How Does Rolfing Realign the Landscape of the Body?

press release from The Rolf Institute

Rolfing Releases the tension, tightness and restrictions that are held in the connective tissue – called fascia – which surrounds and penetrates the muscles and every other structure in your body. If you have ever cut into a piece of steak, you have seen the fascia close up – it is the white filmy substance binding muscles together.

Dr. Rolf was the first therapist to recognize the critical role played by the fascia, which gives the human body its specific shape and orientation. While the fascia’s remarkable plasticity enables us adapt to stress and injury, it can also throw our bodies out of alignment with gravity. Slouched backs with heads too far forward, knock –knees or bowed legs, flat feet or high arches, excessive spinal curvature – these are all the telltale signs of complex patterns of strain and tightness resulting from the thickening of the muscles and fascia.

Dr. Rolf’s deepest practical insight was to recognize that this very same plasticity could be harnessed to literally reshape the body and bring about a fundamental structural transformation.

Through highly refined techniques of applying pressure with the hands, a skilled Rolfer can soften and lengthen the fascia, which in turn frees your body from constrictions and enables it to right itself effortlessly in gravity. Rolfer’s hands release the compensations that develop from injury and then interfere with optimal adaptation to gravity.