Muscle Synergies Heavily Influence the Neural Control of Arm Endpoint Stiffness and Energy Consumption
Fig 12
Regardless of their details, synergies bring about functional limitations, Part II.
Functional consequences of three additional potential synergies, for total of five beyond those reported by Osu and Gomi (1999), as mentioned in Fig 11. Because synergies invariably imply a loss of control degrees of freedom (i.e., fewer independently controllable muscles as seen in Fig 5), it is to be expected that they all reduce the controllability of the size, shape and orientation of the stiffness ellipses as shown here and in Fig 11. Therefore, our results are generalizable to the concept of synergies in general, and are not limited to the particulars of any one specific synergy.