Fig. 11. Example of the relationship between afterload and the stiffness of the series elastic component (SEC). The range of loads for this preparation (length 6.1 mm) corresponded to 0.2–0.8P₀, where P₀ is the maximum isometric twitch force. The line was fitted through the data using the method of least squares (r²=0.984). The method used to calculate stiffness is described in Materials and methods and illustrated in Fig. 2.

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