Rick Albrecht

Being physically active and training for fitness and performance can seem pretty complex when you consider all the factors involved: mechanical loads and forces applied, energy metabolism, musculature and bone health, and so on. Kinesiologists study these areas to help athletes and others improve athletic performance, enhance mobility, and avoid or heal from injury, but anyone can apply the basic principles of kinesiology.

ATP, which stands for adenosine triphosphate, is the sole source of energy for all human metabolism, yet very little of this fuel is actually stored in the body. Instead, the body has three different systems of ATP production: ATP-PC, anaerobic glycolysis, and aerobic phosphorylation. Each system uses different starting fuels, each provides ATP at different rates, and each has its own downside (like fatigue).

Maintaining physical stability takes more than a single structure working in isolation to provide joint support. Instead, lots of parts — muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, and other soft tissues — all have to work together to produce a stable joint. Stable joints help you avoid injury, such as shoulder dislocations and ACL sprains.

Exercise is a fantastic medicine for the body, especially for your heart. When you engage in aerobic training, your cardiovascular system becomes fit. Consistent aerobic activity produces physical changes in the heart, the blood vessels, and in your ability to use oxygen. It’s like getting a complete overall to a car’s engine!

A variety of methods exist for strength training, yet many people train the wrong way and unwittingly sabotage their efforts to increase strength and muscle mass. To see the fitness results you are looking for, make sure your strength-training regimen incorporates these four simple rules. Rule #1: Lift heavy enough If you want to make your muscles stronger, you must force them to do work more than they are used to (called overload)!

Motion analysis is a fancy way to refer to the act of evaluating how someone one moves. Coaches, physical fitness trainers, physical therapists, and others use motion analysis to help their patients and clients enhance mobility and improve performance. Knowing where to start can be difficult, but if you break the analysis down into five stages, you’ll be well on your way!

Some tasks are difficult to alter while they are being performed; others are easily changed. Whether a movement can be changed during the actual task depends on the complexity and timing of the movements, as well as the presence of external factors. In other words, the type of information that the human body has to process and the way in which it processes that information (its feedback mechanism) determines whether an activity can be changed midcourse.

As participation in recreational and sporting activities has grown over the past several years, so has the number of injuries. Muscle injuries are a very common occurrence for people who are physically active. Often these injuries are just an unfortunate annoyance, but other times, they’re debilitating and take a long time to heal.

Kinesiology covers a wide range of subdisciplines, with many organizations that provide excellent resources for the practitioner. The following resources provide a good starting place for those wanting to enter the profession. Consider joining one or more to begin building your kinesiology network: American College of Sports Medicine: A global organization, the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has 45,000 members and certified professionals from 90 countries and represents 70 occupations within the sports medicine field, including exercise physiologists, physical therapists, sports medicine doctors, cardiologists, personal trainers, and other fields that use exercise and movement as therapy.