Body Mechanics

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Clinical Orthopedic Manual Therapy (COMT): Body Mechanics is a 2-day hands-on workshop that is part of the COMT Certification – Skillset Approach Program offered by Dr. Joe Muscolino. The goal of the COMT Skillset Approach Certification is to reinforce and hone essential COMT assessment and treatment skills, thereby strengthening your level of critical thinking and effectiveness of practice.

Employing proper and efficient body mechanics may be the one most important skill that a manual therapist can employ for career longevity. The average professional life of a manual/massage therapist is well under 10 years. Much of the reason for this is poor body mechanics that lead to overuse pain and dysfunction syndromes in the therapist’s body. It is impossible to remove all physical stress from the profession of soft tissue manipulation/massage, but it can be minimized so that a long and successful career can be enjoyed.

Effective therapist body mechanics are also often the key to effective orthopedic treatment of our clients/patients, and therefore a long and successful career. Manual therapy, whether it is soft tissue manipulation (massage), stretching, or joint mobilization, involves the introduction of forces into the client’s body. The effectiveness, depth, and fluidity with which we create and deliver these forces is largely determined by our body mechanics.

Learning safe and effective is not a matter of memorizing rules for each technique or stroke that we employ. Rather, there is a science and an art to body mechanics that involves guidelines for how we position and move our body when performing manual therapy. Learn how to work from your core, how to most effectively position your feet, how to stack joints, how to generate force from larger and more powerful muscle groups, and how to work with the height of the table and the various contacts to accomplish effective clinical orthopedic manual therapy!

COMT: Body Mechanics is a 2-day (16-hour; 16 CE credit hours awarded by the NCBTMB) hands-on workshop that teaches the science and art of employing proper body mechanics; in other words, COMT: Body Mechanics teaches how to use our body when performing manual therapy techniques. With this workshop, you will sharpen and master the ability to reason through how to employ effective body mechanics with each of the various hands-on assessment treatment techniques that exist. The approach of this workshop is to teach from the perspective of critical thinking in a hands-on setting so that you can creatively apply the techniques for clinical orthopedic work on your patients/clients.
During the workshop, we will practice and perfect body mechanics guidelines for all manual therapy techniques. Specifically, we will learn and workshop body mechanics applied to soft tissue manipulation when the client is in prone, supine, and side-lying positions, as well as applying these guidelines to stretching and joint mobilization techniques.

We will hone these skills by actually workshopping our body mechanics when massaging and stretching many of the muscles of the body, including prone work to the paraspinal musculature of the spine, supine neck work, psoas major work in supine, side-lying, and prone positions, QL work in prone and side-lying positions, and many other muscles and muscle groups.

This workshop will build mastery and confidence in your body mechanics skills. Coupling the mastery of body mechanics with your hands-on assessment and treatment skills will lift your clinical orthopedic manual therapy practice to a new level!

COMT: Orthopedic Assessment Testing is part of the COMT Skillset Approach Certification.

The five courses are:
Palpation Assessment
Orthopedic Assessment Testing
Body Mechanics
Stretching: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Neural Inhibition Techniques
Arthrofascial Stretching: Grade IV Joint Mobilization for the Manual Therapist