(Editor’s Note: This interview took place in October 2015 when Stolzoff was sitting in on a Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) Advanced Training taught by Jan Sultan.)

Richard Ennis: Recently, you’ve taken an interest in research and did a study with Western Washington University. What drew you into an interest in research?

Russell Stolzoff: There’s been a growing emphasis placed on trying to demonstrate Rolfing SI’s efficacy through research. One of my clients is a professor at the university, and one day I just asked her. She was talking about some different research that she was doing, and I thought to myself, “I just need to inquire as to whether Rolfing SI could ever be part of Karen S. Price graduated with honors from Northwestern University in 1974. After receiving Rolfing SI in 1977, she began her Rolfing training in 1978 and graduated from The Rolf Institute in 1979. She received her advanced Rolfing certification in 1988. She is a long-term meditator and a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-200). Karen has maintained a private practice in the same location in Palo Alto, California for thirty-seven years, specializing in work with women and children. For more information on Karen, please see the bio on her website rolfingchildren.com. Marie Terrill is Certified Rolfer and Certified Structural IntegratorCM with a small private practice in Eugene, Oregon. She is also Secretary of the Rolf Institute Research Committee. Marie studied molecular biology at The Evergreen State College and has ten years of experience in the field of functional neuroscience, with a specific focus on epilepsy and epilepsy research. Additionally, Marie has an ongoing interest in the therapeutic aspects of movement, dance, and yoga, all of which she incorporates into her Rolfing practice. She has been a dedicated yoga practitioner since 2006 after sustaining a major injury, with a practice most recently fed by teachers in the field of Yoga Therapy and from the Iyengar tradition. Her website is www. mindbodyrolfing.com. a project that she supervised.” She said yes. I never saw myself, being someone who didn’t have an advanced degree, as being capable of initiating or conducting research, and I didn’t know how I could become part of a team of people. Several years ago, Tom Findley came and talked to the faculty. It was all good information, but he was basically saying, “If you don’t have a PhD, sorry for you.” That was a little discouraging. But then I saw this potential opening, and I just asked about it and it went from there.

Russell Stolzoff

Richard Ennis

RE: If I’m interpreting you right, you thought that it was too daunting or impossible to get into. [But now] you’ve done this and realized that anybody who puts energy into it could do Rolfing SI and research.

RS: It’s about making the right connections, and it’s good if you can link with people who have some interest. Like this professor had a real interest in fascia research, and she’s been going to the Fascia Research Congress (FRC). I think I really lucked out with her. [Similarily] Karen Price connected with a lead researcher at Stanford and got her thing going. [Editor’s Note: Price conducted research on Rolfing SI and cerebral palsy; see the interviews with her on pages 17 and 29.]

RE: Say a little more about what your research project was.

RS: The project was to see if Rolfing SI sessions improved proprioception of the ankle, balance and power demonstrated by what they call ‘counter movement jump’, or ‘two-footed jump’, in recreational soccer players.

RE: Did the players receive a Ten Series tailored to each of them, or was there a standard?

RS: What I was initially excited about was that I wanted to do a Ten Series and try to measure something, not just a session, and not just a [move]. I knew there’d been a study of doing a pelvic lift on a person who never had Rolfing SI before and it improved vagal tone.

RE: Then it becomes about a technique rather than about holistic work.

RS: It becomes about the move. It becomes about pelvic inclination but not about Rolfing SI. I really wanted it to be about receiving a series of sessions, but then you run in to all these problems. We had two different Rolfers and we tried to get on the same page, but you’re never doing exactly the same moves.

RE: This is one of the things that holistic medicine or any kind of holistic practice has difficulty with – these very multi-factorial [sessions] that are tailored to the individual as opposed to just trying to test one variable. It sounds like you got good recognition of that just from doing the study, that, “Oh, yeah. This is hard because it’s hard to do holistic studies and because there are so many variables going in.”

RS: Right. There are so many variables. Even though we tried to do holistic [sessions] and we tried to see whether holistic [work] would affect this small little measurement in a significant way. I talked to Eric [Jacobson] and had some back and forth with him. He actually loaned us his protocol, from his study, as he defined . . . the ten sessions [of the Series].

RE: What age group were the research subjects, and what did they know or expect?

RS: They were eighteen to thirty-four, something like that. They knew they were getting Rolfing sessions; some had heard of it, but most of them didn’t know what to expect really.

RE: I’d like you to talk a little bit about the physical response that you were measuring, but also other elements of their experience. What kind of results did you get that were part of the research and what you were measuring, and what other add-ons did you get that were more about the holistic realm that’s not quantifiable?

RS: The results from the measurements were inconclusive and caused us to rethink the research design, and maybe try to adjust it for possible future studies. We – Brad Jones and I; Brad worked in the study with me – took photos and we used the Body Align Pro that Isaac Osborne developed. He’s down in Santa Barbara. He trained at the Guild for Structural Integration and he has developed this nifty little photographic application that you can use on a smart phone or on an iPad. You could see that people got the kinds of changes that we expect when we do SI.

RE: You got the kind of results that a Rolfer would be looking for?

RS: In terms of the measurements, [we] didn’t. They weren’t reflected in the measurements in the way that we hoped that they would be.

RE: What’s your thinking on why that was?

RS: I wasn’t really a part of the data collection. It’s hard for me to know for sure . . . Some of it had to do with the choice of the joint that we measured – there’s not that many degrees of motion. It might have been that the sample size was too small. It also might have been that there were too few sessions.

RE: Because of my background in research, I have to say, “Wow, how typical.” This outcome is very often so in a preliminary study. You think, we’ve got analytical methods involved, we’ve got techniques on Rolfing SI involved, and [now we] find all these things that need some kind of adjustment. Or we gain enough information from this preliminary study to design a better study, and so we’ve got the secondtier study. Then maybe some day things are so promising you do a placebo-controlled study of some sort and it grows. Your experience really fits that prototypical package. You do a study and [often] end up having to go back to the starting block and look at some things again.

RS: That’s actually important for the Rolfing community to understand, because most of us are not researchers. I think there’s this hope that we’re going to get some kind of research that’s going to blow people’s minds and everybody is going to suddenly accept the scientific basis of Rolfing SI.

RE: It’s difficult, but you don’t want to discourage people. Like you said, Tom came and discouraged you initially because it is a huge task. Then there are certain people who had that perseverance who really want to keep going at it. I have an interest and the background in research.

RS: What kind of research did you do, Rich?

RE: I spent twenty-five years in biotech research, in various aspects. Mostly antiviral research (HIV, hep B, hep C, influenza). When I got into Rolfing SI, I starting looking at the science, or lack of science, in some areas. Obviously we can use more information, good information. I think the science information I get, I actually use it for my practice a lot. I think bringing Rolfing SI into an understanding of research, and the data that’s out there, and how to read research, actually can really improve your practice.

You didn’t have a science background, you went from being a Rolfer to then getting into science. I’m wondering, Russell, how about science, does it impact your practice, affect your Rolfing [work]?

RS: It’s a great question. I think I’m more cautious about speculation. We don’t [always] know what we’re really doing or why it works. Obviously, we’re trying to relate to people in their bodies in an intelligent manner – I think that there’s a lot to that. I’m more bewildered than ever and I think it goes along with the maturation of being a Rolfer for a long time. You feel less pressured to have answers because you know that people get better. You don’t know exactly how it’s happening, but you know. You don’t grip or contract around the ‘why?’. You’re able to sort of say, “I’ll tell you, I’m not really sure why.”

RE: At the same time, at the FRC this year, there were 800 scientists and bodyworkers. There’s a ton of information out there. Despite tons of information, there are still a lot of deep unknowns, but it’s not like there isn’t any information there. It’s just, “Wow, this is a complex field.”

RS: When the results from the research came back in the way they did, I was really disappointed, because I thought I went out on a limb in a certain sense. I don’t think I held it in quite the right way. I’m coming to learn more and more and feel more and more comfortable about what happened, and better about what we did. One of the things was I really wanted it to show something more conclusive than it did. Yet, when the results came back the way they did, the professor was like, “Yeah. This happens all the time in science.” A lot of people tried to help me understand that this is the case, and you did that with me as well. You were really helpful to me. I felt like I owed some explanation to all the people who donated money because I went out and asked people to [fund the research]. I initially felt like they might feel let down by what happened.

RE: That’s a really interesting point. We have this biased desire for a certain outcome. If we don’t get that outcome, our first response is, “Oh, that was a failure.” Then our second response is, “Oh, that’s the data we got – let’s interpret.”

RS: Yeah, totally. The way I kind of solved it was [to see] that there’s a hope for an outcome and that we need more validation.

RE: We could continue Rolfing SI as it has been done. As Jan [Sultan] said [in this class we are in], “I could be a kind of folk practitioner,” but Rolfing SI hasn’t grown a lot in thirty years. In that same amount of time, there’s been huge growth in other fields like acupuncture, like chiropractic work. A lot of that is driven by evidencebased practices. Yes, people come to us, but we don’t have a lot of practitioners and Rolfing SI is unknown to a lot of people – I think that’s one factor. Not that Rolfing SI has to become an insurance-based thing or has to be very scientific in its practice. I think sometimes people [in our community] wonder if science is going to change Rolfing SI. I don’t think it has to have an impact on how we do Rolfing SI. When I talk to clients about working on their suboccipitals and lowering the tonus in the body, they go, “Oh, that’s wild. I can work here and relax my hamstring.” When they hear there’s some science behind it, some evidence, they go, “Oh, you’re not just making this up. That’s kind of cool.” It gives you an opportunity. When you’re becoming familiar with the research and what good research is out there, [it affects] how you can talk to clients.

RS: I think that’s great.

RE: Some people live and work in really educated areas, as I do [Silicon Valley], where clients want to know, “Is there anything published on this?” If you say, “No, there’s nothing published, we just kind of recognize it,” it doesn’t have the same psychological impact. I think it gives a lot of comfort to certain types of clients [to know research is being done]. The project you were involved in was supported through donations from the public, and also supported by the Rolf Institute® which has a Research Committee and a mission to promote] research. I’m on the Research Committee right now, and I know there’s some awesome Rolfer/scientists in our midst, and also non-scientists, like you, Russell, doing research. Stephen Evanko just joined the group, he’s a researcher up in Seattle. Eric Jacobson is on the Research Committee and he is doing some really high-level research on back pain out of Harvard. Then Paula Stal down in Brazil has been doing research on fibromyalgia and Rolfing SI. The last year, there have been several publications, including by Karen Price, who has done cerebral palsy research for several years [with Stanford], and she’s got some recent publications. A lot of publications have come out recently. The Rolf Institute has a mission to promote research, not just from the standpoint of wanting understanding of [our work], but also to teach research – how to read research, how to interpret research, how to know what’s a good research paper.

The Research Committee is working to support both young investigators getting started doing small studies and also to promote teaching of research. Not just how to do it, but also how to interpret the literature that’s out there. When you see a paper, can you interpret whether the study design was appropriate? Whether the statistics were appropriate? That’s not a very easy thing to do. If you talk to Eric Jacobson he will say that ability to understand how to pick apart papers is something that comes out of five years of being in college [learning the background].

It’s important that [Rolfers] don’t look at this as a push to [have] a clinical understanding of Rolfing [and] understanding the research data that’s out there. [I would instead frame it as,] “How does that support you as a Rolfer?” You don’t have to be a scientist to let that science flow through you and help your practice. With a lot of people [in our community] helping to do research and becoming educated about research, it’s just another aspect that’s going to help the practices of all Rolfers.

RS: Awesome.

RE: Russell, what plans do you have to participate in more research?

RS: I’m going to try and get you involved in the next project at Western Washington University. Maybe if Steve Evanko, you, and I sit down with the professor up there we can ask what’s the next thing we can do.

RE: I’m in the process of moving to Whidbey Island, so we’re going to form a Northwest research team. Sharon Wheeler is also up there. I worked [with her] on her ScarWork abstract for the 2015 FRC. These are exciting times for the Rolfing community. Thank you for your time and for sharing your experiences.

Russell Stolzoff is a Certified Advanced Rolfer, Rolf Movement Practitioner, and Rolfing Instructor with a practice in Bellingham, Washington.

Richard Ennis is a Certified Advanced Rolfer on Whidbey Island, Washington and in Menlo Park, California. He is Chairman of the Rolf Institute Board of Directors, a member of the Research Committee, and on the Scientific Advisory Council for the Ida P. Rolf Reseach Foundation.The Road from Rolfing SI to Initiating Research Studies[:pb]The Road from Rolfing SI to Initiating Research Studies