Words: Dr Juliet McGrattan
As scientific knowledge deepens, the role of the muscles in our body is being unravelled. Far from being simply the bulge in Popeye’s biceps, we’re beginning to understand the vital role that muscles play in our general health.
From reducing our risk of major diseases to ensuring our independence in old age, muscles are turning out to be central to good health. Running gives our muscles a great workout, but is this enough?
Types of muscles
There are three types of muscle in our bodies. What we traditionally think of asmuscle is our skeletal muscle; it enables us to move and is used for structure and shape. It’s under voluntary control which means we can choose to either move it or keep it still. Skeletal muscle is the bulge in our biceps, the outline of our quads and this is what we damage when we pull a muscle.
Secondly, there’s smooth muscle. We don’t have control over our smooth muscle; it contracts and relaxes under instruction from our autonomic nervous system which is in charge of everyday bodily processes such as breathing and digestion. Smooth muscle forms many tubes in the body, including the walls of our blood vessels and our intestines. The stomach and uterus are made of smooth muscle as is the iris of the eye which makes our pupils dilate and constrict. The third type of muscle is cardiac muscle which is found purely in the heart. An incredible muscle that doesn’t tire and pumps repeatedly day and night, year aft er year.
From top to bottom
Let’s focus on the skeletal muscle, which is so crucial to us as runners. There are over 700 skeletal muscles in the body, the largest is the gluteus maximus (the buttock muscle) and the smallest is the stapedius muscle in our ear which is only around 1 millimetre long. Tendons are tough bands of tissue which connect muscles with the outer lining of bones.
They form a strong anchor, which means that when a muscle contracts, the bone moves too. There’s a network of blood vessels running in and around muscles to bring them oxygen and take away waste products. There’s also a web of nerves that conduct impulses to trigger the muscles to contract and relax.
Mix up your twitch training
If you studied muscles through a microscope, you would find that skeletal muscles are made up of long thin fibres gathered in bundles. Just like a rope, this makes them strong and means that a few fibres can break without the whole muscle giving way.
There are two types of muscle fibre.
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