Chris McKinley wrote:Technically speaking, all muscles work via contraction. Skeletal, or voluntary, muscles are not capable of actively extending, per se. Either gravity, centrifugal force or contraction of antagonist muscles are responsible for the extension of any skeletal muscle(s). As a result, the objective of maintaining an upright posture in a human is a result of multiple skeletal muscles contracting in multiple antagonistic units in such a way that the average balance of force vectors keeps the skeleton aligned in a more or less perpendicular attitude with respect to the ground.
so... bio-mechanically... once the static posture is established through "active" muscle contractions (i.e. the force vectors are balanced), is it possible to remove all muscle contraction, and allow the counter-balanced levers to support each other, purely by the tensility of the "web-work"? in other words, is 100% "song" possible, where the "tension" in the mechanism is not a contractile tension at all, but is an elastic tension... i.e. the balanced vectors stretch each other - by virtue of their gravitationally derived energy - thereby producing an "effortless" tension to support the overall posture against gravity? of course, this would only apply to a static posture, and not the active transformation between them. however, it should still remain possible (if it's possible in the first place) if an external force vector impinges on the posture and the posture rearranges around that force by virtue of its "contraction-less" malleability. does any of that seem to make sense? (static) song = contraction-less tension?
i know i missed the big song thread, and this isn't really the place, but boundaries are meant to be crossed