I just finished my second body mechanics class today. It went all right. There were things that could have been better, and this is why I’ll be looking at it over the next few months.
I felt a little bit rushed this time, more so than the last. Part of that was due to not having a helper. Part was due to having one table in one room and the other in the lobby. This kept me from being able to watch both tables at the same time.
Unfortunately, in this class, we had one person that learned very quickly, and she had to wait while the other caught up. This threw me off, and made me feel like I was rushing. I was disjointed.
The information got passed on. I just felt there was more time needed for practice. Of course, I felt that way with the last class. It was just with this one student doing the moves a couple of times while the others wanted to practice them that kept me feeling like I wasn’t covering the moves enough. Again, this was a learning situation.
I also had one student that was eight months pregnant. She could not be a body for another student so I had to get someone to come in and be that body. One of the comments on the feedback forms was that I should be asking if students are pregnant before allowing them in the class. Uhhh. Somehow I think that is the responsibility of the pregnant student to ask that question.
I have been to many continuing education classes in the past seven years. In each one, we did trades. If someone was pregnant, they could not be worked on because they could not lay flat, or could not take the pressure, or could not be stretched. The only exception to this are my Reiki classes where the student could lay on their side if need be. (Again I see people not willing to take responsibility for checking things out ahead of time.)
The other thing that got me was that all of the students wore their underwear when they were on the table. I was showing glute moves from Esalen and a couple other styles. One can’t do these through underwear. Like come on people. We’re therapists. We work on people’s bodies, and includes most parts including glutes. One can’t teach glute work when people leave on underwear.
What we ended up doing was to move the underwear over the cheek as I had to teach when I taught at Everest. But it is not as good and somewhat inefficient (and stretches the crap out of someone’s underwear). When Tom Cochran teaches Lomi Lomi, he teaches a style where the person needs to be completely undressed. I’ve never heard of anyone telling him no. In fact, most of the female students feel comfortable enough that they allow themselves their breasts to be undraped.
Now I’m not trying to uncover anything unusual in a normal massage like Lomi does. I just find it scary for massage students to be so uncomfortable being worked on in a training session. I guess with Lomi, they know what to expect, or I assume they do. Maybe I need to look at my information to make sure it properly sets expectations. At the same time, that presupposes that the people who sign up for the class bother to read the information. (And these moves were the ones most liked. Go figure.)
But for the most part, I think the students liked what I showed them. I am going to be looking at this over the next several months to see what I need to change. I know it needs to be longer. I wasn’t feeling as confident in some of the moves as I had been in the previous class. Maybe I need to throw a couple of them out and replace them with others. May be if I throw in a few more ‘big’ moves, I can increase the time. Then I can do it over three days instead of two. Something else I could include would be time for the student to put them all together and see how they work. Of course, I’ll need someplace where I can see all the tables at once. It just wasn’t cost effective to spend $350 to rent the hotel room for two tables. And I would have had to have that number two weeks out. This time, the last two people came within the last few days before class.
Oh well. Like I said, it is all a learning situation, for me as well as the students.