What Is Muscle Memory In Bodybuilding And How Does It Work?

You are excited, work hard, and after six months you become stronger and better than ever, but suddenly, you are injured or become busy because of studying or working, or you just lose motivation and stop exercising for three months.

You lost all the results you worked hard on, and now you want to recover them, and you are already excited, you are working hard, and after two months you have regained your previous level.

how did that happen? The first time it took you six months to reach your current level, and now only two months?

What happened here is something that happens a lot to bodybuilders and fitness players, called muscle memory, and we will explain it in this article according to the scientific foundations.

What is muscle memory?

Muscle memory is a joint process between the brain and muscles, in which the muscles reactivate the old nuclei, and the brain sends the kinetic signals in the previously created neurons, making the recovery of strength and muscle size faster.

The next time when something urgent happens to you that stops you from exercising, don't panic, take a rest, keep your diet and you will not lose any muscle gains, all that will happen is the loss of muscle glycogen, which makes you appear smaller

Muscle memory

Unlike octopuses, we humans do not have brains in our limbs and cannot remember the movements that we have done before, however, things that we previously practiced become easier and easier over time, you perform the dead lift without thinking, chest pressure without help and monitor your coach.

On the other hand, the muscle growth speed of the returning trainee after years of interruption is faster than the new trainee, as if the muscles remember your training history and retrieve it faster.

Muscular memory mechanism

Memory in your muscles

When you press your muscles to the point of inflation, new nuclei within the muscle cells grow stronger. For a long time, the idea previously was that the opposite would happen if you stop using your muscles - those cores should die - but this may not be entirely true.

Recent research by biologists, such as Christian Gunderson of the University of Oslo, have revealed that the nucleus shrinks without disappearing with muscular dystrophy.

What explains the rapid restoration of strength and muscle size after periods of interruption is the fact that muscle cells already have nuclei within them, and instead of building new nuclei to cope with the new training intensity, they only reactivated the old nuclei.

And so it took her much less time to build muscle, unlike the new trainee whose body invests time in building new nuclei inside her muscle cells.

Memory in your nerve cells

I got to dance easily after you were training sessions in one movement. Your hand automatically played after you spent hours playing a short piece of music. A lot of similar situations happened to us.

Although some skills, such as biking or mastering tennis, may require strengthening some muscles, the important processes for learning and remembering new skills occur mainly in the brain and not in the muscles.

As explained by neuroscientist Inseley at Oxford University, in an article for Medium. The parts of the brain responsible for that movement develop stronger connections between the motor neurons and the neurons responsible for long-term memory.

This explains why it is difficult to perform a new movement at first, but after the movement is stored in long-term memory, it becomes easier and faster to repeat and requires less energy.