Believe it or not, the largest and most swollen muscles are not likely to be your strongest. New findings suggest the strength of muscles is more to do with the way they are laid out and how quick uncoordinated units of muscle can handle energy – which makes them tiny springs!
The Power of Pennation
Led by scientists at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, and including researchers from the University of Queensland, University of Koblenz-Landau and Stuttgart Media University in Germany — aimed to determine the ideal design for muscles using mathematical modeling.
The main finding of the study was that it is the pennation angle — or the angle of muscle fibres — that determines how much force a given muscle can generate. The greater number of muscle fibers are able to work in tandem, the more force the muscle can produce.
Because of a greater angle formed by the fibers, pennate muscles (which have an oblique arrangement) possess a larger cross-sectional area than do parallel-fibered muscle with this property in direct proportion to its capacity for generating force. It really is a ‘pennate mechanical advantage’ to these muscles that make them far more efficient in producing power, although not so for speed.
Top Muscle-to-Bone Ratio
However, the researchers went further and actually sought to understand why pennate muscle design was beneficial. They additionally considered conventional sizes of a muscle, which one are suited to most extreme power generation depended on ideal relationship between the complete length (L) and pressing factor creating (T).
The mathematical-geometrical models allowed the team to determine the optimal pennation angle for muscle based on its length-to-thickness ratio. They refer to this as the ‘pennation mechanical advantage’—enabling muscle to exert maximum force.
From enhancing the athletic training regimens of real human athletes to the integration and design of robots and prosthetics. Through an understanding of optimal muscle architecture, we can work more efficiently with the body’s native engineering and bring it to sports and robots alike.
Conclusion
The new insights into muscle design that emerged from this research suggest the popular notion “bigger is better” isn’t always correct for muscles. Rather, the bit that makes differences in muscle power, how its fibers are angled and arranged, is called ‘pennate’—and that it works best when laid thick on the bone. The advance could eventually pave the way for major breakthroughs in sports performance, prosthetics and the creation of robots that can efficiently mimic natural creatures, whose remarkable structures have evolved over millions of years.
