Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Interventions
What to master
Focus on exercise prescription principles: overload, specificity, progression, and recovery; plus motor learning, manual therapy indications, and modality selection. Understand dosing - intensity, frequency, duration - and how to progress or regress an exercise. Know the difference between strength, endurance, power, and flexibility training and the parameters that target each.
Traps questions use
Items often test whether you can select the most appropriate progression given a patient's response, or distinguish an indication from a contraindication for a modality. Watch for questions that confuse acute versus chronic management priorities, or that reward a patient-centered, functionally relevant goal over an isolated impairment. Another trap is over-relying on passive modalities when active therapy is indicated.
Worked rule of thumb
Use the principle 'progress the variable that matches the goal.' For strength, increase load or resistance within tolerable pain; for endurance, increase repetitions or time; for power, increase speed of concentric work. If a patient's pain increases and persists beyond 24 hours after a session, the prior dose was too high - regress load or volume before changing the exercise entirely.