I haven’t been to the gym in 8 years, yet suddenly, my body is regaining muscle fast after just a few weeks of going. (33 M)
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That’s not muscle memory.
Muscle memory is actually nothing to do with muscles. It’s about the brain. It’s about where you’ve repeated an action so many times that your brain permanently wires it into the brain so that it can be easily done without conscious thought.
It’s like riding a bike.
When your muscles grow, the muscle cells can actually gain extra nuclei to bulk up. Even if you then lose muscle mass, you’ll still have those extra nuclei in there ready to build things up quicker than before.
You made satellite cells when you were first building muscle. Even after losing your muscle mass, these satellite cells remain and provide an easy path to regain your previously lost muscle cells. You can see it as the structure already being there (albeit deflated), it just has to be filled with muscle cells. It is much harder to do this when you are working from the ground up. Your body has learned from your previous muscle mass/size and remembers it. This way it can easily build back up to the strength you needed during that time. This is the adaptability of the body, being able to conserve energy and lose mass when needed and also remembering your previous mass to quickly get back to the same strength to complete the same tasks which asked for that kind of strength. Evolutionary this is very advantageous. You might ask, why don’t we already have those cells and just be huge quickly? Your body wants to be as efficient as possible while also making sure you survive, therefore it will only ‘remember’ the maximum you have reached before and not beyond that (considering you never needed to be bigger than your maximum before, so why would your body ‘waste’ energy to prepare for it, you might never need it)
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