And it's one that I think most people are familiar with themselves , which is soreness . We think of it as a muscle soreness . But I was trained early on in my scientific career to always question the seemingly obvious .
First of all , what does soreness really reflect ? Is it really muscle soreness ? It feels like it's in the muscles .
Ok . Well , what I didn't explain to you are called muscle spindles . And we have talked about proprioception in uh an episode of before as well , but we never tied this picture together .
So you have this wonderful mechanism of sensing stretch going back . Well , one theory that's been put forward regarding muscle damage is that the pressure is actually being applied to those nerve endings of the muscle spindles . And that's actually responsible for the pain signal that's going back and coming up to your brain .
So they stretch on the inside of the right calf muscle will sense that stretch and it will respond by contracting that pulls you back to the middle and stops you from falling . That's proprioception and muscle spindles and stretch and tell you to contract the way that they work is is through gamma motor neurons . And so these are sensory things .
