02/09/2026
Welcome to Muscle Monday! We’re going to learn some stuff about muscles. Some days it’ll be facts, some days it’ll be specific muscles and some days it’ll be a full lesson. Starting off with a long one so buckle up!
So, what is a muscle? The first thing you need to know is there are 3 types of muscles. Cardiac muscles, Smooth muscles and Skeletal muscles.
Cardiac muscles are only found in the heart. These muscles contract to pump blood throughout the body. This movement is involuntary, meaning you have no control over it, relaxing or contracting. Good thing too, could you imagine having to make your heart beat?
Smooth muscles are what make up the walls of hollow organs. Things like the stomach, the bladder, the uterus, blood vessels and so on. These muscles are also involuntary and contract to move all kinds of substances through the body.
Skeletal muscles are probably what you think of when you hear “muscle”, and what we will be focusing on for this series.
Skeletal muscles are a group of muscle fibers wrapped together by connective tissue that is attached to the skeleton. These wrapped muscle fibers contract and relax to move the body through space with voluntary movement, as in, you are in control of these muscles. These muscles attach themselves to bones with thick bands of connective tissue called tendons. In order to physically move the body these tendons cross joints. When these muscles contract the ends want to meet, shortening the muscle. This is known as the agonist muscle group when talking about movements. This group works with what’s called the antagonist, which relaxes the muscle and lengthens it to allow the movement. A great example is the biceps and the triceps. When we flex our biceps we move the forearm closer to the shoulder causing the bicep to shorten while the triceps lengthens allowing the bicep to shorten. If we flex our triceps it causes the triceps to shorten and brings the arm back down towards the side of the body while the biceps lengthen to allow the movement. Another important job of the Skeletal muscles are to keep our posture and maintain balance. Core stability muscles, or postural muscles, are deep skeletal muscles that are located in the abdomen, pelvis and back. We will go into even more detail as the series continues. Next week we’ll focus on the muscle erector spinae, a large rope like muscle that runs along the back, to elaborate on the roll it plays in maintaining our balace and our posture.
If you’ve made it to the end, I appreciate you! And I hope you enjoyed the read, until next week.
Found on Google from geeksforgeeks.org
