ABOVE: © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM, JOSE LUIS CALVO
Watching the elaborate motion of a pitcher throwing a baseball at more than 100 miles an hour illustrates the essential role of stretching prior to delivering large amounts of mechanical power. Similarly, practitioners of the millennia-old practice of yoga often seem to defy gravity with impressive feats of muscle stretching. By contrast, astronauts returning to Earth from long voyages display a significant loss of muscle tone, as if the prolonged absence of gravitational loading had robbed them of some essential source of mechanical power. Yet much of the biomechanics at the foundation of these familiar phenomena remains beyond the reach of modern scientific inquiry. Perhaps these gaps will be filled in when we develop a better understanding of how muscle tissue works.
According to most physiology textbooks, we already fully understand muscle contraction at the molecular level, and any further knowledge would only deal ...
