Before the term “biomechanics” became standard, the study of forces and movement in living bodies went by several different names depending on the era and the country. In the United States, this field was originally called kinesiology. In Europe, the term biomechanics caught on earlier. And centuries before either label existed, the same basic inquiry fell under “natural philosophy” and, later, branches of medicine and mathematics with no dedicated name at all.
The Earliest Names Were Not Names at All
The study of how bodies move has roots stretching back to ancient Greece, but there was no specialized term for it. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century B.C., produced a work called “De Motu Animalium” (On the Movement of Animals) in which he described animal bodies as mechanical systems and subjected muscle actions to geometric analysis. This was biomechanics in everything but name. Aristotle was what later centuries would call a “natural philosopher,” a catch-all title for anyone who studied the physical world through observation and reason. The idea of carving out a specific discipline for the mechanics of living things simply didn’t exist yet.
Borelli and the Era of “Iatrophysics”
The first real treatise on what we now call biomechanics came from Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, a professor of mathematics in Pisa, in the seventeenth century. His own book was also titled “De Motu Animalium,” a deliberate nod to Aristotle. In it, Borelli analyzed muscle actions, limb movements, and activities like running, jumping, swimming, and flying, applying mathematical reasoning to each one. The broader intellectual movement Borelli belonged to is sometimes called iatrophysics or iatromechanics, terms that described the application of physics and mechanics to medicine. His collaborator, Marcello Malpighi, held a chair in “theoretical medicine,” which gives a sense of how loosely these investigations were categorized at the time. There was no department of biomechanics. The work lived at the intersection of mathematics, anatomy, and medicine, and borrowed its vocabulary from all three.
Kinesiology: The American Term
The clearest answer to “what was biomechanics called?” depends on which side of the Atlantic you’re asking about. In the United States, the use of mathematical and mechanical principles to study human movement was initially called kinesiology. In Europe, the same work was already being called biomechanics. This transatlantic split persisted for decades. The two terms weren’t perfect synonyms. Kinesiology, derived from the Greek word for movement, was broader and often included anatomy, physiology, and psychology of movement alongside the mechanical analysis. Biomechanics was more narrowly focused on forces, levers, and the physics of motion.
The distinction sharpened in the 1960s. A landmark event called the Big Ten Body-of-Knowledge Symposium identified six areas of specialization within physical education, and biomechanics was listed as its own category, separate from exercise physiology, motor learning, and other subfields. This was a turning point: biomechanics was being carved out as a distinct discipline rather than lumped under the kinesiology umbrella. By the time the American Society of Biomechanics was founded in 1977, the term had gained enough traction in the U.S. to stand on its own.
Chronophotography and Motion Science
In the late 1800s, a parallel stream of biomechanical research developed under yet another name. Etienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist, invented a technique called chronophotography that captured successive phases of movement on a single photographic plate. Working alongside the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Marey recorded the displacement of body segments and created what were essentially body diagrams in motion. By 1888, he had moved from still plates to photosensitive film, laying the groundwork for cinematography itself.
Marey and his contemporaries didn’t call their work biomechanics. They described it as the experimental science of motion, or simply motion analysis. Their tools were cameras, not force plates, and their language came from optics and physiology rather than engineering. But the questions they were asking, how does a human limb move through space, what are the phases of a stride, were squarely biomechanical.
Related Fields With Overlapping Names
Several adjacent disciplines have, at various points, overlapped so heavily with biomechanics that their names were used almost interchangeably. Bioengineering is the most prominent example. It encompasses biomechanics but also includes biomaterials, biotechnology, and bioscience. Drawing clean lines between these fields has always been difficult, precisely because the work is interdisciplinary by nature.
Kinanthropometry, the measurement of human body dimensions in relation to movement, developed its own scholarly community and international working group. It sits within the broader family of kinanthropology and kinesiology but focuses specifically on body size, shape, and composition as they relate to physical performance. While not a direct predecessor to biomechanics, it shared enough intellectual territory that the two were often housed in the same university departments.
Before any of these modern terms existed, the engineering mechanics of materials began to flourish in France and Germany during the Industrial Revolution. Researchers studying the strength of bones, the elasticity of tendons, and the load-bearing capacity of joints were doing biomechanics using the language and methods of structural engineering. Their home departments were engineering or medicine, not anything with “bio” in the title.
How the Modern Term Won Out
The word “biomechanics” gradually displaced its competitors because it was precise. Kinesiology was too broad, covering everything from motor learning to sport psychology. Natural philosophy was too vague, a relic of an era before scientific specialization. Iatrophysics was too obscure and too tied to seventeenth-century medicine. Bioengineering was too wide, pulling in fields that had nothing to do with movement. Biomechanics said exactly what the field studied: the mechanics of biological systems.
The 1960s and 1970s cemented the transition. University departments that had once grouped all movement science under physical education or kinesiology began creating dedicated biomechanics programs. Professional societies formed. Journals launched. By the 1980s, biomechanics was the internationally recognized term, and the older names had either narrowed in meaning (kinesiology now often refers to the broader academic discipline that includes biomechanics as a subfield) or faded from common use entirely.