If you're really good at reading, you can zone in on paragraphs you think matter by way of skimming the text. So if you need to know how to stop knee cave in the squat, you'd go to the squat chapter and then the section on technique instruction or common errors (been a while since I opened the book). Then you read the first 1 or 2 sentences of every paragraph to quickly find out if it's relevant to your specific problem. This works well on texts you've read before, provided they're well written. Luckily, the books are well written, so this technique works pretty well if you're a good reader.Originally Posted by AndrewL
Wouldn't recommend you do it on texts you haven't read before, but it can work on texts you haven't read that are really similar to texts you have. For instance, if a certain strength coach authors a certain text on a certain topic he's written about before, you can skip ahead by identifying information you've read in other texts, thus skipping old information until you reach new information. In this way, I can say I've read every article on topic X by author Y and not spend days on end reading dozens of articles simply by not re-reading parts of texts I've read earlier.
This is also a good way to determine whether or not a text is worthwhile reading. Say you're interested in a specific event related to some shooting or accident. You're bound to find countless hits on Google that are virtually the same article. Regardless of the sameness of these articles, you want to find out specific information like a motivation or names of victims or what have you. You don't want to read every article in full just to find out the information isn't present. So what you can do to try and prevent wasting your time is to scan for traits relating to this specific information with your eyes. Names of victims, for example, are capitalised, so scanning for any capitalised letters (especially mid sentence) is a good way to zone in on this type of information. Numbers stand out like sore thumbs, so things like age and dates are easily spotted. It also helps to know the structure of specific kinds of articles like news coverage, but that's something you only get a feel for by reading a bunch of articles.
This applies to Rip's texts and books, too. If you want to know about the hamstring involvement in the squat, you can more easily scan the chapter on the squat if you zone in on segments that discuss anatomy, introduction to the squat, or reasons for doing the squat. The instructional part is probably not going to cover the anatomy because that may break structure too much, especially if you interrupt the instructions with pages and pages about one muscle and then continue instructing the lift. Again, going by memory, but it's just an example to prove a point. So scanning for any discussion of anatomy pre or post instruction is a helpful way of finding sections on the hamstring in the squat. Words like "bone", "segment", "moment arm", "angle", "leverage", "hip (drive)", "trunk" etc are all words to look out for as they are all related to the hamstring, in this case, or evidence of a discussion of anatomy taking place in the paragraphs in which they're located.
It's a bit more work than pressing buttons on your keyboard, but by no means an exercise in futility. Definitely more of a skill to practice than a handy tool anyone can just use on day 1. Even just recently, I scanned Practical Programming for information on failure and managed to save seconds of my reading experience. Seconds, I tell you.
