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Assessment of size ordered recruitment

P. Bawa,K. Jones,R. Stein

Published 2014 in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

ABSTRACT

The spinal motoneurons innervating a limb muscle are heterogeneous: they vary in diameter of cell bodies, axons and surface area of the dendritic trees, electrophysiological differences (e.g., input resistance, afterhyperpolarization, spike threshold) and contractile properties of the associated muscle units. Considering the range of motoneuron and corresponding muscle unit properties, the obvious question arose about how and which motoneurons were selected by the central nervous system for various types of contractions and movements. Elwood Henneman and his coworkers proposed an unequivocal simple pattern in a series of papers starting in 1957 from experiments conducted on reduced cat preparations (Henneman, 1957; Henneman et al., 1974). The Size Principle of motoneuron recruitment stated that for any net excitatory input to the motoneuron pool, motoneurons were recruited in an orderly fashion, always from small to large. Stein and coworkers demonstrated that the size principle generalized to voluntary isometric contractions in humans, which they called Orderly Recruitment (Milner-Brown et al., 1973). The literature on this topic is well summarized in a recent review by Heckman and Enoka (2012).

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