Functional Anatomy and Biomechanics: How to Learn Useable Anatomy

Anyone can improve their knowledge of anatomy and their ability to predict movement — and prove it. This is about learning useable, moving anatomy, not passing a quiz.

Anyone who works with people in movement benefits from seeing and predicting movement in real time. After many courses and an MSc, I still didn't feel like I had a good grasp of useable anatomy. Hand me a multiple-choice questionnaire and I was magic. Put me in front of a moving body and it was a different story.

The HMAC and the map method

In 2006, after wrestling with yet another expensive course, I threw my dad's accountancy brain at the problem of remembering and predicting movement. The result was a skeleton spreadsheet I called the HMAC — the Holistic Movement Assessment Chart.

The clever part is that it gets you to learn content in a map style — learning routes — which is the system memory champions have used for years. In the course, I get you to play along: drawing with me, moving on instruction, and finally predicting the motions in order at every joint as they happen.

Five steps to learn the bones and joints

1. Find a skeleton in a funny position (Pixabay is a good source).
2. Using a book to help you, draw all of the bones and label each one.
3. In the same order you drew them, go back and name the joints.
4. Repeat the above, in the same order, but from memory.
5. Fill in the missing bones and correct mistakes using an anatomy book.

Keep repeating those five steps and you'll eventually know all the bones by putting yourself into that position.

Make it stick

• Bad drawings are good. If your drawings are terrible, you tend to remember them even more.
• Use colour consistently. Writing words in different colours, the same way each time, gives you another hook for memory.
• Make silly names. Similar-but-daft names give you an emotional attachment to the bones, which helps recall.
• Name your skeleton. Give them hair, a back story, a whole tale — the story carries the order for you.

A worked example: Terry's story

Here's the kind of story I use to remember the bones in order:

Terry the one-sided skeleton reached out with the tip of his phalanges, which pulled on his metacarpals and carpals — already sore from boxing. He wasn't stiff, though; he still had good movement in his radiocarpal and distal radioulnar joints. His radius and ulna were decent, holding strong at the proximal radioulnar joint, and thanks to the strength he'd built through tennis, his elbow was sturdy too. He didn't find his humerus funny at all — it irritated him when it seized and couldn't move around the glenohumeral joint. A good laugh would have moved his scapula and clavicle up and down and freed things off.

To reach, he needed all the support his core could give — the ribs, sternum and spine. Shaking his skull above his axis, he remembered the phone number for his spine, 7-12-5-5-4: cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacrum and coccyx. None of that strength works without the pelvis as the centre of movement, and that leans heavily on the deep ball-and-socket hip, where the femur sits just perfectly.

The femur is a sturdy bone — lucky, because the patella is forever upset at being mislabelled "the knee". The tibia and fibula sit on a structure that, when everted, is soft and giving like quicksand, yet push it into inversion and it turns rigid. The fibula takes no weight and just keeps company with the tibia, proximally and distally, while the tibia forms the knee with the femur. Together they cuddle the talus, which then reacts to the calcaneus — this tibiofibular, tibiotalar, talonavicular and subtalar gang commanding the cuboid, navicular, tarsals, metatarsals and phalanges to stand rigid or relax and give. From the outside, you'd see it happen most at the midtarsal joint.

The point of all that: Terry really does use every joint and bone to reach the milk on the top shelf. Build your own story, and the anatomy stops being a list and starts being a route you can walk any time.