What is Muscle Memory? How does it Work?
Many of us might not be aware of muscle memory and wonder to know what muscle memory is? When the muscle is initially built, it can always be rebuilt, which is muscle memory in humans. The muscle memory takes control when you resume working out after having a break from working out for a while.
A lot of us took a long, unplanned break from the gym earlier this year. If you’re taking months off for personal reasons, you’re likely to have experienced large and significant losses in strength.
If you start training again and lifting weights again, when will your muscles bounce back?
It won’t feel like you start from scratch since you’ve likely built muscle memory and built a foundation of strength. Getting it back does, however, not mean it will be straightforward.
Even during extended time off, you’re able to regain your strength with muscle memory training and proper nutrition.
What is Muscle Memory?
Many simple daily actions involve a complex sequence involving tension and relaxation of many muscles. We have practiced most of the actions throughout our lifetime, meaning they are thus quicker, smoother, and more accurate.
As a result of repeated practice, actions as complex as riding a bike, knitting, or even playing a musical instrument, you can perform almost subconsciously. The power of repetition in committing a motor task provides it.
Even though muscles themselves cannot remember anything, the nerves attached to them play a role in motor learning. Any movement requires brain activity, and your brain acquires patterns for motor skills as you do repetitive movements. As a result, a less cognitively demanding movement will result in the future.
What Does Muscle Memory Do?
Most commonly, muscle memory occurs in the context of muscle loss – or if you do not train regularly for long periods. People think if you train hard enough, muscle memory will assist you in regaining strength and size rather quickly. However, muscle memory is less about strength and more about learned motor skills.
Muscle memory, usually achieved by training to excel, is often associated with improved performance and mass gains in muscle tissue.
Excessive hypertrophy in the gym causes a growth factor known as myonuclei to be produced in muscle fibers. Those cells play an essential role in helping to increase our muscle fibers’ strength.
Several studies suggest that the number of myonuclei in muscles stays stable even after prolonged inactivity and muscle atrophies. Thus, those cells are still there the next time we hit the gym, ready to synthesize protein faster than they did the first time.
Advantages of Muscle Memory
Here are some advantages of muscle memory that I have noted down for you. Let’s have a look at the advantages!
- If you want to improve your strength and mass, muscle memory is one aspect to consider.
- The healthier people who train with bodyweight exercises and bands have a harder time maintaining their body size than smaller people.
- Young and physically fit people who became immobile lost one-third of their muscular strength, while very immobile people lost one-fourth.
- If you stop eating while exercising, you may experience a caloric deficit leading to weight loss since you will lose muscle mass.
- Don’t skip the protein if you have to stop exercising.
- Increased protein consumption may slow down muscle loss in athletes, even when they aren’t training.
- Next, we get to the issue of whether those muscles will return.
- Muscle mass is regained three times as fast in the immobilized person as the time spent out of action.
- Although you may not be immobile, your potential window is generally much smaller unless you haven’t moved since three months ago.
- Active people stop training for 12 weeks and got back to their One-Rep Max after only eight weeks of gym time.
What Happens When it goes Bad?
Muscle memory allows you to work harder and achieve more significant results since you don’t have to exert much mental energy. Muscle memory is indeed a learning movement – whether the movement is correct or erroneous.
By repeatedly performing a movement improperly, you are “teaching” your nervous system and body that’s the way you should move.
Let us return to an analogy of the woods. There’s an even more accessible and safer way to get to your house. Getting off that “improper” path involves breaking a habit and being willing to step off it. You can also use elliptigo 8c for building your legs’ muscle memory.
If you are learning something new, whether it’s weightlifting, yoga, swimming, or something else—take the time to learn it the right way. Healthworks coaches and trainers can provide you with guidance. It is much safer and less challenging to learn something and correct a mistake the first time than retrain one’s muscle memory and undo a mistake.
Sum Up
All this is to say that there’s no need to panic if you’ve been unable to do any hard training for a while. When you have spent most of your life eating right and staying fit, you’ll know straight away when you need to get back in shape.
Just as you can learn to do anything physically, whether it be a squat or strumming on a guitar, it takes time and practice. Your muscles also play a role, but the brain plays a much more important role in determining what action you take. You may only feel like your muscles are doing something on their own.
Read Also: How to Tone Your Body?