The muscular system is responsible for movement.

It is made up of muscles, joints, tendons, bones, ligaments and connective tissue that help to protect internal organs. All of these systems work together so that they can provide the body with posture, motion and stability, heat and to help with digestion. There are three types of muscle tissues, which contribute to the functions: skeletal, cardiac and smooth muscle. Skeletal Muscle This muscle is the tissue that surrounds the skeleton. They give the body the ability to move. When the brain wants to move an arm or a leg, it sends electrical impulse from the axons to nerves that innervate the muscle fibre. This then causes the muscles to contract and pull the skeletal bone with them. This is translated into movement like walking, talking or waving. Smooth Muscle Smooth muscle is in the esophagus where food is pushed down the pipe into the stomach. After food passes through the stomach, its sent to the first part of the small intestine this is called duodenum. In the duodenum more smooth muscle further digests and helps your body absorb nutrients. More smooth muscles push the waste products of the digestion process are pushed down the colon and out the anus for excretion of unstable material. Cardiac Muscle This muscle is the tissue that comprises heart ventricles, atria and valves. These muscles use action potentials to electrically contract the heart, giving the body a method of pumping the blood from veins to lungs down the arteries. If blood is not properly supplied to the heart muscle, the muscle dies and heart attack and cardiac arrest can occur.

When a muscle is about to contract, a lot of things can happen quickly. The calcium levels rises; this then sends a message to regulator proteins in the cells. The regulator proteins release the signal for the actin and myosin filaments to begin pulling at each other. The molecules of ATP are burned to create energy, the filaments pull at each other to create contraction. The muscles are anchored to either end of the bones of the skeletal structure, which they pull against to make movement.

Involuntary Muscle
The nervous system automatically controls voluntary muscles in your body. This is a muscle that contracts without conscious control and found in walls of internal organs such as the stomach, intestine, bladder and blood vessels. There are two types of involuntary muscle visceral and cardiac. Smooth muscle tissue makes up these muscles. The Heart: Found only in the heart Can stretch like visceral muscle and contract like skeletal muscle Short single contractions give it its name: twitch muscle The nervous system controls contraction through electrical impulses

Internal Organs: Find these visceral muscles in the digestive tract, respiratory passages, urinary and genital ducts, bladder, and walls of the blood vessels They contract more slowly than skeletal muscle Example: when you swallow food, the visceral muscles in the esophageal wall slide the food down in the stomach where the muscles work with enzymes and stomach acid breaks down the food, then is transferred into the small intestine. The small intestine absorbs the nutrients and keeps the food moving through the large intestine. The muscles in the walls move it to the rectum as the body absorbs water from it.

The Diaphragm: The dome-shape muscle has the striated appearance of skeletal muscle but acts like both voluntary and involuntary muscle It separates the abdomen from the chest cavity Example: when the doctor asks you to take a deep breath, you inhale and the diaphragm contracts downward to allow air to fill your lungs, then when you exhale, it relaxes compressing the lungs. You control your breathing without even thinking about it The automatic nervous system also controls it and the diaphragm Voluntary Muscle (skeletal, striped muscle) These muscles are the ones that are under control and are generally attached to the skeleton. The whole muscle is covered with a strong connective tissue and attached at each end of the bone tendons. Running through each muscle fibre are smaller fibres, having alternate light and dark bands these contain protein filaments. The end of the non-moving bone is called the origin of the muscle; the end attached to the moving bone is called the insertion. Voluntary muscles have fast twitch and slow twitch fibres. Fast twitch fibres contract quickly, but do not use oxygen well and tire quickly. Slow twitch fibres contract slowly, but use oxygen well and keep going for a long time. For example sprinters in a 100 meter dash would need to have fast twitch fibres. Endurance athletes like a marathon runner would have slow twitch fibres.

Antagonistic pairs of muscles create movement when one (the prime mover) contracts with another the antagonist relaxes. Examples of antagonistic pairs are working are: The quadriceps and hamstrings in the leg The biceps and triceps in the arm

Huxleys Sliding Filament Theory The findings of Hugh Huxley and Allan Huxley, published in Nature, May 1954, gave rise to the sliding filament model in virtually the form we see it today (Huxley 2004). The theory stated that skeletal muscle contracted when two types of filaments consisting of the proteins myosin and actin slid past each other without either filaments length actually changing. Termed the sarcomere, thousands of these filaments lay in a recurring pattern within each muscle fibre, and as the sarcomeres contracted, so did the muscle fibre.

By Chloe Rees