Dr. Andy Galpin

So now remember, the nucleus of the cell is what holds your DNA.

It relegates all activities and tells the cell to grow, shrink, die, repair, or any other necessary function.

The overwhelming majority of cells in all of biology are single nucleated.

Some of them actually get very interesting when they have two or three.

But skeletal muscle has thousands per cell.

This allows it to actually have such extreme size because now we have more relegation centers throughout it.

I can give you an analogy here.

Let's imagine you're running a business and you want to have a branch manager at every one of your offices.

Well, if you only have one branch manager, it's hard to have an office in, say, Chicago, New York, Dallas, and Seattle.

Too many little things happen in local areas.

It's hard to relegate and to change things quickly.

But if you could put a manager in every single location, the success of each branch, as well as the speed and turnover, goes up.

That's effectively what your muscle cells are doing.

They're putting a lot of nuclei in a lot of different places.

So that allows not only the size to expand, but where this really matters is the adaptability.

Your muscle is hyper-responsive to things that are happening in a short time window across a broad domain of insults.

What I mean, this could be responsive to physical contraction, to blood flow, nutrient availability, glucose, oxygen, hormones, lifestyle factors.

All of these things are being measured and monitored by skeletal muscle, and because it has the ability to adapt in multiple segments,

It can do that and it can do that very quickly.

Giving you some firm numbers on this nuclei, let's say that biceps brachii muscle we talked about a second ago was 10 centimeters long.