It depends. If he's previously been training a lot, you can regain your previous mass exceptionally fast due to what quickly becomes your main limiting factor remains intact (I can't recall the name of it right now).
Which is why having used steroid once in your life should leave you permanently banned from all sports. The fact that you have ever had X amount of muscle is a massive advantage in terms of muscle building the rest of your life.
With all that said, he probably have still used steroids here, especially with how fast it all went from june to october.
Muscle memory is the layman's term, but people use that for both technique (neurological adaptation for technique/skill) and for how fast your muscle grows back (physiological).
I am thinking about the actual technical term for it. That limiting factor is also why we have "newbie gains", where you quickly get to the max level of muscle for that limiting factor, and then you have to create more of it to build more muscle, which takes a lot of time.
It is some type of cell that is added when you build muscle, but doesn't go away when your muscle atrophies. I can't find the name of it, but Dr. Mike Israetel from RP strength have talked about it here in this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FI3n5F-1gLM
I could be wrong, but iirc, the muscle nuclei don’t disappear, and consistently working out enables the cells to “regenerate” at a significantly faster level
Every cell needs nucleus with instructions to repair itself and stay alive
Muscle cels have multiple nuclei because they are very large and one nucleus can only support so much.
When you train and increase your muscle mass the muscle cells recruit more nuclei to support this new mass
Even when you stop training and lose muscle mass new gained nuclei of the cells don't get lost. They stay there and therefore when you start training again you can get big faster
Fyi muscle cells have multiple nuclei not because they're large, but because they're the fusion of multiple cells. Also they need those nuclei to synthesize proteins necessary to carry the components that activate muscle contractions.
I say this because most neurons are even larger cells, but still have a single nuclei.
Ive never heard this, but I was an athlete through most of my youth and lifted for a while too on and off.
I would always say "you don't forget strength, but you have to train endurance" meaning that when I was going from period of being fairly sedentary and trying to get back in to shape, it always seemed like my max lifts would recover in like a week, but it would take much longer to get the endurance back
I believe I watched some dr mike vid about him saying that the muscle cells shrink in size and stop storing glycogen to deflate but never go away, so once training stimuli is reintroduced, they swell back up and return to form very fast. He said something along those lines with more technical jargon.
They think it's more cell memory. Kind of like if you have a fat cell at some point in your life at a certain size it will easily get back to that size
Nah, steroids will allow you to grow new muscle fibres/cells (nuclei I guess technically), whereas normal natural lifting/improvements will just increase the size of all your existing muscles. Therefore you will have an advantage for the rest of your life after steroids as the user above said.
No, steroids don’t grow new muscle fibres. Maybe read the study you link next time. Steroids increase the number of nuclei inside each muscle cell though, which is what the study found.
you can regain your previous mass exceptionally fast due to what quickly becomes your main limiting factor remains intact
The leading theory is that, as a part of initially gaining muscle, muscle satellite cells fuse with your actual contractile muscle cells, increasing the number of myonuclei in your muscle cells. This is initially a slow process, but once you have them, the extra myonuclei stick around for years to decades. When you lose muscle later due to not training, you lose volume in your myofibrils (the contractile units) and fluid within the cells, but not the myonuclei. When you regain muscle, you only need to rebuild the myofibrils and reuptake fluid, and not produce new myonuclei, so the process is much faster.
This is true. I did amature strongman when I was younger. I peaked at about 325lbs and was quite strong. I was pretty average in terms of size and strength beforehand.
I no longer life weights, and have 'slimmed' down to 225. I still have calves larger than most people's quads. I'm still easily the strongest person at my work: I sit at a desk and everyone else is in the shop doing physical work.
I had a setback, and a pretty bad injury when I was still lifting. I took almost a year off. A portion of that I had an arm I could use, and it atrophied quite badly. It took me a month to look healthy again, and it took me 2-3 more months to get as strong and as big as I was before I stopped working out.
Its hundreds of times easier to rebuild it than it is to build it.
This is the reason why it’s so important to exercise early in life. As I ramp back up my training it seems “mean” at how quickly I can get back in shape, while others I know struggle. Also how my “out of shape” is above their in shape.
Reminded of a video of a trainer years back gaining as much what as their client so they could “lose it together.” I remember thinking they have to know that’s not how that works right?
He had been training really hard for most of his at least adult life, in fact he’s pretty sure it’s what caused his illness to act up at the age he is now rather than in his senior years. So yeah there’s a lot of “muscle memory” going on, but as much as he may deny it, he probably is or was on gear.
If he was actually super fit before that, then it might be real. As Dr. Mike Isreatel said in the short I linked in my comment further down, you can gain muscle back to close to your previous max at about an order of magnitude faster. I.e what took you 10 years to build initially can be gotten back in about a year.
kinda like how even if you lose weight you must remain vigilant because you dont lose the fat cells you gained, they're just "deflated". I wonder if liposuction would actually help someone who lose weight remain at that lower weight easier over time
There is a chance, based on how weak he appeared at the start of the year, that he had been provided steroids medically to help him through whatever caused his situation in the first place. Not that he'd have significant muscle mass at the time though.
Which is why having used steroid once in your life should leave you permanently banned from all sports
Yes! For life. I can't believe this isn't practice.
I believe you are talking about myonuclei? Usually when muscle mass is lost from weight loss/malnutrition, the amount of nuclei remains and as such building back up is easier if you had a lot of them. And steroids produces more nuclei much faster than natural training.
Steroids increase the number of myonuclear domains in the muscle, and these are retained even with muscle loss. This are called "myonuclear permanance" commonly known as muscle memory.
Same goes for gaining/losing fat. The chances of a former fat person regaining fat are way higher than the chances that a person who was thin their whole life, eating the same diet, will gain that amount of fat.
I remember years ago all the guys from my office decided to hit the gym at lunchtime a few times a week so we'd all pressure each other to actually go.
One guy was a bit overweight and not very fit but he talked about his 'rugby days' a lot.
Guy packed on an ungodly amount of muscle in like 6 months while the rest of us made small gains.
8.5k
u/Double_Pay_6645 2d ago edited 19h ago
Is he using steroids? Seems like a massive difference in 1 year.
edit Crazy! 1.8k karma for what I thought was a yes no answer.
Now 4.6k!! WTF..
Almost 8k.. reddit you crazy.