You probably heared of the saying of those who have good training experience and who are forced to take a break. don’t go back to nothing, but return to the old level relatively quickly. A matter of good muscle memory?
Our Muscles have special cells in that they are incredibly plastic. That means they can grow or shrink at will depending on our lifestyle. Resistance training is an example that can cause hypertrophy (muscle growth), resulting that muscle fibers can be 100,000 times larger than an average cell in the body. On the other hand, bad nutritional habits or a sedentary lifestyle can cause muscles to shrink. We call this (atrophy). But will you completely lose your muscle and will you have to rebuild it as long, how you build it in the first place?
The term muscle memory could be really misleading for a lot of people, because you don’t have actual memory inside the muscle.. Two things are happening here, first in your central nervous system, whenever we learn a new skill like riding a bike, the information gets stored in our brain in a place that is called the cerrebelium. The more you practice a skill you will get better at it. Even when you take a long break, your neuromuscular system is already programmed to execute the movement.
The second thing is happening within your muscle cells. The first time you start training you will get stronger because the muscle adapts to the stimulus of weight training. It does this by increasing the amount of myonuclei in your muscle cells. It was believed that if you stop training, you will cause atrophy (muscle loss), creating cell death that is also called atoptosis, that removes the amount of myonuclei. But research shows that the amount of myonuclei still excist within the muscle cells. So the muscle can skip the process of creating new myonuclei and build up your muscle faster than ever before.
This is why the term muscle memory is used. I would call it myonuclei memory 😊
The researchers developed a model, so lets have a look at it. So when you first lift weights there are little repair celle floating around the muscle cell like satelites. The satelite cells fuse with our muscle cells and give nuclei. So then there is more nuclei in our muscle cells that means that there is more space, so that means that the cell can grow. So when you stop lifting weights or training in general. All that muscle size will get less big, so then you are losing muscle. But the nuclei still sticks around and that means when you start lifting again you will get your muscle size back. Because you can skip the process of creating new nuclei. Only downside is that they did this study on mice. But in 2017 they conducted a study on humans with the goal to see hoe muscle memory works within humans.
This study had people train for 7 weeks and after the 7 weeks they would take 7 weeks off and after that they would train for 7 weeks again. They found that the changes that happened at the dna of the subjects stayed the same. And it doesnt go away during 7 weeks of non lifting. your dna is responsible for pumping out new muscle protein, so the muscle “memory” is written in the dna of your muscle cells. While this study does not show how long this lasts, it definetly shows us but its possible that it can last for years to to get a big response when you retrain after a long lay off.
So I recommend not to stress if you have not trained for weeks because the myonuclei still sticks around anyway. The next thing if you want to build the muscle back up I did not found it to be neccesary to be in a crazy surplus because building new myonuclei is really hard and If youndont have to build that to regain your old mass back, I recommend staying at your maintenance calories to begin with to avoid unneccesary fat gain. The 3rd thing to give you as an advice is to stay patient and give your body enough time to adapt.
Scientific References:
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