One of the pleasures of life is being able to relax and sit outside watching all that goes on around you. One of the favorites is trying to identify the different birds that visit your area. Probably the most fun bird to watch is a hummingbird eating at a hanging feeder in your yard or even hitting on the flowers in the yard. The hummingbird is so small and the wings beat so fast you can hardly see them. I have a few that hang around the feeder and am amazed that they can be stationary in one place or fly off at a fast speed in the blink of an eye.
I read a statement that a hummingbird’s wings move 90 times every second. That makes the wings move 5,400 times every minute. I started to wonder what type of muscle can move that fast. And include the question of what system of nerves to the muscle can handle that fast of a movement. That number of contractions in one second is very hard to imagine. Trying to relate that fast movement to what a human can do in comparison is the realization that humans are very slow-moving.
Human muscle has three major types. There is a fast twitch and a slow twitch muscle fiber and then a middle twitch fiber that can be conditioned to be close to fast or slow twitch. Most humans are about a 60 – 40 ratio of either fast twitch or slow twitch. Most of us are not super-fast moving and can’t sustain that muscle movement for long periods of time. We can work to improve one or the other but never really reach that elite level of movement. Some athletes have a ratio of over 85 – 15 of a muscle fiber component. If the ratio is fast twitch fiber the athlete has the potential to be a sprinter in the Olympics. If the ratio is slow twitch fiber the athlete has the potential to run a sub-5 minute mile pace in a marathon.
