This and “it’s confusing for students when they hear anatomy terms, so it excludes people who don’t know them”, are two things I hear when movement educators are explaining/justifying why they don’t take a&p training.
I can see where these ideas come from. And at the same time, I don’t agree with them. They’re largely a symptom of poor previous experiences with anatomy/physiology education.
Here’s why:
1. For starters, it’s not about the lingo. Or at least it’s not about showing off the lingo. Having a working understanding of anatomy and physiology is WAY more than just names of bones and muscles – AND way more than just throwing those names around like a smarty bum.
Part of the problem there is that so many teacher training groups spend most of their limited time on memorizing muscle and bone names. It’s not that knowing bones and muscles isn’t useful – it is to some degree – it’s just less important than learning concepts of biology and foundational elements of the human body. Much of the “my clients don’t care about the lingo” stems from this practice of only teaching bones and muscles, because trainees walk out thinking that’s the majority of anatomy. But it’s not.
A better understanding how the body works actually means we can be more effective in our movement education through the APPLICATION of the knowledge.
The way the lingo does help us, is if we’re working closely with people who have medical things going on and we can actually collaborate with the rest of their medical team, because we understand the lingo – ultimately helping our people so much more.
2. Even though they think they don’t care, the more knowledge we share with them about the human body, the more empowered they become to influence their own health and how they feel on a daily basis.
On top of that, evidence shows that the more we know about things like pain science, the greater the chance is that our pain-reducing efforts will be successful! So really, it’s in their best interest to start learning this stuff.
3. The other thing is – we’re in the room to teach our people about moving their bodies…so why can we not also teach them about the terms we’re going to use in class (that are relevant to the movements of the day)? The idea that something is confusing to people in the room simply is feedback for ourselves as educators – if someone is confused it means we haven’t explained it well enough or in enough ways.
So instead of confusion being a reason we shouldn’t learn this stuff, it is actually impetus for us to gain a more complete understanding, so that we CAN reduce confusion, through our sharing of knowledge more accurately and in a greater variety of ways.
Because also there’s absolutely no reason we can’t teach them what we’re talking about in class. And trust me – when you do it well, people really appreciate learning stuff in class. It really also, doesn’t take much time at all or even much effort (a few words timed correctly can help people identify and learn the action of dorsiflexion of the ankle very quickly, as just one example).
The beauty is as well, when we do it well, more people are included. People mostly get left behind in classes because we as the educator haven’t done a good enough job of explaining things – so part of our job is to pay attention to this, and to then be able to on-board more people with different ways of explaining things.
The variety of ways we can speak to anatomical concepts is a direct extension of both how much we’ve studied and the range of topics included in our studies. As in, the depth and the breadth of our learning reflects our ability to keep everyone on-board in a class.
Keep in mind most a&p training is designed around an attempt to memorize bones and muscles. Without much else.
Which is also why we don’t do that in our intro course. In the future, I’ll teach you bones and muscles and regional anatomy. Not yet though – because again, we gain more (and therefore have a greater impact) through understanding how the body works.
Over the years of teaching this stuff, I’ve found that sharing things like how the body adapts to inputs, how we can modify positions to target different areas of the body better, WHY we shouldn’t always “microbend” things, and so on to be far more useful right off the bat for movement educators.
In this way, we often help people experience the difference between knowledge application and “lingo”.
If you’ve got the itch to dive deeper into the world of anatomy and physiology, your chance to is coming up on May 2nd.
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