The strength training workout that you did early this week, today, and the rest of 2024 just may serve you well a decade from now. Swedish researchers published a new study last month in the Journal of Physiology that provides our most comprehensive understanding of the concept of “muscle memory.” Muscle memory is the idea that doing some strength training for a period of time, and then discontinuing that strength training, and then returning to strength training much later in life leads to more pronounced improvements when compared to starting a strength training regimen from scratch.
Here is how it works…
You strength train diligently for 12 weeks. During this time period, you increase your muscle strength, your muscle size, and you also increase your number of myonuclei (the nucleus of a muscle fiber), thus laying a foundation for more muscle tissue and strength.
Then, you stop strength training for 12 weeks (or perhaps 12 years – neither is recommended 😊). After the cessation of strength training, we lose all our gains in lean muscle tissue and strength (we are right back to where we started) however, we retain all of the new myonuclei that we created.
Here is what we don’t know (but we hypothesize)…
When you return to strength training, you will increase your muscle strength and size much faster because you have more myonuclei working in your favor (hence, “muscle memory”).
At the time of this writing, the literature is pretty clear that we retain the myonuclei; the research is less clear that it equates to more rapid muscle strength and hypertrophy improvements (although the plausible mechanism exists).
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