About Rolfing
Answering Questions About Rolfing
Rolfing is a system of hands-on soft tissue work and movement education. Rolfing can change your alignment and movement patterns and make your body more comfortable and capable. Rolfing uses a series of approximately 10–15 individualized sessions to bring lasting changes to your body. Each session is different, and cumulatively they balance your body by releasing lifelong patterns of effort, compensation, tension, and strain.
Rolfing was developed by Dr. Ida P. Rolf (1896–1979) over the course of her lifetime. Originally a biochemist, Dr. Rolf also studied many other disciplines, including osteopathy, yoga, and homeopathy, while developing a unique way of working with fascia (connective tissue) to organize the body in relationship to gravity. She called her work Structural Integration, but others commonly referred to it as "Rolfing." The word Rolfing® is now a registered service mark of the Rolf Institute.
About the Founder
Dr. Ida P. Rolf, PhD
Biochemist · Professor at Columbia University · Developer of Structural Integration
Dr. Ida Pauline Rolf was born in New York City in 1896. She earned her PhD in biochemistry from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1920 — a remarkable achievement for a woman of her era — and went on to work as a research scientist at the Rockefeller Institute for twelve years.
Driven by a desire to find solutions to her own health challenges and those of her family, Dr. Rolf spent decades studying and experimenting with many systems of healing and manipulation, including osteopathy, chiropractic, yoga, the Alexander Technique, and homeopathy. Through this exploration she developed the insight that the human body is fundamentally a system of seamless networks of connective tissue — fascia — and that lasting structural change was possible by working with that tissue.
She called her work Structural Integration, based on the principle that the body functions most efficiently when its segments — head, shoulders, thorax, pelvis, and legs — are properly aligned in the field of gravity. Over decades of teaching and practice, her method became widely known as "Rolfing," and in 1971 she founded the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration in Boulder, Colorado, to train and certify practitioners. Her foundational text, Rolfing: Reestablishing the Natural Alignment and Structural Integration of the Human Body for Vitality and Well-Being, remains a cornerstone of the field.
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