Massage and bodywork is a fascinating and highly engaging profession. Where else do you have the opportunity to engage with such a wide segment of the population, all while simultaneously helping your clients feel better in their daily lives? While massage is sometimes demanding, there’s no question: it’s a highly rewarding profession.
When you first start out on the path to become a professional practitioner, you enroll in a massage therapy program. As part of this program, you learn all that you can about massage in a relatively short period of time. Of course, it’s not just therapeutic techniques and applications that you encounter in your courses. In addition to massage and bodywork-specific topics, you also spend a considerable amount of time on pathophysiology, biochemistry, anatomy and physiology, kinesiology, and a number of other scientific subjects. At the same time, you delve into what’s involved in running a small business and managing a massage practice. All in all, it’s a considerable amount of information to assimilate, digest, and eventually master: and you have to do it all in the span of months, not years.
Eventually, the day comes when you finally graduate. After devoting all of your time to absorbing the information presented to you from week to week, you’re ready to go out into the world and practice massage.
There’s only one thing standing between you and your career as a massage therapist: the Massage and Bodywork Licensing Examination (MBLEx). Before you can start your practice, you need to become licensed in your state. And in the vast majority of states, the MBLEx is your ticket to licensure.
Unfortunately, passing the MBLEx is different from what you’ve encountered in previous months as part of your massage therapy program. Sure, the material is similar: after all, the MBLEx test is meant to verify what you’ve learned as part of your massage therapy program. But there’s a big difference between what you’ve been doing in school, and what you’ll need to do in order to pass the MBLEx.
As part of your course of MBLEx study, you’ve been interacting with your teachers day in and day out, working with fellow students, engaging in hands-on learning, and eventually taking various types of tests to gauge your understanding.
Meanwhile, the MBLEx exam is a standardized test. By definition, standardized tests are designed to serve a single purpose: determining whether a wide and varied sample of the population is able to perform a shared, central set of tasks. They’re not tailored to your particular learning style, or to your individual background. They’re standardized, by definition.
While standardized tests aren’t perfect, they’re still our best bet for measuring performance and mastery when it comes to something like licensing for massage professionals. And while passing the MBLEx isn’t easy for certain types of learners, it’s certainly achievable for everyone. The key is to know how and what to study.
We’ve put together this guide to help you prepare for the MBLEx. Apart from their time in massage school, many adult learners who are preparing for a standardized test like this one have been out of school for years. It’s easy to feel intimidated by this exam: but remember, there’s no need to be. After reviewing our guide to studying for the MBLEx, you’ll be ready to start studying. And, next thing you know, you’ll be a licensed massage practitioner.
Ready to get started? Read on to learn more.