Anatomy Trains UK

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. “But when I came to try to teach, all the books you can find put forward the ‘single-muscle’ theory. Ida Rolf kept saying, “It’s all connected through the fascia.” Other than invoking the image of a grapefruit or a loofah, how do you make this real? How do you get ‘actionable intelligence’ on the functioning of the whole musculoskeletal system? “Just as an exercise to cement the students’ knowledge, I began stringing the muscles together through the fascia. This idea was initiated when Dr Jim Oschman gave me an article by Raymond Dart (the anthropologist and Alexander Technique student) linking the muscle in the trunk in a double-spiral arrangement (which shows up here as part of the Spiral Line). “My reaction was, “Why stop there?” From this base, I expanded Dart’s idea to the whole body, to help students see connections by stringing muscles together. The ‘rules’ are that the connections have to follow the grain in the fascial fabric in more or less a straight line, without breaks or changing levels.