PEPonline
Professionalization
of Exercise Physiologyonline

An international electronic
journal for exercise physiologists
ISSN 1099-5862

Vol 4 No 6 June 2001

 

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.

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