What is muscle memory? Muscle memory, also known as procedural memory, is a type of procedural memory in which information is retained after learning a certain activity or skill. The most common example of this is the ability to remember an ABC. In fact, if we want to commit something to memory, such as the word ‘dog’ or ‘pony’, after we have learned it, we tend to retain it for longer periods of time.
It has been observed that different parts of the brain, namely the amygdala and the basal ganglia, play different roles when learning new tasks. The former region is involved in instinctive behavior, such as hunting, while the latter region contributes to our sense of self-consciousness or imagination. Although each region has its own role in memory encoding, they are connected via a large network of brain areas. This enables the different brain regions to work in parallel when needed. Some examples of such parallel brain regions are the superior colliculus, the entorhinal cortex and the prefrontal cortex.
Interestingly, researchers have found that some genes may be responsible for the phenomenon of less muscle growth after training. In fact, many experts think that the decline in muscle growth is caused by genetic mutations at the protein level. Interestingly, some of these mutations alter the functioning of the messenger ribonucleic acid ( mRNA) in muscle cells. If the mRNA is nonfunctional, the muscle cells do not grow.
What is muscle memory? As an athlete, you may notice that your strength and performance does not improve much after a few days of rigorous training. What is happening is that some muscles are being used more than others during your workout routines, and this is causing them to be exhausted faster. When this happens, your muscles are not able to sustain the same amount of strength for a long period of time, which leads to less overall gains in strength and size.
The main problem lies with your gym routine. Many people make the mistake of over-training their muscles before they even start training. They usually start working out with high hopes of gaining huge muscles and ridding themselves of fats. But once they start seeing the results coming in, they lose interest in going to the gym anymore. It is important to start training with lower weights and high reps. Your muscles need to build up endurance before they can be built up to handle heavier weights and higher rep workouts. And remember: less weight, more muscles.
What is muscle memory? Muscle memory refers to the connection between the brain and your muscles. You have already seen that your muscles change in response to different movements, but did you also know that they also remember what was done to them before? Your brain has a short memory, as it does not require much information to make a decision. That means that each time they are asked to perform a certain movement, they have to think back about what was done just before.
This explains why we have so many injuries to muscles at once. If you lift a heavy weight that really causes you to strain your muscles, your myonuclei are actually damaged. With continued training, these myonuclei start producing more protein. As the muscle recovers, it stops growing new myonuclei and instead starts producing damaged myonuclei, which leads to permanent muscle weakness. A weak muscle will not be able to support the same weight for very long, and this means that you are more likely to get injured from over training than someone who is just training their muscles for strength.
Muscle memory also explains why the body heals itself so slowly after intense muscle damage. Your body starts rebuilding the damaged parts of your muscles much slower after an injury, because it takes a lot longer to create new satellite cells to replace the ones that were destroyed. After you have been in an injury, you need to do more intense workouts for several days or weeks to completely get rid of the pain and damage caused by the prior injury. Your body rebuilds the muscle quickly after you rest, but this takes a while, so you can expect your muscles to slow down in the mean time, because your satellite cells are repairing themselves.
