# Getting the maximal strength of your model!

When working with subject specific scaling of models, it can be a valuable tool to know what the strength of your model is for a given posture. This post will show you a way of calculating the maximal strength of a simple 2D arm model in various postures. The concepts presented can of course be extended to models involving the full body model or parts of it.

For us to do this we first need to setup an example model. The model is a 2D arm model comprised of an upper and lower arm segment, attached with 8 simple muscles (fig. 1). The model is constraint to only allow movement in the global x and y direction. This allows us to impose movements which resembles flexion and extension of the shoulder and elbow joint. Since we want to show a general way of calculating the strength, we setup four load scenarios to mimic a flexion, extension, push, and pull movement. Since we want to investigate maximum strength, we need to be sure that the muscles are recruited appropriately. This is done by switching to the MinMax_Strict muscle recruiter.

The first step in finding the default max strength for a posture is the know the relationship between load and max muscle activity ($mmact$). We do this by implementing a parameter study to investigate the $mmact$ across a spectrum of loads. This is done using the AnyParamStudy class as seen below:

This study runs our model through the loads defined in the $load$ variable. So, in this example it does 100 steps where it starts at -200 N and stops at 300 N. This enables us to plot the $mmact$ as a function of the load. By running the parameter study for all four load scenarios we end up with a graph as seen in fig.2.

We can see that for very low loads there might be other factors affecting the relationship. If we dwell by this fact and think why this could be, we could infer that the influence of gravity and segment mass could interfere with the relationship between $load$ and $mmact$. This means that when applying low external loads, the important factor in $mmact$ is the mass of the moved segments, and the gravity imposed on these segments. The graph also tells us that for high loads there is a linear relationship between load and $mmact$, and the linear part is crossing through $mmact = 1$ for all scenarios. We can use this information to calculate the maximal strength of the model. If we look at the equation for a linear function it looks like this:

Where in this case y is the mmact, $x$ is the load, $a$ is the slope of the function, and $b$ is the intercept with the y-axis. The slope of the linear part can be calculated using only two points and applying the equation:

Now that we know the coordinates of two points and the slope, we can start figuring out what the load is at $mmact = 1$. For this we again look at equation $\ref{eq:2}$, only this time we know the slope, the point $\left( x_{2},y_{2} \right$, and the $y_{1}$ coordinate, which should be equal to 1. We are therefore interested in finding $x_{1}$. We rearrange equation $\ref{eq:2}$, into:

This allows us to evaluate what is the maximal load $x_{1}$ that the model can support in a given posture. To check our results, we can calculate the maximal strength using equation $\ref{eq:2}$ and try and implement that load in our model. As anticipated the $mmact$ reached 0.996, and the same holds across all four load scenarios.

### Find the code on GitHub

The AnyScript example which shows the concepts of finding the maximum muscle strength is available on GitHub.

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