Educate Yourself

Educate Yourself

Before you embark on your fitness quest, bone up about bones and the rest of the body.Study the exerciser’s version of Anatomy 101 so you’ll at least know a little about how the body functions. The skeletal system is your body’s framework. Because it’s what holds everything up, physicians and fitness instructors often talk about “building strong bones” through weight-bearing exercise and sufficient calcium intake. The organs—heart, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys, and all the rest—take in oxygen, food, and liquid process them, send them around the system, and eliminate waste. At the most basic level, your muscles enable you to sit, stand, and move. Strengthening, toning, and stretching the muscles should be a major part of any fitness program.
Anterior and posterior muscle chart.Men and women obviously have some different internal organs, but we all have the same muscles—roughly 650 of them, two thirds of which are skeletal muscles that enable you to move your body. Many are so obscure that only a medical student is likely to know them by name. Astonishingly, no two muscles perform exactly the same function,although groups of large and small muscles function in harmony to enable you to perform specific moves. Of these hundreds of muscles, your exercise program will target roughly two dozen. Simply and briefly, the major muscles and muscle groups are described in the sections that follow.