Muscle Magic: How Your Body’s Muscles Work to Support You
Want to talk about an amazing and intricate system? Just look at the muscles in your body. They work together to allow almost every movement that your body can do. Yes, they perform the obvious “I want to lift this heavy box” movements, but they are also what allow your blood vessels to relax or contract. This motion is what brings blood to your cells and then pushes it back to your heart. How does your food travel through your digestive system? Muscles! How does your heart pump out blood? It’s a muscle!
One of the easiest ways to separate the different types of muscles is by those that are voluntary and those that are involuntary. Some muscles work voluntarily meaning that your body has to intentionally tell them to move. Your brain told your finger to click on the button to open up this article for instance. Your voluntary muscles make up your skeletal muscles.
Voluntary Muscles
Skeletal muscles
Your skeletal muscles are the largest type of muscle in your body. These are the ones you focus on at the gym. For instance, when your biceps contract, your hand moves toward your shoulder in the classic curl motion. In the classroom we often hear the term musculoskeletal system to combine both the muscular and skeletal systems. This is because they work so closely together. Your skeletal muscles are attached to your bones by fibers called ligaments and tendons. When the cells in your muscles work together to shorten the muscle group (contract) these tendons pull the bone causing it to move.
Another important role your skeletal muscles play is by helping the blood in your veins get back to your heart. This is especially true of the muscles in your legs. For instance, the blood in the veins of your foot has the farthest journey against gravity to get back to your heart and lungs for fresh oxygen. When you stand, walk and run your muscles are contracting to help push that blood up through your veins and back to the heart. This is also why it is so important to get up and walk around during a long plane flight or make stops during a long car drive. This helps to prevent blood clots from forming as your muscles help to prevent blood from pooling in your veins.
Involuntary Muscles
Other muscles in your body work involuntarily, meaning that they work whether you think about them or not, and thank goodness! Could you imagine if we had to tell our lungs every time we needed to take a breath or to tell our heart to pump? Our involuntary muscles make up our smooth and cardiac muscles.
Smooth Muscles
Smooth muscles are found within many of your organs. Think about your intestines and the rippling motion they make to move your food through your digestive tract. Smooth muscles are so important that a majority of medications and treatments provided in an emergency work on the smooth muscles of organs to help save that person’s life. Some of the main roles of smooth muscles are shown in the chart below.
Cardiac Muscles
Finally we have our cardiac muscle. Yes, your heart is actually a muscle! The cardiac muscles within the walls of your heart are what allow the chambers of your heart to relax to fill with blood and then contract to push blood out of the heart either to the lungs for fresh oxygen or out to the body to deliver that oxygen where it is needed.
Pretty amazing, right? Your muscles are in constant use. They maintain your posture, they keep your joints stable, they keep you breathing, and their contractions even produce the majority of your body heat!
