How much anatomy and physiology do I need to know as a personal trainer?
As a training provider offering advanced education to those looking to start a successful career in the fitness industry, our job at YOUR Academy is to help learners appreciate not only how to pass the anatomy and physiology unit of their Level 2 Gym Instructor and Level 3 Personal Trainer qualifications, but also how to APPLY the information learnt during their course so they can use it in the real world.
When it comes to how much anatomy and physiology a personal trainer should know, this is a very hotly debated topic! At YOUR Academy, our viewpoint is that there should certainly be an appreciation for how the body adapts to exercise. If the science is understood, then the application of advice relating to both exercise and nutrition will be much more effective.
Lets explain what we mean.
Within the unit 1 anatomy and physiology section, you will learn things such as:
How blood flows all through the body.
The joint actions of each joint in the body.
The 3 energy systems.
However, how often do you think you would explain any of these things to your clients? Probably vary rarely, unless the client has learnt anatomy themselves and are rather inquisitive!
The majority of the general population need a personal trainer for support, motivation, advice and guidance, not to be taken back to GCSE biology!
So why learn it then? Is this just outdated education that has no relevance to the gym instructor and personal trainer qualifications nowadays, or is there something in this that the majority of training providers FAIL to explain to their learners and its relevance to their new career?
The answer to THAT question is the latter. Most training providers who deliver Level 2 Gym Instructor and Level 3 Personal Trainer qualifications FAIL to explain why individuals need to learn the information, or put into context what conversations the personal trainer will be having with their clients and the decisions a personal trainer needs to make when planning workouts and nutrition advice.
Lets explain more by breaking down why the application of anatomy and physiology is so important to the personal trainer.
Blood flow
Firstly, lets look at if a personal trainer needs to explain to a client how blood flows through the body? The obvious answer is no, clients do not need to know about how the aorta begins the process of transporting oxygenated blood around the body, and how the arteries break into aterioles which then break off into capillaries!
However, there are certainly some parts of the cardiovascular system section of both the Level 2 Gym Instructor and Level 3 Personal Trainer qualifications that need to be understood so personal trainers can apply it to their programme design.
For example. To warm up effectively, you need to create vaso-dilation to the working muscles (basically a widening of the blood vessels). This helps increase blood flow to the areas worked, providing the nutrient, include glucose and oxygen, to fuel exercise. Once a personal trainer knows this, they will appreciate the importance of an effective warm up, as well as realise that getting a client to warm up on the bike prior to an upper body workout is a rather stupid idea!
By putting the anatomy and physiology learnt into practice, a personal trainer will plan a cardiovascular pulse raiser at the start of every workout along with dynamic stretches for the areas of the body that are about to be worked. This effective warm up will full prepare the body for the main workout ahead, leading to a more effective workout and less chance of injury.
Joint actions
Next let’s explore if a personal trainer really needs to under the different types of joints within the body and the joint actions they create. Remember, a joint is the meeting of two bones, and provides the opportunity for the bones to move relative to one another. There are fancy terms for these movements, such as flexion, extension, horizontal flexion and abduction as examples. So why the hell do you need to know that as a personal trainer? Good question!
The main reason we give at YOUR Academy is that an understanding of joint and joint actions will help personal trainers design much safer and effective resistance-based workouts. Lets explain how.
Understanding how each joint moves in the body will give you an appreciation of how many exercises you will have to prescribe to ensure all muscles surrounding that joint are trained. Lets start with the elbow. The elbow is a hinge joint, and just like the hinges of a door only allow movement in one direction and then back again, so too does the elbow. So, if you add an exercise to a workout that targets the muscles to move the joint in one direction, e.g. a biceps curl (this would be classed as an elbow flexion exercise), then you should also include an exercise that targets the opposite muscle that moves the joint in the opposite direction, e.g. a triceps push down (this would be classed as an elbow extension exercise). If you fail to do this, the muscles on one side of the joint will get stronger compared to the muscles on the opposite side of the joint, and long-term this can lead to a muscle imbalance, leading to potential pain and injury. But what about the shoulder joint? Well, this is a ball and socket joint, meaning that it can move in many different directions. This therefore means there must be a hell of a lot of muscles that can move the shoulder joint in all these different directions. Let’s review the 8 different shoulder joint actions:
a. Shoulder flexion (anterior deltoid)
b. Shoulder extension (posterior deltoid, lattisimus dorsi)
c. Shoulder horizontal flexion (pectorals)
d. Shoulder horizontal extension (posterior deltoid)
e. Shoulder abduction (medial deltoid)
f. Shoulder adduction (lattisimus dorsi)
g. Shoulder external rotation (infraspinatus, teres minor)
h. Shoulder internal rotation (subscapularis)
It should now be obvious that to training all the muscles that are responsible for creating these 8 different joint actions, you need to include more exercises within a resistance programme! But do the majority of personal trainers include exercises for all 8 joint actions for the shoulder – HELL NO!
Typical joint actions targeted within a workout are shoulder horizontal flexion (this joint movement targets the pectorals – got to the get chest pump!), shoulder adduction (things like lat pull downs) and shoulder abduction (shoulder pressing movements).
The main ones that are neglected in upper body workouts are shoulder internal and external rotation. These joint actions are mainly created by the rotator cuff muscles, a muscle group mainly responsible for the stability and control of the shoulder joint. Lack of exercises prescribed for these muscles is a major reason why a lot of personal training clients get shoulder injuries due to the rotator cuff muscles becoming severely weaker compared to the muscles around the shoulder that help to move it, such as the pectorals, lattisimus dorsi and the deltoids.
So to conclude, the reason why you need to understand joint types and joint actions within the body, is to be able to prescribe resistance based workouts effectively, covering all the major muscles around each joint to help client’s get stronger and prevent injury.
Energy systems
And lastly, lets review why a personal trainer needs to understand about the 3 energy systems the body uses to keep us alive.
Within your Level 2 Gym Instructor and Level 3 Personal Trainer qualifications, you will learn about 3 different energy systems, the aerobic energy system, the lactate energy system and the creatine phosphate energy system. All 3 systems have exactly the same job, and that is to provide the raw materials to be able to regenerate human energy (which is called adenosine tri-phosphate, or ATP for short).
The only reason why we have 3 different energy systems is because they all work together to help regenerate energy based on the activities we are doing. The level of exertion we are working at, along with how long we have been doing something for, determines which energy system will be predominately used. For example, right now you are most likely reading this sat down, and your exertion level is low. This would mean you are primarily using your aerobic energy system, which requires both carbohydrates and fats, along with oxygen, to function and keep producing enough energy to EVERY cell of your body to keep you alive. In your anatomy and physiology unit, you will be taught how this works via the mitochondria, if you did sports science you will learn about the Kreb cycle and the electron transport chain. But guess what, you don’t really need to focus on that in the real world! All you need to appreciate is:
The fuels someone needs to have within their body for the energy system to work.
The duration the energy system can go on for.
The intensity at which each energy system becomes the predominant source of energy.
How we explain this best at YOUR Academy is within our practical, face-to-face days, where students are asked to complete cardiovascular exercise at different levels of intensity to discover what training within each energy system feels like.
For example, we begin with a warm up, this low intensity activity predominately uses the aerobic system which requires carbohydrates, fats and oxygen to function effectively.
What we do next is then ask the learners to complete what we call ‘lactate intervals’. This is where the learner finds the exercise intensity where they are heavily fatigued (both breathless and ‘heavy’ feeling muscles) after 1 minute of high intensity work. After this minute, the learner is given chance to recover by reducing the intensity and working at this reduced intensity until they start predominantly using the aerobic system again. How they know when this has happened is that they will be able to talk again, as their breathing rate has reduced. The interval is then repeated.
For the creatine phosphate intervals, we like to do this via some resistance-based tests. Creatine phosphate is the priority fuel during maximal intensity, short duration activities. Want to know when creatine phosphate runs out……. Aim to do explosive squat jumps or press ups, and as soon as you start to feel your power reducing (e.g. you don’t jump or press up as high from the floor), this is a sign that your creatine phosphate in your muscles has run out, and your body will be switching predominately to the lactate system, meaning performance will need to reduce in order to continue.
Conclusion
So as you can see in the above examples, the APPLICATION of learning the anatomy and physiology is the most important part of the argument surrounding if personal trainers need to understand anatomy and physiology. There is a clear rationale as to why it is in the syllabus of the Level 2 Gym Instructor and Level 3 Personal Trainer qualifications, but it is the responsibility of training providers, such as YOUR Academy, to explain this knowledge to individuals in a clear and applicable way to enhance the person’s career as a fitness professional!