Muscle memory means you won’t ‘lose it’ when you take a break from the gym

Muscle memory more powerful than previously thought and could even help prevent frailty in old age, research says

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It’s a commonly held belief that if you stop going to the gym, your muscles will weaken and it will be much harder for you to get back in shape when you start exercising again.

But new research debunks this myth entirely, claiming that a phenomenon known as muscle memory is more powerful than previously thought and could even help prevent frailty in old age.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, found that muscles built in our teen years act can actually benefit our fitness levels for years despite long periods of no training.

This is due to cell control centres, known as nuclei, that we acquire when we’re young that enable muscles to become larger at a faster rate when they’re retrained, even after our muscle cells have shrunk due to disuse.

This suggests we can “bank” muscle growth when we’re young.

Our muscles contain the biggest cells in our bodies; they fuse together and form a type of tissue called syncytium, which enables the cells to behave like one single cell.

“Heart, bone and even placenta are built on these networks of cells,” explains Lawrence Schwartz, professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts and co-author of the study.

“But by far our biggest cells - and biggest syncytia - are our muscles.

“Muscle growth is accompanied by the addition of new nuclei from stem cells to help meet the enhanced synthetic demands of larger muscle cells."

These new nuclei are known as myonuclei, the ones that researchers identified as being responsible for fostering muscle memory, despite previous studies claiming that numbers of myonuclei in the body decrease after muscle disuse.

“Two independent studies – one in rodents and the other in insects – have demonstrated that nuclei are not lost from atrophying muscle fibres, and even remain after muscle death has been initiated,” Schwartz adds.

His findings could offer some respite to those who’ve been trying to get themselves back into the gym post-Christmas, but haven’t found the time yet.

“It is well documented in the field of exercise physiology that it is far easier to reacquire a certain level of muscle fitness through exercise than it was to achieve it the first place, even if there has been a long intervening period of detraining,” he says.

“In other word, the phrase ‘use it or lose it’ is might be more accurately articulated as ‘use it or lose it, until you work at it again’.”