Ch 8Fundamentals of Kinesiology and Biomechanics in Sports — Class 11 Physical Education, concept-first.

Watch a world-class sprinter such as Usain Bolt and a club runner side by side and, even without any training, you can see that something is different — Bolt's running looks light, relaxed and yet tre…

Sports and exercise keep us fit, but only a few people understand the logic and the technical points behind the movements that make us fit.

Sports activities are good for health and everyone wants to stay fit, but comparatively few people know the logic and facts behind these fitness activities — the technical points that lie behind every…

The word kinesiology comes from two Greek roots — kinesis, meaning movement, and logos, meaning to study. Put together, kinesiology is literally the discipline that studies movement.

Several scholars have defined kinesiology, and the standard definitions a Class 11 student should know all point to the same idea — the study of human (and animal) movement.

Knowledge of kinesiology is of great practical value to coaches, physical education teachers and physiotherapists.

If kinesiology is the broad study of human movement, biomechanics is the part that treats the body as a mechanical system and asks about the forces behind the movement.

The word biomechanics is built from the Ancient Greek bios, meaning life, and mechanike (mechanics) — so biomechanics is the study of the mechanical principles of living organisms, particularly their…

The standard definitions of biomechanics that a Class 11 Physical Education student should know all stress the application of mechanics to living bodies and to the forces acting on them.

Biomechanics is, above all, the science of movement technique, and it is most useful in sports where technique matters more than sheer physical build.

Biomechanics is useful in sport because a small number of core principles can be applied to all human movement.

The nine principles of biomechanics form the minimum set of core principles that can be applied to all human movements. They can be organised into two broad groups:

The textbook lists nine biomechanics principles, each with a short definition and a sporting example. Learn all nine; they are a common very-short- and short-answer question in CBSE Class 11 Physical…

Dynamics — the study of bodies in motion — divides into two closely related branches. One simply describes how a body moves; the other explains the forces that make it move.

The same physical laws that govern all objects in the universe also govern the human body. In mechanics, movement is studied as either static (objects in equilibrium) or dynamic (objects in motion), a…

Having studied what movement is and the forces behind it, we now describe the movements themselves — the handful of fundamental body movements from which every sporting action is built — and the plane…

Movement (or motion) is the act of moving — a change of place or posture, or transference by any means from one situation to another.

From the fundamentals of movement we can now name the eight basic types of body movement produced at the joints. Every sporting skill is a combination of these.

To describe movements precisely, biomechanics treats each joint as an axis and pairs it with a plane. In kinematics the limbs or segments of the body are assumed to rotate about the joints, with no sl…

A plane is an imaginary flat surface that divides the body into two parts. There are three planes of motion in which the body moves.

An axis is a point or straight line around which an object moves or about which the movement of a body segment occurs. There are three axes of rotation, and each axis is perpendicular to its plane.

A movement is usually referred to by the single plane in which it mainly occurs — for example, walking is described as a sagittal-plane movement.

This unit of the CBSE Class 11 Physical Education course examined how the human body moves and the forces that produce and control that movement. The key ideas, in the textbook's order, are: