The Dog's Internal Anatomy: Part 2 Muscles, Tendons, Ligaments

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For the next topic of the dog's musculo-skeletal system, I will be talking about four things. I will go over the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints. These four tissues help tie together the skeletal system, which supports the animal, and allows movement.

Muscles

Muscles are what gives your dog movement. There are a lot of other systems that also contribute, but it is the contraction and relaxation of muscle that gives mechanical movement to the skeletal system, allowing dogs to walk, run, wiggle their noses, etc.

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There are three different types of muscle in the mammalian body. There is Skeletal muscle, Cardiac muscle, and Smooth muscle. Cardiac muscle is just what it sounds like. This is heart muscle which has well-developed cross-striations throughout the muscle. Heart muscle beats rhythmically on its own due to Pacemaker Cells in the Myocardium which discharge and cause the involuntary heartbeat.

The Myocardium is just the thickest middle layer of the heart wall and Pacemaker Cells are just cells that set and keep a pace within the heart.

Smooth muscle also contains these pacemaker cells, but these beat at an irregular rhythm. Smooth muscle does not have any cross-striations, and is found in the internal organs of mammals, and are also involuntary.

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Next comes the skeletal muscle. This is what I will be concentrating on. Skeletal muscle requires voluntary thought processes, which triggers nerve impulses, which then triggers muscle movement.

Skeletal muscle is attached to the skeleton by tendons. I will talk about these in a minute. Muscles allow movement of the skeleton to occur by contracting and relaxing. Muscles do not expand and push, they can only contract and pull. This is why there are muscles on each side of a bone. They are called Antagonistic Muscle Pairs. For example, one muscle contracts and pulls to bend the leg, the other contracts and pulls to straighten it out.

These are the basics of muscle, and from here on out things get very complicated. I will keep it simple, so here are just a few other things to know about muscle.

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Skeletal muscle is made up of individual muscle fibers, that taken together, form the muscle structure. Each muscle fiber runs in a parallel line between the tendons, and most muscle fibers both begin and end at the tendons. The way that these muscle fibers are arranged makes the contractile force additive, that is, when contraction occurs, the force along the line of muscle adds up as more force occurs.

There are three main proteins that make up the contractile mechanism in skeletal muscle. They are Myosin-II, Actin, and Tropomyosin. Tropomyosin is further made up of three subunits.

I will try to generalize what happens in muscle when contraction occurs. This process is very complex, so remember, this is just a layman's explanation.

Skeletal muscle is made up of thin filaments and thick filaments. The contraction of muscle occurs when the thin filaments slide past the thick filaments. The so called "power stroke" occurs by what I would call a lever action. A lever from the thin filament detaches from the thick filament, moves down the thick strand, re-attaches, then flexes and pulls the strand shorter. The distance moved is just a few nanometers, but when hundreds or thousands of these lever actions occur all along the muscle filaments, considerable shortening of the muscle occurs.

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I hope I explained that in a way that you can understand, because you can spend months studying just the mechanism of contraction and relaxation of muscle.

There are two types of muscle fibers in the dog's body. These are Type I and Type II fibers. The different fiber types are found in different types of muscle. Red muscle is mostly made up of Type I fibers and are darker, respond slowly and have long latency, and are responsible for maintaining posture. These are long, slow contractions.

White muscles contain mostly Type II fibers and are responsible for fine, skilled movements. They have short twitch durations.

One last tidbit about muscle is that dog skeletal muscle has the ability to exert 3 to 4 kilograms of tension per square centimeter of cross-sectional area. This is also true for human skeletal muscle.

Tendons and Ligaments

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The information that I have about tendons and ligaments will be brief. Tendons are what attach the muscles to the bone, and Ligaments are what attach bone to bone. They are both very tough and fibrous. They can take a lot of stress, but once they sustain an injury, tendons and ligaments heal slowly. If they are allowed to rest, they can regain their strength and motion. But if the injury is ignored, and more damage continues to occur, it will result in obvious pain. Without rest and treatment, tendons and ligaments will never regain their original strength or range of motion.

Tendons are made up mostly of collagen protein, along with other proteins. They have a poor blood supply, and when they suffer injury, they are difficult to treat, and often do not heal well.

Ligaments are similar to tendons in structure, but attach bone to bone.

Changes in the mechanical motion of a limb also affects changes the tendons and ligaments. When tendons and ligaments are gradually placed under increasing stress, they can adapt and become stronger and more flexible. This occurs in athletic dogs and dogs that perform daily work such as herding, pulling sleds, and other activities. When dogs gradually work up to a certain work level, the tendons ......