From Tracy Markley, the 2021 IDEA World Fitness Personal Trainer of the Year, among other accolades, comes BIOMECHANICS OF YOUR BODY: a thin but packed volume whose subtitle, A Simplified Way to Learn Human Movement and Muscles, represents a much-needed mission statement. Medical authorities agree that exercise is key to staying healthy, but this doesn’t mean everyone needs to start pumping iron until they resemble 1970s Arnold Schwarzenegger. Movement of any kind helps. “[T]he body was made to move,” Markley writes in her introduction, an obvious yet powerful statement–but made to move how? How rigorously? How often? And what about the elderly, or people recovering from strokes, for whom even simple movements are a challenge?

Markley is the perfect guide through the landscape of physical fitness. BIOMECHANICS OF YOUR BODY is ostensibly a textbook, but with its straightforward style and no-nonsense design, readers will not be bored. Starting with abdominal muscles, Markley proceeds through every muscle group–spine, upper body, arms, legs, hips, and pelvis–describing the structure of each and how it makes movement possible. Better than the text, however, are its two distinct kinds of illustrations: the anatomical, textbook-style cross-sections of the human body’s various bones and muscles, and the drawings of people engaging in various activities, which bring otherwise dry medical descriptions to life. It helps immeasurably to see, for instance, next to the entry on “flexor digitorum profundus”–the muscle that flexes the fingers–a picture of a bowler rotating his forearm to put some spin on the ball. (“Did you know the word ‘profundus’ means deep?” asks Markley, showing the range of her interests.)

A couple of things would make this book stronger: a longer and more detailed reference list (the bibliography should not be shorter than the About the Author section), and an occasional anecdote. Markley’s style is refreshingly ingenuous, but it would be more engaging with, say, a story or two from her life–or maybe accounts of how her clients overcame certain injuries (using pseudonyms here would keep this from being a privacy concern). Still, BIOMECHANICS OF YOUR BODY is a valuable tool for staying active, learning one’s body, and improving one’s standard of living.

Tracy Markley’s BIOMECHANICS OF YOUR BODY is a simple yet informative guide offers something for people at all levels of physical fitness.

~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader