GetBodySmart.com: Refresh your knowledge of Human Anatomy & Physiology
A fully animated and interactive "Book" about human anatomy and physiology.
I’m not going to tease the story here. Getbodysmart.com is great for three populations within the industry.
New personal trainers
Seasoned personal trainers
The clients of personal trainers
New & Seasoned Personal Trainers
Anatomy, Physiology & Biomechanics are the foundations of our field. It’s in your best interest to be as familiar with these as possible to
Directly help the population you work with.
Give yourself the best opportunities to not get swindled when choosing continuing education, adopting new systems, and using new methods from charismatic professionals surrounding our industry.
Be able to converse confidently with professionals that work in specialties surrounding our own. Ie. Physical therapists, dieticians, occupational therapists, chiropractors, orthopedic surgeons, etc.
Great for educating your clients
The majority of our clients are not going to be “students of the human body”. That’s a hard fact a lot of trainers need to be ok with because it helps set the stage for how you talk to them about the body and find ways to make it easy for them to understand how all of its parts work together. GetBodySmart.com combines some lite exposure to science jargon, while also providing really easy-to-understand images and short videos of movements.
Why I recommend this site most
In theory, you should be able to have a similar experience on any site that talks about A&P and biomechanics, but that’s just not the case. The information is the same, but how GetBodySmart organizes it really helps the understanding for all levels.
1st: For instance, they visually group everything by systems first(see the image at the top of the article) which seems like a no-brainer, but not all sites do this.
2nd: for the muscular system they break them down by body area or more specifically “muscles that action on X area”
This is my personal opinion, but this style of grouping help bring an understanding that the body works as a system or a unit versus as individual structures working independently.
3rd: The real magic happens once you get to an area of the body or a muscle group that you want to explore more. They use layers overlapping simple images that help orient you to where the muscles actually are on the body. You can navigate through the layers to see all the overlapping groups of muscles surrounding the one that you chose to look at. Again, this helps identify the human body operating as a unit
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4th: They provide a few primary muscle actions associated with the muscle you chose and accompany it with a brief description and short looping video to show you what that looks like. The simplicity of the imagery paired with the descriptions work well with each other because it’s not always easy for people to mentally picture how words on a screen translate to a movement.
I wish they would add one more section that shows an example of a “real-world movement”, but that’s just me splitting hairs since I am in a movement-specific discipline. Someone only learning A&P woulnt’t necessarily require that from this resource. Maybe that’s what they cover in their paid sister service KenHub.com?
I love using this resource for my clients who ask for more information. I can share a link about the muscles we talk about, show them all the surrounding tissue that might also have influences on a movement, and allow them to do some self-guided learning without the threat of hearing contradictory information about exercise, or injury.