Rating: 
Summary: When all else Fails...
Review: ...read a book. Especially this book. Anyone who has suffered an injury, the insult of surgery, the subsequent humiliation of physical therapy, should read this book. Despite the naive illustrations, the authors provide a treasure trove of information on how to perform rehabilitation exercises and stretches.I feel lucky to have discovered this book. A little over a year ago I had knee surgery. Unfortunately, as the right knee continued to improve, I developed pain in the left hip. My physical therapist told me to gut it out and take aspirin. A year and two months after my surgery (and seven months out of phys therapy) I could not lift my left leg above four inches without debilitating pain. While in the library, I discovered this book and decided to give the stretches a try. Well, now I have full range-of-motion and just marginal discomfort. I have been performing the stretches and exercises faithfully for six weeks. It works. I recommend this book for anyone who has an interest in how the body works, whether you're a weekend warrior or a sedentary type.
Rating: 
Summary: Better for rehabilitative therapy
Review: Bruce from Rolling Hills unfairly slams this book in his review. I checked it out from the library,and the exercises are from easist imaginable to challenging. I will aid and guide my elderly 84 year old father in his recovery from a 14 month hospital stay that turned an elderly very fit ATHLETE into little more than a modern day concentration camp survivor. It was so sad to see the athlete that entered the hospital come out a very old man who struggled to go up even a few steps, and needed assistance to eat, walk, and learn to talk again.
Rating:
Summary: Better for rehabilitative therapy
Review: Bruce from Rolling Hills unfairly slams this book in his review. I checked it out from the library,and the exercises are from easist imaginable to challenging. I will aid and guide my elderly 84 year old father in his recovery from a 14 month hospital stay that turned an elderly very fit ATHLETE into little more than a modern day concentration camp survivor. It was so sad to see the athlete that entered the hospital come out a very old man who struggled to go up even a few steps, and needed assistance to eat, walk, and learn to talk again.
Rating:
Summary: Simply Great !!!
Review: Great book to have if you want to keep fit. Book contains very simple terminology that any one can understand. At the end of the book you'll find an array of exercises to keep you in tip top shape.
Rating:
Summary: Not for health care professionals
Review: I found this book not very informative for health care professionals, but it may be a good choice for people looking for specific exercises and a brief anatomical background.
Rating:
Summary: A Perfect Book
Review: I originally checked this book out from my local library. I have had low back trouble, been working with a physical therapist at a local health club, and wanted to know if there was more I could do on my own. This book allows you to look for a specific body area, read about it in an easy-to-read format that is non-technical, yet gives brief definitions and terminology that you might hear from your dr. It then lists recommended stretching and strengthening exercises. The back of the book contains simple drawings demonstrating the stretches or strengthening exercises. It targets back, hips, shoulders, etc. for whatever area you need help in.
Rating: 
Summary: There are better books available
Review: I really didn't know where to start to become a physical therapist but I read this book and it takes about almost every aspect of it. This book covers all the body parts with great depth and ways to prevent, rehab, and treat injuries. This book is also very affordable.
Rating:
Summary: Great information
Review: I really didn't know where to start to become a physical therapist but I read this book and it takes about almost every aspect of it. This book covers all the body parts with great depth and ways to prevent, rehab, and treat injuries. This book is also very affordable.
Rating:
Summary: There are better books available
Review: My disappointment in this book has to do with its organization. I was looking for information on a shoulder injury and what to do for it. When looking through the chapter on the shoulder it did help that all the things that could go wrong with your shoulder were in bold print so you could skim to find the correct one, but then I wanted to know what to do to help my injury. Now I had to search the book again. If not right there, you'd think it'd be in the next section...but no, the next section was on "taking care of your shoulder" before anything goes wrong. But if you keep turning pages you do finally find a section titled "When Problems Occur"...however, now you search again for your specific problem only to find pretty general information for all shoulder injuries. I prefer the organization in The Sports Medicine Bible for a good overall reference book...and I like Allan Levy's Tennis Injury Handbook for more specific questions. Allan Levy also had a more general reference book called the Sports Injury Handbook, but, once again, the organization of the Sports Medicine Bible presents the information best (Symptoms, Causes, What you can do, What the doctor can do, etc.)
Rating: 
Summary: Think twice before buying this book.
Review: Sorry to be a negative voice, but I was disappointed with this book. There are scores of exercises and stretches given, but there's not enough focus on which exercises work for which problems. There's a "try everything" mentality here, with the assumption that one has multiple hours per day to maintain one's body. The book explains how the body works but is weak at tying that information to good advice on what to do to prevent and repair. It's almost as if the book were written by an overly cautious attorney who's afraid to give any advice on the chance that it might not work for someone. It's the old "vague is better because it's safer" approach. Recommendations are so generic as to be commonsense. While there's plenty of impressive and arcane anatomical verbiage, the drawings accompanying the text don't label the parts referred to in the text, making understanding difficult. All the stretches and exercises are lumped together at the end of the book, one after another, with little explanation. The drawings are amateurish, with some of the line drawn models looking more like monkeys than humans. Part of what made this book seem so unimpressive was that I ordered it along with another book that was incredibly good: Allan Levy's Sports Injury Handbook. The contrast in quality between the two books was startling. See my review there.
| 
