Abstract :
Muscle behaves in a variety of exotic, esoteric, and protean ways. Interestingly enough, a good deal of this exotic behavior has been revealed from laboratory experiments on excised muscle, rather than from observation of intact, in situ, in vivo muscles. Naturally a satisfactory physical model of muscle would have to be capable of behaving like real muscle in a wide variety of ways. This presentation will acquaint you with the laboratory behavior of muscle and with models that have been devised to help quantify that behavior and/or to understand the basis for it. Only a model capable of simulating all known behavior should be considered competent to serve such purposes. One such model will be defined and used for obtaining a set of parameters for muscles.