Why is your body safer and less prone to breaking when you are relaxed when you hit something at high speeds or with great force?
In: Biology
tense muscles are extra stress, They won’t counter a force strong enough that’ll break your bones anyway
“The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.” Confucius
There’s no give when you’re tensed up. Strains or breaks are more likely to result.
You absorb more of the force when you are relaxed. Think about it like dropping a box of spaghetti from a roof. If the spaghetti is uncooked it is much more brittle and a lot of it will be broken from the fall. If it’s cooked, it’s the same object but now more flimsy and it will be relatively unaffected from the fall.
Most peoples muscular-skeletal system (tendons and muscles) are only strong enough to support their own body weight give or take fifty percent. (100-300lbs)
But as a block of meat, not trying to support our weight with our muscles, we can support many times that. like fighter pilots pulling 6Gs (600-1800lbs) where the seat supports all the weight.
Think of it like this: if you throw a piece of glass at a wall, it will shatter. If you throw a rubber ball at a wall, it will bounce off. If you hit a wall when you’re all tensed up, you have a higher risk of breaking something because you’ve gone rigid, like the glass. However, if you hit a wall while relaxed you’ll be a lot less likely to incur damage due to being more elastic, like the ball.
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