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When I woke up at 5:30 this morning to hit the gym the room was empty when I arrived. Just like it was yesterday when I went. But I’d be willing to bet the farm that in about 5 weeks when the new year rolls around I’ll be seeing new faces in there every morning for a few weeks as people attempt to hit the ‘reset’ button on their physical fitness and for all of those people out there we have some good news: muscle memory is on your side.
I tend to think of ‘muscle memory’ as an abstract concept referring to remembering how to do something I haven’t done in forever, like parallel parking or speaking Spanish in another country. But a new scientific study into actual muscle memory suggests that our muscles remember how to re-build muscle quickly after extended periods of inactivity and those who might’ve been skipping the gym lately can get their #gainz back faster than it took them to initially build muscle.
I came to this study via an article on NPR from Will Stone titled ‘After a break from strength training, muscle memory may help you bounce back’ and in that article he links to a new study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports by competitive bodybuilder Eeli Halonen who is a doctoral student in Exercise Physiology at University of Jyväskylä in Finland.
For Eeli Halonen, the genesis of this study began “after a months-long hiatus from training” which led to significant muscle mass loss. But when he returned to the gym he was amazed by the rapidity which he was able to regain his muscle. He told NPR “It was pretty fascinating to see this phenomenon in myself.”
After that, he set up a study with 40+ other ‘untrained individuals.’ During a 20-week workout regimen consisting of standard weight lifting exercises (bench, curls, etc), half of the participants lifted weights continuously for the 20 weeks and the other half lifted for 10 weeks, took a 10-week break, then lifted for 10 straight weeks after the hiatus.
Obviously, the ones who had taken the 10-week break from weight lifting experience significant muscle loss. Muscles are the ultimate ‘use it or lose it’ example. What they found, however, was fascinating to all of those involved in the study.
Muscle Memory: Regaining Gains Through Weight Lifting, How Long Does It Take?
After the group who took a 10 week break began weight lifting again, they found it only took them 5 weeks to get back their muscle mass to where they were before.
More astoundingly (IMHO), at the end of the study they found that there was no difference between the two groups in terms of muscle development progress. Professor of exercise science at the University of Arkansas, Kevin Murach, told NPR “it’s a positive finding for those that need to take time off for whatever reason. You can rest assured that your muscles will readapt quite readily.”
I don’t know you (yes, you) or your current state of physical fitness but I can say that these finds are encouraging for me. For about two months I’ve been struggling with bicep tendinitis in my right bicep and thus have been having to avoid certain exercises on Arm Day and Chest Day. I’ve also had to scale back anything with my left arm so I don’t end up looking like the freakishly-large-one-arm-guy from Lady in the Water.
Of course, more research will now commence to learn more about this phenomenon because at this point all they were able to determine is that muscle memory aids in quickly rebuilding muscle after inactivity/loss of muscle mass. They don’t actually know why muscle memory speeds up the process of regaining muscle.
The article on NPR that led me to reading the study put for this explanation which seems plausible enough:
Unlike most cells in our body, skeletal muscle cells, called myocytes, can have hundreds of nuclei. As your muscles expand, you add on more to support the growth. Once you stop lifting, the muscle fibers will get smaller, but some studies show they retain those nuclei, which may set you up for faster gains when you finally hit the gym again.
“The thought is you have more of these control centers and they can basically cause more rapid adaptation the second time around,” says Murach. “There’s evidence for that and against it, so it’s still quite contentious.”
They also propose another more radical answer… That lifting weights actually rewires DNA to flip the switch on/off on various genes. Both of those theoretical explanations will require significant amounts of research to determine what exactly is going on with this phenomenon.
But at the end of the day, these findings offer hope. For anyone who has been mired in a state of inactivity, know that getting back in the gym can quickly lead to regaining muscle and feeling great in much shorter time than it initially took to build muscle in the past. And please do go read that article on NPR as I obviously found it fascinating enough to come share some of it with you all today and think it’s something every guy should read.