tonic Function Model: The Human Gravity Response System” (Structure, Function, Integration, Vol. 50, No. 3, November 2022).
This is Part 2 of Where Tonic Function Came From, a three-part series.