An athlete experiences severe muscle fatigue during a high-intensity sprint. Which failure mode becomes likely as intracellular ATP levels rapidly deplete, impacting cross-bridge cycling?

💡 Explanation

Muscle fatigue during intense exercise leads to rapid ATP depletion; because ATP is essential for breaking actin-myosin cross-bridges, a lack of ATP impairs myosin detachment from actin, resulting in sustained muscle contraction and failure. Therefore, impaired detachment is the correct outcome, rather than enhanced reuptake or increased buffering, which require adequate ATP.

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