arm, back, body, exercise, health, leg, muscle, pecs, posture - June 21, 2011

Three Body Muscle Types

Our body holds three main types of muscle

Cardiac Muscle- Involuntary muscle

This means the muscle in active without conscious thought.

The muscle has a lateral connection between the muscle fibres meaning that when active makes all the fibres react and contract at the same time. This is needed so that the blood is pumped upwards into the blood vessels, a large amount of force is required so this cycle can take place. The difference between the cardiac and skeleton muscle, when the skeleton muscle is activated it uses individual muscle fibres contract if it used all like the cardiac muscle we would find it hard to live life from day to day. Picking a glass up would be impossible every glass would be crashed by your hand as like placing a pen on paper to write a letter, you might find the pen going through the paper and the table if you not lucky.

Smooth Muscle- Involuntary muscle

The reason it is called smooth muscle because the way it looks under the microscope, again this is an involuntary muscle that contracts without conscious. Most smooth muscles can be found around the arteries, digestion tubes around the artery walls all over our bodies.

You can find a mixture of both voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles within the core these are used mainly for maintaining our posture

Skeletal Muscle -Voluntary muscle

These are the muscles that can be found around the bone structure in order for protection against breakages and factures, they produce movement and also the muscles are able to store energy. To activate this muscle we need conscious thought so that we can send a signal to the muscle through our nervous system ordering the muscle to contract. The skeleton muscles can be found all around the body the bicep is one of many skeletal muscles.

Its import when you write your fitness plan to have involve the opposite muscle, around our body we have the muscle groups at the front and back. Most people concentrate on the muscles on the front of our bodies as these are the ones we can see in the mirror. All the front muscles have opposite muscle groups which we need both for our bodies to activate normally and produce movement.

Just think if we only had the use of the muscles at the front of our bodies, for example when awaking in the morning we would need to contracted our abdominals to lift our bodies out of bed, in doing so we would place our back into an L shape. It would be impossible to fix if we didn’t have the use of the latissimus dorsi a muscle, which is located in the lower back, we would need this muscle to contract so that we can become straight again and carry on with our day. Remember muscles can only shorten they need an opposite muscle to contract so it can bring us back to our original form of shape.