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.