Ch 18Locomotion and Movement — Class 11 Biology, concept-first.

Movement is one of the most basic hallmarks of life, and it is shown at several different levels in the human body -- not only by the whole body walking or running, but also by individual cells and ev…

A skeletal muscle -- so called because most skeletal muscles are attached to and move some part of the skeleton -- is built as a hierarchy of progressively finer structures, each nested inside the one…

Each sarcomere is built of two distinct kinds of protein filament that lie parallel to the long axis of the myofibril and partly overlap one another: a thin filament and a thick filament.

The contraction of a skeletal muscle fibre is triggered by a signal originating in the central nervous system and is executed through a precisely ordered sequence of electrical, chemical and mechanica…

Movement of the human body as a whole is possible only because the contractile force generated by muscles is applied to a rigid, jointed internal framework -- the skeletal system -- that the muscles c…

The axial skeleton, totalling 80 bones, forms the main vertical axis running through the head, neck and trunk of the body, and its principal function is to protect the vital organs that lie along this…

The appendicular skeleton, totalling 126 bones, is made up of the bones of the limbs together with the girdles that attach each pair of limbs to the axial skeleton, and its principal function is to en…

A joint is any point of contact between two bones, or between a bone and a piece of cartilage, and joints are what allow the otherwise rigid bones of the skeleton to move relative to one another under…

Because the muscular and skeletal systems work together as a single locomotor system, a disorder can arise in the muscle itself, at the neuromuscular junction where nerve meets muscle, in a joint, or…

This chapter examined how the human body produces movement and how it is supported by the skeleton.