This book offers a succinct but comprehensive description of the mechanics of muscle
contraction and legged terrestrial locomotion. It describes on the one hand how the fundamental
properties of muscle tissue affect the mechanics of locomotion and on the other how the
mechanics of locomotion modify the mechanism of muscle operation under different conditions.
Further the book reports on the design and results of experiments conducted with two goals.
The first was to describe the physiological function of muscle tissue (which may be considered
as the motor) contracting at a constant length during shortening during lengthening and
under a condition that occurs most frequently in the back-and-forth movement of the limbs
during locomotion namely the stretch-shortening cycle of the active muscle. The second
objective was to analyze the interaction between the motor and the machine (the skeletal lever
system) during walking and running in different scenarios with respect to speed step frequency
body mass gravity age and pathological gait. The book will be of considerable interest to
physiology biology and physics students and provides researchers with stimuli for further
experimental and analytical work.
