Dr. Andy Galpin

But once again, it's basically everything non-smooth and non-cardiac.

Now, if you've listened to any of Dr. Andrew Humelman's work, he's talked extensively about the role of neuroplasticity, which is the ability of your nervous system to adapt or change in response to various stimuli or lack thereof.

Well, skeletal muscle's ability to respond like that is even greater.

So it will change its nature in both the short term, and now we're talking in order of seconds to minutes, as well as in the long term.

So its ability to alter how you feel and perform is extensive.

In order to understand that, we need to talk briefly about what muscle really is.

So what exactly is skeletal muscle?

Well, let's start all the way back at the beginning.

In your body, you've got somewhere between 600 to 700 different muscles.

Now, we don't know the exact number.

There's no scientific consensus on that.

In fact, I remember fairly recently a paper came out arguing for the identification of a fifth quadricep muscle.

So the tradition is that you've got four, hence quadricep muscles in your quad or your thigh there, and they had argued that they had identified a fifth one.

Now, I don't know the literature on that as well anymore, but the point is you've got a large number of muscles throughout your entire body.

We tend to group them into muscle groups.

So continuing with the quadriceps theme, we tend to call that the quad muscles, although that is actually four individual muscles.

Your biceps are actually a combination of several different biceps muscles, your triceps, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we've got all the muscles in our body.

We've got these subgrouping of muscle groups.

And then within each individual muscle,