... midges ( Asphondylia sp.). They store elastic energy by forming their body into a loop and pressurizing part of their body to form a transient ‘leg’. They prevent movement during elastic loading by placing two regions covered with microstructures against each other, which likely serve as a newly...

...Dominic James Farris; Glen A. Lichtwark; Nicholas A. T. Brown; Andrew G. Cresswell ABSTRACT Humans utilise elastic tendons of lower limb muscles to store and return energy during walking, running and jumping. Anuran and insect species use skeletal structures and/or dynamics in conjunction...

... with stretch–shorten cycles. This result suggests that replacing muscle stretch–shorten work with tendon elastic energy storage and recovery does not reduce the cost of force production. This calls into question the assumption that reduction of muscle work drove the evolution of long distal tendons. We propose...

...Christopher V. Anderson; Nicholas P. Larghi; Stephen M. Deban Temperature strongly affects muscle contractile rate properties and thus may influence whole-organism performance. Movements powered by elastic recoil, however, are known to be more thermally robust than muscle-powered movements. We...

... elastic contest Maximal performance is a key measurement in linking the ecology, fitness, biomechanics and morphology of animals ( Arnold, 1983 ; Bennett and Huey, 1990 ). Several aspects of maximal locomotor performance are readily testable in the laboratory, show strong repeatability within...

...Dominic James Farris; Grant Trewartha; M. Polly McGuigan; Glen A. Lichtwark SUMMARY The human Achilles tendon (AT) has often been considered to act as a single elastic structure in series with the muscles of the triceps surae. As such it has been commonly modelled as a Hookean spring of uniform...

...Christopher V. Anderson; Stephen M. Deban SUMMARY Temperature strongly affects whole-organism performance through its effect on muscle contractile rate properties, but movements powered by elastic recoil are liberated from much of the performance decline experienced by muscle-powered movements...

...Stephen M. Deban; A. Kristopher Lappin SUMMARY Temperature has a strong influence on biological rates, including the contractile rate properties of muscle and thereby the velocity, acceleration and power of muscle-powered movements. We hypothesized that the dynamics of movements powered by elastic...

...Thomas J. Roberts; Emanuel Azizi Summary The muscles that power vertebrate locomotion are associated with springy tissues, both within muscle and in connective tissue elements such as tendons. These springs share in common the same simple action: they stretch and store elastic strain energy when...

.... This variation might be due to variation in the storage and reutilization of elastic energy in tendons. Using a simple musculoskeletal model, it was predicted that the amount of energy stored in a tendon during a given movement depends more critically on moment arm than on mechanical properties of the tendon...

.... 241 , 725 -737. * Author for correspondence (e-mail: [email protected] ) 17 7 2007 © The Company of Biologists Limited 2007 2007 elasmobranch cartilage mineral content stiffness strength viscoelastic elastic Scale is critical when studying biological materials...

...): for these katydids closing wing velocities are dramatically lower and they make short trains of pulses, with intervening periods of silence greater than the duration of the pulses they separate. This signal form may be the signature of scraper-stored elastic energy. Fig. 2. Four successive frames from high...

... work done in a muscle-powered acceleration. The muscle model consisted of a muscle-like actuator with frog hindlimb muscle properties, operating across a lever to accelerate a load. We tested this model in configurations with and without a series elastic element and with and without a variable...