Figure 2.

The concept of the muscle synergy hypothesis. Because the human body has a greater number of degrees of freedom to successfully perform the motor task, it is believed that the central nervus system (CNS) is always faced with the problem of choosing a certain combination from an infinite number of possibilities. It implies that the CNS needs to perform a large amount of computation. To address this problem, CNS is believed to adopt a control strategy that reduces the number of degrees of freedom requiring control, i.e., the muscle synergy hypothesis. The muscle synergy hypothesis is based on the assumption that the CNS controls synergies composed of multiple muscles, rather than individual muscles separately. With this control strategy, the CNS may be less computationally demanding than when controlling individual muscles.