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.

After a few teaching iterations, the whole project became so interesting that I started to systematize these connections. With the encouragement of my friend Annie Wyman, the full picture and implications of the lines started to become clear. I started to see the lines in assessing my clients, and then started building my structural bodywork sessions around these lines.

Moving toward publishing happened as a happy coincidence. One of my students (in my very small early classes for massage therapists in Maine) loved these lines, and said, I'm going out to Hawaii to teach these lines to Lee Joseph's students!? (His was another structurally-related school of bodywork.) I realized that if I was going to lay claim to this idea and have it come out correctly, I needed get it written down. At the same time, Leon Chaitow, N.D., D.O. was forming the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, and was calling in his chits with all his old friends to get articles to start this venture off.

The resulting journal articles proved so popular that Churchill Livingstone (who has since been swallowed by Harcourt, which was in turn swallowed by Elsevier) in the form of Mary Law asked me to write a book on the idea. The book was published in 2001, with the second edition appearing in 2009, and the 3rd in 2014. The book has been translated into 10 other languages; German, Finnish, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and modern and traditional Chinese.

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