In Memory of Joe Glenn: The Importance of Functional Anatomy

One of my earliest mentors passed away recently.  Joe Glenn was a professor in the Kinesiology Faculty at the University of New Brunswick.  He also served as the Athletic Therapist for the entire varsity sports system with particular care given to the (9-time national champions) men’s hockey team.¹

I took all his classes and loved his dry delivery and subtle humour.  He had a funny habit of carelessly wandering beyond the margin and into the text when using a stapler.  Once, we teased him about our inability to read a question on a exam without tearing it apart.  He took it in stride.  Of course the next exam was stapled right through the middle of the page!

There was nothing haphazard when it came to assessing patients and making diagnoses though.  His attention to detail was remarkable —a modern Joseph Bell.²

Though some treatments have advanced beyond what he did at the turn of the Millennium, so many more simply caught up to what he already knew and taught us.  Most of that harkens back to a profound understanding of functional³ human anatomy, and Joe’s Kinesiological Human Anatomy course was the single most important class I’ve taken.  At the time, UNB had one of the top Kinesiology programmes in the world, and it’s still strong today.  Surprisingly, for a sport science or kinesiology or physiotherapy curriculum to include an applied/functional anatomy course is rare.  None of my Masters colleagues had such a course.  This is a major oversight as it’s not dependent on cutting edge technology or expensive research equipment.⁴  

A plethora of articles in peer-reviewed physiotherapy, biomechanics, motor control, exercise physiology, and strength and conditioning journals also indicates this is a widespread issue across the entire sport science field.  When it comes to designing experiments details matter: cursory anatomical models often lead to misleading conclusions.  If you’re going to study hip extension —or are designing a training programme to improve it, or are treating an injury to the area— it really helps to know which muscles actively extend the hip, and which structures resist that action.  The Adductor Magnus muscle, for example, is both a hip flexor and an extensor:  It can extend a fully flexed hip.  It can also flex an extended hip.  The hip angle where it transitions between actings as a flexor or extensor is also affected by the degree of hip rotation and abduction.  In a single leg stance it behaves a differently than when standing on both legs, or in an open kinetic chain.

We learned about this in Joe’s class and we answered a lot of practical questions, like “How can some professional skiers and offensive linemen continue their careers without an ACL and don’t even wear a brace when competing?  Others were more hypothetical, such as: What would happen if the quadriceps were excised, but all other tissues and joint integrity remained?  What movements would be possible? (Short answer: Despite being unable walk or kick, you could still do squats.)⁵  

Pennation angle.  Fascicle length.  Fibre orientation.  Tissue elasticity resulting from its constituent protein composition and arrangement.  Neural versus muscle versus ligamentous tension.  Active and passive insufficiency.  We geeked out on this stuff because it was interesting and because it made sense of what we were seeing/doing in the weight room and on the fields, mats, courts.  With our increasing understanding of functional anatomy, we could use logic to clarify many of the apparent contradictions that we were discussing in advanced biomechanics, motor control, and exercise physiology classes.

It was enlightening.  We’d quiz ourselves and each other:  Name every muscle that attaches to the scapula.  How does the hip rotational role of each of the adductors vary as the hip moves from neutral to flexion in a closed kinetic chain?  In what way is gait altered by a short Fexor Hallucis Longus?  How are the spin roll and glide of the gleno-humeral joint coordinated in throw? A punch? A slapshot?  How is each impacted by various adhesions, lesions or inflammations?  What about scapular positioning? And so on.

After graduating, and spending a semester at the McGill Sports Medicine Clinic and with their football team.  I returned to UNB for the last part of my internship in athletic therapy and to prepare for the certification exams.  Under Joe’s supervision, I was working with women’s basketball and the co-ed wrestling team.  That first week back, I made predictions about the injuries “my” players were most susceptible to, primarily based on what I’d learned from Joe.  They were recorded in my logbook, and included details on the individual athlete, which limb, structure(s) and degree of severity.  Nearly half those predicted injuries occurred before the end of the season.  It turned out that 80% of the injuries suffered by those two teams, were on my list.⁶   The remaining 20% of injuries requiring treatment on the sideline or in the clinic were contusions, abrasions, and concussions.  Everything orthopaedic had been predicted.  What was most frustrating was they were preventable (at least in severity) through targeted training interventions.  I asked myself: “Why am I patching people up when I can be preventing most of these injuries from occurring in the first place?”  It was at that point that I pivoted (with Joe’s blessing) away from rehab/athletic therapy, and towards strength and conditioning.  

Training athletes for injury prevention lead to an interest in improving their performance, which put me on the path to speed enhancement.  By understanding functional anatomy, guess what I learned from integrating these goals?  The injury prevention stuff goes hand in hand with the performance enhancement stuff.  And it does not include bridges, unstable surfaces, or rehab exercises for prehab.^6. It involves training for improved cognitive, technical and athletic speeds.

Good bye, Joe, and thank you for everything you taught me.

– CG