Muscle redundancy is greatly reduced by the spatiotemporal nature of neuromuscular control

Animals must control numerous muscles to produce forces and movements with their limbs. Current theories of motor optimization and synergistic control are predicated on the assumption that there are multiple highly diverse feasible activations for any motor task ("muscle redundancy"). Here, we demonstrate that the dimensionality of the neuromuscular control problem is greatly reduced when adding the temporal constraints inherent to any sequence of motor commands: the physiological time constants for muscle activation-contraction dynamics. We used a seven-muscle model of a human finger to fully characterize the seven-dimensional polytope of all possible motor commands that can produce fingertip force vector in any direction in 3D, in alignment with the core models of Feasibility Theory. For a given sequence of seven force vectors lasting 300 ms, a novel single-step extended linear program finds the 49-dimensional polytope of all possible motor commands that can produce the sequence of forces. We find that muscle redundancy is severely reduced when the temporal limits on muscle activation-contraction dynamics are added. For example, allowing a generous $$12% change in muscle activation within 50 ms allows visiting only $$7% of the feasible activation space in the next time step. By considering that every motor command conditions future commands, we find that the motor-control landscape is much more highly structured and spatially constrained than previously recognized. We discuss how this challenges traditional computational and conceptual theories of motor control and neurorehabilitation for which muscle redundancy is a foundational assumption.