How Our Muscles Work

Last week, in reading, we inspected what muscle fatigue was and why our muscles get fatigued. This week we are going to inspect even further and write about how our muscles work. We had to watch two little video’s to tell us different kinds of information that we need to know about our muscles that we have in our body and what their jobs are.

Did you know you have more than 600 muscles in your body? These muscles help you move, lift things, pump blood through your body, and even help you breathe. When you think about your muscles, you probably think most about the ones you can control. These are your voluntary muscles, which means you can control their movements. They are also called Skeletal muscles, because they attach to your bones and work together with your bones to help you walk, run, pick up things, play an instrument, throw a baseball, kick a soccer ball, push a lawnmower, or ride a bicycle. Muscles are all made of the same material, a type of elastic tissue (sort of like the material in a rubber band). Thousands, or even tens of thousands, of small fibers make up each muscles. You have three different types of muscles in your body, smooth muscle, cardiac muscle and skeletal muscle.

Smooth muscles, sometimes also called involuntary muscles are usually sheets, or layers, with one layer of muscle behind the other. You can’t control this type of muscle. Your brain and body tell these muscles what to do without you even thinking about it. You can’t use your smooth muscles to make a muscle in your arm or jump into the air. But the smooth muscles are at work all over your body. In your stomach and digestive system, they contract (tighten up) and relax to allow food to make its journey through the body. Your smooth muscles come in handy if you’re sick and you need to throw up. The muscles push the food back out of the stomach so it comes up through the esophagus and out of the mouth.

Now, let’s talk about the kind of muscle you think of when we say “muscle” the one that show how strong you are and let you boot a soccer ball into the goal. Their are your skeletal muscles sometimes called the striated muscle because, the light and dark parts of the muscle fibers make them look striped (striated is a fancy word meaning striped). Skeletal muscles are voluntary muscles, which means you can control what they do. Your leg won’t bend to kick the soccer ball unless you want it to. Their muscles help you make up the musculoskeletal system the combination of your muscles and you skeleton, or bones.

For me personally, muscles are very important to us because it moves our bodies and that it is really helpful. If we never had muscles inside our bodies, we won’t be able to move at all.