When you imagine the strongest muscle in your body, what is it that you think of?
In the past it has been suggested that the tongue is the strongest muscle in the body, but this is not correct.
What is the strongest muscle? (Mike Harrington / Getty)
For a start, the tongue is not actually just one muscle but a set of eight different muscles.
Also, while it’s undoubtedly a very dextrous muscle what with being used in speech, the tongue is not the strongest regardless of how you define strength.
So what is the strongest muscle then?
Well, that last part about how we define strength is actually pretty important here, as that would change the answer.
When it comes to muscles there are a lot of them in the flesh-puppets that our consciousnesses inhabit.
In fact, there are in excess of 600 of them altogether, falling into three different categories.
These are the skeletal muscles, which are connected to bone and facilitate movement, the smooth muscles which surround the hollow organs such as the stomach, uterus, bladder, and intestines, and the cardiac muscles.
Smooth muscles are important, but facilitate things like pushing food through the digestive tract or squeezing on the bladder to urinate, so aren’t really there for strength.
Which brings us to the skeletal muscles, the bony boys, which are much better candidates for strongest muscles.
So what are our criteria for the strongest?
Well, one could be exerting the strongest force by weight, which would go to the masseter muscle, which is the one connected to your jaw.
This can exert a lot of force on the jaw to help us chew our food, regularly applying 200lbs to molars during chewing, and the record human bite force being some 975lbs!
Humans have a lot of muscles to help us pilot our flesh-suits (mikroman6 / Getty)
We could also say that ‘strongest’ means ‘best endurance’, which means there’s only really one candidate – the heart.
You’ll be surprised to know this isn’t a skeletal muscle, but a cardiac muscle – shocking I know – and given that if it stops then you die, it’s hard to name a more hardworking muscle.
Strong could also be the largest muscle, the gluteus maximus, which in addition to providing padding when we fall over while ice skating helps us to retain balance and posture.
What about the muscle which has the greatest force overall?
This would be your soleus, just below the calf muscle, which is always pulling against gravity and without which you couldn’t walk or run.
People were left stunned, with one commenting on social media: “How am I just seeing this?” while another wrote: “Who else thought it was the butt.”
Meanwhile, a third said: “I have literally never thought that about the tongue.”
An honourable mention also goes to the muscles around our eyes, which have to do a huge number of tiny and precise movements to direct our gaze.
Also to the diaphragm, because breathing is fun.