Muscles and Their Function

By: Nick Izzo

Hey folks, today this blog will deal with types of muscle, their function and their structure. All of the human body’s muscles fall into three categories. There is smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, and skeletal muscle. All three serve very important functions in the body and are essential to life.

First we will discuss smooth muscle. Smooth muscle is involuntary muscle. It is controlled by the autonomic nervous system which, in short, is the part of the nervous system that is responsible for the control of bodily functions not consciously directed. Smooth muscle is mainly found in the digestive system like the stomach, intestines and bladder as well as the walls of blood vessels. There’s also cardiac muscle. This is also controlled by the autonomic nervous system but also the endocrine system. The endocrine system is a collection of glands that create hormones to regulate your metabolism, growth and development, tissue function, reproduction, and sleep. The cardiac muscle is found only in the heart, so quite essential to our daily life. Then another very important muscle that has a plethora of information on it is skeletal muscle. Its primary function is to convert electrical signals to mechanical movement. Skeletal muscles create the ability to move, keep upright while standing or in a chair, force production for breathing, and also helps you shiver. Now, the structure of skeletal muscles can be very complicated. All skeletal muscles have connective tissue coverings. The mechanical movement of the muscle strains the connective tissues which results in a transfer of force to the tendon resulting in bone movement. Skeletal muscle itself is surrounded by epimysium. Inside of the epimysium is the perimysium which takes a bundle of muscle fibers and surrounds those. Then even deeper, each muscle fiber in those bundles has endomysium surrounding it. Each individual fiber is a single muscle also known as a myocyte. So in short, many tiny single muscles create what we call a muscle.

Muscles are a fascinating component of the human body. Without them, quite obviously, we would not be able to function how we do now. They have a lot more to their structure than you would think and every single part of their build up contributes to their ability to function in the way they do.

References:

“MSU- KIN 173 – Foundations of Kinesiology – Spring 2017”. Education.msu.edu. N.p., 2017. Web. 10 Feb. 2017.