The Macrocycle

Dashboard

A training program for a 5-hour, 225-item exam — not a cram sheet.

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missed questions logged

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Curriculum

Anatomy phase runs the compressed 13-week sequence, then folds into board-style systems review. Click any week to open it.

Program start date: Adjust if you're starting later than planned — every week date below recalculates. Gates, content, and progress aren't affected.

Anatomy Deep-Dive

The apparatus behind Weeks 1–13: how to filter what's worth memorizing, gated checkpoints before advancing, and the learning science underneath it.

Priority tiers — a study filter, not a reading list

Each tier has a different job in a study session — treat them differently, don't study everything the same way.

TIER 1

Know cold, no lookup. The only tier that belongs on a timed quiz. Gate requirement: ≥90% on a quiz, cold, twice in a row. At 70%, it's not "almost there" — it goes back into tomorrow's retrieval queue.

TIER 2

Recognize and understand. Quiz it, but the bar is lower — ≥75%, and reasoning your way there is fine. Don't burn Tier-1-level repetition here.

TIER 3

Reference when needed. Never quiz this cold. Read once, know where to find it again, move on. Flashcards for Tier 3 content is scope creep.

TIER 4

Low priority. Skip outright during the anatomy phase. If it resurfaces later as board-relevant, learn it then, in that context.

Session template — how to run each cadence day

Every MSK-region and Foundation week runs on the same five day-types. The specific content changes; how you run the day shouldn't.

Content day (Mon/Tue) Read/watch first — a text pass (Kenhub, TeachMeAnatomy) plus a short visual pass (AnatomyZone, Ninja Nerd) — then actively encode: cardstock cards or a self-drawn diagram, never highlighting. Pair every fact with an example (a movement, a clinical correlate), not a bare definition. ~30–40 min.

Retrieval day (Wed) No new material, no rereading. Closed-book blank-sheet recall of the content day(s), then shuffle the card deck and self-test. Under ~90% cold, that content goes back into the next content day's queue — don't mark it learned yet. ~20–30 min.

Question day (Thu) Genuinely timed practice questions, roughly a minute a question for pure recall-level content. Log every real miss with the 5-category system — a careless miss under time pressure is a recall-speed issue, not a knowledge gap, and worth tracking separately. ~20–30 min.

Cumulative day (Fri) Mixed questions spanning this week AND everything before it, not just this week's content in isolation — this is the actual data point that counts toward the next gate. ~30–40 min.

Clinical application day (Sat, MSK regions only) Take one condition from the week and run it through the full reasoning ladder yourself: structure → impairment → clinical presentation → differential → special test. Writing the reasoning out, not reading someone else's case, is what makes it transfer to boards-style questions. ~30–45 min.

One flagged gotcha worth teaching deliberately during Week 1's content day rather than assuming it's obvious: dorsal/ventral aren't fixed synonyms for anterior/posterior everywhere — they follow the trunk rule (ventral=anterior, dorsal=posterior) at the trunk, but on the hand "dorsal" means the back of the hand and on the foot "dorsal" means the top surface, not the trunk mapping.

Level-up gates

Don't move to the next region or phase until every box is honestly checked — a gate only protects you if it's real. These persist locally like everything else on this page.

Monthly milestones

Month 1

Foundation complete (Gate 1). Spine and Shoulder regions complete (Gate 2 cleared twice).

Month 2

Elbow/forearm/wrist/hand, Hip/pelvis complete. Knee region underway.

Month 3

Knee and Ankle/foot complete — Gate 3 cleared. Neuroanatomy underway.

Month 3.5

Neuroanatomy complete, Gate 4 cleared. Full merge into systems-based board review begins.

If a month slips, protect neuroanatomy's full stretch first — compress an MSK region instead. Neuro is where thin coverage shows up hardest on boards.

Research-backed ways to actually retain this

Retrieval practice (the testing effect): recalling something from memory strengthens it far more than re-reading it (Roediger & Karpicke). Every session should end with you producing an answer from memory, not reviewing a page with the answer already on it.

Spaced repetition: memory decays on a predictable curve (Ebbinghaus). Reviewing right as you're about to forget — not right after learning — is what moves something into long-term memory.

Interleaving: mixing regions or topics within a session is harder in the moment but produces better long-term discrimination between similar concepts (Rohrer & Taylor) — exactly the skill NPTE differential questions test.

Elaborative interrogation: for every fact, ask "why is this true?" or "how does this connect to what I already know?" — this is what turns O/I/A/innervation into clinical reasoning.

Dual coding: pair verbal information with a visual you draw yourself (Paivio) — drawing a muscle's line of pull from memory beats reading a description of it.

Desirable difficulty: if retrieval feels easy, it's not doing much for you (Bjork). Closing the source before you try to recall is the mechanism doing the work.

Sample question ladder — use this shape for any topic

L1 · Recall

What nerve innervates the tibialis anterior?

L2 · Understanding

If it's significantly weak, what movement deficit and gait compensation would you expect?

L3 · Application

A patient shows foot drop with steppage gait — which nerve, root, or muscle group is most likely involved?

L4 · Clinical reasoning

Lateral knee pain radiating below the fibular head, weak dorsiflexion/eversion, intact knee extension — how do you differentiate a common peroneal lesion from L5 radiculopathy on exam?

L5 · NPTE application

Between those two patients, which single exam finding most reliably tells them apart, and why?

Fastest way to get Level 3–5 questions: take any structure and run it through this ladder yourself. It works for any topic, so you're never dependent on someone else having written the question you need.

Anatomy resource stack

Resource	Role	Cost
Kenhub Premium	Primary learn + retrieval quizzing	~$29–39/mo, often discounted
Physiopedia	Clinical bridge — structure → impairment → treatment	Free
TeachMeAnatomy (free tier)	Fast reference / second explanation	Free
AnatomyZone / Ninja Nerd	Visual primer before new MSK/neuro topics	Free
Muscle & Motion	Movement-based functional anatomy — worth adding once MSK regions start	~$15/mo

Weak Points

1 = very weak · 5 = excellent. Rate honestly, re-rate every few weeks — the trend matters more than any single score.

Missed Question Log

The point isn't the wrong answer — it's why. Knowledge gap, weak understanding, application error, or careless mistake are four different fixes.

Date	Topic	Category	Follow-up	Status

Study Group

Optional layer on top of the solo plan — useful for retrieval practice and case discussion, not for first-pass learning.

How to use a group here

Learn and retrieve solo first. Bring retrieval gaps to the group, don't co-read material for the first time together.
Weeks flagged with 👥 below are natural group sessions — cumulative/integration weeks where quizzing each other and arguing about clinical reasoning pays off most.
Best formats: timed mixed-question sets followed by talking through *why*, teach-back on one subtopic each, or mock patient-case reasoning.
Keep it to a standing cadence (e.g. every other Sunday) rather than ad hoc — coordination overhead kills adherence faster than content does.
A group session can replace part of a week's practice-question target, but log your own misses even if the group discusses them together.

Group-friendly weeks

Group notes

References & Strategy Notes

Official exam information is separated from this program's own study-strategy choices.

Official NPTE information

FSBPT NPTE-PT Test Content Outline, effective January 2024 225 total items per exam form (180 scored + 45 unscored pretest), delivered in five 45-item sections over roughly 5 hours of testing time. Content is organized into eight body systems, a System Interactions category, and non-system areas (equipment, safety, professional responsibilities, research/EBP).

fsbpt.org — NPTE Content / Test Content Outline PDF

Approximate scored-item ranges by system (out of 180 scored items) Musculoskeletal ≈44–54 items (the largest single domain); Neuromuscular & Nervous System ≈39–48 items; Cardiovascular & Pulmonary ≈22–27 items; System Interactions ≈8–10 items; Integumentary ≈8–11 items; the remainder spread across other body systems and non-system categories. FSBPT's published figures — re-check fsbpt.org before your final review phase in case a cycle updates them.

fsbpt.org; cross-checked against multiple 2026 prep-company breakdowns of the same blueprint

Scoring Scaled score 200–800; 600 is passing. Scaling adjusts for form difficulty, so there's no fixed "percent correct" target — every item counts equally, including ones you can't identify as pretest items.

This program's own strategy choices (not official FSBPT guidance)

Why anatomy first, and why this compressed 13-week version Anatomy is the substrate every later system leans on. The 13-week version (vs. a slower first-pass curriculum) reflects that this isn't learning from zero — it's re-consolidating coursework already covered once into something durable, run on a repeatable Mon/Tue-content → Wed-retrieval → Thu-questions → Fri-cumulative → Sat-clinical-application weekly cadence.

Why gated checkpoints A gate only protects you if it's real — moving to the next region without actually clearing one just relocates the gap instead of closing it. Four gates run through the anatomy phase: Foundation→MSK, per-region advancement, all-MSK→Neuroanatomy, and Neuroanatomy→systems merge.

Why the extra runway went into more interleaved practice and a longer Peak phase Compressing anatomy into 13 weeks (instead of spreading it further into the school year) freed roughly a month of calendar time before the exam. That time was used to add more full-system interleaving in Build and extend Peak to four weeks — more full-length practice exams spaced further apart, rather than cramming several into the final two weeks.

Why retrieval practice over rereading, why spacing, why interleaving comes later within a region but earlier across systems These follow the same evidence base as before — testing effect, spacing against the forgetting curve, and interleaving for discrimination between similar-looking conditions — the exact skill NPTE differential-diagnosis questions test.

Resources referenced in this plan

Anatomy phase: Kenhub as the primary learn/quiz tool, Physiopedia as the clinical bridge, TeachMeAnatomy/AnatomyZone/Ninja Nerd as free references, Muscle & Motion optional once MSK regions start. Systems phase: a comprehensive review text or structured course as the spine, your own DPT lecture material as the primary source for anything currently being taught in class, a question bank for retrieval practice, and PEAT for official full-length simulation closer to the exam.