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 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 .
And so these are sensory things . So what's happening is unlike when you tell your muscle to contract , it goes alpha to the muscle contract , these muscle spindles work so that it is oh , I've been stretched , send signal back to some central point typically in the spinal cord . And we don't actually want to go all the way up to the brain .
And that's gonna be innervating your muscle fibers and that's gonna tell the muscle fibers to contract . Those are typically spread out throughout the uh all sides of the muscle in interior or exterior , all over on the outside though , there is another type of muscle called a muscle spindle . Now , these are noncontractile .
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 .
