Topic: Motor units

Motor units (MUs), which compose spinal motor neurons and their innervated muscle fibers, are the fundamental unit of motor control. For nearly one hundred years, researchers have studied how MUs are recruited during movement, and the textbook understanding is that a simplified control strategy is used. A single ‘common drive’ is sent to a muscle’s motor neuron pool, which controls the amount of force that muscle will produce. This understanding has drawn primarily from experiments involving subjects generating static or gradually changing forces. However, recent results, using experiments wit