Roughly how many skeletal muscles are there in the human body?
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Answer
About 600 muscles
The smallest of them, the stapedius, sits in the middle ear, where it steadies the tiniest bone in the body and protects you from loud sounds.
How to estimate it
There is no real derivation here, and the total depends on how anatomists split or group muscles. A rough sanity check: the skeleton has 206 bones, and moving a bone in several directions takes opposing pairs of muscles, about three per bone on average. 206 × 3 is roughly 600. Most anatomy references settle on about 600 muscles.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica; US Library of Congress
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