Anatomy & Kinesiology Lessons

Developing a successful training program is easier if you have an appropriate knowledge on the human body. It makes no sense that your main goal is to build muscle and at the same time you hardly know part of the muscles in your body. If you know how the body works, you can design compensated training programs without neglecting muscles, you can detect problems on your program easily and, especially, you can reduce the risk of injury yourself with inappropriate exercises.

Some anatomy and kinesiology lessons are the first step for acquiring this knowledge about your body. With anatomy and kinesiology, you can know all the relevant muscles and their biomechanics. A good place for finding all this information is ExRx.net (Exercise Prescription on the Net) site. ExRx is a huge site with many sections related to weight training. Sure I’m going to refer to it many times in later posts. But now we’re only interested in the “Exercise Instruction & Kinesiology” section. Here you can find:

• A graphical muscle body map with links to each muscle information.

• A muscle directory with detailed information about all the muscles. This information includes the other names used to refer to this muscle, the different heads that compose this muscle, the movements performed by this muscle (e.g. flexion, extension, abduction, adduction, rotation, etc.) with links to the involved articulations, the attachments of this muscle with the bones, the related muscles, the location of this muscle in a graphical muscle map and optionally, some additional comments about particularities of this muscle.

• An articulation directory with detailed information about all the articulations, including the movements performed by this articulation and with links to the involved muscles.

As you can see, anatomy and kinesiology information is extensive and thorough. Of course, it is not necessary to know every detail, but a general knowledge on which muscles compose our body and some notions on their biomechanics will enrich your training routines by considering often neglected (but important) muscles and will help you to prevent injuries.

Welcome & Motivation

Hi, my name is George and I’m an amateur bodybuilder. I’m one of those who find something fascinating in bodybuilding. Based on my own experience (I started bodybuilding 6.5 years ago), I can assure that bodybuilding can change your life. It allows a complete development of not only your physique, but also of your mind. In fact, all your way of life will be altered. I think that is why bodybuilding is likely the greatest sport.

Proper training and nutrition are key concepts to reach success in bodybuilding. Of course, I think it’s needless to say that steroids and other drugs don’t fit in my training philosophy (and should not fit in any). But what is then the “proper” way to achieve your goals in weight training? Well, it depends. Bodybuilding is not an exact science, and different people can make pretty gains using different types of training, but in the same way there are some common practices and beliefs in bodybuilding that are completely useless and even harmful.

Knowledge is the key to develop a successful training program and the web has become a great support to acquire this knowledge. However, sometimes it is awkward to find what you are looking for within this huge information and, in addition, sometimes different sites defend contradictory facts. For these reasons, “Natural Bodybuilding Principles” blog sees the light with the goal of providing you with the appropriate links where finding useful information for developing an effective weight training routine. My aim is to share with you my own training experience and my conclusions about weight training information available in the web.

I’ve decided to organize the posts in this blog in mainly 3 categories: training, nutrition and rest/recuperation, which correspond to the fundamental concepts for achieving success in bodybuilding. In fact, a good training program must consider in a proper way all these factors in order to obtain proper results.

I hope you find the “Natural Bodybuilding Principles” blog interesting and that you participate by commenting your own training experiences, thus the blog can become a bodybuilding fans meeting point.