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Session 176
In today’s episode, Ryan talks with another Ryan, a current medical student who recently matched in Psychiatry at Loyola University Chicago as they discuss the importance of maintaining one’s health and fitness as a premed, not only to maintain sanity, but also to increase your efficiency in studying and life in general.
Ryan shares with us his premed journey as well as his website, The Whitecoat Fitness, a site that promotes diet, fitness, and lifestyle making it an awesome resource for premed students.
Also listen in as Ryan describes what match day was like for him at their school and his reaction upon opening his envelope while going blind.
Here are the highlights of the conversation with Ryan:
Ryan’s premed journey:
- Bouncing back between pharmacy and medicine until his sophomore year
- Landing a job as an in-patient pharmacy technician and deciding he wanted to take the medicine route
- Shadowing a local physician in summer time
The importance of shadowing:
- To get the feel if you really like what you do
- Don’t just shadow but talk to them about the life they live, the things they do, the things they enjoy, and how much time they have for the family, and what their whole life looks like
How to network to get shadowing opportunities:
- Reaching out to a premed club and networking with people
- Asking for contact referrals rather than cold calling
How he stumbled upon The White Coat Fitness:
- Athletics as a large part of Ryan’s life
- Working out at the college gym
- Spending two years to try different training programs
- Getting questions from people about nutrition and fitness
- A lot of wrong information going around
- The mindset trap people commony fall into of doing 0% if you can’t do 100%
- You can do effective exercise even in 10 minutes
It’s a sad fact that medical students are not really trained in nutrition, diet, or exercise.
Getting the mindset of going to the gym:
- Knowing and setting priorities first
- Including health in your priorities
- Scheduling things
The benefits of exercising:
- Walking as a cardio exercise at the same time a way for Ryan to relax and mentally decompress
- Increases your focus and retention
- Promotes efficient studying
TIP: Do some aerobic cardio before studying to help increase memory retention.
Transitioning from nonclinical med schools years to doing clinical rotations:
- Taking his priorities and scheduling things
- Priority #2 as to how and when to get his exercise in
- Figuring out he had to exercise first thing in the morning
Ryan’s advice to keep you motivated to exercise:
- Find the motivation inside yourself in terms of what it means to you.
- There is no too small. It all makes a difference and it will all build on itself.
- Set super easy goals when you’re first starting out – so easy that you possibly couldn’t fail
- Slowly work that up and it will start to show and you’ll start to enjoy it and feel the effects
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Links and Other Resources:
If you need any help with the medical school interview, go to medschoolinterviewbook.com. Sign up and you will receive parts of the book so you can help shape the future of the book. This book will include over 500 questions that may be asked during interview day as well as real-life questions, answers, and feedback from all of the mock interviews Ryan has been doing with students.
Are you a nontraditional student? Go check out oldpremeds.org.
For more great content, check out www.mededmedia.com for more of the shows produced by the Medical School Headquarters including the OldPremeds Podcast and watch out for more shows in the future!
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