Muscles and Space

Two functions of your skeleton are to: (1)provide shape and support for your body (2)enable you to move.

Skeletal muscles are attached to the bones of your skeleton.

Muscles work in coordination with your skeletal system and nervous system to make your body move.

Regular exercise is important for maintaining both muscular strength and flexibility.

Exercise causes individual muscle cells to grow in size.

Because your muscles are trained to work in the presence of gravity, without exercise or gravity muscles shrink.

This is called muscle atrophy.

Space programs have developed special equipment for astronauts to exercise in space to prevent muscle atrophy.

Dr. James Hicks is a UCI professor who helped develop some of the exercise equipment used by astronauts.

Dr. Hicks is a comparative physiologist- he studies how and why animals work.

Because of his knowledge of gravitational physiology, Dr. Hicks was asked to educate the crew of Disney/Pixar’s WALL-E about the long- term effects of space flight on human physiology.

His scientific conclusion was that after a long period in space, humans would “look like blobs.”