Introduction
Every squat, bench press, sprint, and even every breath you take depends on multiple body systems working together. Your nervous system sends the signal. Skeletal muscles produce the force. Tendons transfer that force to bones. Joints allow the resulting movement. Your cardiovascular and respiratory systems keep the working tissue supplied with oxygen and fuel the entire time. None of this happens as an isolated event — it’s a whole-body collaboration, every single rep.
Most lifters never formally study this. They learn “chest day” trains the chest, “leg day” trains the legs, and beyond that, the underlying machinery stays a black box. That’s not a knock on anyone — gyms and fitness content rarely explain the why behind the what. But once you understand even the basics of how the body works and how its structures work together, you stop seeing exercises as a list of instructions to follow and start seeing them as part of a system you can actually understand and reason about.
Understanding the basics of how this system is built and how it works isn’t academic trivia for lifters. It sharpens exercise selection, improves technique, makes programming decisions more logical, helps you set realistic expectations for how different tissues adapt, and turns fitness terminology from a foreign language into something you can actually use. This guide gives you that whole-body map — not as a 10,000-word medical textbook, but as a clear, connected overview of how the human body is organized and how its major systems work together during training. Wherever a topic deserves a deeper look, we’ll point you to the dedicated guide that covers it in full.
QUICK ANSWER: Anatomy is the study of the structures of the human body, while physiology is the study of how those structures function. Anatomy tells us what the body is made of and where its structures are located; physiology explains how those structures work individually and together to sustain life, produce movement, and adapt to exercise.
| Anatomy | Physiology | |
| Studies | Structure | Function |
| Main question | What is it, and where is it? | How does it work? |
| Example | Structure of skeletal muscle | How muscle produces force |
| Training example | Anatomy of the quadriceps | How the quadriceps generate knee-extension force |
Anatomy vs. Physiology: What’s the Difference?
The difference is quite straightforward. Anatomy focuses on structure: bones, muscles, joints, organs, nerves, and blood vessels, and how they’re arranged relative to one another. Standard anatomy and physiology textbooks sometimes split this further into gross anatomy (structures visible to the naked eye) and microscopic anatomy (structures visible only under magnification), but for a lifter, the practical distinction rarely matters — what matters is that anatomy answers “what is this, and where is it?”
Physiology, by contrast, focuses on function: how muscles contract, how the nervous system sends and interprets signals, how blood circulates, how the respiratory system exchanges gases, how metabolism provides energy, how hormones regulate the body, and how these processes adapt over time in response to training.
Why Anatomy and Physiology Must Be Studied Together
The real reason this guide treats both together rather than separately comes down to one idea: structure influences function, and function depends on structure. The anatomy of the shoulder joint allows for an enormous range of motion, but that same anatomical freedom is exactly why the shoulder relies so heavily on muscular control and stability to function safely. Similarly, the internal architecture of a skeletal muscle — how its fibers are arranged — directly influences how much force it can produce and how fast it can produce it. You can’t fully understand one without the other.
Homeostasis: How the Body Maintains Internal Balance
One physiology concept is fundamental enough to mention before going any further: homeostasis, the body’s ability to maintain a relatively stable internal environment despite external and internal changes. This includes keeping body temperature, blood glucose, blood pH, fluid balance, and blood pressure within fairly narrow, workable ranges. Exercise is, in a very real sense, a controlled disruption of homeostasis — a hard set or a demanding cardio session pushes several of these variables away from their resting baseline, and your regulatory systems respond in real time to bring things back into balance, or to support the temporarily higher demand. Training adaptation is, at its core, your body getting progressively better at managing exactly this kind of disruption.
Levels of Organization in the Human Body
The human body is organized in a clear hierarchy, from the smallest chemical building blocks up to the complete organism:
Chemical level (atoms and molecules, including proteins like actin and myosin) → Cell (the basic living unit, such as a single muscle fiber) → Tissue (a group of similar cells working together, such as skeletal muscle tissue) → Organ (a structure made of multiple tissue types working together, such as the biceps brachii) → Organ system (a group of organs working toward a shared function, such as the muscular system) → Organism (you, the complete athlete).
Each level depends on the one below it functioning properly. A muscle fiber can contract properly only if its internal chemistry, including calcium handling and ATP availability, works correctly. A muscle can only produce coordinated force if its individual fibers are activated in the right pattern. And you, as a complete organism, can only perform a heavy lift if every level below is doing its job at the same moment — which is part of why fatigue, injury, or illness at any single level can affect performance at the level of the whole body.
The Four Basic Tissue Types
Underneath every organ in the body are just four basic tissue types: epithelial tissue (forms coverings and linings), connective tissue (supports, connects, and protects — including bone, tendon, ligament, and cartilage), muscle tissue (generates force through contraction), and nervous tissue (transmits electrical signals). We cover connective tissue’s role in training adaptation in far more depth in our Connective Tissue guide.
The Human Body Is Made of Interconnected Organ Systems
Scientists traditionally organize the body into distinct organ systems to make it easier to study, but in reality, no system functions in true isolation. Every system you’ll read about below is constantly interacting with the others during a single training session. For the complete rundown of all ten major systems, see our 10 Major Organ Systems in the Human Body guide; here, we’ll focus on the ones most directly relevant to strength training.
The Skeletal System — The Body’s Structural Framework
Bones do far more than just hold you upright. The skeleton provides structural support, protects vital organs, stores minerals like calcium and phosphorus, produces blood cells within bone marrow, and — most relevant to training — provides the mechanical framework that makes movement possible in the first place. An adult skeleton has roughly 206 bones, but you don’t need to memorize that; what matters more is understanding how bones function as a system rather than naming every one.
Bones as Levers
This is where anatomy and bodybuilding connect directly: a contracting muscle generates force, the tendon transfers that force to a bone, and the bone acts as a lever around a joint, converting muscular tension into the movement you actually see and feel. Bone itself isn’t a passive structure either — it actively remodels in response to mechanical loading, a principle covered in depth in our guide to Wolff’s Law. For the full picture of skeletal anatomy, see Human Skeletal System: Anatomy, Functions, Bone Structure & Training Benefits and Major Bones of the Human Skeleton. Want to see how it all fits together visually? Explore our Interactive Human Skeleton tool.
Joints — Where Movement Occurs
A joint is simply the point where two or more bones meet, and joints exist along a spectrum from highly mobile to highly stable. Most of the joints relevant to strength training are synovial joints, which include a joint capsule, cartilage covering the bone surfaces, and synovial fluid that lubricates the joint and reduces friction during movement.
Why Joints Matter in Strength Training
Nearly every major lift is really a sequence of joint actions working together. A squat is a coordinated hip, knee, and ankle movement. A bench press is a shoulder and elbow movement. Understanding which joints are involved in a lift, and what each one is doing, is often more useful for programming and technique than memorizing a muscle-by-muscle breakdown. For the full picture of joint structure, mobility, and the major joint types, see Joints in the Human Body: Anatomy, Types, Function & Movement.
The Muscular System — The Engine of Human Movement
The body contains three types of muscle tissue — skeletal, cardiac, and smooth — but skeletal muscle is what this guide, and this entire site, is primarily concerned with, since it’s the tissue you deliberately train and reshape.
What Skeletal Muscles Do
Skeletal muscle produces force, drives movement, maintains posture, stabilizes joints under load, and even contributes meaningfully to heat production. If you want to explore individual muscles visually rather than just reading about them, our Interactive Muscle Anatomy tool lets you click through the body and see exactly where each one sits.
How Muscles Create Movement
The basic sequence is always the same: a nervous signal activates a muscle, the muscle produces force, that force is transmitted through a tendon, and the tendon pulls on a bone to create movement around a joint. We break this entire process down in full — including how a skeletal muscle is built from the whole-muscle level down to actin and myosin — in our Muscular System: Anatomy, Functions & Role in Strength Training pillar.
Muscle Contractions
Within that force-production process, a muscle can act in one of three ways: concentric, eccentric, or isometric. We cover exactly how these differ, and why the distinction matters for both strength and hypertrophy, in Types of Muscle Contractions: Concentric, Eccentric & Isometric Explained.
Anatomical Movements
Movements themselves are described using standardized anatomical terms — flexion, extension, abduction, adduction, and others — that describe what’s happening at a joint regardless of which exercise is producing it. We’ll be covering these systematically in a dedicated guide soon; for now, you’ll see these terms used throughout our muscle-specific anatomy articles.
Tendons, Ligaments and Connective Tissue — Holding the System Together
Tendons connect muscle to bone and transmit the force your muscles generate into joint movement. Ligaments connect bone to bone and provide joint stability and guidance rather than force transmission. Cartilage covers joint surfaces and helps distribute load evenly. Fascia and other connective tissues wrap and organize muscles and organs throughout the body.
It’s worth stating plainly: strength training doesn’t adapt only muscle. Tendons, bones, and other connective tissues also respond to mechanical loading, but typically at a different pace and through different mechanisms than muscle tissue does — which is part of why progressing load gradually matters even once your muscles feel ready to handle more. For the full detail on each of these tissues, see Tendons and Ligaments, Connective Tissue, and Articular Cartilage.
The Nervous System — How the Brain Controls Movement
The nervous system is divided into the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) and the peripheral nervous system (the nerves branching out from it). The basic chain of command for any voluntary movement runs from the brain or spinal cord, down through a motor neuron, to the muscle fibers it controls, which then produce force.
Motor Units and Proprioception
A motor neuron and every muscle fiber it controls together form a motor unit — the basic functional unit the nervous system uses to control force output. Smaller motor units, controlling fewer fibers, tend to be recruited first for fine, low-force tasks, while larger motor units, controlling many more fibers, are recruited as force demands increase — which is part of why a maximal effort recruits a much larger share of the available motor-unit pool than an easy, low-effort warm-up repetition. Alongside this, proprioception (your body’s sense of its own position and movement in space) plays a constant, largely unconscious role in coordinating movement and maintaining balance and joint stability, which is exactly why unfamiliar movement patterns often feel clumsy at first and improve rapidly with repeated practice, well before any strength or size changes occur.
Strength Is Not Only About Muscle Size
This is one of the more underrated ideas in strength training: a meaningful portion of your strength comes from neurological adaptations — how well your nervous system recruits motor units, how quickly it can increase their firing rate, and how well it coordinates multiple muscles together — not purely from how much muscle tissue you have. This is one reason beginners can gain strength rapidly during the first weeks of training, before substantial muscle hypertrophy has had time to develop. For the full picture, see The Nervous System: Its Critical Role in Athletic Performance, Nervous System Adaptations to Strength Training, and The Law of Muscle Fiber Recruitment (Henneman’s Size Principle).
The Cardiovascular System — Delivering Blood, Oxygen, and Nutrients
The cardiovascular system consists of the heart, blood, and blood vessels, and its core job is to deliver oxygen and nutrients to working tissue, remove carbon dioxide and metabolic byproducts, and help regulate body temperature.
What Happens During Exercise?
During exercise, heart rate rises, cardiac output increases, and blood flow shifts away from less active tissues and toward working muscle, where the demand for oxygen and fuel is highest—a well-documented pattern covered in depth in standard exercise physiology references. For the full anatomy and how it responds specifically to training, see Anatomy of the Heart and Circulatory System and Cardiovascular Response to Exercise.
The Respiratory System — Getting Oxygen Into the Body
The respiratory system moves air through the airways into the lungs, where oxygen crosses into the bloodstream at the alveoli and carbon dioxide is removed on the way back out. During heavy lifting, breathing patterns change substantially — including the use of techniques like the Valsalva maneuver during a heavy brace — and the respiratory system also responds to exercise and training, although the nature and magnitude of those adaptations depend heavily on the type of training performed. See The Structure and Function of the Respiratory System and Effects of Training on the Respiratory System for the complete picture.
The Endocrine System — Hormonal Regulation
The endocrine system works through glands that release hormones into the bloodstream, which then act on receptors in target tissues to produce a physiological response. Hormones relevant to training include insulin, testosterone, cortisol, growth hormone, and thyroid hormones, among others — but it’s worth being clear up front that these hormones act within a complex, tightly regulated system rather than as simple “more equals better” dials, and that skeletal muscle itself also acts as a hormone-releasing organ during and after exercise, not just as a passive target of hormonal signals. For specific hormones and their role in training, see Testosterone: The Master Muscle-Building Hormone, Cortisol Hormone, Human Growth Hormone, and our broader guide to Hormones and Muscle Growth.
The Digestive System — Turning Food Into Usable Nutrients
The digestive system breaks food down into absorbable nutrients — proteins into amino acids and small peptides, carbohydrates into monosaccharides, and dietary fats primarily into fatty acids and monoglycerides — all of which the body then uses to fuel training and support recovery. This process starts in the mouth with mechanical breakdown and enzyme activity, continues through the stomach and small intestine where most nutrient absorption actually occurs, and ends with the large intestine handling water reabsorption and waste. This is genuinely relevant to a lifter’s results, since none of the nutrition strategies you follow matter if the digestive system can’t actually break down and absorb what you’re eating — but a deep dive into digestion itself belongs in a nutrition-focused resource rather than this anatomy guide.
Energy Systems and Metabolism — Fueling Muscular Work
ATP is the immediate energy currency for muscle contraction, but muscle only stores a very small amount of it at any given moment. The body continuously regenerates ATP using three interconnected energy systems: the phosphagen (ATP-PCr) system, which supports very short, explosive efforts; the glycolytic system, which produces ATP rapidly from carbohydrate during demanding efforts of moderate duration; and the oxidative system, which produces ATP more slowly but with far greater total capacity, particularly important during longer-duration work and during recovery between efforts. All three systems are active at the same time during virtually any activity — what changes with exercise intensity and duration is their relative contribution, not which one is “switched on.” For the full breakdown of how these systems interact and how training targets each one, see Understanding Energy Systems: Aerobic vs. Anaerobic for Effective Resistance and Cardio Training.
The Urinary System — Fluid and Electrolyte Balance
The kidneys and urinary system regulate fluid balance, electrolyte levels, and acid-base balance, while also removing metabolic waste from the blood. This matters for exercise because fluid and electrolyte balance influence normal physiological function and can affect performance, particularly during prolonged exercise, heat exposure, or substantial fluid loss. See Hydration and Electrolytes in Sports Nutrition for the practical, training-focused version of this topic.
Body Composition — What Your Body Is Made Of
Body weight and body composition are not the same thing. Two people can weigh exactly the same and have very different proportions of fat mass, fat-free mass (including muscle, organs, and bone), and water — which is exactly why the number on the scale alone tells you relatively little about your actual physique or progress. This is a huge part of why “the scale didn’t move” isn’t automatically bad news: a person can lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously, keeping total body weight almost unchanged while their body composition, and how they actually look, changes substantially. We won’t get into measurement methods like DEXA, BIA, or skinfold calipers here, since that’s a large enough topic to deserve its own dedicated guide — see What Is Body Composition? A Complete Guide for Lifters & Athletes for the full picture.
How the Body Produces Movement
This is where everything above comes together. Take something as simple as a biceps curl: the brain initiates the movement, motor neurons activate the elbow flexors, the activated muscle fibers produce force, tendons transmit that force to the bones of the forearm, the bones rotate around the elbow joint, and your cardiovascular and respiratory systems work throughout to keep the active tissue supplied. Movement is never the product of one muscle working alone — it’s the coordinated output of your nervous, muscular, skeletal, cardiovascular, and respiratory systems acting as a single unit.
A heavy barbell squat shows the same principle at a larger scale. Your brain and nervous system coordinate activation across the hip, knee, and ankle extensors at the same time. Multiple muscle groups produce force together rather than one muscle acting in isolation. That force is transmitted through several tendons to several bones at once, and multiple joints move together in a coordinated sequence. Meanwhile, your cardiovascular and respiratory systems work harder throughout the set to keep all that active tissue supplied with oxygen and fuel, and your connective tissue transmits load across every joint involved. A single heavy rep is, in a very real sense, nearly every system in this guide working together at once.
How Strength Training Changes the Human Body
One of the most useful things to understand as a lifter is that a training stimulus doesn’t just change muscle—it produces adaptations across multiple tissues and systems, each on its own timeline, a principle emphasized throughout strength and conditioning certification curricula like the NSCA’s.
| System / Tissue | Major Training Adaptation |
| Nervous system | Improved neural drive and coordination |
| Skeletal muscle | Hypertrophy and increased force capacity |
| Tendons | Structural and mechanical adaptations |
| Bones | Increased and remodeled bone tissue |
| Cardiovascular system | Training-specific circulatory adaptations |
| Metabolism | Improved energy-system capacity |
| Connective tissue | Gradual adaptation to mechanical loading |
The practical message in that table is simple but important: different tissues and systems adapt on different timelines. Neural and metabolic changes can emerge relatively quickly, while substantial muscle hypertrophy and structural remodeling of tendons and bone generally require repeated loading over longer periods — which is exactly why patience and gradual progression matter even when one part of the system feels ready to move faster.
Acute Responses vs. Chronic Adaptations
It’s worth drawing a clear line between two related but different ideas. An acute response is what happens during and immediately after a single training session — heart rate, ventilation, blood flow, and circulating metabolites all rise temporarily and then return toward baseline. A chronic adaptation is the lasting change that builds up over weeks and months of repeated training: increased strength, muscle size, neural efficiency, and connective tissue or bone remodeling. Every workout produces an acute response; accumulating many of those responses over time, combined with adequate recovery, eventually produces a chronic adaptation.
Why Anatomy and Physiology Matter for Lifters
Understanding this material translates into several concrete benefits. It leads to better exercise selection, because you understand joint action and muscle function well enough to pick movements deliberately rather than by trend or guesswork. Furthermore, it leads to better technique, because you understand where a movement is actually supposed to happen. It leads to better programming, because you understand stimulus, fatigue, and adaptation as connected concepts rather than separate rules. It leads to better communication with coaches, therapists, and training partners, because terms like concentric, eccentric, flexion, extension, origin, insertion, agonist, and antagonist stop being a foreign language. And it leads to more realistic expectations, because you understand that muscle, nervous tissue, tendons, bone, and the cardiovascular system don’t all adapt at the same speed.
A practical example: a lifter who understands basic anatomy, faced with shoulder discomfort during an overhead press, can reason through the problem — is this a joint mobility issue, a stability issue involving the rotator cuff or scapular muscles, a technique issue, or simply a loading issue that needs a temporary adjustment? A lifter without that framework is left guessing, or worse, pushing through discomfort without understanding what’s actually happening. That difference in problem-solving ability, more than any single fact memorized, is the real practical payoff of learning this material.
Bodybuilder’s Take: You don’t need to memorize every anatomical structure in the human body to become a better lifter. What actually matters is understanding enough anatomy and physiology to see exercise for what it really is: an interaction between muscles, joints, bones, nerves, and connective tissues, all supported by the systems that keep them fueled and functioning.
Anatomy Terms Every Lifter Should Know
| Term | Meaning |
| Anterior | Toward the front |
| Posterior | Toward the back |
| Superior | Above |
| Inferior | Below |
| Medial | Toward the midline |
| Lateral | Away from the midline |
| Proximal | Closer to the trunk or point of origin |
| Distal | Farther from the trunk or point of origin |
| Superficial | Nearer the surface |
| Deep | Farther from the surface |
For the full breakdown of every directional term in this table, including common mistakes lifters make when using them, see our complete guide to Anatomical Position and Directional Terms.
You’ll also come across origin, insertion, agonist, antagonist, and synergist constantly throughout our anatomy content — we cover exactly what these mean, and how muscle names themselves often hint at them, in How Skeletal Muscles Are Named.
Explore Human Anatomy and Physiology
From here, this guide hands you off to the specialized resources that cover each system in real depth:
- Muscles & Muscular System — Learn how skeletal muscles are organized, produce force, and adapt to training. → Muscular System pillar
- Bones & Joints — Understand the skeletal framework and how joints allow movement. → Skeletal System / Joints
- Nervous System — Discover how the brain and nerves control muscle activation and movement. → Nervous System
- Hormones & Endocrine System — See how hormones influence muscle growth and recovery. → Hormones and Muscle Growth
- Cardiovascular & Respiratory Systems — Learn how your heart, blood vessels, and lungs support working muscle. → Heart and Circulatory System / Respiratory System
- Physiology & Body Systems — Get the full map of all ten major organ systems. → 10 Major Organ Systems
- Body Composition & Fat — Understand what your body is actually made of, beyond the number on the scale. → Body Composition pillar
Coach’s Note: Learn Systems, Not Isolated Facts. When I’m teaching a beginner anatomy, the biggest mistake I see is memorizing a list of muscle names with no understanding of movement attached to them. Knowing “this is the latissimus dorsi” is close to useless on its own. What actually matters is understanding where it is, where it attaches, what movements it contributes to, and how a given exercise changes the mechanical demand placed on it. Learn the system, not just the vocabulary, and everything else — exercise selection, technique, programming — becomes far more intuitive.
Key Takeaway
- ✓Anatomy studies structure; physiology studies function, and neither can be fully understood in isolation from the other.
- ✓Human organization progresses from chemicals and cells to tissues, organs, organ systems, and the whole organism.
- ✓Bones and joints provide the mechanical framework that makes movement possible.
- ✓Skeletal muscles produce force and transmit it through tendons to bone.
- ✓The nervous system controls muscle activation, coordination, and a substantial share of your strength.
- ✓Connective tissue supports and transmits mechanical forces throughout the body.
- ✓The cardiovascular and respiratory systems keep exercising tissue supplied with oxygen and fuel.
- ✓Strength training produces adaptations across multiple body systems, each on its own timeline.
- ✓An acute response happens within one session; a chronic adaptation builds up over weeks and months of training.
- ✓Understanding basic anatomy improves how lifters approach exercise selection, technique, and training adaptation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is anatomy?
Anatomy is the branch of science that studies the structure of the body, including its organs, tissues, and systems, and how they’re arranged relative to one another.
What is physiology?
Physiology is the branch of science that studies how the body’s structures function, both individually and together, to sustain life, produce movement, and adapt to stimuli like exercise.
What is the difference between anatomy and physiology?
Anatomy answers “what is it, and where is it?” while physiology answers “how does it work?” Anatomy studies structure; physiology studies function.
Why are anatomy and physiology studied together?
Because structure influences function and function depends on structure — you can’t fully understand how a muscle or joint works without also understanding how it’s built, and vice versa.
Why is anatomy important for strength training?
Understanding anatomy improves exercise selection, technique, and programming decisions, and helps you set realistic expectations for how different tissues, like muscle, tendon, and bone, adapt at different speeds.
What body systems are most important during exercise?
The muscular, skeletal, nervous, cardiovascular, and respiratory systems are the most directly involved during exercise, working together to produce movement and supply working tissue with oxygen and energy.
How do muscles, tendons, bones, and joints work together?
A muscle produces force, a tendon transmits that force to a bone, and the bone acts as a lever that rotates around a joint, producing the movement you actually see.
How does the nervous system control muscles?
The brain and spinal cord send signals through motor neurons to muscle fibers, activating them to produce force. The nervous system also controls how many motor units are recruited and how quickly they fire, which is a major factor in strength independent of muscle size.
How does strength training change the body?
Strength training produces adaptations across multiple systems, not just muscle: improved neural coordination, muscle hypertrophy, tendon and bone remodeling, and metabolic changes, each occurring on its own timeline.
Do bodybuilders need to study anatomy?
Not to the depth of a medical student, but a working understanding of anatomy and physiology genuinely improves exercise selection, technique, and programming, and makes it much easier to understand why certain training approaches work.
References
- Betts, J. G., et al. (2023). Anatomy and Physiology 2e. OpenStax. openstax.org/details/books/anatomy-and-physiology-2e
- Standring, S. (Ed.). (2020). Gray’s Anatomy: The Anatomical Basis of Clinical Practice (42nd ed.). Elsevier.
- Tortora, G. J., & Derrickson, B. (2017). Principles of Anatomy and Physiology (15th ed.). Wiley.
- Saladin, K. S. (2020). Anatomy & Physiology: The Unity of Form and Function (9th ed.). McGraw Hill.
- Kenney, W. L., Wilmore, J. H., & Costill, D. L. (2021). Physiology of Sport and Exercise (8th ed.). Human Kinetics. us.humankinetics.com/collections/physiology-of-sport-and-exercise
- Powers, S. K., & Howley, E. T. (2021). Exercise Physiology: Theory and Application to Fitness and Performance (11th ed.). McGraw Hill.
- Haff, G. G., & Triplett, N. T. (Eds.). (2021). Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning (4th ed.). National Strength and Conditioning Association / Human Kinetics. nsca.com
- American College of Sports Medicine. (2021). ACSM’s Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription (11th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.
- Folland, J. P., & Williams, A. G. (2007). The adaptations to strength training: Morphological and neurological contributions to increased strength. Sports Medicine. link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-200737020-00004
- Kjaer, M. (2004). Role of extracellular matrix in adaptation of tendon and skeletal muscle to mechanical loading. Physiological Reviews. journals.physiology.org
- Pedersen, B. K. (2013). Muscle as a secretory organ. Comprehensive Physiology. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23897689
