Wednesday, 18 June 2014

Stabbing muscles when flexed and when relaxed

Well, if we look in very basic detail at how muscle contraction works within a myofibril of the sarcomere:



Animation of muscle contractions



N.b. this isn't on a loop and only plays through seven times



The red lines represent actin filaments whilst the blue lines represent myosin filaments. During muscle contraction the filaments move over each other:



Relaxed myofibril



Partially Contracted myofibril



(Over)Contracted myofibril



As shown in the above diagrams the "more contracted" a muscle is then the smaller the size of the H zone (the area where there are just myosin filaments).



So if we consider a penetrating impact that went through a plethora of identically aligned sarcomeres (obviously this is not the case in nature) then we could presume that (et ceteris paribus) the object would not penetrate as deeply into a contracted muscle as it will hit more tissue on its route than in a relaxed muscle.

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