By Valerie Berg
Structural aging is a term I created to describe the breakdown of structural elements we see over and over in the human body’s relationship to gravity that creates a look or a feel of “aging.” It is a loss of grace in the multiple planes of movement our spine and body are inherently made to move in. Structural aging may or may not have anything to do with actual age.
Age and Structural Bodywork
Rolfers work to support and change the vertical collapse in the human structure. Rolfing structural integration—a systematic process of fascial manipulation—always looks at how we inhabit our environment. Are we supported by gravity or broken down by it? In teaching rolfing workshops on this subject for the last 10 years, I have studied through my clients, my body, and the response of the students, the basic patterns that show up and how they might be addressed.
Aging patterns occur and happen at all ages, not just the elderly. However, aging can be more difficult if the structural relationships have lost their integrity, support, and adaptability.
Aging is a loss of the multiplanar movement and spirals that exist throughout the body; it is when we have also lost relationship to the context of our environment perhaps due to injury, emotional and physical trauma, or illness. We lose access to multiple directions of mobility and range of motion. Our sense of where our body begins and ends proprioceptively is altered. It is not necessarily age-related, and yet it feels and looks like “aging.”
However, when the elderly client enters our offices, the same approach prevails. What we might see is a shuffling of the feet, looking downward, and a body that has taken on flexion at the pelvis and rib cage. A loss of spinal curves is common. We can even observe loss of eye movement into peripheral vision. Many have lost balance and are no longer able to lift a leg to put on a shoe or sock. Trust in the ground and support have disappeared. Hearing loss may cause hesitant movement and a locking up of hip joints. Shoulders and arms are stiff and do not reach anymore.
Adjusting to the Elderly Client
Introducing multiplanar movements through fascial change and Rolf movement integration is still a main goal in the Rolfing 10 series and beyond. The benefits of rolfing are numerous. To regain small movements, such as the ability to turn the head when changing lanes while driving, could maintain the person’s freedom to drive. Getting up and down from chairs, walking to the bathroom at night, and not falling are all hugely beneficial to staying active in life.
All Rolfers are trained to understand and work with the fascial relationships that inhibit or prevent full movement and expression in our daily life. Many are also trained in Rolf movement integration. We work with the “layer of availability.” With older clients, issues such as thin skin that can bruise and redden easily, blood thinners that can create bruising, and any neurological issues that may affect balance have to be considered. Changing the position during the rolfing session may be necessary to adapt to their limitations. Osteoporosis must be taken into account. Exerting less pressure on rib cages and spinal vertebrae is needed.
We adjust the angle and depth to the layers that are accessible and open to change. Nothing is forced—ever. Rolfing structural integration is a two-way process. The client is always communicating what they are experiencing so the adjustment for the concerns of the older person is always considered.
Keeping The Aging Body Young
Fear resides in the nervous system. It may reside in the front of the body moving us into flexion, the psoas tightening up and curling us into a sagittal (front-back) orientation. Extension can also go on overload keeping us hyper-tense and held up, fearful of the very ground that could support us. The fear of falling, of being hurt and reinjured, keeps us one-dimensional and usually locked in the forward vision. Giving these tight flexors some room, and balancing front to back, changes the way anyone walks across a room!
Working with a Rolfer improves the verticality—the up-down relationships in our body. We need the ground for support and the sky (and arms reaching) for orienting to space. Opening the mobility of the client’s feet and re-teaching them how to use full ankle hinges and toe hinges to get full extension into the hip joints changes the ability of the client to walk with some confidence. The Rolfing 10 series addresses all these fascial relationships with functional re-education within the limits of the client’s age.
Even though tissue may change more slowly in an 80-year-old than a 40-year-old, it changes, and the client is ecstatic to feel some possibility again to walk and move in the world. I have had numerous clients tell me Rolfing keeps them young.
One might begin a movement as simple as getting out of a chair with the perception in the body that one doesn’t have both legs capable of support and projecting themselves across the room to where they want to go. So, they may even abort the movement completely, give up, and not go out the door even though a previous injury has healed. Fear of falling and isolation changes an elder’s body. Their perception of the capacity of their movement has now concretized in an injured perception that slows or withholds the energy to move out, up, or forward.
For an older person feeling less hope for change, the renewed sensation of range of motion and even a small ability to engage without pain or restriction is a huge boost to emotional and mental health.
One joint, one limb, or just one tendon may become fixed in movement, unable to respond to the entire constellation of the body’s attempt to being upright on two legs moving in multiple planes. Our planes of movement may then lose one potential direction.
Our proprioception becomes limited and the look and feel of aging begins to appear. The fear or anticipation of falling changes the tonus and nervous system response to the world throughout the body. This can show up at age 20, 50, or 70. The loss of easy access to the various planes and rotations of movement pushes the body part into its own isolated function, yet it influences the entire constellation of function and posture.
Studies in aging are abundant these days. Gait speed and variability can predict mortality. There are others mentioning that the better able we are at getting up off the floor without our hands, the longer we live. We also know now that homeostasis—regular patterns repeated over and over—are not a sign of health in our autonomic functions or in our movement patterns. Teaching our clients various ways of walking and moving are non-aging tactics. Variability and our principle of adaptability must be reintroduced into the fascial networks with our hands.
Our ability to maintain balance in all planes (sagittal, frontal, and transverse) requires abductor-adductor balance around the hip joints. The fragility of going up and down stairs requires abductor-adductor balance and a strong lateral arch. Rolfers are balancing all planes of motion in the fascia.
Living in the Body
Popular consumer “antiaging” products have infiltrated our culture. As Rolfers, we have always had the process that speaks to the deeper realms of how we live in the bodily context of a human who will live, age, and die. Our work is not about preventing or avoiding any of that. We work with structural integrity and relationship that is changeable and transformative at any moment in time and age, and we are hopefully creating grace in gravity where there is none or little, grace in locomotion, and even in our gestures of expression that lose their variability and finesse. The reward of bringing joy in movement to aging clients is huge.
The elderly shuffle, with head down, eyes down, large thoracic kyphosis, no arm swing, feet shuffling along-one directional rhythm . . . we have all seen it and hope to avoid it. It may not be an aged person; it may be someone looking at their phone or a young person living and moving through a spine that has lost its natural curves and this is the only way they know how to walk.
The long hours of sitting have flattened the lumbar lordosis, and everyone knows of the eyes-grabbing computer screens pulling the cervical curve into a new formation designed apparently to get the eyeballs deeper into the object of our sight-grabbing.
Our job is to stand up on two legs and walk or run . . . and not fall. Our job is to stay upright and see and hear and orient to the world outside, and self-regulate inside.
When clients come in “out of sync” due to injuries or life’s traumas, we see their compensations in their changed coordinations and loss of synchronicity in their movements. Aging clients’ bodies are like scrapbooks of their physical and emotional lives that can still have potential to some energy and power to engage. How we orient and view the world influences our ability to adapt to changing terrain and visual references.
So, it is not about working on “old “people. It is about how—in any client and at any age—we can prevent our musculoskeletal structure including our “way of being” from aging prematurely and then hopefully circumventing aging problems related to pain and possibly disease—both mentally and physically.
I have always been intrigued by the different ways people age and face life’s challenges with such different attitudes. Being a Rolfer who deals with physical and emotional patterns in the soft tissue of the body, I get to see the options and changes available at any age.
author bio
Valerie Berg trained in 1987 at the Rolf Institute. She has a degree in education and modern dance. She developed a workshop called Structural Aging which came from feeling the results the first time she received Rolfing at the age of 25. The joy of moving our bodies with freedom and no pain is what gives us the sense of being alive and young—not our age. She practices full time in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is a member of the DIRI faculty. Reach her at val03berg@gmail.com. “Rolfing” is a registered trademark and designates the Rolf Institute’s brand of structural integration, the discipline developed by the late Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.
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