Well, I ended up NOT getting that A on my last exams, but I did get an A overall in the anatomy class so I’m happy with that.

This semester we’ve got 3 tracks were doing… muscle, cell, etc. physiology; neuroanatomy and development; and pathology and pharmacology.

So far doing fairly well in each. I know a fair amount just from my undergraduate biochemistry major, and I also know a fair amount from just being around on the Internet discussing training, nutrition, and general health which is good.

As far as other things:

1. Making good progress on the book. I’m up to about 105 written pages so far without pictures. However, given the fact that I actually need to describe exercises because I can’t assume people have other books, this thing is going to be very long. I have about 50 on programming so far which will likely end up being approximately 70-80, and then likely another 100-125 on exercises (I’m hoping way less… but doesn’t look that way so far). Then I will have to add the obvious pictures in for exercises and that may be another 50 pages by itself. So we’re probably looking around a 225-250 page book.

I’m hoping that this is not he case… but if people were looking for a “Starting Strength” of bodyweight this may be what this turns into. However, I don’t have the credentials of Mark Rippetoe, or the expertise of working with athletes like Coach Sommer does so I guess you’ll have to take that for what it’s worth.

Main priority right now is the book though. I hope that if I can continue to keep my motivation up I can have a rough draft done by Thanksgiving/Christmas time…. then we can get editting and photos done by Spring break-ish and then book out sometime by summer. But I’d love if we can get that done earlier… but realistically I’m expecting later.

I guess it depends how professional we want to go with the pictures. I won’t sacrifice any quality on the writing though.

Thoughts? Opinions?

2. Aside from trying to churn out the book I have a bunch of article projects on hold or semi-written. These would be things on:

A. Diseases of civilizations (overview of such things related to civilization specifically)
B. focusing on the feet (more in depth on feet stemming from many comments on VFFs and shoes sitting and lower body dysfunctions)
C. Semi-rewrite of tendonitis with more details
D. Phosphatidyleserine
E. Overtraining
F. More in depth stuff on the core (why valsalva, some tidbits on abs exercises, etc.)
G. Getting priorities straight (a sequel to kiss)
H. Theory on injures (which I have a crapton of info but I still need to think through some more)
I. more information on functions of energy pathways

And then of course we have the hopefully coming soon edition of the updated “How to construct your own workout routine” done by an outside writer who we hope to make a full contributer some day.

Yeahh…. I’m mostly focused on trying to get the top three done given that (A) Robb Wolf’s book is out now that I can refer to and he goes in depth on a lot of the nutritional topics covered with that, and (B) most people have foot issues of some sort because we all wear shoes, and (C) I have this info just sitting and semi-rewrites are actually fairly easy to do like I did with one of the articles which will be mentioned in the next point.

If any of you have any preferences let me know in the comments.

3. I did an overhaul of the mechanism of the cardiovascular disease if you wanna check that out.

And that’s really all I have right now.

So we are continuing to fly through our anatomy class. Only have a few weeks after this and 2 more tests (1 more this coming week, and 1 the week or two after). 9 credit anatomy class in about 9-10 weeks. Pretty crazy.

Regardless, I have been doing well even though my studying has been decreasing each exam. First exam went 100/110 (90.90%), 125/130 (96.15%), and 85/90 (94.44%) which isn’t too bad. Overall, I’m 92.82% in the class which is fine I guess; the average is 85.84%.. my class is very studious.

If anyone wants more detail or would like to follow along I can post some more detailed information on what we are required to learn just to see if you have the cahones to do well in the class. The topics for each exam have been as follows:
1. Chest/shoulder/neck/head
2. Scapula, back, arm, forearm, hand
3. Abdominal walls and contents (organs)
4. Hips, thighs, knees
5, Leg and foot

Obviously, I’d like to finish with an A on every exam and an A in the class which would be nice to say I did. The material comes to be pretty easily since I have a background of reading/investigation as you can see with this site, so I’m not to worried about applying what I know.

We’ll see though. I’m gonna try to work on a lot of revisions this weekend and do a bit of studying for the upcoming exams.

Okay so basically got a test on Tuesday so most of my weekend is going to be geared towards that. Should be interesting because I haven’t quite been keeping up with the work, but I can identify stuff real well on the cadavers so that helps. I just need to memorize more stuff about specific markings on the bones, the rest of the specific origins and insertions of muscles, and then miscellaneous information about joints and such.

In other news, we have a project (clinical correlations) coming up which should be fun. How lucky of my group to draw lateral epicondylitis (aka tennis elbow). Since I have already written an article on tendonitis this should be fairly easy to do…. and I’m good at searching pubmed so doubly so.

I think the biggest thing though is that means I’m going to do an overhaul of the current tendonitis article, since I have more important information to add to it. It’s probably the article that needs an overhaul the most currently on the site so that’s a plus.

Will keep plugging away at the book in the meantime.

Okay so…

1. The actual first bit of knowledge that I have gained from the PT program has been put to use.

Basically, a person asked me back in the second blog post what was the most interesting this I’ve learned so far if I remember correctly. Well, I ended up commenting on TMJ issues:

I’d probably say that some of the upper cervical problems can be correlated with jaw issues. Since the temporomandibular joint sits in nearly a similar axis with C1 vertebra and the skull if one thing gets jacked up (the mandible/jaw) or the upper cervicals get messed up you can have some problems going back and forth between them.

Ironically, it came up a little while later in this thread which actually helped out and got put to good use. (Post 76 and later if you’re interested in reading).

So hooray for that.

2. So the volume of information I need to know shot up a ton. I HOPE I can work more on the book, but it looks like I’m actually going to have to increase studying a bit more for the time being because we’re going super detailed on the forearm/hand, and my knowledge base is lacking in that area compared to other such areas like the shoulder.

So I’m going to try to hit up a lot on the book this weekend, but I can’t promise anything. If I was to give a percentage I’d probably say the writing is around 60-70% done or so, but we need to put together pictures and exercise pages too so I’m not quite sure how long that will take to do even after I’m finished writing and editting. I’ll do the best I can.

3. We are finally getting a rewrite of “How to construct your own workout routine.” (HTC)

As probably only a few of you know, I used to have a blog before Chris and I teamed up to create this site. We don’t have any links to it, but we do have HTC article which I was planning to port over eventually. I have about 4-5 articles half written including revisions to this that I could rewrite into articles if I can find the time to do stuff….

I wrote it back in ‘07 with multiple revisions and additions into ‘08. However, a lot of the information is somewhat… well, not necesarily outdated… but not efficient in context.

So KC Parsons has taken up the mantle for the rewrite, and I’ll be helping to edit. Frees me up to work on the book more (which is obviously a good thing), and hopefully will be a stepping stone to possibly bringing in additional knowledgable writers to the site. You can be assured that it will be good quality stuff.

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As always, feel free to post up comments or questions. We were also thinking of starting a Q&A column if people wanted to regularly send in questions…. but I suppose since we aren’t a popular site that it’s better to use forums for now unless you would want one of us to comment specific on your issues.

So please, if you like our articles it would be great if you could get the word out to other people!

Okay, so I was lazy and didn’t get out a post last week. My bad.

Alright so I can’t really talk about the exams questions at all unfortunately. They were a bit easier than I was expecting as there was more straight forward questions than conceptual questions that I though there would be.

Normally, patient evaluation from observation and some experience requires a fair bit of critical thinking and analysis of all of background patient information to determine a plan of action. I kind of expected the questions (at least on the written portion of the exam) to reflect this type of ability that we would need as PTs. However, it wasn’t the case which was good for everyone else, but kind of dragged me down a little since I over thought some of the questions.

Overall, combining the written, lab, and surface anatomy I ended up with 90% overall which isn’t bad… but isn’t really good either considering I felt like I knew a lot more information than I was able to answer correctly. The majority of my wrong answers were from dumb mistakes which was to be expected, but it was a lot of dumb mistakes. Say if the answer was “flexion at X joint” I only put flexion and was marked off. Yeah, dumb stuff like that.

Regardless, overall the class is probably a 6-7 on my “hardness” scale still given that I acutally have to put in a bunch of time reading/studying the information to make sure I’m not leaving anything out. But the overall volume of information isn’t that much given what I already know; and it’s certainly not hard for me to understand the information either. Given the depth of my anatomy understanding coming in, I have the ability to locate a lot of the structures on the cadaver very well compared to most of the class.

The next unit will be overall good to me though since it’s a bit cumulative with the previous exam which means I have an advantage from previously knowing a lot of stuff so I don’t forget as easily, and we are covering the shoulder/scapula, deep back, and forearm/hand which I do know a fair amount. If there’s any art of the body which I was say I would be most confident if I was thrown into a PT clinic right now to treat patients it would be with the shoulder. My knowledge on the anatomy is relatively high level much moreso than the “Shoes, Sitting, and Lower Body Dysfunctions” article that I recently produced. Which is why I want to get out one for the upper body soon… but it will have to wait until after the book.

Speaking of the book I’ll probably try to put more work into the book this coming week though since we don’t have any exam until July 6th. Currently, I’m writing up the programming sections, and then we have to compile a lot of pictures and specific information on exercises since I can’t assume people have any other resources such as Coach Sommer’s book.

If you guys have any specific questions that I may be able to answer (that won’t compromise the honor code) feel free to ask away! I’ll try to answer the best I can since I’m not putting a lot of time into articles at this point. :\