“…In vertebrate muscle, 28,33) pioneered the use of complex stiffness and its dynamic decomposition to characterize the muscle fiber contractile state, to identify specific steps in the cross-bridge (XB) cycle, and to characterize the sensitivity of these steps to ATP and its metabolic products. They extended these methods to cardiac muscle (17,27,34), and their pioneering work has now been applied and extended by several other groups (2,3,6,13,19,21,26,29,32).One outcome of the work of Kawai et al (14,15) has been the routine practice of decomposing the measured dynamic stiffness into a sequence of first-order dynamic processes, each with increasing characteristic frequency (3,17,19,21,27,32,34). Thus dynamic stiffness is represented as the sum of component stiffnesses due to processes A, B, C, and so on, where process A, with characteristic frequency a, is slower than process B, with characteristic frequency b, which is slower than process C, with characteristic frequency c, and so on.…”