Muscle is the powerhouse for a panoply of animal motions, yet peak muscle performance is constrained to a narrow set of conditions. As a result, muscles are often thought of as being adapted for peak performance for specific behaviors. This has given rise to the notion that fish axial muscles are specifically adapted for producing explosive locomotor behaviors. However, fish also use their locomotor muscles to generate over 90% of the power for suction feeding. This raises a critical issue: what impact do these two very different behaviors have on muscle performance? For example, a well-studied form-function relationship in fishes has been the mediolateral strain gradient that forms in the musculature during axial locomotion, where muscle on opposite sides of the body undergoes the highest tensile and compressive strains. Under these conditions, only a thin section of muscle could shorten at velocities appropriate for maximizing power. Prior work has identified a complex morphological solution to this constraint, but the emerging dual-function paradigm raises the question: does such a strain gradient exist for suction feeding? We measured length changes in different regions of the epaxial musculature to determine whether these motions occurring in different planes (lateral flexion versus dorsiflexion) produce different strain patterns within the muscle. We found that suction feeding produces a linear strain gradient that, unlike the gradient for locomotion, occurs along the dorsoventral axis. Our discovery of these orthogonal strain gradients presents a paradox: bluegill should not be able to attain maximal muscle power output in both swimming and feeding, yet there is evidence to suggest that they do. Future work solving this paradox may produce new insights into the structure and function of axial muscles in fishes.