What is the maximum power output of the human body through muscles?
It’s an interesting question, and spans a lot of thought space – everywhere from projects in micro power generation in third world countries to The Matrix (yeah, that’s right, Coppertop!) Real numbers are hard to come by, though. Part of the problem is in that definition of maximum. I would guess that very few experiments have actually been done to determine the true maximum – because that would likely kill a person, if not destroy their muscles! Another related point is that the power output depends strongly on the load – i.e. the system is nonlinear. Everybody could agree that to walk across a very shallow incline seems to take much less effort than traveling the same height completely vertically, even if ultimately the potential energy gained is equivalent (Science-speak: potential energy is a state function — translation: it doesn’t matter how you get there, the result is still the same.) What this all means is that you might get different numbers for max power output depending on
