Single Use Plastic

What? Is this blog getting environmental? Its becoming increasingly obvious that humans over consume, a direct result of this is garbage and to a larger extent plastics....but that topic is well beyond the scope of this blog. I am writing about something completely different today, its known as the Load- Deformation curve, and it looks like this...

The load deformation curve . This image was retrieved from the following rat study 894

Looks like a lot of technical jargon....So...what we have here is a plot of Load vs Time, and three major areas of the graph seen as Preloading, Elastic region and a Plastic region, you will also note that around the plastic region are terrifying words such as "Ultimate Stress" and "Fracture".

Now, this research group was identifying bone loss characteristics in heavily drugged rats. If you recall from the last posts there are a few things that change our bones strength such as exercise....another one of those things can be drugs. The group applied a force to the bones of the rats, increased the force over time and watched what happened until failure, sounds brutal.... because it is. 

What does this have to do with plastic? The term "plastic" is used here to define a region where tissue changes to a point where there are permanent changes to the tissue when you remove the forces applied. While, more happily, the "elastic" region is one where the changes will not be permanent when you remove the forces applied. So lets think about that for a second and its application to injuries, health, wellness, and sports performance. Tissue can change and adapt, you can load it to a point where it changes even when the load is removed, but then you can also load and stress it too much to the point of "Ultimate Stress" and "fracture"

There are two major concepts to think about, how much load you give your body, and what makes it resistant load.......something to think about....I'll continue in the upcoming days.