When you think about massage, you usually think about muscles. The massage therapist is the guy or gal who helps your sore muscles get better. For sake of clarity, I will not challenge this assumption in this article (but we’ll revisit this in the future… ☺). It dawned on me however, that many people do not actually know what a muscle is and how it works. This article is an attempt to give you with the basics about muscle anatomy and physiology.

Before we explore the anatomy of a muscle, I need to make a short digression. Anatomy, or the study of living things, has been shaped throughout centuries by one important tool, the knife. Until the invention of very sophisticated in-vivo, non-lethal, less invasive imaging tools (such as MRIs), scalpels dictated how we viewed the body. As a result, the classic study of anatomy is a very fragmented discipline. We dissect systems, muscles, bones, observing them as separate entities. However, in a living body, muscles and bones are not separated. Muscles and tendons are not separated. Muscles and skin are not separated. Almost nothing exists in isolation. As our understanding of living bodies is greatly expanded by the advances in technology, we now truly understand the depth of the meaning that everything is connected. Unfortunately to shape our discussion, I will need to use the classic anatomy concepts and the metaphorical knife to present muscles to you.
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