Cardiac muscle
This muscle is unique, only found in one place, its the muscle that makes up your heart, it has a vital role to play and lets understand how.
The muscle behind your heart.
Powering one of the most vital organs in the body, cardiac muscle has several unique qualities that allow it to perform this vital task.
Like skeletal muscles, the cardiac muscle is striated, and contracts through the sliding filament method. However it is different from other types of muscles in several ways:
Unique location.
This type of muscle, called the mydocardium, is found nowhere else in the body, and it works tirelessly to keep you alive. Every time it contracts it squeezes blood out of your heart, when it relaxes it allows blood to once more fill your heart.
Its ability to do this is due to the remarkable properties that muscles possess, including:
- It forms branching fibres
- It is not attached to a bone, but rather to itself
- It never gets tired
- It works automatically and constantly without ever pausing to rest
- Highly efficient at turning fuel into motion
- Extreme endurance
- The ability to heal itself under certain circumstances
- The capability to grow stronger with appropriate overload (e.g. exercise)
Its special.
All of this makes your heart one of the most amazing and reliable organs in your body.
