What affect does cold have on hand muscles?

Answer 1

Temperature affects every single aspect of the human body. Regarding your hands, cold temperatures typically cause your body to shunt blood away from the non-vital parts of your body (as the body itself sees it) which causes your hands to have decreased circulation to all the tissue, including the muscles in your hands, due to what's called vasoconstriction, or constriction of the blood vessels. To put it simply, the decreased circulation causes the muscles to grow "cold" and become stiff. Hypothermia takes this concept into a larger degree. The lower the bodies temperature, the more noticeable the effects of muscles. The muscles themselves require a reaction of calcium ions and chemical reactions at the molecular level, along with a nervous impulse from the brain to work. Since a normal healthy body operates efficiently at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, naturally a decrease in the bodies internal temperature would decrease this efficiency slowing the nervous impulse from the brain that is required to initiate the chemical reactions in the muscles themselves to initiate. As the body grows colder in a hypothermic environment, the impulses from the brain slow dramatically causing miscoordination, and muscle weakness. Heat causes vasodilation, or, dilation of the blood vessels resulting in increased blood flow. This is one of the mechanisms the body uses to cool itself off. If the temperature outside the body gets hot enough, the body distributes the blood which is maintained at 98.6 by the hypothalamus of the brain, throughout the body in an attempt to cool the body off. This along with sweating plays a major role in temperature regulation within the body.

Answer 2

The affects would be generally the same as all other skeletal muscles: Cold muscles get less oxygen and that makes it more difficult for the body to remove waste products like carbon dioxide and lactic acid from them. Exercising with cold muscles makes it harder for them to burn fatty acids which then get clogged in the arteries. Cold muscles are less responsive to signals from the nervous system so movements are less coordinated. They are also less elastic and don't absorb shock or impact as well as warm muscles which then makes them more prone to injury.

Uncomfortably cold working conditions can lead to lower work efficiency and higher accident rates. Cold impairs the performance of tasks. Manual tasks are also impaired because the sensitivity and dexterity of fingers are reduced in the cold. At low temperatures, the cold affects the deeper muscles resulting in reduced muscular strength and stiffened joints. Mental alertness is reduced due to cold-related discomfort. For all these reasons accidents are more likely to occur in very cold working conditions. Cooling of body parts may result in various nonfreezing cold injuries. Fingers are at greatest risk because this area does not have major muscles to produce heat. In addition, the body will preserve heat by favouring the internal organs, thus reducing the flow of blood to the extremities under cold conditions. Hands tend to get cold more quickly than the torso because:

# they lose heat more rapidly since they have a higher surface area-to-volume ratio, and # they are more likely to be in contact with colder surfaces than other parts of the body. --submitted by www.warmmouse.com

Answer 3

when it gets cold your muscles contract and relax. They do this very quickly to produce heat and in the meantime cause us to shiver.