What Happens When You Stretch

"When you stretch the muscle fiber is pulled out to its full length sarcomere by sarcomere."
-I thought it was pretty cool that when you stretch, you're muscle fibers are being pulled to the maximum length. I always thought that stretching was limited by how far our bones will allow us to go and their joints, but it's actually the maximum length the muscle can reach.

"Picture little pockets of fibers distributed throughout the muscle body stretching, and other fibers simply going along for the ride."
-It's cool how our muscle works as a multitude of individual pockets or fibers. When movement occurs in the muscle, a few of the fibers are doing the work and the rest are just following along the fibers causing the moton.

"Some sources suggest that with extensive training, the stretch reflex of certain muscles can be controlled so that there is little or no reflex contraction in response to a sudden stretch."
-I know that the body comes with a lot of issues when you are born, but in many ways, we can train our body to get better at certain actions and overcome some weaknesses. I like how this example of the strectch relfex allows us to overcome a negative aspect of our muscles if we practice extensive training.

Relate and Review

The stretching of the muscle occurs in the sacromere which is the basic unit of contraction in the muscle fiber. When a sacromere contracts, the area between the thick and then myofilaments increaes, and when the sacro mere stechted the area of overlap is gone. the nerves in our muscular system allow us to know where parts of the body are in comparison to the body through the proprioceptors. The stretch relfec occurs when the muscle is stretched and so are the muscle spindle. This triggers the stretch reflex that tries to resist the change in muscle length. Other aspects of stretching in the lengthening reaction and the reciprocal inhibition.