BACKGROUND Pectoralis minor muscle length is believed to play an important role in shoulder pain and dysfunction. Current clinical procedures for assessing pectoralis minor muscle length may not provide the most useful information for clinical decision making. OBJECTIVE To establish the reliability and construct validity of a novel technique to measure pectoralis minor muscle length under act...

Muscle-tendon unit surgery for correction of deformities and movement dysfunction in children with cerebral palsy (CP) is fairly complicated. An understanding basic muscle-tendon properties their adaptation to both CP are important develop advances this field. In review, we provide information therapists, surgeons, scientists regarding the short- long-term adaptations unit. Surgical releases, l...

The length-tension relationship is a fundamental property of muscle. In its classic form, which is used in muscle models incorporated into studies of motor control, the length-tension relationship is measured during maximal activation via tetanic electrical stimulation in whole muscles or during high intracellular calcium levels in single muscle fibers. In this study, we measured the length-ten...

Background. Muscles not only shorten during contraction to perform mechanical work, but they also bulge radially because of the isovolumetric constraint on muscle fibres. Muscle bulging may have important implications for muscle performance, however quantifying three-dimensional (3D) muscle shape changes in human muscle is problematic because of difficulties with sustaining contractions for the...

Muscles actuate movement by generating forces. The forces generated by muscles are highly dependent on their fibre lengths, yet it is difficult to measure the lengths over which muscle fibres operate during movement. We combined experimental measurements of joint angles and muscle activation patterns during walking with a musculoskeletal model that captures the relationships between muscle fibr...

The Frank-Starling mechanism of the heart 1-3 can be described as the relationship between force and length of cardiac muscle. With the advent of the cross bridge theory of muscle contraction 4,5 and Gordon and collaborator’s classical study 6 describing the fitting of this theory to the force-length relationship in skeletal muscle, several investigators started to study this relationship in ca...

Slow-twitch motor units in the medial gastrocnemius muscle of the anesthetized cat were found to have an average optimum length for active tension that was 0.8 +/- 0.5 (SE) mm longer than the whole muscle optimum. For fast-twitch units (time to peak < 50 ms), the average optimum was 1.3 +/- 0.3 mm shorter than the whole muscle optimum. After the muscle had been subjected to 10 stretches while m...