Muscle tissue is like the cool superhero of our body! They have this neat power: contractility, which means they can shorten in length. Imagine Spiderman's web-shooting action, but instead of shooting webs, muscles pull!

Real-world example: When you bend your arm, the bicep muscle contracts (or shortens) while its antagonist, the tricep, lengthens.

Muscles are social creatures; they like to work in pairs, called antagonistic pairs. When one contracts, its buddy lengthens.

Real-world example: Think of it like a seesaw. When one side goes up, the other goes down!

• These muscles help you dance, jump, or even do the floss! They're attached to bones, hence they're named skeletal muscles.
• If you zoom in on them using a light microscope, you'd see they sport stripes - thus they're also called striated muscles. It's like they're wearing striped pajamas!

• These are like long, unbranched tubes all aligned together. Each tube is called a muscle fibre.

• Fun fact: They come together by fusing many baby muscle cells (embryonic muscle cells).

• Despite being enclosed by a single plasma membrane, they are a bit rebellious with multiple nuclei and being much longer than typical cells.

  Real-world example: If muscle fibres were a train, typical cells would be just one compartment of that train.