Muscle contraction is the tightening, shortening, or lengthening of muscles when you do some activity. It can happen when you hold or pick up something, or when you stretch or exercise with weights.

A concentric contraction is a type of muscle activation that causes tension on your muscle as it shortens. As your muscle shortens, it generates enough force to move an object. This is the most ...

Beet juice boosts endurance for many (but not all) people, according to a series of studies over the past five years or so. The active ingredient appears to be nitrate, which somehow reduces the ...

Current medical imaging technology misses important data regarding muscle contraction, including the ways in which a muscle's shape changes when it contracts, how the muscle bulges, and how its ...

When muscle cells are viewed under the microscope, one can see that they contain a striped pattern (striations). This pattern is formed by a series of basic units called sarcomeres that are arranged ...

Using powerful new visualization technologies, researchers have captured the first 3-D images of the structure of a key muscle receptor, providing new insights on how muscles develop across the animal ...

In a serendipitous discovery, UC San Diego researchers using cryo-EM technology captured the first visualizations of the 3-D structure of the muscle acetylcholine receptor in fetal and adult muscles.