Thursday, May 13th

Today was my longest day in the athletic trainer's room yet. I met Kelly at 9:30 and we went over my homework from the night before. I had to tell Kelly what I thought would be good sport specific exercises to perform after having knee surgery. I had to find sport specific exercises for hockey, lacrosse, and football. I learned that the exercises not only vary by sport, but vary by position in each sport. Wide receivers will do different exercises than the tight end or kicker, because they do different jobs on the field. After we discussed and I performed some of those exercises, I went to work out from 10-11. When I finished working out I went back to my dorm, changed and showered, then went to medical science class where we continued to talk about concussions. I reported back to the room at 1 and began prepping for practices. Nik and I took the waters out to each athletic field. After that is was a day of taping. I have never spent so much time taping anything. I started with the ankle. After doing the ankle, a standard ankle tape, I learned how to do an Achilles ankle tape. From there I moved on to doing a simple ankle wrap to reduce swelling. I still need to master all the ankle wraps. From there I moved onto shoulder wraps. I wrapped three different ways. One way to stop from upward/backward movement and another to stop downward/forward movement. The third way was a substitute for a sling. After those wraps I moved onto the wrist wraps. I learned to wrap in neutral, up, and down. I practiced that for awhile after. That brought me to about 5 p.m. Then Chris taught us about stimulation and we were hooked up to it. He taught us about closed loops and open loops, and what that meant when dealing with electricity. After that we picked up water jugs from the athletic fields, cleaned the tables and called it a day. Tomorrow I will report at 9:30 to the athletic training room where Kelly and I will wrap up the information on the knee and move onto the main injuries of the shoulder. Special thanks to Nik Taz, Brett Kangas, and Zach Spencer for letting me practice different wraps on them. An extra special thanks goes out to Connor Toomey who sacrificed his lacrosse practice to let me tape him repetitively for two hours.

Hours: 9:30-10 knee exercises and info with Kelly, 10-11 workout, 11:50-12 medical science class, 1-6 trainer's room stretching, icing, assistance, stimulation/wrapping practice.

Total Hours: 5 hours and 30 minutes