Lower Body Anatomy 20 Lower Body Muscles for SUF CPT Personal Training Certification

If you’ve ever said “I’m training quads” and assumed that meant one muscle, this one will sharpen your coaching brain fast. We’re leaning into more video-supported teaching because anatomy and biomechanics click when you can see what we’re describing, especially around the hips, knees, and feet.

We break down lower body anatomy for lifters, coaches, and personal trainers who want clearer cues and better exercise choices. You’ll get a clean, practical tour of the quadriceps (yes, all four muscles), why the rectus femoris is the only biarticulate quad, and why the popular VMO “isolation” idea on leg extensions does not hold up the way people claim. Then we move to the hamstrings you can actually palpate, explain what it means to cross two joints, and show how foot position on leg curls can bias medial hamstrings versus biceps femoris.

From there we connect the dots through adductors, glutes, and calves, using simple landmarks and memorable cues like the “belt buckle” for posterior pelvic tilt and glute control. We also clear up sarcopenia vs atrophy so you stop mixing up aging-related muscle loss with injury-driven muscle shrink, because that confusion leads to sloppy training advice. Along the way we hit the Achilles tendon, the calcaneus, and even the sartorius, the longest muscle in the body, to round out a true hips-to-toes mental map.

If you want better results from strength training and better explanations for your clients, press play, then subscribe, share this with a training partner, and leave a review. What lower body muscle do you want us to break down next?

Because the SUF CPT exam is conducted verbally, this episode focuses on helping you explain the muscles clearly and confidently, just like you would during the test.

You'll learn the muscles of the glutes, hips, thighs, and lower leg, along with simple ways to remember their actions and roles in training.

Perfect for:

• SUF CPT candidates
• New personal trainers
• Coaches improving anatomy knowledge
• Anyone studying lower body functional anatomy
• Interested in becoming a personal trainer and those who are changing careers into personal training.
• SUF CPT is the fastest growing personal training certification with elite partnerships at Life Time Fitness and Equinox.

Want to become a SUCCESSFUL personal trainer? SUF-CPT is the FASTEST growing personal training certification in the world!

Want to ask us a question?  Email info@showupfitness.com with the subject line PODCAST QUESTION to get your question answered live on the show!

Website: https://www.showupfitness.com/
Become a Successful Personal Trainer Book Vol. 2 (Amazon): https://a.co/d/1aoRnqA
NASM / ACE / ISSA study guide: https://www.showupfitness.com

Transcript

Welcome And More Video Plans

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Haddy all, welcome back to the show finished podcast. Today we're gonna start implementing more of what the market wants and they want to see more videos. This is for those that are doing your cardio, hitting that 150 minutes of cardio per week. Now, when you're driving, ideally, maybe you're in traffic or you're sitting in your car and you want to get more out of the podcast. So I'm gonna have some video analysis today of some anatomy, hip anatomy, as well as go over a program. So, in person, we have our internship, and right now we're getting into the 20 muscles of the lower body. Obviously, as you know, there's more than 20 muscles, but these are the expectations that we set with SUF CPTs to level up the standard. Most trainers could even tell you a couple quadriceps, that's one muscle, right? It's actually four. We'll go over that here in a second. 646 plus muscles of the human body. And the reason I say plus is because it's not definitive. Some anatomists will say it's 650, some will say 656. General rule of thumb is going to be right around 646. 206 for bones, that is set in stone. We have the appendicular, the axial skeleton, the basic unit of the skeletal system, the osteon. But for today, we're going to focus on muscles, of which the basic unit will be the sarcomere. Sarcopenia, it's what we what we should really be talking about. As we don't exercise, we lose that muscle mass due to age, not confused with atrophy, where if you jack up your knee, torn ACL, and you're put into a cast, you'll look at your quad and it's significantly smaller. That's atrophy. Sarcopenia is the loss of muscle mass due to age when you don't use it. Like in the 40-year-old virgin, if you don't use it, you will lose it. Aging myself with good comedies out there, they're not any more good ones, but you don't care about that. You're here to learn anatomy and the belt buckle trainer. Look at this sucker. Nice and beautiful today is going to help you better understand your anatomy. So start with the quadriceps. Quad means four rectus femoris, rectus femoris, tomato, tomato, vastus lateralis, vastus intermedius, and vastus medialis. I will go over to the anatomy chart and show you where these are in the human body as well. Hamstrings, that's the posterior side. So if you are driving, this would be appropriate to do with the leg that is not on the gas. Put your hand behind your left leg and your fingers on the medial side. You'll feel those two guitar strings. Those are tendons, those are the semis, semi-membranosis and semitendinosus. On the lateral side, there's one thicker guitar string. That's your biceps femoris. So the hamstrings are all bi-articulate. That means it crosses two joints, starting on the butt bone or the ischial tuberosity, that's the hip. And then it's going to deviate depending on which muscle it is. So the semis are going to go medially into your tibia, whereas the biceps femoris is going to go laterally into your fibula. That's why foot position matters when you're doing leg curls. You can bias more of the semis or the medial. You can bias more of the biceps by going externally. Whereas when you do extensions of the leg, you can't bias the vastus medialis or lateralis. Doesn't matter what any textbook is going to say. That is not the case. Your VMO is underactive. You're going to bias the V. No, shh, shh, just shh. The only biarticulate quad muscle is your rectus femoris. It works with hip flexion. All of these work with extension of the knee. When we get to the adductor group, we love baseball right now, even though USA didn't do too hot last night. Major League Baseball, MLB, adductor magnus. That is the stucco technique that we teach at our weekend seminars. We're going to be in Houston this Friday and Saturday. And then at the end of the month, we're going to be at Providence Athletic Club in Oakland for a two-day seminar. So the technique that we do is on the adductor magnus, the adductor longus and the adductor brevis. There are two other muscles that adduct. They just don't have the word adductor in front of them. The pectinius as well as the gracillus. So Major League Baseball has great pitching. For the glutes, we have the gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus. The medius is really sitting in that frontal plane, working great with abduction. The upper fibers of the glute max are going to work with abduction as well. Glutus maximus is a cool muscle, four actions. In the sagittal plane, it's going to extend frontal plane. It's going to abduct. Transverse, it's going to externally rotate. And then with that posterior tilt. Show me that belt buckle. Show me that belt buckle. That's a posterior tilt of the pelvis. The glutes work with that. The calves, we have seven gastrocnemius. That's that beautiful BAM! Look at that sucker right there. That is the big superficial posterior calf muscle. The soleus is behind that or deep. On the front side, we have the anterior tibialis as well as the posterior tibialis. And then we have the proneus brevis, longus, and tertius. It's like a BLT sandwich. Top button is going to be your gastrocnomius. The bottom button will be your anterior tibialis, and all the meat in the middle is going to be your posterior tip and the proneus muscles, also referred to as the fibularis muscles. Again, tomato tomato. Now we're going to come over here with a little Blair Witch project. Van O White, Miss Megan is going to hold this for me. The posterior side, we have the big gluteus maximus. And then we have the semis over here. We have the semimembranosis and semitendinosis, gastrocnemius. If you remove it, you're going to have the soleus underneath. We have some smaller knee muscles. This isn't a knee anatomy podcast, but we have the plantarius and the poplitius. Those are deep knee muscles. You have this tendon right here. The story of Achilles, his mom took them and dipped them into the river of sticks. So everything was mortal except his Achilles tendon, which goes into your calcaneous heel bone. We have seven tarsals, of which one of those tarsal bones is the calcaneus. On the anterior side, my favorite muscle of the human body, the sartorius. My dog's gone. Where is it? Sartorius, come here. Isn't that a great name? Sartorius. Oh, I want to name a big dog. It comes running through the park. Love that name, sartorius, longest muscle of the human body. It flexes the hip saggelly. It abducts. It externally rotates. It works with knee extension. It stabilizes in the frontal plane. Really, really cool muscle. The sartorius is a hip muscle, one of the three biarticulate ones, as well as the TFL, which comes down to the knee. And then we have the gracillus. On the anterior side, we have the quad, the rectus femoris, which is going to start on the anterior, inferior iliac spine, and it's going to go to your patella ligament and your patella tendon. And then we have the vastus medialis or the teardrop. We have the lateralis. And then if we remove the rectus femoris, we have the vastus intermedius, anterior tibialis. That's when you do dorsiflexions. And then behind that, we have the posterior tibialis. Now let's kick a look over here. Thank you, Miss Megan. Say hello to Megan. Isn't she awesome? Ah, I scared her. I actually did scare her. I can't believe it. Oh my God, she's so easy.