How Does A Muscle Contract Hard?
There is a principle you need to know about called the “All or None Principle”. Each individual muscle is made up of many many muscle fibers. When a muscle contracts, you brain is basically sending an electrical charge to that muscle. To keep this simple, let’s say that your bicep is made up of 100 individual muscle fibers. Each individual fiber is either contracted or relaxed. When you lift a light weight, maybe only 5-10 fibers will “fire off” while the other 90 fibers are completely inactive. When you lift a heavier weight, your brain may send an electrical impulse to “fire off” 15-20 fibers, while the other 80 or so muscle fibers are inactive. So muscle contraction is based upon what percentage of muscle fibers are “firing off”…and how many are inactive. So the muscle fiber is either all the way activated or not at all..”All or None”. A harder contraction would indicate that your brain is sending stronger electrical impulses to the muscle, recruiting more muscle fibers in the proce
