Episode Transcript

 

Transcript:

 

The Thinking Practitioner Episode 116: Anatomy Trains Updated (with Tom Myers)

 

Til Luchau:

Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner.

Thinking Practitioner podcast is supported by ABMP, Associated Bodywork and Massage professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education and quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with PocketSuite and much more.

Whitney Lowe:

And ABMP CE courses, podcasts, and Massage and Bodywork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including those from Til, myself and our special guest today. So Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking and Til who is our special guest with us today?

Til Luchau:

Tom Myers. Tom Myers is our special guest today. And Tom, it’s a pleasure to have you with us here today. Welcome, Tom.

Tom Myers:

Great to be here with both of you.

Til Luchau:

Yeah, you have written a large number of articles from Massage and Bodywork, but then also you have a long list of other publications. I’ll introduce you a little bit, then we’ll get into our conversation. You’re best known perhaps as the author of the book, Anatomy Trains, which I believe from my poking around this morning was first published in 2008. Is that right?

Tom Myers:

First published in 2000.

Til Luchau:

2000, okay. Now updated to its fourth edition. So not only has your Anatomy Trains concept had a big influence on hands-on bodywork, but it’s really widely used as a model in yoga and movement therapies, athletic training and more. In fact, I’ve started doing some collaboration with some dance teachers and when they hear that I have some myofascial background, they want me to talk about Anatomy Trains when they come in. Oh, isn’t myofascial Anatomy Trains? Isn’t that the same thing?

Okay, so I saw that your book is still, what is this? 24 years after it first appeared ranked by Amazon as their number three bestselling title in physical therapy to this day, as well as their eighth bestselling physiology book. And I would say, that book has arguably done more to familiarize people with the work coming out of Ida Rolf’s lineage than any other single title. And I want to hear your thoughts on that, but with that in mind, I also thought the listeners will interested in some of the background and context for you, for your work and give us a chance to update on what you’re up to now.

So I got a disclosure to make first too, before I turn it over to you, I want to acknowledge Tom, my own debt of gratitude to you for being the one of my earliest fascial anatomy teachers back at the Rolf Institute in the mid-1980’s. And then a few years later, hiring me there at the Rolf Institute where I assisted you, then later taught and then stayed for 20 years, and that was really the beginning of my own career in the teaching field. And you’ve done me the honor of inviting me to your summer program in Maine, which we’ll mention a bit more at this end, to come teach one of my workshops. So Thank you, Tom.

Tom Myers:

Oh, you’re so welcome. One of the better decisions that I made at the Rolf Institute was to bring you in as I stepped out.

Til Luchau:

That’s a nice thing to say. So where do you want to start? I’m curious about some of your origin story. How’d you get started in this field? What drew you to it? What’s kept you in it? That kind of thing.

Tom Myers:

It depends on how far back you want to go. I grew up in divided between science and art. I had two older brothers. One was an artist and one was a scientist. And so I was a doctor monkey. I didn’t become a doctor and I was an actor monkey. I wanted to become an actor. I think I found my niche in between a doctor and an actor. First as a practice in which I was fortunate to do Rolfing. And straight Rolfer, I did the 10 sessions faithfully on many, many people. Of course, I did fix-It sessions and one-off sessions and shoulder sessions and sessions for pregnancy and things like that. But I was straight down the road for a very long time. And it was 25 years before, and I journeyed through Feldenkrais and Emily Conrad for movement and European osteopathy. So cranial work and visceral work all impinged on my work, but movement was a big thing about that. And when I wrote Anatomy Trains, I didn’t put any technique in the book deliberately because I wanted to see if it would appeal to other people and it did in that way.

So that building of the Anatomy Trains was a slow road that you were in on the beginning of there at the Rolf Institute because all the anatomy books were dividing the muscles up and Ida was saying, “Well, the fascia joins everything up.” And so it got its retro name because I was just going, “Well, you can get on the train here and you can get on the external oblique and go over to the internal oblique,” and Anatomy Trains just stuck on that.

Til Luchau:

I remember some of your first iterations of that there in the foundations at the Rolf Institute where you were talking about trains, the sequential combinations of work there. And then you’ve developed it of course into the book and into a body of work and into the central tenet, I think of your hands-on approach and probably movement approach as well. And is it fair to say that you took inspiration from Ida Rolf’s holistic vision, that everything’s connected, that the connections are what matters more than the parts and looked to make a map that people could follow? Since we are reductionists in our thinking, we want a step by step or a piece by piece understanding of that holism. Is that a fair way to think about it?

Tom Myers:

Yeah, except that I’d give a whole lot more credit to Ida Rolf in the way that I have iterated that particular work. So Anatomy Trains, as you mentioned, and as I’ve been really grateful to see has been used in trainers and in dance and in trigger point therapy and kinesiotaping and all kinds of things that had application to that is not structural integration, what I learned at the Rolf Institute, you learned at the Rolf Institute. And the building of the trains was something that happened slowly over the 80s and 90s when we first knew each other and after.

And then the other thing that happened was like Saul on the road to Damascus being hit by lightning and knocked off this horse. It was a very sudden realization that I could reconfigure an Ida Rolf’s 10 session series. I would say front line, back line, lateral line, but she divided it differently. But what hit me on road to whatever Damascus I was going to was that I could reconfigure these sessions in terms of these continuities. And I went to the Rolf Institute and said, “Can I do this?” And they said, “No, it’s too far from the orthodoxy.” And so I said, “Well, give me a leave of absence so I can go and teach this.”

So I tried to teach the 10 series all of the lines and very rapidly, within a year or two because those students brought on other students and I’ve had that role ever since and I’m very happy. I think the Rolf Institute is doing a wonderful job, the Guild, it’s resurrected, it’s doing a great job. Just so happy to see the field of structural integration burgeon and I have a very particular take on it, which is Ida said, “Only works for one generation, then you have to have some basis.” So Anatomy Trains and putting structural integration into Anatomy Trains was my attempt to give it a basis other than Ida said, “Do this first, do this second, do this third.”

I can explain it instead in terms of we address the anatomical continuity along the front of the body first. That’s generally what we do. Then we go to the back, then we go to the sides and we go to this spiral. Then we go into the core, what I call the deep front line, which goes all the way from your inner ankle up to the bottom of your skull as one fascial piece.

So I had the opportunity to get into the lab and dissect all of these lines both on the skeleton, leave them on the skeleton, take everything else away, but also to take the myofascial continuity that goes all the way from your tongue to your inner ankle off as one piece. The only bone in it is the hyoid bone right here. Depending on whether you want to include the jaw or not. The jaw is the limb of the head going down into this hyoid system that then envelops the heart, that then goes to the transverse system, the psoas, on the pelvic floor and down the inside of the leg. I’m glad I’ve lived so long to be able to demonstrate them in the lab, which will be coming out in the 5th edition of the book, which is contracted but not yet written.

Til Luchau:

You dissected these out and you showed physical continuities, took a beyond concept into dissection images, which-

Tom Myers:

Well, as soon as the book came out in 2000, the general reaction among professionals was, “That’s great, Tom, but it’s in your imagination.” I don’t have the wherewithal patience to actually research myofascial force transmission, which is what Ida was positing, that your posture changes because of myofascial force transmission that is sent through the body that responds. One thing we haven’t mentioned is Buckminster Fuller and tensegrity, this idea that the bones float in a soft tissue, an elastic thing in the fascia, the myofascia, the muscles, and together our elastics and the bones are the ice cream sticks. And that kind of engineering-

Til Luchau:

Sorry, for our listeners, you’re showing us a model of sticks and stretchy parts, tensegrity model that shows how it moves suspended in space.

Tom Myers:

I’m sorry, I just got off another Zoom call in which I could be seen.

Til Luchau:

We’ll have some people on our YouTube channel watching too.

Tom Myers:

Okay, good. But this, you can certainly see it on our website or just look up tensegrity applied to the body. That was a unique part of my education that got me to look at the Anatomy Trains in terms of the holistic elastics pulling in, the bonds being the incompressible struts pushing out, and that instead of having, which we see in every God damned massage, physiotherapy, any training that’s going on, there’s a skeleton hanging in there, and it gives you the impression that we have a stable skeleton inside, which is moved around body, individual muscles. Supraspinatus does the first 15 degrees, and then my deltoid takes over to 89 degrees, and then the trapezius…

It’s not like that. It’s a whole coordinated thing and explaining the shoulder in terms of leverage, people stopped trying to do that 100 years ago. It’s really a tensegrity. And we don’t have the engineer. I don’t have the precise engineering. I’m not that engineer either, but the idea of how that works translates so well into trying to make a significant change in somebody’s posture. It’s easy to make a temporary change in somebody’s posture. It’s easy to make insignificant changes in people’s posture, but can you make a significant sustainable change? That’s been my quest all through my career with everybody who comes.

Til Luchau:

We got to go there. So what’s your takeaway? Can we make a sustainable change in people’s posture?

Tom Myers:

Yes, but not everybody. Okay, so there are-

Whitney Lowe:

I want to hear too, what’s your thought on the mechanism of how that occurs? How we’re doing that?

Tom Myers:

Well, we’re working with two things. We’re working with a neuromuscular set. Now I would say that’s the underlying noise or expulsion of the nervous system, down the motor nerves, into the muscles.

Til Luchau:

Resting tone, posture, reflexes.

Tom Myers:

But it’s from the every minute of every day how I hold my muscles to something that’s habitual, to something that’s sporadic, to something that’s occasional. I’m lifting a whole bunch of weight that I don’t usually lift. All of those are subject to the constraints of psychology, physiology, and physics. You don’t get to escape those. And I loved Ida’s saying, “Get your physics under your metaphysics.” So when we start talking about emotion and all the things that bodies do, the outer limit of those is what physiology will do and what physics will do. So you can’t change the body in a way that doesn’t concord with those three things. So the psychology of the person is expressed in that neuromuscular set, expressed finally in behavior as that neuromuscular set. And so if you don’t change that, you’re not going to change the posture very much. You could call it psychological, but it’s definitely neurological that lies in the neurology.

Now, here’s the problem I have with the neurology. In ’57 Wilder Penfield mapped the brain by taking small electrodes. You can operate on somebody’s brain when they’re wide awake, you just have to anesthetize the skull. So he was opening up, he didn’t want to take good brain along with the tumor. So with his little electrode, he’s the one that why we know that the sensory gyrus and the motor gyrus are in the parietal lobe, and he would hit somebody’s occipital lobe and a light would flash for them. And so that’s how we map the brain. But when he touched the temporal lobe, people on the table would say, well, I know I’m in an operation, but I can smell the bougainvillea when I’m walking up towards my grandmother’s house. Very vivid memories. And so Penfield said, “Well, hearing, but also memory is stored in the temporal lobe and it’s stored in engrams.”

That was 1957. It’s 2024. What is an engram? Tell me. What is the substrate of memory? Nobody has come up with the substrate of memory. It’s crucial to understanding change of body behavior, but also to just consciousness in the body. How do we construct memory? And we’ve made some advances in neurology, but nobody can still tell me what an engram is. What is the substrate of memory in the body? So people come up to me and they want us to talk about cellular memory and muscular memory and fascial memory and my answer to that is I don’t know what a regular memory is, so I don’t know about all these other. How are we getting there? I’m sorry. I got off on a rant about that.

Til Luchau:

You’re talking about how our ability to change posture, to have a lasting change in posture involves, you call it this neuromuscular set.

Tom Myers:

Interaction between the neuromuscular set and what we can call the fascial set, but I would include cartilage and bones. So in our body, our body is all made up of cells, of the 40 trillion in our gut. But the 40 trillion make us up nerves, muscles, epithelial and connective tissue. That’s all you get to build this thing up. But it’s not all you get because there is inert. So-called inert. Guimberteau would call it living matter. So it’s part of your living matter. That’s a philosophical question for when we break out the cognac, but it’s in your body, which is your skeleton. It’s maintained by cells, but it’s largely acellular. It’s largely non-cellular material, extracellular matrix. So it’s always an interplay between the extracellular matrix, fascia, bone, cartilage, joint capsules, et cetera, the adventitia, loose tissue, and what the cells are doing. Specifically for us, what the neuromuscular set is in the posture.

So I have to persuade people to move differently or to stand differently or to approach how they’re going to get in and out of the car or any of those things. There’s going to have to be a nervous system reeducation as part of that. That was, I think, the fundamental thing that Ida have recognized when she brought Judith Aston into the Rolf Institute, that she was doing a great job with the manipulation and she was. She was a white witch in that kind of thing, but her approach to movement was as stilted as mine. And I grew up in New England. So I have educated myself in movement since then, and I’m now 75 and still kicking. So I’m very grateful to Judith and other movement teachers for that. But I’m very grateful to Ida for getting me off the streets and giving me something useful to do with my hands.

But can you make a change in people? I use the image of the Continental Divide, which runs right down through where you are, I think, not where I am. And if a raindrop lands on one side of that Continental Divide, it’s going to end up in the Columbia River. If it drops three inches on the other side, it’s going to end up in the Mississippi River. The Continental Divide is a this way or that way. When somebody comes to you for this kind of change, I’m not talking about fixing their funny hip or their low back pain or the wonky neck, that’s a job. But if you’re doing this thing that we do in structural integration, which is okay, the airplane is flying at this level, we’d like the airplane to fly at a higher altitude, it wouldn’t run into so many mountains. So instead of dynamiting the mountains in front of you trying to fix things, let’s lift the level of the airplane.

So if you’re involved in a lift the level of the airplane project, in other words, getting somebody from one level of vitality to really another functioning, sustainable level of vitality, that’s going to involve changing the whole pattern, changing the whole body, changing that neuromuscular set and changing how the inert parts, the extracellular matrix, has responded over the years.

And if you simply go into training without addressing that fascial part of it, you’ll get somewhere with the training for sure, but to get into those deep dark corners is hard for a trainer or hard for a yoga teacher, hard for the practitioner, but also hard for the person because those areas are so forgotten, so out of the proprioceptive body map that our hands are so helpful in finding those number three areas. And by number three areas, I mean areas that are inert for us and therefore unrepresented in our brain that we break that sensory motor amnesia with new sensory data.

Which means we do have to look at the bodies because if we’re working on the same old places or if we’re working on the places that they’re telling us to work, “Oh, my back is sore. Please work on my back.” “No, it’s your front that needs the work, then your back will calm down. Yes, we’ll touch your back to reduce the inflammation and to get things to ease up, but if I’m working where you’re asking me to, I’m running on your story, and if your story worked, you’d have already fixed this by now.” I need to have another story than the client has. I don’t want to say that the clients lie, but they lie all the time because they don’t see the reality of what’s going on with them.

So if you buy their story, you’ve just become their servant. You’re bought into healing them. It’s a deal I don’t want to make with my clients. I make the client, I make the deal with a client that you come to it with your intelligence and your problems, and I come to it with my intelligence and my problems, you’re paying me money, so the focus is on you, not me. I get myself out of the way and then I can give you some attention to whatever’s going on. And that’s about it. That’s all I’ve got to offer you. My attention is owned by having touched a lot of the people over the years, but it is not expert in the sense that it’s much more.. I know, Whitney, at least as I read your stuff, I love how you stay on the side of evidence-based practice. And my stuff is much more based on practice-based evidence. It’s not evidence.

Whitney Lowe:

One of the things I wanted to ask you here in framing this with the way your work has evolved over the years. We had an episode just recently on the podcast with Greg Lehman from Toronto talking about the world of biomechanics, and we got into a discussion of forms. How important is it for people to keep doing certain movements of certain form or a certain way? And I’m curious what your thoughts are now and have they evolved for the models, it seems, at least my perception of some of the early models that came out of the Rolfing world were about trying to get a lot of people to accommodate or match a particular type of model or structure. And it seems like that’s evolved a lot now. And so I just want to hear your take on how… Because it seems like there’s so much variability and individuality of what people might be experiencing or exploring in their body.

Tom Myers:

And I can draw a really exact parallel to that with Joseph Pilates, who was likewise somebody who emerged as a thought leader in the interwar period between the first World War and the second World War. And they were reacting to the Edwardians and the Victorians who had really strong lumbar curves because their chest were up and their vests were buttoned and they had a bustle. And so Ida Rolf was waistline back, top of the head up, other things, and we looked like a bunch of twits trying to force ourselves into that particular form. Not only that, but she never met a posterior pelvis she didn’t like. And my teacher who brought me into anatomy, his name was Louis Schultz, and he had the most posterior pelvis ever. And Ida used to line us up with the person with the most posterior pelvis at one end of the line, and the person with the most anterior at the other end. I had an anterior pelvis, so I ended up down there and scathing would be heaped upon those with an anterior pelvis and praise would be heaped on those with a posterior pelvis.

And Louis was one of those who had a really posterior sacrum, old man’s ass, flat back kind of thing. And I loved him dearly, and he was a great guy, but he spent the last couple years of his life in the Greenwich Village on Canadian crutches because that posterior pelvis is not a stable thing. Over time for your LFI, your lumbar curve, etc, you need balanced curves. So her model was suited to her time and in the Anatomy Trains model, I’m not so focused around a thing that she had called the line and everybody should get on their line. So when we do this, if we were to describe what we’re doing in structural integration in the most physical reductionistic terms, we are trying to bring everything toward the center and elongate along middle. So that a skater, when she starts turning, she has her arms out, and then when she pulls them in, she’ll turn into a whirler on that center line.

But that’s what we’re trying to do with just human posture, that things when they get out of line, they are going to reduce your ability to move efficiently and increase the amount of work that the joints have to do. That, I think we can do with a whole lot of people. How many people can we make that kind of vitality change with the folks having one level of vitality as they come in and another level of vitality that’s sustainable for them a few months after they come out of the process? That’s something we’re still learning about, but it happens enough in my practice to keep me interested and vitally alive because those are the most interesting clients and the most interesting process. They’re not necessarily the most interesting clients, but they’re the most interesting processes to go through as a therapist.

And those kinds of journeys of transformation, even if there’s only X per year, are enough to keep me going and enjoying the fix-it work and the other things that I’m trying to do to relieve things but not really change the insights fundamentally. I don’t know how that works with your thing with Greg, but…

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. So if I can, one more thing. I wanted to go back to the whole Anatomy Trains thing for a moment too, because there’s another question that I’ve always wanted to ask you, and we’ve never gotten a chance to chat about this with the idea, this concept of these long fascial lines extending the whole length of the body, and obviously there are points along those pathways where those connective tissues are tethered to other things and other structures, and so my question is, do you know, is there any way to measure the degree of dissipation of those tensile forces, let’s say throughout the long line of a fascial connection, or has anybody done anything like that?

Tom Myers:

Yes, it’s very clear that there’s lots of dissipation to each side. So when I have done the Anatomy Trains, I’m trying to be very clear about this all the time, that these are just one set of fascial connections going through the body. If you just grab your lower leg in your hand, you are holding all the connections from the gastrocnemius to the soleus to the deep posterior compartment. All the compartments there are all tied together as one. When you go up for a basketball jump and you come down, the Achilles tendon is not taking all that weight. It’s not strong enough to. The body is not a strain focusing machine, it’s a strain distributing machine. So that strain distributes over sideways from muscle group to muscle group, and a lot of that is dissipated.

I think the Anatomy Trains being long things really lend themselves more to a postural analysis, a long-term change in the spine and long-term changes in the hips in the relationship to the feet more than to the functional stuff. I’ve been very gratified that trainers and other people in the movement world have found it useful, but my own self, I think it’s best application is to these kinds of postural things that Rolfing is supposed to address itself to.

Til Luchau:

I’m remembering a conversation we had in Maine last time I was your guest there, pre-Covid sometime, and I was ribbing you a little bit about, why didn’t you call it anatomy trees or anatomy branches? Why are they lines? What is this long line thing when the figure that’s tossed around is 30%? 30% of a muscle’s pull is distributed to surrounding structures as opposed to the bone it’s attached to.

Tom Myers:

As opposed to at the other end of the muscle attachment.

Til Luchau:

Yeah.

Tom Myers:

Yeah, but long-term strains, the question for the house because Whitney was just right, we call the muscle parts tracks and the parts where it tacks down onto the deeper layer as stations, so to emphasize the continuity of the train. Now, how much is transferred over the head of the fibula from the perennial compartment, which is a tube about the size of a straw, just a bit bigger than a straw. Look at Robert Schleip’s section of it. How much of that strain is distributed over the head of the fibula to what? Could be either the eliotibial band, which also comes to the fibula, or could be the short head of the biceps or the biceps femoris in general. That is a question that researchers are starting to answer. Jan Wilke has been doing this work really nicely, slowly, carefully. He did a literature search and found the superficial back line, but can’t find the superficial front line. So now he’s going to work to see if there is transmission along these lines by ultrasound and other methods.

And that still is very short-term. What they’re looking at is very short-term, and what I’m looking at myself in patterns of people are very long-term patterns that seem to be held in place by lines. Very many people, if you look at them from the side, will have an arc from shoulder to ankle. If they have an arc from shoulder to ankle, then that’s a bow. If there’s a bow, there’s a bowstring. The bowstring is the superficial back line. Somewhere along there, that will be shorter. The front line, the skeleton will have been pushed into the front line. So the front line will be tight and people will be complaining about things on the front line, but it’s the back line that needs to lengthen.

Likewise, genu valgas or genu vargus, somebody with bow legs, with o-legs with genu varus is going to complain about everything on the outside of the leg. They’re going to have the iliotibial band-friction syndrome. They’ll have anobarsiditis at the trochanter, they’ll have some irritation at the iliac crest, but the fascia is short on the inside between the ischial pubic ramus, the bottom of the pelvis and the inner ankle, and that’s pushing the skeleton out. It’s pushing the knee out. So yeah, the complaints are on the strained side, but it’s the short side that needs to lengthen if we’re thinking fascially. Do we then need to do functional things with the abductors and the adductors around all that? Absolutely.

But the fascial part of it, you ignore it. Maybe sometimes it’s your peril, but you certainly, if you ignore it, are going to have a lot more time in training to try to get the muscles to change the fascia than if you take some of these areas that have glommed into that omnidirectional goo that we see in places that are not functionally working and one, comb out the goo and the goo in there, and two, reawaken the nervous system. You do both of those with your hands when you go into these areas that are so totally forgotten that they can’t tell you about them anymore. So you have to-

Til Luchau:

Okay, so fascia, how are you thinking about it?

Tom Myers:

Yeah, fascia.

Til Luchau:

Fascia. How are you thinking about it these days? Because there was a bunch of stuff a few years ago,, “Tom Myers says he’s over fascia,” you’re so over it, was the quote that came up.

Tom Myers:

A CNN reporter called me and was trying to do something on foam rolling, I believe, and you do these interviews and then the thing that comes out is so totally not what you said. I said you’re unlikely to lengthen the iliotibial then or the plantar fascia by rolling it under your foot. Might feel good, might feel better, but you’re not actually lengthening the fascia. That’s what I said. And so that came over as, “Tom Myers says, fascia can’t change.” I don’t know if that’s what you’re referring to.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, what do you really think?

Tom Myers:

I think that that’s true. You are not going to significantly change the length of that part of your exosymbiotic skeleton, of the extracellular matrix, however, that around the plantar fascia on the upside, you have all the toe flexors attaching to it. That’s why it’s the plantar aponeurosis. On the underside, you have all that fat that’s attached to it. You have those tendons coming through. Those things can get stuck together. It’s definitely worthwhile to, as I have for 50 years, put your fist in the plantar fascia and go down. Just don’t tell me you’re lengthening it. We’re doing something, but I think we’re taking away the extra bits and you don’t see the extra bits in the anatomy books because they’ve all been cleaned away. Can I give you one more example?

Til Luchau:

For sure.

Tom Myers:

Psoas tendon. Always shows the psoas tendon heanly going over the oedipectinia ridge and going down to attach in a very precise point on the lesser trochanter. If you on a living person or on a cadaver, we have to open it in a particular way, pull on the psoas from above, in other words, tense psoas, if I put my fingers in coming in on the inside to the lesser trochanter and have my client lift their foot off the table so that the psoas is contracted, it’s not a clean tendon that goes to the lesser trochanter. A tent appears, it pulls up a tent. Now that tent is extra fascia that has attached itself to the psoas, which is not palpable when the psoas is relaxed. So we all do a lot of palpation with the psoas totally relaxed, but as soon as the psoas engages, you realize, oh my God, it’s got a lot of these tendrils that are going sideways to distribute the force or to make the origin of the psoas bigger or whatever it’s doing, but it’s accumulated over the years.

My job is not to lengthen the psoas tendon by going in there or to scrape it off the lesser trochanter or anything like that. My job is to reduce the tent so that it looks more like the book looks. It looks less fettered and cluttered with extra stuff. Here’s another one. If I put my hands on the side of the neck and all I have to do is touch the scalenes and they’re saying my brachial plexus, that’s not that my hands are in the wrong place, it’s that the fascia is so tight around their scalenes that when you touch it anywhere, the fascia is pulling through to the brachial plexus.

That tells me I need to comb that extra bit away so that the brachial plexus has movement in and out as it needs to independently of the scalene fascia. That’s a gentle combing thing that I need to do to let those structures differentiate. Then I can talk about integrating that function. Why did that happen? Oh, they have such a head forward posture. Maybe we can lift ribs one and two to make this change that we’ve made more sustainable for them. The sustainable part, the part of fix it that I truly would like to see more attention paid to in physio and other-

Til Luchau:

Well, what you’re describing fits with the Steccos emphasis on gliding and differentiation more than stretching and lengthening. And I remember the chapter you co-authored with somebody, and I have it up here on the shelf, tensional network, where you said, “No, we can’t actually make that much difference in the passive length of fascia, but there are physiological mechanisms going on that might explain some of what we’re feeling.

Tom Myers:

Yeah, it’s really hard to separate what are fascial changes from what are neurological or other just circulatory changes. Just changes in hydration and profusion.

Til Luchau:

Yeah. Or a willingness to move on.

Tom Myers:

Any others figure out the actual mechanisms of these things, I do like watching what happens after I intervene with my hands, and I have a story about fascia that I’m telling, but water and nerves play into it too.

Til Luchau:

Okay. Here’s the new track. What is it, do you think, about this lineage that you and I are part of, Ida Rolf’s lineage, that caused it to be so pervasive or influential? Why do you think so many influential bodywork teachers trace their pathway back through all things like you, like Eric Dalton, Art Riggs, Judith Aston, James Earls in the UK, et cetera. What was she up to? What was she part of that has caused it to persist so much like this?

Tom Myers:

That’s a good question. I do think that she was ahead of her time on Holism, and so we’ve done 300 years since Burelli published in 1687, and we’ve thought about that mechanical way that muscles have moved for these 400 years or 300 years, something. We’ve learned a great deal from it. But now the question that Ida was asking, the question that I tried to answer with the Anatomy Trains is, well, how particularly if we start putting things back together, can we look at the body differently? I don’t think the Anatomy Trains is going to last very long. It’s a transitional model between a more facial model that I’m working with other old Rolfer Jeff Lin to create new images out of the visible human data set, and that’s going really well to where I hope we can present a more facially based anatomy within a few years. If I last so long.

Anyway, the project’s underway, but whatever happens. And we will be thinking about this much more in terms of gliding between planes. What Gil’s talking about with perifacial membranes, we see so many adhesions in the dissections. “Adhesions,” I’ve got air quotes around that because they would allow a certain amount of movement, but do they allow the full range of movement? I don’t know. We haven’t done the studies on that yet, and I’m not the researcher who’s going to do it.

Til Luchau:

So mechanisms aside, maybe what’s persisted is something different.

Whitney Lowe:

Oh, yes,

Til Luchau:

Something different, maybe it’s the inspiration, maybe it’s the vision. You said her model of completeness, her model of the whole body. She was really a master at positioning her ideas in her work too, that helped people really see the value, like her asking for a commitment of 10 sessions or charging more than anybody else was charging at the time or having rigorous entrance requirements to her trainings. So she constructed a school and an offering that inspired a lot of people and inspired people to see value in it. Do you have advice for practitioners given all that, and given that you’re an elder in that tribe, how would practitioners reinforce, say, the perceived value of their work now? Do you have any ideas about that?

Tom Myers:

Oh, I think we occupy a unique position in the bodywork marketplace, and I’m not devaluing anything from point work like Steckos or trigger point work. There’s so many multiple good approaches to the body. I think we have a niche between osteopathy and massage that is looking at the form and what are the limits to changing the form, which is a question we addressed earlier. There are obvious limits, but are those limits really where we’ve thought they were? Or are older people more amenable to change? Could we do a much better job with younger people to have a structural hygiene? We just don’t have that right now in society. So I think she was pointing towards that. I have a really strong thing about the process of 10 sessions. I know I changed it well, but that’s not very important or big.

But the idea that it has a beginning and a middle and an end is something that I wish all psychology schools and massage schools, how to successfully graduate a client. It’s one of the things we do in our training is how do you successfully graduate a client at the end of… Well, well, it means that the beginning of the line, you’re saying, “Well, how are we doing with this process? We’re coming towards the end. What do you think could be next for you?” Not getting into this thing of the 30th session and the 50th session with this person week after week after week. It’s just become a dependency relationship at that point. You’re not making that big a difference in their lives. They’re not making that big a difference in your joy and happiness. You need to Marie Kondo your practice in a big time way if you’ve got lots of people who you’ve seen for dozens and dozens and dozens of times. What are you doing?

Til Luchau:

You’re talking Marie Kondo, I mean, does this bring you joy? Does this-

Tom Myers:

Yes, does this… I don’t have a practice like that anymore, but I would look at my client book regularly and say, “If this is a long-term client, am I really still doing some good for them or am I just their weekly fix of nurturing feelings and nice touch and something that feels relieving and intervening?” I’m not willing to make that deal with my clients. I’m not interested in that. So most people that I see, there’s nothing magic about the number 10 or 12, but most of the clients I would see for a two or three months period and then say, “Great, now it’s time for you to go see a Feldenkrais practitioner. Go do some Pilates.” We’ll talk about that. What’s next? What’s the next thing for them? But not me again and again, then again, then again.

Til Luchau:

So you’re shifting the model between an ongoing indefinite massage relationship, and you’re saying in this lineage we have this idea of a series, and that by itself creates a sense of value or a sense of finiteness that reinforces the perceived value?

Tom Myers:

Well, it’s a sense of process. It’s not like they can’t ever come back again. I’ve got clients that I’ve been seeing for 10 years, but I don’t see them regularly for 10 years. I see them irregularly. Once a year for two or three sessions or twice a year for two or three sessions. So I have an ongoing relationship with them, but I just don’t have that kind of weekly dependency. It’s not always dependency, but it frequently resolves in that kind of a way if you go on and on and on and on. There’s less and less value coming out of each particular session that you’re doing with them. And when I feel that less value coming out, it’s hard for me to continue. They may want to continue, but I’ve run my course on it. I would be false if I didn’t Marie Kondo them through some other joint person at that point.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. I want to go back for just a second too to something else that you were saying earlier in relation to your thoughts about some of the newer research that’s come out about contractile cells being present in fascia. If it’s shortened in a lot of these situations that you’re talking about where there’s an apparent postural ramification from a shortening on one side and a lengthening on the other side, what is causing fascial shortening? Is it these contractile cells or is it adhesions or what is causing fascia to shorten?

Tom Myers:

Okay, I will answer the question about fascia shortening. I want to say one other thing about Ida Rolf. She was a freaking giant. She just was amazing. You were asking why she had so much effect on Buckford and so many people, as did Alan Watson and a lot of people back in the day. But she did have an outsized influence, and I think one of the bravest things she ever did in her life, she had a very successful teaching career teaching chiropractors, osteopaths, physios, et cetera in Europe and the states. And she gave that all up in 1960 and went to these bunch of crazies out at Esalen, which were not her natural ilk at all. She wore a suit every day and always had her hair up with a flower in it. And I heard her say the word “fuck” once in all the time that I spent with her. And she or she was among the conga playing dope smoking hippies of California.

And the reason that she did that was because people were taking her techniques and applying them to fix it work. But very few people were taking on this idea of a thing, a project is what I was talking about a bit ago, and carry that through and then let people go. I think that’s a unique selling point of what she did. And I’m in the last years of my life really in my school promoting this idea of short term contract, project based work rather than endless work, because I think the endless work just dulls your soul. It’s the practitioner I’m thinking about in this, not the client.

Okay, active fascial bowel contraction via the monofibroblasts. Everybody should know this is the only way in which fascia contracts. There is no other motor nerves going to fascia. No other way that we’ve seen that the fascia contracts other than through trauma and scarring, that it gets a little shorter than it was before as well as thicker and more felty. But if you have a fascial contracture, that’s because the muscle contracted, like in a kid with cerebral palsy or something. The muscle contracted. The fascia was there for so long that it is now built in a contracted position, but the fascia didn’t contract. The muscle contracted. The fascia responded in the same way that it does with all of us to that neuromuscular set. In this case, the neuromuscular set never changed. So the fascia simply set in that position.

Okay, now if we’re talking about the myofibroblasts, we need to know that the myofibroblasts are closer to smooth muscle cells than striated muscle cells. So they work in a spiral contraction, not a linear contraction. I suppose if you put a whole bunch of them together in a row, you could get a linear contraction out of it. But when you say one side is shorter than the other, due to myofibroblasts, I’ve got one eyebrow raised. Really? It’s not muscles that is doing that. I think it’s mostly the muscles that start it. We’ve seen myofibroblasts may be active in Dupuytren’s contracture here as a mountain or various physiology or pathology. We know that they get active in my legs when I’ve done one of my fourteen-hour plane trips because water begins to gather. And so the coral fascia, the myofibroblasts, get active in the corral fascia and bring it in. We also know if you’re working out, the myofibroblasts will get active in your thoracolumbar fascia.

We know that they produce a few Newtons worth of force, and that that is appreciable in terms of the stiffness of the thoracolumbar fascia, and therefore it’s readiness to resume loads. But I have never seen any evidence that myofibroblasts, other than the Dupuytren’s contracture, were the cause of postural changing. So I started de-emphasizing the myofibroblasts in my talking, simply because people grab on it and say, “Oh, fascia is contracting.” Well, kind of, but there’s no nerves going to those myofibroblasts. They don’t run on caffeine, they don’t run on adrenaline. They run on oxytocin and nitric oxide. It’s a very physiological, not a psychological or biomechanical thing in my opinion.

Til Luchau:

And you’re continuing to grow beyond the muscular model, which was again, questioned by Ida Rolf originally. And you helped me think beyond back in the ’80s or whatever it was, but there’s that idea that, well, we could just treat fascia like a muscle that’s contracting and it’s pulling in this way in my muscle’s mind, we’re realizing there’s so many other ways that it may be participant or not in the picture. There’s so many other factors as well.

Tom Myers:

Again, I love Ida Rolf. I think she was a genius. There was nothing in her whole fascial talk, because we didn’t know it in the ’70s, about the elasticity of fascia. There is nothing in walking and nothing in yoga that builds the elasticity of the fascia. If you’re doing nothing but a stretching yoga practice, you are not utilizing the properties of fascia that we now know are there.

Til Luchau:

Tell me about your changing view of using the properties. She was not a fan of exercise, Ida Rolf.

Tom Myers:

She said, “You get all the exercise you need walking down the street,” once you got Rolfed, once all the muscles were balanced.

Til Luchau:

Yeah, and as I understood it, her objection was that we could press or harden the body or thicken things, and her work was about the opposite. But your work has really been picked up with a gusto by personal trainers, by yoga teachers, as you mentioned, by movement folks. So where’s the bridge? Tell me about how your views say, on exercise or activity have evolved beyond what Ida was saying or how they’re different.

Tom Myers:

Well, I just have not been able to stay with her thing that only this work is necessary and that then with a balanced set of muscles, you don’t need to then put them through the movements. That’s not anything about Rolfing. That is about the fact that we built a zoo and we live in it. Humans have built a zoo around themselves where they go on flat surfaces where the need to move is simply not there anymore. And I don’t mean to sound like a grumpy old man. I’m certainly part of that myself. I spent all my college years hunched over a typewriter and pouring over books and not thinking about my body at all. So it was a great revelation to me to come back to it via Tai Chi and Rolfing and all the things that I ran into in the early ’70s in Boulder.

Til Luchau:

I remember you saying when you got the urge to exercise, you would lie down until it passes, Woody Allen’s line.

Tom Myers:

You’re bringing up one of the lines that I’ve forgotten that students bring up to me every once in a while. Something that I said 20 years ago, that’s no longer… Absolutely, at age 55, I was sitting there with my bad bod and I got the research from Robert Schleich that said, “You can train elasticity.” And listen, elasticity is a property of youth. If little Johnny falls down the stairs, there might be tears at the bottom, but if Grandma falls down the stairs, it might be much more serious than that. And that’s mostly a function of elasticity. And so I said, “Okay, I can do something about that.” So I began running on my toes, doing four foot running, my heels never touched the ground, and I look like a white ass deer running along the road.

And I do want to run on the road because I want something hard. I want to bounce. I want my ligaments to be stretched and recoiled, stretched and recoiled. I want my Achilles tendon and my plantar fascia to be stretched and recoiled, stretched and recoiled because that builds elasticity at almost every level. I’ve been trying to figure out where the elasticity is in the fascia. It’s everywhere. It’s at the molecular level, it’s at the macromolecular level, it’s at the fiber and the fibril and then the crimp, and there’s just every level has elasticity tucked into it. So I don’t know exactly which layer I’m working on, and there’s different kinds of elasticity. I’m talking about this particular with a very low constitutive. Anyway, like a Super Ball. I’m working on my fascia to be elastic like a Super Ball. There is also an elasticity that is more like a gummy worm. If you stretched out a gummy worm, Robert used to do this, stretch out a gummy worm and put it next to the unstretched gummy worm in a half an hour, the one you stretched will come back.

Now, that’s not the kind of elasticity that Reeves was studying and that I took up when I was doing my running. Those are cycles that have to be about a second, between an 8/10ths of a second and 1.2 seconds rhythm. So walking does that, running does that, skipping rope does that, bouncing of any kind does that. Yoga just doesn’t have that in the lexicon of the movements. Tai Chi doesn’t have that in the lexicon of the movements. Tai Chi and yoga are wonderful. They’re very well worked out, but you couldn’t not walk in those days that Tai Chi and yoga were made. You can get through all day here without doing much walking in the electronic industrial world. So I might save face with Ida Rolf because I’m going to have to face her soon. And I might say, “Well, things have changed and now we need more exercise.” But honestly, I think we needed more exercise then too. The combination of the fascial work and the exercise work is a much better combination for me rather than just the work or just exercise.

Whitney Lowe:

And I just want to make a quick plug too. If I remember, you’ve been a very strong advocate of the whole idea of changing the whole model of physical education in schools as needing to really be very different and change that focus for a long time.

Tom Myers:

Yes, because the kinds of things that I run into are, well, bad obstetrics is really bad on mothers and bad on babies if they’re using forceps and other things that damage the babies in birth. But just movement hygiene for if we taught parents how their babies moved and that they got interested in how that first year, because so much learning happens in that first year, and we put almost $0 of our educational money into that period. So educating parents as to how their babies move, how their babies are going to actually sit and stand up and what things to look for. Then as we get into school having movement hygiene, we do basic psychological hygiene and you can’t act out in class. You’re going to have to go stand in the corner, say thank you, all those things are like psychological hygiene. And we have diet hygiene and don’t drink all chocolate milk all day, but we don’t have any movement hygiene in the schools. We just let people out for recess and maybe we do some physical education, but often the people who need it the most are ignored also, in the classes.

And so if we had a basic standard of, yeah, you should be able to get down and get up off the floor and do a standing bending test at seven to make sure you don’t have an incipient scoliosis. I think there’s just a whole lot we can do with the body and that it’s fairly urgent because we’re all going to disappear up the metaverse and by 2080, having a body is going to be a really interesting thing because we’re going to be linked up to machines in ways we don’t even think about now. We’re going to be designing babies in ways we don’t even think about now. And I’m coming to see that my decision to get into body work in 1973 was a pressured one. Before that, I had worked in politics because god knows it’s crappy. And then I had worked in environmental work because god knows the environment, we’re killing species at incredible rates. But then I just came to the place, well, if we don’t reform humans, both of those things are down the tubes anyway.

But now I see as we go more and more into the electronic era, and I watch the kids, and I’m not an old person, I’m just as addicted to my phone as anybody else, but you get really fixed on 25 centimeter focal length and a lot of things that we are doing a very large experiment with our children that I’m not sure whether we have a control left because all the stone age cultures have been soaked up into what I call the zoo, the industry world.

Til Luchau:

Tell us about what’s on your plate at the present time. I want to hear about your summer program. I want to hear about what else you’re interested in, what you’re up to, what you want our listeners to know about.

Tom Myers:

Great, thank you. What I’m all about these days, is trying to detail the connections. We did a lot of dissection during the Covid period, and I now need to edit that dissection into a usable atlas. So that’s one of the things I’m doing. I’m working on a fascial anatomy, anatomy that would be based on the fascial planes and the different kinds of fabric that we see in the body and the different places it occurs. And so that’ll be coming out I hope in the next couple of years. And we continue with our structural integration program. As I say, Anatomy Trains gets used by all kinds of people. And I do workshops for different physios of our trainers, et cetera. But our main thrust for what we’re trying to teach is structural integration. And so those programs are going on East Coast, West Cast, in the US, in Australia. I just was in Japan and Europe getting things going there again, after the Covid era.

And so we’re very bullish on bringing structural integration as a worldwide program. That’s the other thing about Ida Rolf is we’re very culturally yes? I don’t think the line is going to be the same for Russians or for Africans or for Koreans as it has been for us Caucasians. And so we need to be culturally nimble and agile as well as we move structural integration into different cultures. So that all has my interest. And since you mentioned the summer program and we’re having you out for the summer program, I’m very glad to have you out here along with Sharon Wheeler and David Davis and I are going to do a course together for structural integrators. I’m doing-

Til Luchau:

I saw Wojtek Cackowski’s on your roster.

Tom Myers:

Yeah-

Til Luchau:

You were talking about-

Tom Myers:

…teachers who’s carried the Anatomy Trains into yoga and carried it. Again, I’m not trying to say it’s superior to anything else. It’s just a very interesting take on how you use drivers in yoga to get glide along the fascial planes. That burning that you feel under your Rolfer’s elbow should be the fascial planes moving on each other and it’s the perifascial membranes, the stuff that’s too short in them, that’s being lengthened, pulled along, whatever the actual physiology of what’s happening in there, of the fluidity happening. He is able to drive that not from a hand from the outside, but by how you position yourself similar to yoga asana, but not necessarily. I really love the development that he’s doing.

I’m really happy, if you’re saying the things that are on my mind. One of the things that’s off my mind is people are carrying the Anatomy Trains into areas that I could not. For instance, Wojtek with Zoga, and I don’t think Kier’s coming out for the summer program this summer, but Kier Schumacher has taken the Anatomy Trains and applied it to neurovascular work and is opening up arteries all over the place with their very gentle work. And that’s scenario that I didn’t get to explore. Some vets have found the Anatomy Trains in horses and dogs in Denmark. That’s really interesting. I won’t die for lack of interesting things to pursue.

Til Luchau:

Well you’re handing off your inspiration and your interest. You’re empowering and catalyzing a lot of people’s inquiry. I’m looking forward to coming to offer what I do there at your summer program. You mentioned Wojtek and his really creative movement adaptations. He’s been a guest on the show and he and I have done a bunch of things together, we had a couple of Thailand retreats, but I’m really looking forward to that. What thoughts do you want to leave us with Tom?

Tom Myers:

I just hope that people will realize the value of the third system. That we have been so focused on the circulatory system and changing the chemistry in the body. We’ve been so focused on changing the psychology and the neurology that happens in the nervous system, central nervous system and beyond. And that there is this third body wide system, which is the fabric that holds you together. And we’re very familiar with the idea that we have an army of soldiers in the white blood cells that go out and fight for us in our bloodstream and hit those germs and keep us safe from viruses. And so we have lots of soldiers running around our body and we’re not equally aware that we have about an equal number of gardeners running around the body, gardening the body. These are the fibroblasts in your fascial system, and you’ve probably heard of remodeling. These are the cells that come around and remodel.

And they remodel as gardeners do. On the front end, they have enzymes that clip off the old dead fascia and in the back end, they’re squirting out the mucopolysaccharides that make new fascia. And the whole thing is such a gardening job that happens all over your body all the time, such that all the material of your system is replaced. There used to be an urban myth that every cell was replaced, every molecule in your body changed it every seven years. That’s an urban myth. I found out recently that you have, I have molecules in my Achilles tendon that were probably there since I was 12. So that’s a very stable part of the body that’s not going to change over its molecules easily. But your bonds are not that way. Your bonds change out their material all the time because your body is just populated with this whole series of gardeners who are healing you, restoring you, keeping you upright, keeping your system healthy.

So I look forward to the research that’s going to tell us how we can enhance that system, whether it’s nutritionally or by what movements. There’s no one movement that’s right for everybody. I’ve gotten so much benefit from Tai Chi and yoga and training, which I must admit, I had a prejudice about training coming in. And I’ve met so many intelligent people in this thing that have really a lot to say, and they’re not just pushing iron overhead for the sake of it. And so it’s been a really great journey for that. So stay curious, I guess, and that’s what I’d like to leave you with.

Til Luchau:

Well, thanks for being a model for that yourself. Thanks for the personal inspiration and opportunities you’ve created for me over the years, and thanks for taking the time with us today, Tom.

Tom Myers:

Oh, thank you for this opportunity. It’s great to see you both and know we’re all still out there in the world.

Til Luchau:

We should thank our closing sponsor. Books of Discovery has been part of this massage therapy and bodywork world for over 25 years. Nearly 3000 schools around the globe teach with their textbooks, e-textbooks and digital resources. Books of Discovery likes to say learning adventures start here. They find that same spirit here on The Thinking Practitioner podcast, and they’re proud to support our work knowing we share the mission to bring the massage and bodywork community thought-provoking and enlightening content that advances our profession.

Whitney Lowe:

And instructors of manual therapy education programs can request complimentary copies of Books of Discovery’s textbooks to review for use in their programs. So please reach out at booksofdiscovery.com. And listeners can explore their collection of learning resources for anatomy, pathology, kinesiology, physiology, ethics, and business mastery at booksofdiscovery.com, where Thinking Practitioner listeners can save 15% by entering “thinking” at checkout. So again, thanks to all of our listeners and our sponsors. You can stop by our sites for the video show notes, transcripts, and any extras. You can find that over on my site at academyofclinicalmassage.com and Til, where can they find that for you?

Til Luchau:

My site is advanced-trainings.com. If you have comments, questions, or things you’d like to hear us talk about, just record a short voice memo on your phone and email it to us at info thethinkingpractitioner.com or look for us on social media. I am at Til Luchau. You just type in my name on social media. You’ll find me. Whitney, where do people find you?

Whitney Lowe:

The same. They can find me under my name, Whitney Lowe on social media as well. So you can rate us on Apple Podcasts. Please do that. It does help others find the show. And you can hear us here on Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean or wherever else you happen to listen. So please do share the word, tell a friend. And Tom, thank you again once more for joining us today. It was a wonderful conversation.

Tom Myers:

Yeah, thanks very much. It was a great conversation. You guys have great sponsors. I’ve had wonderful relationships with both Books of Discovery, and I have a major article coming out in the ABMP magazine, so good on you.

Whitney Lowe:

All right.

Til Luchau:

Honored by that. Yeah, you’re right. Thanks, Tom.