|
Your Muscles' own "Tug-o-War": Cross-Bridges
Ever play tug-o-war? Two teams holding a rope, pulling as hard as they can? Whether you were on the “winning” team or not, chances are you would have experienced that point of no return in which one team picked up momentum, eventually overpowering the other team with a surge of unyielding rhythm. Little did any of us know at the time that we were personifying the miraculous phenomenon that enables our muscles to contract: cross-bridge formation. Amazingly, when our muscles contract, what’s really happening is that each of countless little muscle fibers called actin (think of the tug-o-war rope) is pulled across by another type of muscle fiber (in this analogy, our team of “pullers”) called myosin. This causes our muscle fibers to move toward and overlap one another, not unlike what basically happens in a tug-o-war contest. Of course, you’d need a heck of a lot of tug-o-war teams to even come close to the contraction of just one muscle, but you get the idea. Visualize that the next
time you’re in Warrior 2! ?
Back to "Articles" page..... |
