Muscular Overview

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Muscular Overview Objectives

Describe key “athletic” attributes of different animal species.
List and identify different sectional planes, including transverse, sagittal, and frontal cuts.

Start Your 2B Media Assignment here

We have approximately eight more weeks in this course, which is the perfect length of time to practice long-term data collection.

Body Data Plan

For this media piece you will plan and start data collection about your own body. Consider whether there is anything you want to maintain, or possibly something you may want to improve.

Select three parameters about your body that you would like to monitor over the next two months. This could be any of a wide range of data sources. For example: amount or quality of exercise, size/diameter of particular muscles, sleep length and/or pattern, foods eaten or time of day eating, indicators of negative stress, time spent sitting, etc.

You will be collecting data over the two months, at least twice a week, on your selected forms of body data. For example, I’m monitoring the number of 10-minute exercise intervals I’m doing each day, the percentage of vegetables on my plate I’m eating in each meal, and how many hours of continuous/un-interrupted sleep I’m getting at night.

For this media piece

List three body parameters you are going to collect data on over the next eight weeks and explain why you chose these three areas to focus on.
Describe the form of data you will be collecting, how you will record the data, and how often you will make measurements. For example, is the data numbers, photos, and/or text? Will the data be logged in a spreadsheet, photographed, written in a journal? How often are you collecting the data (multiple times a day, every day, twice a week)?

Collect data over the next eight weeks, you will be analyzing it in a future media piece.

Summary: turn in for this media piece:

1. A list of the three body parameters you have chosen to collect data on and why you selected them.

2. Your data plan, including: the form of data, how you will record it, and how often you will collect data.

You may alter this plan as necessary over the next eight weeks.

Note: if you are trying something new and challenging, it may be a good idea to get medical advice from a professional. Don’t overdo it; use your common sense and ask for assistance if needed. Also watch for others in your family who may try to keep up with you.

If you have a scale, you may monitor body weight in your body data plan. This video describes a limitation of using weight as an indicator of health.

We’re starting the muscular system with a comparison between humans and other species. Watch each video and be prepared to describe key “athletic” attributes of each species.

Cheetah

Kangaroo Rat

Pronghorn

Tiger

Pronghorn

Chimpanzee

Humans

Mark Summarizes

Before we get too far into the muscular system, we need to talk about how we look at organs and tissues. Often when we study organs we are only looking at small pieces, not the entire organ. It matters what direction we are looking in, whether it is the length of an organ, or a cross-section. This video introduces sectional planes.

Microanatomy is the study of tissues and cells under the microscope. Knowing the plane you are viewing is important in identifying structures.

These images show two different planar cuts through skeletal muscle (100x)

Notice how different these look. It would be possible to think skeletal muscle cells are just round balls instead of long tubes if you just saw the transverse cut.

Sagittal (lengthwise)

Transverse (cross-section)

The next section explores the human muscular system in more detail.

Check your knowledge. Can you:

describe key “athletic” attributes of different animal species?
list and identify different sectional planes, including transverse, sagittal, and frontal cuts?