CREDIT: HOMEPAGE.SMC.EDU

It's been a funny scene around the Fanshawe Fitness Centre as of late. All of the Fitness and Health Promotion students are panicking over an anatomy test that they need to score 70 per cent on to pass. To make matters worse, they have to do a similar test next semester where they have to obtain 80 percent.

Human anatomy considers the structures of our bodies, the muscles, the bones, the ligaments and the tendons, and there are many other things to consider. Where do all these muscles originate on our bodies? Where do they insert? What are their specific roles in the human body? Considering how many different structures we have in the human body, you're probably starting to get the idea of why Fanshawe's poor FHP students are freaking out!

So why do they have to learn all of this nonsense? It's definitely not so they can just sound "science-y" to their friends. One of the main reasons is so that they can learn the specific mechanics of the body's movements and what exactly is responsible for each of these movements. Once familiar with all of these structures, origins and insertions, the FHP students soon find that the sky is the limit.

The reason for this is because this specific knowledge is the ultimate backbone to understanding how the body moves, works and, more importantly, improves through fitness. An easy way to think about it is in terms of muscles versus movement. Once you learn what muscles cause which movements in our bodies, you are off to the races.

For example, what extends the leg from a bent position to its neutral straight position? The quad muscles, right? So if the quads do the actual work for this movement and your goal is to strengthen the quads, what should you do? Add some sort of weight resistance to your leg and do leg extensions. Voilà! You just did the basic problem- solving for how we figured out how to strengthen the quad muscles using leg extension machines in the gym. There is clearly a lot more detail involved in the complexity of all the actual structures involved in the movement, but that is the layman's summarization.

The bottom line is that if you want to improve a certain muscle, learning the basics of the muscles and the movements will make life a hell of a lot easier for you in terms of personal program designing. Do you have to become an anatomy expert like the FHP students are striving for? Absolutely not, but a general knowledge of the basics will go a long way. You will no longer be the person who asks "What do I do to tone up this muscle?" You will be the person who says, "I know that this muscle moves this limb, so now I know what movement I have to do with an added resistance to tone that muscle!"

Frédéric Delavier is the author who wrote the infamous Strength Training Anatomy book. It's a book that has excellent illustrations with explanations of the anatomy and examples of gym exercises that train each muscle. Its popularity motivated him to write his followup project titled The Strength Training Anatomy Workout. It takes the initial knowledge you gained from his first book and educates you on the numerous ways you can devise a personal program that is right for you.