Practice Makes Muscles 20 Percent More Efficient
Scientists aren’t guaranteeing perfection, but they do think that greater efficiency is a reliable product of practice,–20 percent greater efficiency, to be precise. Researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder report that when they studied the ways that test subjects learned particular arm-reaching movements using a robotic arm, they found that even after a task had been learned and the corresponding decrease in muscle activity had reached a stable state, the overall energy costs continued to decrease, which seems strange. A University of Colorado news release reports that at the end of the task, (which included more than 600 repetitions of reaching movements) the net metabolic cost as measured by oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide exhalation had decreased by about 20 percent. The experiment studied people who used a handle on a robotic arm, similar to a joystick, to control a cursor on a computer screen, [...]
Original post by Art Jahnke
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