Anyone who has spent some time in the gym and moved past the noob stage know what Muscle Memory is. But is it just a myth or is there actual science behind this phenomena experienced by many.

Muscle building

To understand how Muscle Memory works and if it is real we first need to understand how muscles are built.
To build new muscle you need to constantly put them under stress. You need to give them a reason to grow otherwise it will stay the same.

Now for muscles to build and to the processes and stuff they first need to go into hypertrophy. Muscle fibers known contract the muscles and this leads to them performing a certain action.

These fibers can be placed into to subcategories :

1. Fast Twitch muscles
2.Slow Twitch Muscles

Fast twitch muscles use more oxygen to create a powerful blast of energy in a high frequency. The frequency causing this type of fibers to not last very long. Fast muscle fibers are the only fibers used in muscle building.

As you can see in the picture above the sprinter has more muscle definition and mass and that's because his fibers mostly consists of Fast Twitching ones. The runner on the other hand has slow twitching muscles but he can run long distances without getting tired. The sprinter could try running long distances but he would fail.

Lifting weights is a great example of putting your muscles under stress. When lifting weights, the muscle fibres tear and the muscle breaks down and new nuclei form.The New nuclei enable the muscle to grow by synthsasing protein and rebuilding the broken down fibers causing the muscle to gain size.

Now this is where fast twitch muscles come in . When performing an action the nervous system recruits more fibers the harder the task becomes.

Lifting something heavy once is do-able, but try doing it ten times ...Now that is where it gets challenging. When you start lifting with each rep more fibers get recruited to help aid in the action being performed but you will notice it gets harder with each rep and that is because the fast twitch muscles are getting tired and when you reach rep ranges from 15 and up that is were slow twitch muscles come into play and that is why you don't have the same strength as you did when you started.

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Now when one stops training due to an injury or laziness , the muscles undergo a process called atrophy and essentially it means that your muscles shrink.

Muscle memory

Muscle memory is used by bodybuilders as a term to describe the rapid growth of muscle after resuming training from a extended period of rest.
But how can this be true ? Remember their muscles got smaller resulting in strength lost so we can rule out that it’s because more resistance was added.

The science behind this

Research has shown that the nuclei that formed from the resistant training remains in the muscle even if the muscle shrinks.
Upon returning to training the muscle building process is made shorter.

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What do I mean ?

Muscles grow rapidly upon return because the process of creating new nuclei is skipped so the body can immediately start synthesizing the proteins and rebuilding the muscle.

Whereas when you first start training your body first needs to form new nucleuses before it can start rebuilding.

But it is important to remember that the muscles can only rapidly grow to its previously maximum size, once the muscles reach this size , the rebuilding process returns to normal since new nuclei need to be formed.

I wrote this article because I recently returned to the gym after fracturing my back and I noticed how fast the gains started to roll in.

Source: http://www.menshealth.co.uk/building-muscle/what-is-muscle-memory

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