Reverse engineering motor unit recruitment: a framework for studying motor unit recruitment during dynamic movement

Motor units control muscle function and coordination. However, most experimental and modelling motor unit recruitment studies have investigated isometric contractions, which limits its applicability to human movement. We introduce a musculoskeletal simulation framework that reverse engineers the recruitment and firing rates of motor units and found that our approach generated patterns consistent with previous isometric contractions studies but can be extended to predict motor unit recruitment over a range of muscles and dynamic movements.