Sandy Fritz MS NCTMB
2008 Massage Therapy Hall of Fame Inductee
Sandy Fritz has been in professional massage practice for nearly 30 years and a massage school owner (Health Enrichment Center in Lapeer MI) and educator for 20 years. She is the author of a major textbook line for Elsevier/Mosby publishers including Mosby’s Fundamentals of Therapeutic Massage 3rd edition, Mosby’s Essential Sciences for Therapeutic Massage 2nd ed. Mosby’s Massage Therapy Review, and Sports &Exercise Massage: Comprehensive Care in Athletics , Fitness & Rehabilitation, Clinical Massage in the Health Care Setting as well as instructor manuals and educational resources to accompany these texts. Sandy presents continuing education seminars and consults for massage therapy school on curriculum development and instructional strategies. |  |
Body Mechanics
4 CE Credit Hours NCBTMB, Florida
Body mechanics allows the massage practitioner's body to be used in a careful, efficient, and deliberate way. It involves good posture, balance, leverage, and the use of the strongest and largest muscles to perform the work. Fatigue, muscle strain, and injury, including overuse syndromes, can result from improper use and positioning of the massage practitioner's body while giving a massage. The delivery of therapeutic massage has unique postural and physical demands. Body mechanics for most professionals are focused to lifting or exerting a force in an upward direction such as when a nurse lifts a patient from the bed to a chair. Other aspects of body mechanics apply to dynamic movement such as for dancing and participating in athletics or the martial arts. By contrast, a majority of the effort exerted to give a massage is a sustained, restrained, and somewhat static movement with pressure focused down to deliver compressive force. The massage practitioner makes extensive use of the forearms, wrists, hands, fingers, thumbs, knees, and foot to deliver compressive force. Because of this difference, following standard recommendations provided to most professionals for the safe use of the body is of little use to the massage practitioner. In fact, attempting to modify these forms of body mechanics may actually result in injury to the massage professional. There are four basic concepts pertaining to body mechanics that are common to all the techniques that are used to apply compressive force against the body tissues during massage application. During this class we will discuss and practice:
- Core strength.
- Weight transfer
- Perpendicularity
- Stacking the joints.
Teaching Teachers
4 CE Credit Hours
Course Goal and Outcomes
General Goal: To develop an understanding of competency-based teaching and it's relationship to massage therapy education.
Outcome Objectives. After completion of this course, the participant will be able to:
- Specify applicable learning outcomes/competencies you expect learners to achieve or demonstrate
- Define the roles and responsibilities of the teacher and student in a competency based learning experience
- Assess personal teaching style and its implications for competency based learning as it applies to therapeutic massage education
- Use a rubric for assessment of competency based education
Competency-based education focuses on learner performance, often called learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are designed to related directly to the ability to perform a task. In this class we will consider the concept of competency based learning and review theories applicable to therapeutic massage education and competency development.. We will explore the application of various clinical teaching/learning approaches and the importance of constructive feedback and evaluation.
Outcome Based Massage - Beyond Modalities
4 CE Credit Hours
An evolution is taking place in massage.
Therapeutic massage application to address a specific result is commonly called outcome based massage. The process for developing a plan of action for massage to achieve the outcomes requires using a clinical reasoning process.
In the past, as a massage therapy educator who teaches entry level and advanced level students, I often found myself confused and frustrated when attempting to teach the fundamentals of massage. I personally learned massage in the late 70ies by taking classes in the various modalities popular at the time. There were lots of modalities, all appearing different on the surface but similar in application. The language was different for each modality but what I did with my hands and intention were familiar regardless of what the name of the course or who was teaching it. Since those early days the massage profession evolved, diversified and even become more fragmented. Then, about five years ago something happened. Many "experts in the field of massage" began to identify the more universal and repeating components of massage and bodywork theory and practice. How exciting it is to be a part of this leap in understanding that, like most things, massage and bodywork modalities and methods are more alike the different.
The shift from a modality focus (examples: Swedish massage, reflexology, deep tissue massage, Amma, Lomi Lomi) to an outcome focus requires a change in terminology and how massage application is described. One definition of massage is that it represents the manual manipulation of the soft tissues. Soft tissue manipulations create various mechanical forces which cause shifts in the form and function of the body. The physiological responses of the body to massage are not specific to the modality used but, rather, to what is described as qualities of touch. Come learn the essence of what we do.
Practical Ethics
4 CE Credit Hours
Using an ethical decision making structure participants will contribute to the development of the course content by identifying ethical dilemmas that are most important to the group. Sandy Fritz will facilitate the course discussion and model the function of a mentor as a beneficial support system for professional ethical behavior.
Guiding the course discussion will be the following topics:
- Ethical decision making model-a way to help therapists make decisions for: self, self/client, self/peers, and as part of multidisciplinary health care team.
- What participants identify as local national and global issue in massage that therapist are encountering and suggestions on how to resolve them ethically.
- How does an individual massage therapist determine their scope of practice keeping in mind MN is not yet licensed.
- What strategies can be used to managing the unexpected in the professional environment ie. Dealing with flashbacks, both integrated and intrusive; emotional release; sexuality issues
Upon completion of this course the participant will be able to:
- Identify ethical issues important to professional development
- Use a problem solving method to address ethical decision making
- Identify the qualities of a mentor and use that criteria to choose a mentor to assist in professional development.
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