Anatomy: The
Forgotten Piece of the Beginning
Tommy Boone, PhD,
MPH, FASEP, EPC
Professor and Chair
Department of Exercise Physiolgoy
College of St. Scholastica
Duluth, MN 55811
SOME YEARS
AGO, the study of the relationship between form and function was considered
important. College professors impressed upon their students the value
of knowing human anatomy and its fundamental relationship to function.
No one graduated from college with a degree in Health and Physical Education
without passing the “Kinesiology” course. It was “the” course that
all students dreaded, but were probably most interested in taking.
A major part of the reason they didn’t like the course had to do with the
requirement to memorize origins, insertions, and functions of the major
muscles of the body.
The idea was simple.
If the students could identify the muscles and understand the relationship
of individual muscles to each other, the likelihood of understanding human
movement and thus sports skills was increased. Every student wanted
to know more about the anatomy of sports skills, and so the students seldom
ever challenged the professors. Every single muscle was put to memory,
which raises an interesting question. “Was it correct to require
the students to memorize origins, insertions, and functions?” If
the professors were correct, “Why is there so little emphasis on anatomy
today? More to the point, why don’t all graduate programs that offer
exercise physiology have an anatomy course?” To be even a bit more
blunt, why don’t the exercise physiology programs have an anatomy laboratory
with cadavers?” Clearly there is no substitute for cadaver dissection
in the study of functional anatomy.
Answers to these questions
will be explored in this article. The purpose is to understand why
anatomy has become the forgotten course in the graduate curriculum of most
exercise physiology programs of study? Perhaps, part of the answer
is that most professors (and certainly most students) would argue that
memorizing a list of facts, formulae, and bits of anatomy is a waste of
time! Memorizing anything is openly said to be meaningless.
Memorization is said to have little to no value in real learning.
Real thinking is defined as something other than memorization? It
is said that memorization is simply unnecessary and often distracts from
a higher level of cognitive function. Many educators appear to believe
that the statement is true.
However, the single biggest
myth in academia is the idea that memorization isn’t important. It
is entirely untrue that the power invested in memorization is meaningless
or a waste of time. To remember facts of diverse dimensions, a person
must have an excellent memory. All students (and their professors
for that matter) memorize bits and pieces of different subject matter everyday.
Remembering origins, insertions, and functions are as important as remembering
physiological calculations to understand oxygen consumption or mean arterial
pressure. Is there any more sense of importance in remembering the
solution to a cardiac output calculation versus remembering the origin
of the pectoralis major. What about recalling the insertion of the
muscle or the role it plays in inward rotation? If a person should
know the right information about each question, what is the role of recall?
In short, being able to recall the “lateral lip of the bicipital groove
and the fact that the pectoralis major assists in inward rotation bears
directly on one’s ability to remember the information.
It is not clear thinking
to believe that exercise physiologists can understand the human body without
knowing anatomy? Professors should know that a precise understanding
of anatomy is crucial to an accurate leadership role in fitness, health,
sports training, and rehabilitation. If they do, and good sense suggests
they should, it argues against the fact that they appear disinterested
and essentially do nothing to engage students in anatomy discussions.
It is as if there might be an attitude that anyone can learn anatomy, but
only the select few, perhaps, the exercise physiologists, can learn physiology.
Such thinking is incomplete and foolish. It sets the stage for poor
judgments and a conflicting message, especially with respect to the realm
of athletics and human movement. Such a disconcerting point of view
is disruptive and uncharacteristic given the impressive academic degrees
most professors have earned.
Yet, today, aside from the
status quo of most doctorate programs that offer something approachable
to exercise physiology, there are few if any academic programs in exercise
physiology that require gross anatomy courses. Imagine the incompleteness
of a PhD degree that is centered squarely on the human body and, yet the
future professors complete their education without having the hands-on
opportunities to dissect cadavers. It is the same inappropriateness
in thinking when studying oxygen consumption without having the opportunity
to measure it. Exercise physiologists argue strongly for the cutting
edge metabolic analyzers and other physiological equipment to identify
with “physiology” while the idea of procuring a cadaver for a more thorough
trustworthy analysis doesn’t seem to enter their minds. Surely, the
importance of knowing structure at the same level of knowing function isn’t
that hard to face except for the old battles of separation of one discipline
(exercise physiology) from another (physical education). To make matters
worse, most exercise physiologists either don’t know or act like they don’t
know the differences between being a physiologist and an exercise physiologist.
In short, the issue of anatomy is but one of several unanswered questions
centered directly on the question, “What is exercise physiology?”
Indeed, there are a lot of
such questions and one, in particular, “Why teach anatomy, anatomic terminology,
connective tissues, articulations, muscles, and nerves?” Despite
the many issues that surround the unanswered questions with the anatomical
perspective, it is essential that exercise physiologists recapture the
original thinking of human movement as a synthesis of the complex interaction
of the skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems, including the biomechanics
of movement and the biochemistry of movement. Indeed, an understanding
of anatomy is essential to gaining a working knowledge of the human body.
All professors understand this point but have allowed their better thinking
to be derailed and tabled. To complicate matters, they have also
embraced a “specialist” thinking as a rule of thumb of their work expectations.
Their fuzzy logic has misled them, and unfortunately has kept them from
understanding the criteria or characteristics of a profession.
Exercise physiologists ought
to wake up and place an equal emphasis on investigative techniques specific
to anatomical human movement. One way to do so is to introduce a
human anatomy course at the graduate level. An exercise physiologist
with gross anatomy training and dissection experience should teach the
course. Cadavers should be procured by the department from local
medical schools and stored in the department’s anatomy laboratory.
The structural and functional relationships should be integrated with the
physiological lectures. Becoming involved with anatomy will help
clarify a more professional distinction for the department as well as the
profession.
Hence, if exercise physiologists
want to help with the emerging profession, they should encourage the teaching
of anatomy at all levels of the students’ education. A course in
functional anatomy is much more important to an exercise physiology student
than another course variation on physiology, chemistry, or biochemistry.
There is something wrong with the idea of an exercise physiologist who
is conducting research at the muscle fiber level, but who cannot recognize
the differences in shoulder flexors and abductors. There is also
the troubling notion that students who are required to learn the cellular
enzymes for energy production, while failing in the understanding of the
nerves to specific muscles. Ultimately, knowledge of basic neuroscience
(such as the lateral pectoral nerve innervating the clavicular fibers of
the pectoralis major, as in shoulder flexion) allows for a better understanding
of everyday human movement than the histologic differences between fiber
types.
Anatomy is an essential knowledge
for all exercise physiologists. It is time to reflect on the lack
of emphasis placed on it. Professors should argue for the teaching
of anatomy, and its integration in the practice of exercise physiology.
They should teach osteology (to understand the points of origin and insertion),
myology (to establish the relationship of muscles of different joints to
each other), and neurology (to appreciate the role of the nervous system
in function and dysfunction). Joint motions should be analyzed with
reference to specific muscles, either as one-joint or two-joint muscles,
and how singly and collectively they function to produce the desired action
or actions.
The kinesiological (i.e.,
anatomical) analysis can take on a variety of different forms, including
but not limited to, weight lifting, sports skills analysis, fitness and
training, and exercise rehabilitation. The joints and the range of
motion possible should be understood in terms of the nervous system.
Students should know the spinal nerves that innervate the skeletal muscles
to fully understand the loss in muscle function when an injury occurs to
a specific nerve or related nerves. The nerve-muscle information
is critical to a solid science background in any science curriculum that
is responsible for developing and/or maintaining the human body, either
in preparation of sports, during rehabilitation, or as a function of life-style
management.
To this end, exercise physiologists
need to have a much greater appreciation of anatomy. The contribution
to function can be demonstrated convincingly in several important ways.
Logic and reason require a commitment to function, as in the exercise intensity
necessary to reach the training threshold to realize the true greatness
in one’s genes. Yet, in order to win, the athlete’s mindset must
be just right. He must also connect with his muscles to create the
right combination of factors. An exercise physiologist trained in
functional anatomy is better set to create, alter, and/or reconstruct the
knowledge and meaningful experiences to achieve athletic success.
The mechanisms of athletic function cannot be fully appreciated without
an in-depth understanding of the structure of the human body. It
is equal in importance to the science of physiology, and it is inseparable
from physiology in that anatomy tends to reflect physiology.
Copyright
©1997-2001 American Society of Exercise Physiologists. All Rights
Reserved.
ASEP
Table of Contents
Questions/comments