Build Muscle !

Anatomists of the -not so distant- past seemed to have a muscle-fetish. They would spend hours describing them to their half-asleep students, and you were certain to find questions regarding origins and insertions in every self-respecting anatomy paper.

Thankfully, as pure anatomy is rapidly being replaced by clinical anatomy in most medical courses, students are required to focus less on the exact attachments and more on the rough position, function and innervation of those annoying little masses of contractile cells.

But there is still a fair bit of information to remember, and I couldn't find a resource that kept things nice and simple. The textbooks had too much useless information, the atlases looked chaotic, and most of the revision books only provide you with a don't-ask-just-memorise table that doesn't really cut it for me.

So Google came to the rescue, and I came across a marvellous creation called the LUMEN Master Muscle List, which has a dedicated drawing for each muscle, in addition to a small table with all the necessary information. This format was exactly what I was looking for, but there were two problems : first, each muscle had its own page, so you didn't really know what group it belonged to, and second, the whole thing was on-line, and I prefer to study from a hard copy.

So I decided to compile the most important muscles (head, neck and limbs) into three print-friendly .pdf files, which were a great help for my revision, and which I am sharing with you here.