Lost Your Fitness? Muscle Memory Gets It Back Fast.

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Lost Your Fitness? Muscle Memory Gets It Back Fast.

March 15, 2022 Leave a commentExcercise, UncategorizedBy The Council for Disability Awareness

After two years of inactivity due to Covid-19, many people feel like they’ll never get their fitness back. Or that they’ll regain a fraction of it. You look at your body and think, there’s no muscle there. Where did it go?

The good news is that no matter how long it’s been since you’ve worked out regularly or visited the gym, your muscles are still there even if you’re overweight or underweight. Still better: your muscles are primed to respond fast when you exercise again.

What we call “Muscle Memory” can noticeably restore fitness back in weeks, not months. It helps to understand that there are two powerful dynamics at work. The “memories” of how to lift weights or play the piano are of course not in our muscles. Those memories exist within motor neurons in our brains. Years of practice or exercise can direct our muscles work on autopilot for complex tasks.

The bigger story behind Muscle Memory is at the cellular level in our muscles. It’s all about: myonuclei. They are the nuclei found in every muscle fiber in our bodies. Exercise strains your muscles. As your body repairs the muscles after working out, new cells and myonuclii are added. Your muscles get bigger, you get stronger.

Once you stop working out, you start to lose the sweaty, hard-earned, muscle mass. But research shows that the new myonuclie remains in your muscle fiber for up to 15-years, possibly permanently.

Thanks to the dynamic, brain-myonuclie duo we call ‘muscle memory,’ you can regain what you lost much faster. You’ll pack muscles on quicker after inactivity than the first time you learned to exercise or went to a gym.

An encouraging side note is that’s it’s never too late to add new muscle. The findings show that we should be able to build new muscle memories, regardless of our age. And as an encouraging side note to those who are taking up weight training for the first time, the findings also suggest that we should be able to build new muscle memories, regardless of our age.

As you start to exercise again, the brain remembers the sequence of moves you use to make in the gym or outside. That helps make restarting less clumsy. And as you work your muscles again, the extra myonuclei is programmed to respond fast. So as you pull on your workout clothes, you can thank your muscle memory for not making you start all over again!