Editor’s note: Conversation took place on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025, in person in the offices of Rolfing Associates of the Triad, located in Greensboro, North Carolina. The authors have lightly edited the interview for clarity. At the time of the conversation, Austin Miller had not yet competed in Tokyo, Japan. The text has been updated to refer to Tokyo in the past tense, and details have been included to reflect the December 2025 printing.
Mandy Cheek: Hi Austin, thank you for talking with me today. Let me introduce you to our readers. You are an American pole vaulter from Virginia who is currently ranked 13 in the world for men’s pole vault. You were crowned USA men’s pole vault champion this past summer, where your jump was 5.92 meters (19’5’’), a personal best. Very impressive! And we know each other because I have worked with you during your Rolfing journey.
Patrick Clough is also with us; thanks for joining us, Patrick. Readers will know we work together if they saw our interview in the December 2024 issue of Structure, Function, Integration, “Meet My Rolfer” (Cheek and Clough 2024). Patrick is also your Rolfer.
Patrick Clough: Hello to you both.
Mandy: Austin, thank you for sharing your story as an athlete who has experienced the Rolfing Ten Series® and Rolfing work in general. Every Rolfing
American pole vaulter Austin Miller and Senior Rolfer Patrick Clough
session is confidential. My editor thought it might be difficult to find an athlete who wants to share their Rolfing experience, which made me think that you would be happy to talk about the work. You are always enthusiastic when speaking about Rolfing [Structural Integration]. We appreciate you talking with us.
Austin Miller: Yes, you are welcome. You are right, I talk about Rolfing [Structural Integration] all the time. I tell everyone that they should find a good Rolfer.
Mandy: First off, can you give us a brief background about yourself and how you became a pole vaulter?
Austin: Initially, I got into pole vaulting because I went out for the indoor track team in high school to get in shape for lacrosse season. At the first meeting, they announced that they would be offering pole vaulting that year because they had hired a pole vault coach. And I was like, “Oh, that’s the thing with the stick, and it bends. That looks pretty fun, I want to try that.”
I tried it and I was not very good at it, and so I didn’t stick with it in freshman year. And then I came back my sophomore year, I’d grown up a little bit, and then did well enough that I could make it to the district championship. It doesn’t take a lot to do that; all you have to do is clear a single bar at some point in the year. I did that and I got to go to the district championship. And that meant I got to be a varsity athlete. I was like, “Yes! I’m a varsity athlete.”
Mandy: You got a varsity letter.
Austin: Yes. And I thought, “I can do this.” That’s how I got into pole vaulting. It was something that not a lot of other people do, and that made me think it could be a thing that I do. It could be my thing.
Mandy: And so how tall were you at that point in high school? Being six foot three, you have a little bit of a height advantage already, would you say?
Austin: When I started my freshman year, I was only five feet six inches, and then by the time I got into sophomore year, I was in that six-foot range. And yes, it helps. It also comes with its own set of disadvantages. There’s a certain gymnastic component to pole vault that gets much harder when you’re long and lanky. There’s a reason why you don’t see long, lanky gymnasts. That component of the sport gets a little bit harder when you’re really long and stretched out. But there are other physics components that get much easier when you have a higher leverage point.
A Day in the Life of a Pole Vaulter
Mandy: What is an average day for you during your long jumping season?
Austin: I’ll tell you what I went through yesterday. So, yesterday, I woke up, had breakfast, and then got to the track around 11:30am, set up what I was going to do for my workout, and did the workout. Then, I was working on the track and jumping until around 3:30pm or so. From there, I went into the weight room. I was in the weight room for another ninety minutes or so. After that, I got some dinner real quick, just to get something in my body, and then I coached the club lacrosse team from 6:30pm to 8:00pm.
Mandy: Right. So, are you working out five days a week?
Austin: More like four times a week. If I’m doing serious workouts each time, I keep it to four. My Sunday workout was very light, just activation lifting, that doesn’t take more than ninety minutes total. And then Monday, I was working out for five or six hours, doing a lot more. Then Tuesday, I was doing nothing but physio and getting treatment. So whether it’s going to the chiropractor or dry needling or Rolfing sessions, I have a day of doing errands and taking care of my other work. And then tomorrow, I’ll do a very light activation lift, and then Friday, have a big long lift session in the gym and coaching again.
Mandy: How did you come to incorporate Rolfing work into your maintenance schedule?
Austin: Great question. In 2021, I had a bit of the starting stages of a sports hernia going on, and I was coming up on the Olympic trials, so I needed to get that in shape or just solve it. The alternative was to keep training through it, and then eventually it was going to get to a point where I was probably going to need surgery. And I really didn’t want to go under the knife. And so, my agent, he was a pole vaulter back in the late 1990s and early 2000s and he was one of the best pole vaulters in the world at that time, he told me that he used to get this thing called Rolfing done when he was an athlete. He said that I should maybe try to see if I could find a therapist somewhere near me. That’s when I looked up “Rolfing in Greensboro” and found you. I did a Rolfing Ten Series, and here we are now.
Mandy: Yes, here we are now. And at this point, you’ve worked with all the Rolfers in our clinic: me, Kathy Rooney, and Patrick. How do you feel your performance has changed since you started having Rolfing sessions?
Austin: Yes, I’ve seen the entire crew. I always leave here better than when I walked in. And for me, it’s a huge longevity game in this sport. Especially because pole vault in particular is such a technical event, sometimes it takes a long time to figure out the technical component while trying to build your body up enough to be able to do it at an elite level. Everyone’s timeline is much different. I was always identified as a late bloomer from an athletic standpoint. For me, it’s been crucial to make sure that I’m able to stop little tweaks in my body from becoming kinks in my system later on. And when I’m able to piece together a healthy year, after a healthy year, after a healthy year, then the physical progress is inevitable. And then there’s also career progress that comes with it just being constantly visible at the events and constantly competing.
I’ve been able to stay on the circuit and not take any time off of it, which is really important because, especially in the United States, we have so much depth of talent that if you lose your spot on the circuit, then there is somebody else waiting to pick it up. So once on the top performing list, I need to be able to stay on it, and I credit my sessions with you as having helped me not take too much time off.
Mandy: I remember when you first came for some work, we talked about the hernia that you were concerned about. Has that been resolved? It seems to me it has, because you clearly have been healthy and not had the problem.
Austin: Yes. As you know, my hips and pelvis tend to typically be my trouble area. Now I know the feelings of tightness in that area, and I am much more capable now of resolving it through the range of manual therapists I see. Whether it is with my physical therapists, through a Rolfing session, getting some Active Release Technique in that area, or getting some dry needling on my adductors, or something like that.
I’ve gotten so familiar with the reality that typically, if something is going to bother me, it’s in my pelvis. It’s either my adductors that are real tight or the connections in my rectus abdominis, and all those areas along the waistband, are just kind of gummed up. Sometimes it’s the transverse abdominis getting involved too. It’s typically one of those things, and when I feel something is in ‘red alert’, then I just throw the kitchen sink at it and see my practitioners.
Study the Performance
Mandy: So, Patrick, I know that when you started working with Austin, you watched videos of Austin at his high jumping competitions, looking to see what his body was going through while doing the sport.
Patrick: Right.
Mandy: What sort of special considerations do you make when working with a pole vaulter? And, what about working with an athlete in general within the context of the Rolfing Ten Series ? What would you share with other Rolfers for them to keep in mind?
Patrick: Those are very different questions. Here’s the first thing when working with any athlete. You can think about ballet dancers in a dance company, construction workers who are using jackhammers, or any of the professions where people are actually sacrificing their bodies to their profession. There’s no way you can be a top ballerina without injuring yourself. Football players, their bodies are notorious for the injuries they experience. Rolfers included, doing our work without doing some kind of injury to your body is rare. Rolfers often have shoulder girdle issues.
Now, for each body of these different kinds of athletes, there will be their own unique area that they are bound to have trouble with. And so, for me, I always want to look at what they’re doing. At one point, I went to Austin’s practice session at High Point University, and I watched him do his thing so I could get a sense of what he was doing. I saw for myself his movements and how that was affecting his adductors, his groin, and his shoulder girdle. I thought about what issues there might be in that particular sport. If I’m working with a ballerina, I go to a ballet to see what she is doing. I try to do that for every seriously athletic client.
I think it’s important as a Rolfer to know two things. Number one, if we are working with what we’re calling an athlete (someone who’s using their body professionally), they’re going to be doing things that an accountant, for example, would not be doing with his or her body. Okay? The things the athlete does are things that you would recommend your accountant client not to do because of the wear and tear. Athletes are putting stress into their bodies. Secondly, know specifically what your athlete is doing. I would watch tennis players, golfers, etc., to see how they use their bodies, to get a sense of how it ended up that they had a groin pull, or they had tennis elbow. They have foot problems and they are ballet dancers, I want to see them in action. It’s different to work with an athlete in general. But, it’s also about the specific kind of athlete you’re working with.
Mandy: I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see any of the workouts he does on Instagram [@a_milli29], but they are intense. Like one foot pulling one way and the arm is doing something else, you can tell that they’re little subsections of the movement that he has to do for pole vaulting. They are a lot. It’s not a walk in the park.
Austin: Pole vaulting is an event that has a single action that is among the most all-encompassing in track and field. The decathlon is probably the most involved, where you’re doing all of the events. But in just a singular event, it has the most multi-planar movement. It starts with sprinting as fast as you can down the runway, then you have to be able to jump off the ground, followed by absorbing a huge amount of force at takeoff, and having to try to redistribute it while maintaining some semblance of control over your body and the whole thing.
For this sport, it is primarily focused in the legs, but once you’re off the ground, there’s so much more going on. There’s also a fair amount of risk involved too. And occasionally a jump does not go right and you hit the mat in a weird way, something’s kind of going a little squirrely, and you’re still taking all of that impact of falling into your body in some way, shape, or form. Over the course of a year, we probably take up to 1,000
jumps, depending on the athlete, it is a lot. There is just a lot of force absorption and redistribution in a variety of planes that is happening all the time.
And so the training has to include that too. You’re trying to get your body capable of doing all of that in a very effective manner, and so, at least for myself, because I write all of my own training, that’s something that I try to focus on. Especially from an injury prevention standpoint, I try to do as many complex movements, multi-planar things, as possible, just to try and make my body as efficient at moving as possible. In a boiled down manner, all I’m trying to do with all of my training off the runway is making my body as efficient as possible. Mandy: It makes sense that Rolfing sessions would be a part of that, because adaptability is one of the core things we do.
Austin: Yes, 100%.
Mandy: Working with multi-planar forces is also what we do.
Austin: I remember there was one time when you and I were working, and one of the things that you mentioned was that getting everything back into alignment allows the body to access a greater percentage of its overall strength. That resonated with me. In a way, that idea inspired a cornerstone of my training this year. The idea of trying to maximize the
overall percentage of output that my body is capable of obtaining has been what I’ve keyed in on this year. I’ve introduced a lot of isometric training, which inherently has a way of stiffening up the muscle fibers without building new ones. This makes everything much more elastic and much more explosive, but also teaches the body that it can safely access a higher percentage of its power output than it neurologically thought it could prior to that point.
Mandy: That is fantastic. And it shows in your personal jump this year (5.92 meters; 19’5’’), winning you the 2025 USA Track & Field Outdoor Championship and qualifying you to compete in the 2025 World Athletic Championship in Tokyo, Japan, which you did recently. Congratulations on all your events this year. What helped you get yourself to this point? I know it’s a mix of a lot of things, like experience and strength training, but also diet and sleep.
Austin: Yes, thank you so much. It’s such a cocktail of it all. In the weeks leading up to these big competitions, I had actually started running into some back issues. And so, a big part of getting ready for the championship was just making sure that my body was pieced together and I wasn’t doing anything in training that was going to dismantle my progress. It was a lot of what we’ve been talking about, and so it’s been a lot of trial and error in that time. I’ve gotten pretty close a couple of times in the past; I’ve been one spot out of making the team a couple of times. And, other times, I fell way short. So it was a lot of experience at play as well in getting myself ready.
I knew I didn’t need to do or be anything special on the day. I just needed to be the best version of what I’ve done so far. And I had a pretty good season leading up to that point, and so I didn’t need to do anything that I’ve never done before. I just needed to do all the things I’ve been doing, a little bit better, and then the odds are, I would probably have a really good day. And it’s that kind of energy that I took to Tokyo as well, into the world championship. It’s about giving it the respect that it deserves, it’s a world championship. I didn’t write it off as, “I’m just happy to be here, and I’m so grateful for this opportunity.” Of course, I am, and I’ve also harnessed that energy in the past. But I think sometimes I’ve almost written myself out of the competition before it’s even started. It’s a big competition, there are big names there, and I was focused on being cognizant of the job that I needed to do, and performing at the level that I need to perform at. In my own psychology, I’ve noticed if I’m kind of airy-fairy in my grateful approach, without having the focus on the job that needs to be done, then I’m kind of shortchanging myself in the process of it.
Embodied Mindset
Mandy: I noticed in the last few months, since the last Olympics where we were watching you on television, you had more of the gratitude type of mindset. But something has taken you even further past that. You’re a showman; we could see that your focus and mentality had sharpened even further. It’s almost like you realized, “I’m supposed to be here.”
Austin: Yes, absolutely.
Mandy: Would you say that Rolfing work changes the way you think about your body, how you talk, and how you interact with your physicality?
Austin: I would say mentally, my approach is to focus on training – how I try to build my body and its capabilities. In that sense, adding a fascial lens and understanding how important it is to be considerate of my fascia when building my body during training is where I’ve had
the biggest turn in my thinking. This year, I’ve been the most fascially connected that I’ve ever been.
My fascia has gotten such consistent treatment over the years. I’ve changed how I think about it, and I’ve reformatted what I do in the weight room and things like that. That’s where Rolfing [Structural Integration] has switched my focus in my training.
From a competitive standpoint, there has been clarity that I am very capable and ready to accomplish the job – to go out there and execute. When I get close to attaining these big goals that I have set out for myself, I have to watch out for habits of trying to skip steps to try to get to the end. It’s like carefully building the house and now you’re just trying to plop any old roof on it, rather than taking the time to lay down each part of a good roof. You get so close to the thing you’ve been working for. You have to ask yourself, “What is the thing that separates people from getting all the way there and those who try but don’t make it?” The difference is being able to stay the course, being able to stay within yourself, stay controlled, and not deviating from the plan. Having the discipline not to deviate from what you’ve been doing for years, all the work that has been put into it, to quiet down everything inside of you, and almost be a robot.
In track and field, the people who are most successful throughout the course of their careers, are the ones that can be this focused that they perform like robots. That has been hard for me to do because I’m not a robotic person. I’m a person that flows, things change at the drop of the hat, and I would rather go with the flow than perform like a robot. But for the sake of trying to have the most successful pole-vaulting career possible, I’ve had to learn how to kind of detach myself from the emotion of the end result without detaching myself from the end result.
It’s a refinement that I didn’t do last year at the Olympic trials. I detached myself from the emotion of it and I also detached myself from the end result. “Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. I’m just going to go out there and try my best.” That is very different from detaching myself from the emotion of the whole event, but staying attached to the job I have to do. That’s probably been the biggest competitive mental shift I’ve noticed about myself this year.
Patrick: Austin, sounds like you’re equating trusting your commitment and discipline, and allowing yourself to be detached by being a robot. My notions of “robot” are contrary to my experience of your dynamism. As a Rolfer observing an athlete in motion, I see the ‘Line’ as a dynamic vector much beyond the vertical line when a person is simply standing in gravity. We work to get the fascial blocks in the tissue removed, so that everything is balanced and smooth, and there is an energy that’s emanating from the top of the head and also through the soles of the feet.
For Austin, our role as his Rolfers is to get anything out of the way from him staying focused on his goal. If you have the chance to observe Austin doing a pole vault, you can see the dynamics of the ‘Line’ that we worked with in the Rolfing Ten Series as he sprints, then goes up and over that bar. His body has an inner propulsion where he has optimized the forces. That comes from ensuring that a coherent energy is emanating all the way through the body, through the top of the head, all the way to the feet. That experience alters the way we think about ourselves, alters our relationship with all of reality. It gives us a connection with the universe that is suppressed when the body is compressed. Austin, in his performance, is showing what that coherence and hard work can accomplish. That’s my esoteric two cents.
Mandy: That lands on our theme for this issue, this is about embodied performance, and you are talking about some of the keys to support top-level athletes like Austin. These qualities give a person more confidence, more freedom of movement, and they have less pain in their body when we help them in this way. Patrick: Yes, there’s more dynamism, there’s flow. And when you feel that in yourself, there’s a peace of mind and it alters the way we think about things.
Mandy: Yes, I totally agree. And Austin, you went to Tokyo. What are your goals now?
Austin: I had to be at my best for Tokyo because there are a number of people who are jumping at the top of their game, and it was a dog fight to get on the podium. I was 14th in my group in Tokyo; it’s a very competitive field on the world stage. The goal I set for myself was to go out and execute at the highest level.
Any field event is interesting in the sense that there’s not any tactics that you can use that’s going to alter somebody else’s performance; compared to the track events for example, the competitors are side by side during their events. We go one by one. The only thing you can do is affect
From Austin Miller’s Instagram, May 21, 2025.your own performance. Knowing that it takes my best execution to be able to get on the podium means that’s where all my focus is, staying within myself and making sure that I can go and execute every time down the runway – not be this unrefined ball of energy, but this laser-focused arrow that’s just going right to its bullseye.
Looking to 2028 in Los Angeles, California
Mandy: Is there another Olympics trial on the horizon?
Austin: Oh, yes; for sure. Long-term, definitely shooting for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, California. I think making a home Olympics would be huge.
Mandy: Incredible.
Austin: That would be so much fun. But now that I’ve made my first world team, it feels like the monkey is off my back, a little bit. I know I’ve done it once, and I know I can do it again. And honestly, even when I was jumping at the championship this year, at no point leading up to it did I feel like the best I had ever felt, but I felt good enough on the day. And I know that as long as I feel good enough, then I have it in me to have a really good day. That’s how it was showing up in Tokyo. I took advantage of all the things that are accessible to me from a physical perspective, and from an experience perspective. I enjoyed Tokyo, made sure I was in a good headspace, and I had a good physical space to go execute at my best.
Mandy: Awesome. One last thing I want to ask you. If you talk to someone about Rolfing sessions that has never experienced it, and has no idea what it is, how do you explain it to them?
Austin: Okay, that’s a great question. So, a lot of times, that starts off by asking them how much they know about fascia. And if they don’t really know a lot about fascia, then I try to distill it down and say something quick. I like to ask them to visualize a picture looking at a big ham, cut right through. You got the bone, and you got all the meat, and then there’s the skin on the outside of it. But right in between the skin and meat, there’s that little tiny white layer in there. That’s the fascia. And what happens is it gets stuck to our meat and our tendons. And when it gets stuck, it can start pulling on things in ways that we don’t want them to be pulled on. And so, a Rolfer basically goes in and manipulates that and breaks apart that fascia, and that work stimulates the body to replace those spaces with what should be there.
And when they still have this quizzical look on their face, I’ll say, “Do you ever put on your pants and you wonder why it feels so weird? And the problem is you’ve put on your underwear twisted like ninety degrees and it feels wrong?” Then I’ll say, “When you reposition that fabric back home, then it’s cool, now everything feels great.” People get that right away. And I tell them; it’s just like that ham.
Mandy: Cool way to talk about inside the body versus outside the body.
Austin: Exactly. You tell me, did I get it right?
Mandy: You did; you got that right.
Patrick: Outstanding.
Mandy: People are starting to get an appreciation for what fascia is and its role in health. Patrick and I were talking about this; it’s become the new buzzword. Dr. Rolf (1896-1979) was one of the first people to really connect fascia and structural wellness, the efficient body movement we’ve been talking about. People are beginning to understand fascia is a structural organ, some say fascia system, and how it can change with input. We can all feel for ourselves that how we hold our body and how we move our body, those habits make a difference in how we feel and can move. And if you’ve had some sort of injury that’s disrupted it, there is good reason to be concerned for loss of support and function.
Anything to add, Patrick, as we finish our interview with Austin?
Patrick: It should be clear to anyone who’s reading this article that it takes a lot of energy to work on an athlete at this world-class level. That fascia is tough. Mandy: Good point. And there’s a difference between muscular strength and fascial restriction. I think people confuse that sometimes. Having tight fascia is different than a short muscle, like a short hamstring, for example. Hopefully, people realize after reading what Austin’s had to say, that this work makes such a difference in the athlete’s performance. It’s not stretching. Rolfers are not doing the same thing as stretching at all. We help the body move the way it was intended to move.
Patrick: Frequently, it’s just the chemical dynamics of building up muscle strength that result in building up the thickness and toughness of the fascia surrounding it. It’s just the way that it works. When the Rolfer works on that fascia, it’s a thicker layer of fascia than in more sedentary clients. Mandy: Thank you again, Austin, for talking with us. How can people follow you? Austin: They can find me on Instagram at @a_milli29. https://www.instagram. com/a_milli29/
I’m on Facebook as Austin Miller https://www.facebook.com/p/Austin- Miller-100063941834206/}.
I’m the same on TikTok, a_milli29. https:// www.tiktok.com/@a_milli29?lang=en
I’m the bald pole-vaulting guy. There’s also Army General Austin Miller, who’s not me.
Mandy: And thank you for allowing us to share some of your photos along with this article. I’m sure people will be interested in everything you shared. Thank you, Patrick, for joining as well and sharing your wisdom.
As someone who studied and worked directly with Dr. Rolf, I always value your perspective.
Austin: You are welcome.
Patrick: Take care, all.
Austin Miller, American pole vaulter, from Herndon, Virginia. He’s been competing nationally in pole vault since 2018. He recently finished in 1st place at the United States Outdoor Track and Field Championships, which were held in Eugene, Oregon. Miller is also a pole- vault and lacrosse coach at his alma mater, High Point University. He has an interest in music, writes for This Song Is Sick, a music publication, and says he will pursue a career in the music industry after he retires from pole vaulting.
Mandy Cheek is a Certified Rolfer® practicing in Kernersville, North Carolina. She has a background as a physical therapist assistant, and after searching for her own answers to persistent health concerns, she found Rolfing® Structural Integration to address her persistent pains the best. She enjoys many kinds of outdoor activities and sports, including softball, volleyball, swimming, and recently, yoga. She is also a singer and a music aficionado.
Patrick Clough is a Senior Rolfer who first started his Rolfing training with Dr. Ida Rolf and Emmett Hutchins in September 1972. He completed his Rolfing certification in 1973 and his Advanced Training in 1974. He started his first Rolfing practice in Aspen, Colorado. Then he relocated to New York City, where he practiced in Manhattan for over forty years. These days, he is semi-retired and enjoying life in North Carolina.
References
Cheek, Mandy, and Clough, Patrick. 2024. Meet my Rolfer: Patrick Clough. Structure, Function, Integration 52(2):6-12.
Keywords
athlete; sports; performance; Rolfing Ten Series; fascia; multi-planar sports; activation lifting; pole vaulting; robot; the Line; embodied performance; structural integration. ■
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