Have you stopped strength training at some point and then quickly regained muscle mass? It’s because muscle memory that makes it easier to regain lost muscle mass in that downtime (faster than it took you to earn it the first time you started training). What is this muscle memory due to? How can we take advantage of it for muscle hypertrophy?
Muscle memory: what it is and why it occurs
Just like when we stop riding a bike for a while, then we remember how it was done, our muscles remember that they have been trained. Muscle memory is known as the ability of our muscle fibers to regain muscle mass lost by a period of inactivity.
When we first attended a gym with the aim of gaining muscle mass that gain in muscle mass will cost us more. If after a couple of years training we have to stop training for a few weeks due to an injury or for any reason, that gain will be faster.
Thirty years ago, a group of researchers was the first to show that muscle strength and size could be regained that would take about 20 weeks to obtain, in just six weeks. Subsequent studies have followed his lead to show that there is some kind of local muscle memory responsible for such rapid muscle recovery.
Myonucleotides and muscle hypertrophy
Each skeletal muscle fiber contains hundreds or thousands of nuclei distributed by said muscle fiber. Each of these cell nuclei has the ability to synthesize proteins in its vicinity, which leads to increased muscle mass in that area.
These cell nuclei are known as myonuclei, or what is the same, muscle nuclei. According to this theory, a greater number of myonuclei should have a linear relationship with the size of the muscle fiber, since They are the basis of muscle hypertrophy.
When we train our muscles with the aim of increasing muscle mass additional nuclei are added to the muscle fiber. The important thing is that it seems that these new muscle nuclei are not lost during detraining.
That permanence of myonuclei would be the cause that allows the muscle fiber to grow more efficiently during retraining. This phenomenon is known as muscle memory.
Therefore, the cause of muscle memory seems clear: the myonuclei. Nevertheless, Most studies to date have been conducted in animals.. Human research also suggests that myonuclei are not lost in large numbers following muscle atrophy caused by short-term physical inactivity.
Muscle memory and anabolic steroids
Anabolic steroids help increase muscle mass due to a better ability to add nuclei to muscle fibers. The muscle memory will ensure that those added myonuclei are not lostso an athlete can test positive in an anti-doping test and be banned for a few years, but that improvement could continue in the future.
How can we take advantage of muscle memory?
The ideal is to structure each training season with a beginning and an end where we progress from the minimum to the maximum. The start of the season would ideally coincide with the back from a vacation or after a break of a few weeks.
From that minimum point of intensity and volume we will increase either the intensity or the volume as the programming progresses. The end will coincide with the period of greatest load which will be followed by a discharge of several weeks where the training will be reduced to maintaining ourselves.
Those weeks of unloading will make our muscles more sensitive to training afterwards, while giving us a physical and psychological break. When we return to training, we will take advantage of muscle memory with muscles that are not adapted to training so that with low stimuli we achieve high profits.
If we have finished the season doing 22 backstroke series, for example, after the rest break, we will start again with about six or eight series that they will give us much more stimulation than if we had done them when our body was fully adapted at a much higher volume.
We will collect more, planting less. Muscle memory and the discharge of several weeks will help us in this process. Therefore, every year spend about four weeks minimizing workoutsthese being necessary to maintain muscle mass, but with a low workload.
In Vitónica | Hypertrophy in the gym: the basics to get your muscles to grow this year
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