Anatomy Trains and Structural Integration

Release of myofascial meridian for manual and movement therapist.

Tom says: “I developed the Anatomy Trains during the 1990’s, as a game for students to play when I was teaching Fascial Anatomy at the Rolf Institute. I was inspired by Ida Rolf, and have been practicing the deep fascial work I learned from her since 1976.

These technique’s are specific for the release of myofascial meridians that run throughout the body.

What is fascia? Fascia is the biological fabric that holds us together, the connective tissue network. You are about 70 trillion cells — neurons, muscle cells, epithelia — all humming in relative harmony; fascia is the 3D spider web of fibrous, gluey, and Fascia wet proteins that binds them together in their proper placement.

Anatomy Trains Structural Integration (ATSI) sessions can be used to resolve particular problems, as a tonic for your posture, movement, and what used to be called “carriage”, how you carry yourself through the world. Your body is your most proximate tool. How do you use it? ATSI structural integration can be seen as a course in reacquainting yourself with your body in motion. Most of us have collected extra tension through the course of our lives, either from injury or surgery, imitation of our parents or heroes, from our repetitive activities, or attitudes we’ve acquired along the way. These injuries and tensions form a pattern in our bodies. Exercise, and our mother’s request of us to “stand up straight!” may help, but most of this patterning happens below our conscious awareness and becomes part of who we are. These patterns become written into our muscular tensions, or skeletal form, and into the tissues that go between: the connective tissues.

The Anatomy Trains SI approach is to free the binding and shortening in these connective tissues, what we refer to as the fascial network, and to re-educate the body in efficient and energy-sustaining patterns.