Musculoskeletal simulations that quantify muscle forces during movements, rigorously validated in empirical studies, have great potential to improve life-long mobility for many persons. However, current musculoskeletal simulations generally suffer from physiologically inaccurate muscle models that hinder reliable prediction of time-varying muscle force, which limits their quality and usefulness in the clinic. Although other factors are known to hinder muscle model accuracy, we hypothesize that a fundamental cause is the absence of tissue mass in musculoskeletal models. Inactive muscle mass is most relevant to submaximal activities of daily living (ADL), significantly limiting muscle shortening velocity, work, and power output. Our pilot data show that significant interactions occur between inactive mass, fiber arrangement, and muscle bulging that fundamentally affect muscle contractile properties. This proposal will quantify the effects of muscle size and inactive mass on in situ twitch time, peak shortening velocity, and work for different-sized and -shaped muscles in mice, rats, and goats (1000-fold size range); as well as in comparison to small fiber bundles from these muscles. Our comprehensive contractile property results from animal studies will inform the design of mass-sensitive muscle models, which will be incorporated into computationally efficient musculoskeletal simulations (numbering 19,600 cycles – 104 more than studies previously published) of human movement to test how muscle size, inactive mass, shape, and fiber type affect the activations needed to execute ADL and gait across the lifespan. SA1 addresses how muscle inactive mass and size affect contractile performance via in situ and in vitro studies of parallel-fibered animal muscles; testing [H1a] that more inactive muscle mass, due to submaximal activation (i.e., ADL), yields slower muscle shortening and reduced mass-specific work output, and [H1b] that these effects will be exacerbated for larger muscles and for whole muscles, as compared to fiber bundles. SA2 addresses how fiber arrangement interacts with inactive mass to influence work in different-sized pennate mouse, rat, and goat muscles, with comparisons to parallel-fibered muscles (SA1), testing the hypothesis [H2] that pennate muscles will be less sensitive to inactive muscle mass caused by submaximal activation and show smaller reductions in shortening velocity and work, compared to parallel-fibered muscles. SA3 addresses how muscle size affects activation and function across ADL and gait dynamics via simulations of human movement that build mass-enhanced muscle models into OpenSim simulations with computationally efficient direct collocation to compare differently size-scaled human musculoskeletal models (1 - 1/1000th body mass). These simulations will test the hypotheses: [H3a] that larger muscles generate less work with lower efficiency than smaller muscles, and [H3b] that reduced work with increased mass is more ...