Ep. #939: How to Use Muscle Memory for Faster Muscle Growth

Hello and welcome to Muscle for Life. I’m Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today to learn about muscle memory, which is something I wanted to record a podcast on because many people, particularly people who are relatively new to strength training, are very afraid of losing muscle, especially when they can’t train.

Maybe it’s due to an injury or a family commitment or a frantic work schedule or a COVID lockdown or whatever. And so I have previously spoken about the effects of detraining and that it takes a lot longer to lose muscle when you stop training than many people think. It takes on average, probably three weeks or so of no training.

resistance training to start losing actual muscle tissue. You can lose muscle a lot faster than that. If you simply don’t move around at all, like bed rest, but if you are just going about your normal daily activities, No training, three weeks or so is what it takes to start losing actual lean tissue, as opposed to just losing size due to less intramuscular water and carbohydrate.

But I’m repeating myself because I actually just recently recorded an episode on that specifically. And so that’s one side of the detraining. And in this episode, I wanted to talk about the other side, which is muscle memory, which is real. And you can think of it as a long term, possibly permanent reward that you get to enjoy for Training your muscles.

And in this podcast, I am going to describe what this phenomenon is and how it works physiologically, how you can take advantage of it, and I’m going to address a training technique that I’ve seen more and more people advocate for over the last year or so, whereby you intentionally detrain yourself on a schedule, almost like you would deload, but you go a bit further than that.

You detrain with the idea of re sensitizing your muscles to allow them to grow faster than they were previously. Before we begin, Do you want to transform your body, but you just can’t seem to break out of the rut? Have you read books and articles, watched videos, listened to podcasts, but still just aren’t sure exactly how to put all the pieces together for you?

Or maybe you know what to do, but you’re still struggling to stay motivated and on track and do the things that you know. do. If you are nodding your head, I understand getting into great shape is pretty straightforward when you know what to do, but it’s not easy. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes grit.

And that’s why I created my VIP one on one coaching service. We take people by the hand and we give them everything. everything they need to build their best body ever. We give them a custom diet plan, training plan, supplementation plan. If they want supplements, you don’t have to take supplements. We coach them on how to do every exercise correctly.

We give them emotional encouragement and support, accountability, and the rest of it. And we are pretty good at it too. We have worked with thousands of men and women of all ages and abilities and lifestyles and helped them build a body they can be proud of. And guess what? We can probably do the same for you.

Our service is not for everyone, but if you want to find out if it is right for you, if there is a fit, head on over to muscleforlife. show slash VIP. That is muscleforlife. show slash VIP and book your free consultation call now. Okay, so let’s start with a simple question. What is muscle memory? It is a phenomenon of muscle fibers regaining size and strength faster than it took to initially gain them.

So basically refers to the fact that it Is much easier to regain lost muscle and strength than it is to build muscle and strength from scratch. And so what that means then if you follow a good strength training program for let’s say a year and you build a significant amount of muscle and gain a significant amount of strength and then you take a break from it even for months.

And let’s say you lose a lot of your gains, maybe even all of your gains. And then you start up again. What you’ll experience is it takes you a lot less time to regain that lost muscle and strength than the first time around. And this principle of hard to gain easier to regain holds true for many other skills and physical processes.

For example, regaining your aerobic capacity after a layoff is much easier than Initially, building it up, relearning to ride a bike or ski or skate is much easier than learning those skills the first time. Even if you are learning them or relearning them decades later, relearning to play an instrument like to play a song on a piano, for example, is significantly easier than the first time you went about it.

So as I mentioned in the podcast, muscle memory is a reward. for the hard work that you put into building muscle and strength. You do it once and then it will be easier to do again for years and possibly even decades down the road. Now, how does this work? The Concept of muscle memory. It was first scientifically documented in the early nineties, but it wasn’t until two pioneering studies conducted by scientists at the University of Oslo in 2012 and 2013 that a firm theory of how muscle memory works was formed.

And the theory goes like this. Most cells in the human body, they contain a nucleus and you can think of the nucleus as a little brain. It controls and regulates the cells activities. Now, This little brain, it can only handle so much information and it’s limited computing capacity, so to speak, restricts its ability to grow larger and thus engage in more activities.

Now, muscle cells are unique in that they can contain multiple organs. Nuclei. And those are known as myonuclei, and they carry the DNA that orchestrates the construction of new muscle proteins. Now, as muscle cells contain multiple brains, they can grow significantly larger than most other cells in the body.

They can only grow so large, though, because each myonuclei can only manage so much cell. And that amount is referred to as its myonuclear domain for the muscle cell to keep getting bigger. bigger, it needs more nuclei, more myonuclei. Now, the catch here is that muscle cells can’t just produce myonuclei.

They have to take them from another kind of cell called a stem cell and stem cells are special cells in the body that can be developed into many different types of cells. And of course there are many different kinds of stem cells, but the kind that is most involved in muscle growth is referred to as a myonuclei.

satellite cell. Now, these satellite cells, they lie dormant near muscle cells, and they are recruited as needed to help heal and repair damaged muscle fibers. Now, once called upon, satellite cells attach themselves to damaged muscle cells, and then they donate their energy. their nuclei, which then aids in repair and increases the cells potential for size and strength.

And as you can imagine, this is one of the primary physiological processes that is produced by strength training that causes your muscles to get bigger and stronger. So continuing with this scientific model of muscle memory, once a satellite cell has donated a nucleus to a muscle cell, it appears. To stay there forever.

So what this means is you can regain muscle. You’ve lost much quicker than you can gain muscle. You’ve never had because your muscle cells don’t need to recruit those new satellite cells to then grow back to their former. Glory. Instead, your muscles can simply fire up the muscle building machinery that has been lying dormant.

It is simply more mechanically efficient to be able to skip that step of having to get nearby satellite cells to donate nuclei to then Be able to get bigger and stronger now, that theory has been challenged by other research that has shown that there are just about as many studies that show that my own nuclei disappear when training ceases as those that show that it does not, that those nuclei remain.

in the muscle cells. But if you look into the details a little further, you’ll find that most of the studies that failed to support the myonuclear domain theory that I just shared with you were of lower quality than the ones that did support it. In other words, the more methodologically sound research tended to show that myonuclei do indeed stick around in muscle cells after people or animals stop training their muscles and.

It has a lot of anecdotal support as well. I’ve experienced it myself. If you’ve been strength training for any period of time, you’ve probably experienced it as well. You’ve probably had to take extended breaks at least now and then due to whatever and then found that you quickly regained the size and strength that you lost when you were out of the gym.

And of course the additional myonuclei in muscle cells would not be the only reason for that, but I do think it’s fair to say that the weight of the highest quality evidence is currently that is a big reason why we experience that. And so what that means practically then is if you can’t get into the gym once or twice per week, which is enough to maintain basically all of your muscle and strength, by the way, one or two full body workouts or maybe an upper.

Workout in a lower workout per week, maybe 70 to 90 minutes. So moderate volume, pretty high intensity training, normal kind of hard sets, hard workouts. That is enough volume to maintain all of your muscle and probably all of your strength as well. But if you can’t do that for whatever reason, you simply cannot train for an extended period of time, let’s say a month or longer, you probably will lose some muscle.

And that’s annoying, but you can take heart because once you get back in the gym, no matter how much muscle you lose, let’s say you are not able to do a single strength training workout or just resistance training of any kind, you can’t even do body weight workouts, which can be effective also for maintaining muscle and strength, at least to some degree, and more so for muscle than strength, but you can’t even do that.

It’s gonna be six months of training. No training whatsoever. Yes, you are going to lose a fair amount of muscle, but you are going to have some fun when you can start training again because it’s going to be like a second wind of newbie gains. Remember how much fun that was in the beginning? Remember the first six months when you were just adding weight to every exercise every week?

And you were watching your body change right in front of you and you in the mirror every day. It’s every other day you wake up and you notice a new little bit of muscle definition and you noticed your clothes fitting a little bit better. And if you were cutting, you’re seeing your weight consistently go down, or at least your body fat percentage consistently go down.

You are going to re experience a bit of that. Thanks to muscle memory. And what this also means is when you are cutting, if you do happen to lose some muscle, which again, you can mostly prevent unless maybe you are lean, wanting to get very lean, like stage lean and you are natural, you might lose a little bit of muscle along the way.

But if you do lose muscle when cutting for whatever reason, you can also take solace in the fact that it is going to come back very quickly when you are done cutting. Once you bring your calories back up. To maintenance or maybe a slight surplus if you want to do that. All right. Now let’s shift gears slightly and talk about this theory that we can use muscle memory to build new muscle faster, to hack muscle building.

Here is the idea. We all know that the more muscle we gain, the harder it is to continue gaining muscle. Most guys, for example, can gain probably 15 to 20 pounds of muscle in their first year of weightlifting. Most gals may be about half that. And then year two for most people is about half of year one.

That’s the total potential muscle gain. Year three is about half of year two. And it continues in that manner until potential muscle gain is just vanishingly small until it’s maybe one pound per year, maybe even less for some people. Now, one of the reasons for this is as we approach our genetic potential for muscle growth, it is more and more difficult to keep adding new nuclei to muscle cells.

And the mechanism of satellite cell activation is one of the main culprits behind this because as we build more muscle, the total amount of satellite cells available for recruitment decreases, we have to work harder and harder in our workouts to produce enough muscle damage to quote unquote convince satellite cells to donate their nuclei to muscle cells and the muscle damage that does occur results in less satellite cell activation.

activity. And some people think that maybe we can hack this. So we know, as I mentioned earlier, that it takes three or four weeks without training for muscle to begin atrophying, to begin wasting away. But we know that the additional myonuclei gained through training probably stick around for a lot longer than that.

And 000 question is it Can you resensitize satellite cells to muscle damage? Can you increase their sensitivity to muscle damage and their responsiveness to muscle damage by taking a couple of weeks, three ish weeks off of the gym every now and then, and if you do that fairly consistently, can that help you build muscle faster?

And the answer is maybe, but I am skeptical because there is very little research looking at how that strategy might influence satellite cell activity. There are two studies that were conducted by scientists at the University of Tokyo, however, that showed that. People who take regular breaks from training, so three week breaks in those studies, gain about the same amount of muscle and strength as people who train continuously for the same total length of time, which is interesting.

I have spoken about this research previously. Because it is encouraging for people to know that they can take breaks now and then if they have to and still gain plenty of muscle and strength. But as far as using that research to justify intentional, I guess you can’t say they’re extended breaks, but several week breaks with the idea that this is going to be more effective than continuous training.

That’s where it gets a little bit shaky because both of those studies were done with beginners, people who were not experienced weightlifters. So you would expect them to gain muscle quickly and easily, regardless of whether they took breaks, and that is almost certainly not true for more advanced weightlifters.

These studies also did not show that people who took breaks gained. More muscle. It just showed that the brakes didn’t result in less muscle gain. Those studies were short as well. So it’s impossible to say that the same would be true over the long term. And if we consider how volume and intensity are the two most important factors.

Training factors and muscle growth. Common sense would dictate that dramatically reducing those by taking several week breaks every so often over longer periods of time would result in less muscle gain, not more. And one final point to consider with these University of Tokyo studies is Those findings might have been simply because the participants who took the breaks were more rested and more enthusiastic for their workouts and therefore worked harder in them than the groups who trained continuously.

And if that’s the case you can accomplish the exact same thing with regular deloads. So that’s where I stand on the using muscle memory to hack your muscle growth fury As of right now, if more research comes out in the future that shows otherwise, I will be happy to change my position, but it is nice to know that we can be out of the gym for even a couple of weeks at a time without having to worry about losing our gains.

We can enjoy that vacation with a guilt free conscience. We can recover from that injury with patience, or we can put our energies maybe into something else and. Spend less time strength training. If we want, maybe we want to play a sport or do some other physical activity and want to go from three to five strength training sessions per week to maybe just one or two per week, or maybe even one or two every other week.

If that’s what makes the most sense. We can do all those things without strength training. Worrying any muscle that we might lose will be ready for a quick and triumphant return. I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes.

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Mike at muscle for life. com muscle F O R life. com. And let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you’d like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I’m always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.