This first week in the Athletic Training Room was very similar to what I was expecting. It is a lot of hard work but fun at the same time. The hardest part is all the terminology, anatomy, and tools. At first I was very overwhelmed with all the long terms Chris would use and make it seem so simple. After just one week though, I feel so much more comfortable and actually have some confidence in what is going on.
The routine was the first thing I learned. Things like waters and clean up are all in the daily routine. The first couple days felt a bit long because I was mostly observing, which is very important in Athletic Training. After I learned the basic anatomy of certain parts of the body and gained a lot of knowledge in a brief amount of time with Chris and his books, I was soon taping ankles, wrapping shoulders, stretching people out, and learning all about fitness and exercises to help prepare your body and prevent injury along with rehab from injury.
The first thing Chris and I did was work on inventory for a good chunk of time the first few days. We spent a great deal of time talking about the business aspect of the Athletic Trainers Room. They are given a certain budget to stay in and they have to carefully decide what is necessary and what is not. There are some things that would greatly enhance the Athletic Trainers Room, but the budget just does not have room for it. There is a lot of stuff behind the scenes that I never knew about. I attended the weekly meeting for the whole Athletic Department and discussed practice times and didn’t realize all the effort and things they take into consideration.
I spend at least an hour a day taping ankles and practicing so I can do it on athletes for real this upcoming week. I feel I have become a much bigger help to Chris the second half of the week because I understand so much more of it now. The other day I was stretching out Nick Libby on my own for the first time and he said “Wow, you actually seem to know what you are doing, that stretch felt really good.” That gave me a lot of confidence.
Wednesday and Saturday are game days. I attended the girls varsity lacrosse game and the boy varsity baseball game. The main thing I learned from watching the games from an Athletic Trainer’s point of view is that you need to be scanning the field at all times for possible injuries or collisions so that way you can be knowledgeable of how it happened when or if an injury occurs.
Chris and I spend a lot of the down time in the weight room keying in on certain muscles and how to strengthen them with different contractions. The rest of the down time, Chris gives me words that are relative to what we do each day so I can be more knowledgeable of the basics, because he says the key to being a trainer is understanding the underlying anatomy. I was assigned words, muscles or bones such as, periodization, navicular bone, modality, eccentric and concentric contractions, brachioradialis muscle, delayed onset muscle soreness, and posterior tibialis. Those are just some of the knew things I learned that I had no clue what they were going into this week. So along with the terminology, all of the hands on taping, wrapping, applying ice, heat, stim, or ultra sound are all things I have learned in one quick week.