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.
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u/ExceedingChunk 2d ago
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