What I'm Reading: Anatomy of Strength Training

One of my clients gave me a brand-new copy of this book:



It's a little old - it came out six years ago - but I hadn't seen it. I'm just browsing now, but I intend to take some time and read it in-depth and see what I can use out of it for my clients.

Book Review: The Muscular System

By Adams, Amy
Published August 30, 2004
240 pages

The Muscular System is an introductory text about, you guessed it, the human muscular system. The subject is covered broadly rather than in depth. It's more of a basic overview of both skeletal and smooth muscles, and how they work, and less of an in-depth guide to any particular aspect. Skeletal muscle are what we normally think of when someone says muscles - the muscles that attach to our skeleton and help us stand, move, and lift objects. Smooth muscles are those organ muscles, such as the heart, which are not physically dependent on the skeletal system and which we, generally, don't have much control over.

The book consists of 10 chapters:

1 - Anatomy of the Muscular System
2 - Energy Use by Muscles
3 - Muscular Adaptation to Exercise
4 - Development of the Muscular System
5 - Early Discoveries in Muscle Anatomy and Physiology
6 - Current Approaches to Understanding the Muscular System
7 - Muscular Injuries
8 - Muscular Dystrophy
9 - Other Diseases of the Skeletal Muscles
10 - Diseases of the Heart Muscle
...plus acronyms, a glossary, and additional reference sources.

Each chapter covers its subject broadly, starting from the very basics and then getting into a series of related sub-topics. Each sub-section is carefully explained, and studies are often cited in each section to further explain or support the information. Additional boxed text, as well as pictures, illustrations, and graphs, add to the text's message and help clarify points made in the text.

These sections are good - you'll find discussions of muscle knots vs. muscle sprains in chapter 7, for example, and left-right discrepancies in muscular development (you aren't the same from one side to another). But sometimes they have just enough information to tell you that you need to learn more. For example, the section on musculature in the 50+ population says that muscle size drops steadily after age 50, and this can be halted to an extent with training. But it doesn't discuss what kind of training beyond endurance vs. strength training, no word on methodology, or even if muscular mass is more important than raw strength or power (ability to apply strength with speed). You just don't know, and need to find out more. This is fine an introductory text, but it does feel like a limitation when you read the text. You want and need more but you don't have a path to getting it.

As a depressing aside, it's amazing and saddening how many of our studies on musculature are based on rats, not humans. A lot of what we know about muscles is extrapolated from animal studies. This is for a lot of good reasons, but it also means that much if it is "if the same is true in humans..." and not "studies in humans have shown..." Recently studies have shown human men and human women have differences in responses to training, protein intake, creatine kinase release after exercise, and so on - nevermind comparing species to species.

Rating:
Content: 4 out of 5. Everything in it is on-target and well done. It's pretty basic, which is good, but sometimes it is a little too basic and misses a chance to more fully explain the concepts inside.
Presentation: 5 out of 5. Easy to read, laid out well, and illustrated well. The charts and illustrations are pertinent, clear, and reinforce the points being discussed.

Overall: A very good introduction to the muscular system. Sadly not worth the very high price tag. Worth checking out of the library and reading if you need a basic understanding of the human muscular system.

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Book Review: Strength Training Anatomy (3rd edition)

By Frederic Delavier
Published March 2010
192 pages

Frederic Delavier recently authored a new version of his book Strength Training Anatomy. Here is my review of the previous edition. Because I've already reviewed the book, I'm going to concentrate on what's new and different in this edition.

It's longer. The new edition is 192 pages, compared to the previous edition's 144 pages. What's in the new pages?

More exercises. The new version adds a number of new exercises. These notably include trap bar exercises (shrugs, deadlifts), Arnold presses (named after The Austrian Oak himself), box squats, and potato sack squats (listed as "Squats with a dumbbell held between the legs").

More stretches. Each section now has at least one fully-illustrated static stretch for the muscles from that section. They are illustrated exactly the same way as the exercises, and make for a much more complete resource.

It also adds more notes on exercise - a comparison of deadlifts and straight bar deadlift body positioning and muscle recruitment, for example. So if you ever wondered why your neck is more sore after trap bar deadlifts and your lats are more sore after deadlifts, there is an illustration that shows you why. The book even includes an illustration and text to explain why a "power belly" (that gut that big powerlifters tend to carry) helps in the rebound from the bottom of a squat, resulting in a bigger, heavier lift.

No fold-out covers. The previous edition featured fold-out covers. The new edition ditches them in favor of replicating the information on the same glossy pages used in the rest of the book. This makes the book only slightly physically thicker than the previous book despite the additional 48 pages.

Like the previous version, the illustrations and text are very helpful and well done. Unlike the previous version, it's better designed (no fold-outs!), not much bigger, and much more complete.

Rating:
Content: 5 out of 5. It doesn't have every possible exercise - no kettlebell swings, say, or plyometrics - but it's got a good amount and the information is accurate and useful.
Presentation; 5 out of 5. The pictures are both accurate and attractive, and they are very easy to understand and follow. Since they are the main attraction of the book, this is of critical importance.

Overall: If you liked the previous edition, you'll love this one. Recommended read.

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Book Review: Strength Training Anatomy

Strength Training Anatomy, Second Edition
by Frederic Delavier
144 pages plus fold-out covers, published 2006

Like Mark Vella's Anatomy for Strength and Fitness Training, this book is an anatomical look at various exercises.

Strength Training Anatomy doesn't spend time or pages on exercise selection or introductions. It immediately jumps into the exercises. These are sorted into seven chapters - Arms, Shoulders, Chest, Back, Legs, Buttocks, and Abdomen. First page to last, it's all exercises.

The exercises include free weight, machine, and bodyweight exercises. They're largely powerlifting/bodybuilding exercises and omit Olympic lifts and stretches. Each of the 115 exercises gets it own page, with a skinless model man or woman performing the exercise and the muscles involved colored and labeled. The muscle groups involved are highlighted on a smaller anatomical figure in the corner, and colored circles are used to further highlight what the exercise does.

One interesting element to the book is that each section - legs, chest, etc. - includes an injury discussion. These pages - yellow instead of white to make them stand out - show common injuries to the discussed area and how they can be treated or avoided. These include pec tears, bicep tears, impingement, and other such potential hazards to handling weights.

The book also features two fold-out covers, the back showing the muscle groups and the skeleton (front and back). The front shows the (male) human body's skeletal muscles from the quarter-turned side as well as the front and back.

Rating:

Content: 4 out of 5. Very good stuff, but compared to similar books the amount of exercises shown is somewhat limited.
Presentation: 5 out of 5. Easy to read, attractive images, and well-designed anatomical charts.

Overall: If you want to see what muscles are involved in which exercise, this book is very useful. You can potentially use it for selecting movements as well. It's interesting and very good for what it aims to be - an anatomical guide to exercise.

Book Review: Anatomy for Strength and Fitness Training

Anatomy for Strength and Fitness Training

By Mark Vella
144 pages, published 2006.
$19.95

There are a few books out there that provide an anatomical view of exercises. They mostly seem on the surface like an excuse to draw cut-away shots of men and women exercising. They're useful for fitness professionals trying to better understand the relationship of exercises to musculature, and for fitness enthusiasts in general looking to broaden their knowledge of anatomy.

The book is split into two parts. Part 1 is called "Overview of Anatomy" and it's exactly that. An overview of the musculoskeletal system, planes of body movement, anatomical terms and exercises, posture, and exercise analysis.

Part 1 contains some very useful elements. It thoroughly explains the layout and presentation used in Part 2. It contains a list of common prefixes, suffixes, and word roots of exercise and anatomical terms. This makes it clear that hip adduction, for example, means "movement of the hip towards the midline of the body" because that's what adduction describes. Or that the "con-" in "concentric contraction" means muscle attachments moving together. Very educational, and perhaps surprisingly useful. The usual maps of the muscular structure of the body and the skeleton are there as well. But so are anatomical terms, joint movement terms, pelvic positions, explanations of "open chain" versus "closed chain" exercises.

The only downside is that there is a fairly generic "training goals" table for designing your own workout. It's so broad as to be useless if you're a newbie, but so general that it's useless if you're experienced. For example, it says for Weight Loss, you want 2-4 workouts a week, for 15-30 min (not including cardio), a load of 4-6 on a 1-10 scale (so 40-60% weight), 15-30 reps, 1-2 sets, rest of 15-30 seconds. Armed with that and a list of exercises, could you design yourself a good fat loss workout? Maybe an experienced trainer could, but so much will depend on your exercise choice, your fitness level, and your other activities. It gives too broad of a range...2x a week for 15 minutes, 1 set, 15 reps, 40% of 1RM on one end to 4x a week for 30 minutes, 2 sets, 30 reps, 60% of one rep max. It doesn't give you an idea of how to scale them. Later in the book it gives a couple of sample workouts, but they're pretty generic "8-12 exercises for 2-3 sets" don't mesh well with the earlier advice. In my opinion, it would have be been skipped or dealt with more thoroughly.

Part 2 is the real meat of the book - "Anatomy of Exercise." Theese are the chapters on exercises. They are organized by body part or function, specifically:

Chest
Legs and hips
Back and shoulders
Arms
Abdominals, stabilization, and balance
Stretching
Total body and power exercise

Each exercise comes with:

- basic description of form
- a description of technique (generally very good)
- tips for good form
- analysis of movement by joints
- a list of stabilizing muscles and prime movers
- a color drawing of a trainee executing the movement, with transparent skin to reveal the (well-labeled) muscles

No surprise in a book like this, it contains a lot of machine exercises common in gyms. This is probably a good sales point - users of those machines are a big market. It also contains exercises not commonly includes along side the pec deck and leg extension - snatches, power cleans, deadlifts, planks, and even some yoga poses (in the balance section).

Rating:
Content: 4 out of 5. Contains a lot of good information, only weakened by the inclusion of some incomplete material.
Presentation: 5 out of 5. Well organized, easy to read, with clear pictures and text.

Overall: If you're studying for an anatomy exam or personal training exam, it's worth checking this out. It's also helpful if you're interested in finding out more about the muscles you're using when you lift. For designing your own workout, it's inadequate but would be a useful adjunct.