Everything You’ve Ever Wanted To Know About Muscles

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Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. This post has been updated. Whether or not you’ve resolved to get into shape this January, Muscle Month is here to teach you a thing or two about stretching, contracting, lifting, tearing, gaining, and so much more. Welcome to PopSci’s Muscle Month! We’re kicking off the season with an FAQ on all things muscle-related, based on popular internet searches and queries from members of our staff. Got a question we didn’t answer? Let us know on Twitter. What exactly is a muscle? Muscles form when specialized long and tubular cells, known as myocytes, band together in a process called myogenesis. These fibers are distributed throughout our bodies and come in many different shapes, sizes, and forms, wiki.thedragons.cloud says David Putrino, a physical therapist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System. The human body has three types of muscle cells: Skeletal, smooth, and cardiac.



Smooth muscles line the inside of all our hollow organs like the intestines and the stomach. That’s except for the heart, which contains cardiac muscles (hence the name). Both cardiac and smooth muscles are involuntary, meaning we can’t tell them to tense or relax. Instead their movement is regulated by a precise neural dance formulated by our autonomic nervous system. The muscles that most of us are familiar with, says Putrino, are the skeletal muscles. They include well-known ones like the hamstrings, www.PrimeBoosts.com quadriceps, calves, and illusive external and internal obliques. So, just to clarify, is the heart an organ or a muscle? The heart is an organ, albeit a complex one. Again, it contains a distinct type of muscle called a cardiac muscle, which is only found in the heart, and makes up the main tissue within it, says Putrino. What about the brain? The brain is not a muscle at all.



It’s an organ made up of neural tissue. However, you can still "work out" your brain, so to speak, to strengthen certain cognitive functioning, like memory and attention. Okay, so how many muscles do we have? And what’s the biggest one? What about the smallest? Approximately 639 muscles make up the human body. The aptly-named gluteus maximus is the largest one in the body. You can thank your gluteus maximus for a movement known as the hip extension which allows us humans to perform basic functions like walking and standing-as well as more extreme endeavours like running. The smallest muscle in the human body is the stapedius muscle, says Putrino. But never judge anything by its size: This tiny beast sits inside the ear and stabilizes the smallest bone in the body, the stapes, which is responsible for allowing us to hear the world around us. Speaking of tiny muscles, does it really take more muscles to frown than it does to smile?



Of course everyone wants to think that it takes far more muscles to grimace than grin. But the truth is, no one has ever really done a study to prove it, says Putrino. It also depends on how you define a frown or a smile, he says. A deep frown will definitely take more muscles to pull off than a faint smile. But when it comes to a typical frown compared to a similarly average smile, it’s hard to say. Anecdotes asides, "I’m going to have to call myth on This product one," Putrino says. What’s the most muscular animal? That’s a tough one, says Putrino. "If we’re talking about just strength, beetles are definitely the strongest animals in the world and gorillas are the strongest mammals." If we consider muscle mass, then snakes take the crown for having the highest muscle-to-body ratio. Taken another way, Click here he says, Check this out elephants are thought to have the most individual muscles. And all animals have similar types of muscles, right?