What the blip do you know - about your skeleton muscles and excercise?

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We all know we move thanks to our muscles, so we want stronger and better muscles to move better and stay healthy. It also looks good to have strong muscles... (ever thought why? - it is a sign for health and fertility!) There are three types of muscles in our body : Smooth muscles - involuntary muscles like the muscles in our blood system. Heart muscles - guess where they are found. Striated muscles - the famous skeleton muscles. In this post I will discuss the skeleton muscles. When we speak on movement, we start from a neuron, get to the muscles and then use tendons and joints. Information comes from our brain to the spine, and from the spine to excite our muscle. Every such muscle is excited by several neurons. In our muscle there are muscle fibers. Inside there is a myo-fiber and the functional unit is called the sarcomer. The sarcomer is composed of a Z-disk, thin filaments (actin) and thick filaments (myosin). The myosin is placed over the actin, and has a kind of head that is supposed to connect them. The myosin is connected to the Z-disk and its movement pulls the Z-disk which is connected on its other side to another myosin and thus creating another sarcomer that contracts together with the one next to him. In order to connect the myosin to the actin filaments, calcium has to be involved and therefor calcium is very importnat for muscle contraction. The more alignment there is between the myosin and the actin, the stronger the sarcomer is. In order to release the myosin from the actin, and thus release the muscle, ATP (our body's most common energy unit) must be involved. That is why we have muscle cramps if we work too hard - we don't have enough ATP to relieve the muscle. It might be that we don't have enough energy, or that our blood system is not fast enough to make sure the energy/metabolic cycle goes fast enough and we are left without energy. Calcium arrives from inside the cells (every cell has a stash of Calcium inside a cellular organ called Endoplasmic Reticulum) - a neuron sends information to the muscle and starts a procedure that causes Calcium release. If we train regularly, our sarcomers become stronger (myosin/actin alignment), our cells store more Calcium (we can contract more for more time) and our metabolic rate increases (hence, we are less likely to have cramps due to insufficient energy). As you can see, we use ATP, which is an energy source and we count energy with calories - the more ATP we use, the more calories we "burn". And another bonus for excercising - the larger the muscle, the more ATP it takes to act... which means, the more you excercise, the more calories you "burn" and it is more likely for you to stay in shape. We have a few sensors in our muscles. Some of them tell us how tense they are (by measures taken from the tendons) and some how elongated they are. These measures are taken to help us use our muscles as well as protect them from harm (you wouldn't like to lift something that would tear your muscles...). That is why we can't lift certain weights - our body won't let us harm itself. There are times when we conciously want to stretch our boundaries (like sportmen), and that boundary cross means injury. The stronger we are, and the more experienced we are, our muscles get stronger (Calcium, alignment, metabolism and m uch more) and our sensors are more likely to know our limits better to protect us and let us strain to a considrable effort in order to improve. That's about it. Any questions, addations etc. are more than wellcome.