Short-range stiffness (SRS) of a skeletal muscle describes the muscle's capability to resist external perturbations before the nervous system can intervene. Knowledge of the SRS of individual muscles is critical in understanding their contributions to single joint stiffness and whole limb stability. While the dependence of SRS on muscle force and passive connective tissues has been studied in the literature, it remains unclear how structural and activationdependent components each contribute to

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... whole muscle SRS. The primary goal of this dissertation is to quantify these contributions and identify the most important muscle parameters for estimating the SRS of individual muscles.