Talk:Muscle

This article is currently mammal-centric. Also, Cardiac muscle is usually defined as its own type rather than simply an instance of smooth muscle. I do not feel I have the expertise to expand the article though so I am going to do that annoying thing of just complaining on the talk page instead of just fixing it myself. --Qaz

There are industrial and research projects for artificially augmenting muscle. Is the Wikipedia an appropriate venue for this topic, since it is a future entry?

Would a knowledgeable biochemist explain the 4 methods of energy production in muscle tissue? I recall that 2 are aerobic, and 2 anerobic, but i forget the actual reactions and hormones involved. --AnthonyQBachler

Contents

1 DOMS & lactic acid 2 Hyperplasia 3 human muscle action? 4 GFDL statement for "strongest muscle" section 5 Strongest muscle 6 Draft revisions to article 6.1 Striated and Smooth Muscle

DOMS & lactic acid

according to http://www.naturalphysiques.com/cms/index.php?itemid=142, DOMS is not caused by lactic acid buildup, as stated in this article

This is true. I will correct. Dan100 19:22, Feb 20, 2005 (UTC)

Hyperplasia

There was a paragraph that suggested that muscle hyperplasia could occur in humans. This is untrue - it has only been observed in animals - so I removed it. Dan100 19:22, Feb 20, 2005 (UTC)

human muscle action?

A larger wiki forum on this area may be found on sense-think-act.org (http://www.sense-think-act.org) which may be of interest to contributors to this area...

Hmmm. Nice, but it's a bit secondhand information. JFW | T@lk 13:53, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

GFDL statement for "strongest muscle" section

This statement is made for GFDL purposes to allow deletion of Strongest muscle in human body. The section Muscle#Which is the strongest muscle in the human body? was inserted by a 08:39, 3 Apr 2005 edit by User:Dpbsmith. This edit consists of material developed almost entirely by User:Dpbsmith on 30-Mar-2005 and 31-Mar-2005, with two typo/punctuation corrections by User:Mindspillage.

Strongest muscle

Help on this section would be greatly appreciated. This was a rescue attempt on a substub article that asserted that the tongue was the strongest muscle, without any attribution. VfD consensus was that it belongs here rather than in a separate article. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:47, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This section is now soo large it puts the article out of balance. I am also concerned about original research. Could you please trim this down to something smaller? JFW | T@lk 06:16, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

My big problem in trying to assemble this was the occurrence of many throwaway remarks about thus-and-such muscle being strongest without any reference of clear explanation. The article started with a single line asserting that the tongue was the strongest. In every case, it is NPOV-true for each candidate muscle that there are many, many, many assertions that it is the "strongest." But, yeah, in many cases I'm putting my guesses as to the rationale as a sort of placeholder. Although this is silly trivia-question stuff, I think it should be treated somewhere in Wikipedia, and the consensus was that this article was the appropriate place for it. I'll do my best to trim, but what I really need is help. Dpbsmith (talk) 14:14, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Well, I've at least managed to condense the table of contents and removes the over-conspicuous headings and the whitespace associated with them. The tone of this section is different from the rest of the article and the quality of the information is lower. I'm retitling the section "Trivia: the strongest human muscle" to separate it conceptually.

Please, please, have you got any guess as to the origin or explanation of idea of the tongue being strongest? Does this make any conceivable sense to you? Typical sighting: "The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body and teeth move with pressure" [1] (http://www.atlantadentist.com/Tongue_Thrust.html) and that's from a dental group... Dpbsmith (talk) 14:44, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've only looked breifly at this article, but I have an idea that may help. First off, musclular strength is more complicated than simple cross-sectional area as the layman would understand the term, and is more accurately measured with the measurement of physiologic cross-sectional area, which takes into account the alignment of muscle fibers within the muscle (whether they are fusiform or pennate muscles). Perhaps a new section called "Muscle Fiber Alignment" could discuss these issues, and within this section, side facts like the speed and strengths of certain muscles could easily be worked in as their respective muscle types are explained.--Bennihana 21:56, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's a lot more than that. It's also a function of the number of fibers recruited (by the nervous system), the rate at which they twich, and the compressibility of the fibers. →Raul654 00:11, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be best to just trim this section as much as possible, leave it at the end of the article, and add sections for alignment and compressibility, then talk about recruitment (and its relationship to force and speed) under "Nervous Control" (definitely ought to be there anyway) and also talk about twitch speed under the "types" explanation?--Bennihana 06:34, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Draft revisions to article

Following proposed work-in-progress revision:

Striated and Smooth Muscle

Muscle that we use in physical exertion, be it lifting a box or batting an eyelash, is striated muscle. However, muscle that is used to move food through the intestines and modulate blood flow through tissues is of a different type, smooth muscle. The two types are named after their microscopic appearance, where striated muscle shows cross-bridged filaments running along the length of the cells and smooth muscle does not. This filament structure is the contractile apparatus that transforms energy release from the hydrolysis of ATP into longitudinal tension against the cytoskeleton of the muscle cell; the complex structure of muscle at the tissue level is so designed that the contraction of individual muscle cells combine to result in an organ-level shortening of the muscle as a whole.

(Courtland 17:14, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC))

The first half is a bit dumbed down. I would avoid the use of "we". It may be enough to state that striated muscles are used voluntarily, while smooth muscle is under control of the autonomic nervous system and cannot be conciously controlled. JFW | T@lk 17:22, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

beginning parts of articles are meant for the general public and to start pumping in with "sarcomere" doesn't help the general reader; keep in mind also that this is going to be a point to which much of the reading public would go for information on Muscle -- as that's the title of the article. It might be dumbed down to you, but I assure you it's at a reading level and sufficiently demonstrative to be apprehended by the majority of the reading public. yes, need to change, perhaps, the familiarity of "we". Courtland 17:26, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

on voluntary/involuntary: that's not the distinction between smooth and striated muscle; it happens that there is a correlation but it's not perfect and we do have indirect conscious control over some supposedly "involuntary" muscle functions. I don't want to expound on that in this article because it can be kind of controversial and the general public looks at that stuff and thinks "pseudoscience" or "Ripley's Believe It Or Not". Courtland 17:30, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)