Voluntary and involuntary
Two of the three muscle tissues work without being asked. The odd one out is the one you can see in a mirror.
Voluntary — skeletal muscle only
Contracts when you decide it should. You can raise an arm, hold a position, or stop. This is the only muscle tissue under your control.
Involuntary — smooth and cardiac
Contracts without any decision and regardless of what you want. You cannot stop your gut moving food along or stop your heart beating by deciding to.
And the same split appears again in fatigue
Skeletal muscle tires when worked excessively. Smooth muscle does not tire quickly. Cardiac muscle never tires at all, from birth until death. The tissue you control is the one that gives out, and the two you do not control are the two that must not.
The two properties go together, and they have to
A muscle that had to be told what to do would stop the moment you fell asleep. A muscle that never stopped would be useless for picking things up. So the muscles that keep you alive are involuntary and tireless, and the ones that let you act are voluntary and tire — and you would not want either pair swapped.
Involuntary does not mean unimportant
It is easy to treat skeletal muscle as the real muscle because it is the one you notice. But you would survive a long time without moving an arm, and about four minutes without cardiac muscle. Involuntary means outside your control, not outside your interest.
Three tissues, one design problem solved three ways
All three contract. The differences between them — branched or not, one nucleus or many, striated or not, tiring or tireless — are all consequences of one question: how often does this muscle have to work, and who decides when. Answer that and you can predict the rest of the characteristics.