Chapter 4 – Muscle Reading

Ineffective Textbook Reading

• It is easy to fool yourself about reading. Just having an open book in your hand and moving your eyes across the page doesn’t mean that you are reading effectively.
• Picture yourself siting at a desk, a book in your hand. Your eyes are open and it looks as if you are reading. Suddenly your head jerks up and you will realize your eyes have been scanning the page for 10 minutes, and you can’t remember a single thing you have read.

Wasting Study Time

• Say goodbye to 3 hours. Sometimes the only difference between a sleeping pill and a textbook is that the textbook doesn’t have a warning on the label about operating heavy machinery!
• This is a serious study problem!

How to fix it?

• Approach reading with a system in mind.
• Avoid mental mini-vacations.
• Reduce the number of unscheduled naps during study time.
• Boost your reading skills.
• Reading takes mental focus 
• Apply Muscle Reading.

What is Muscle Reading

• It is an effective way of reading which keeps you active and consumes energy. That is why this strategy is called Muscle Reading.
• It has 3 phases:
  • Phase 1: Before you read
  • Phase 2: While you read
  • Phase 3: After you read

Before you read

• Preview
  • Flip through the text page by page
  • Skim the summaries
  • It prepares your brain to accept information
• Outline
  • Understand the structure of what you read
  • Read chapter outline or create one
  • It organizes your thoughts and makes complex info easier to understand
• Question
  • Write down the questions that resulted from your preview
  • It gets your brain involved in the assignment

While you read

• Focus
  • Sit up; keep your spine straight
  • Avoid marathon reading sessions
  • To stay focused, engaged actively with the reading material
• Flag the answers
  • Act like a detective; seek out the answers to your questions
  • Highlight/underline them
  • Write notes in the margins
  • Markup the text after you have completed reading the section

After you read

• Recite
  • Talk about what you have read
• Review
  • A review within 24 hours moves info from your short term memory to the long term memory
• Review again
  • Simply go over your notes weekly or monthly so the info is easier to recall