You get sore muscles when you train, because you muscle strings rip and when they heal, your muscles grow. As far as I know. So why and how do they shrink?
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These answers are mostly inaccurate. There is a difference between hypertrophy and hyperplasia. Most people who experience growing of their muscles are seeing the effects of hypertrophy, which is an increase in the SIZE of the muscle cells, NOT in the AMOUNT of muscle cells. Basically, the more you use a muscle, the more water/nutrients the muscle decides to absorb so that it has more resources at its disposal. When you stop using the muscle, it realizes it doesn’t need as much water/nutrients anymore (huge oversimplification) and it let’s it go, thus shrinking.
People are talking about hyperplasia, which is an actual increase in the NUMBER of muscle cells, and usually only comes with dedicated weight training after a long time. Even after you stop lifting though, the number of cells remains the same, they just shrink because of above mentioned “deflation”. This means that once you’ve built up a higher number of muscle cells through hyperplasia, it will be easier to regain size in your muscles if you’ve lost it. Because more cells growing=faster growth.
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