Dear Everyone,
I decided sort of kind of what I wanted to do with my major here at Rice. I was looking through the course catalog deciding what courses to take, and stumbled upon one called "exercise physiology." Unfortunately, exercise physiology along with exercise physiology lab both have Kinesiology 300 and 301 as prerequisites. The lab sounds totally awesome, though, because you do experiments on eachother and yourselves (according to the catalog). In any case, I decided to take Kinesiology 300 and 301, Human Anatomy and Human Physiology, and next term I'm planning on taking those exercise physiology classes. I also wanted to take this biomechanics course.
I then happened to think "what if I just got a degree in this?" at which point I googled it and found out that in addition to the courses I was planning on taking, I would just have to take "Nutrition," "Performance Psychology," "Motor Learning," and "Measurement and Evaluation."
So right now my plan is to get a degree in that. And also Chemistry.
In short, I am going to become an expert on this stuff.
The end.
Sincerely,
Kangway
p.s. I haven't been reading anyone's blog because stuff is so busy here but I am going to get around to it once I get my laptop back.
p.p.s. good luck with the start of the season.
p.p.p.s. I started training seriously again yesterday and I'm fat now and still injured.
7 comments:
Awesome. This had occurred to me, too, but unfortunately a) I'm almost graduated in CS and b) Caltech has nothing like this.
caltech students can enroll for courses at oxy, where they do have a kinesiology major.
i think exercise science will be far more interesting 20-30 years from now than it is currently. mostly, what they do now is pure description, without much attempt to understand the full pathway of exercise input -> molecular signals -> gene activation -> molecular output -> observable difference in athletic performance
but biologists are getting better and better at this sort of thing, and eventually we'll begin to understand how humans work. it's an exciting place to be.
make sure you learn bio, too. by the time you're the eminent Dr. Chuang it'll be as much PCR as sticking volunteers on treadmills.
Mark, that's a good point.
I didn't want to be a pure Kinesiology major right now because it's not that strong of a major. It's sort of as you said, pure description, and in a way that sort of bothers me. I guess in that sense I wanted to pick up something solid like Chemistry, and then look on towards graduate school and starting doing research at level that's more than just superficial. It's much more interesting for me to see what's going molecularly to explain larger processes than it is just to say "oh, look at how these athletes respond to this stress. That's cool."
In any case, I guess Caltech students can enroll at courses at oxy. I remember you mentioning possibly taking biomechanics there. That'd be cool but it seems like if you really wanted to go in depth with something like that during your undergraduate years it would be difficult. I guess one way would be to do a bio major and then do physiology related work/classes/research over the summer and one or two oxy classes over the school year. But I mean, I don't know, it's nice having it all incorporated into one nice schedule.
In any case, we'll see how this semester goes and I'll give you all a better progress report.
check out
this article.
Dave Costill says,
"It's mainly been descriptive work, studies that document and describe what we know. But we're approaching the point where we are getting the technology to examine what is going on in the body on a molecular level. So, while we've been able to describe, thus far, the changes that a body goes through as the athlete improves, we may, with the new technology, be able to look at the genetic triggers that regulate the adaptive responses."
I emailed him a while back asking him to elaborate, but I never got any response.
That was an interesting article, Mark. My human physiology textbook opens up with this quote, "Physiology is not a science or a profession but a point of view." A lot of it is in fact just descriptive work at this point, trying to record and write how your body functions.
I don't know exactly the courses I'm going to be taking, but the core requirements are:
Human Physiology
Human Anatomy
Exercise Physiology
Exercise Physiology Lab
Motor Learning
Motor Learning Lab
Nutrition
Measurement and Evaluation
I guess I'm additionally going to be taking a year of Biochemistry, and a ton of Chemistry, so I'm hoping that will help add to the depth of my studies.
sounds like interesting work. are you on semesters?
i'm guessing this will take 3 years, then maybe some grad school depending on what you want to do with the degree?
Yep. Semesters. 15 weeks per semester. Yeah, I'm thinking there might be some graduate school involved.
My human anatomy class isn't too bad so far, the physiology class is rough because it's a 2.5 hour lecture once a week, and there's a lot of reading each week, but it's pretty cool cause the professor is an exercise physiologist. He's already brought up marathon runners multiple times as examples of highly efficient athletes and having lots of mitochondria.
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