Passage A Muscle memory is a puzzling phenomenon. Most bodybuilders have experienced this phenomenon, yet virtually no discussions of it have appeared in scientific publications. Bodybuilders who start training again after a period of inactivity find that gaining muscle size seems easier the second time around—even if athletes observing muscle memory, some plausible explanation must exist.
One potential explanation of muscle memory involves the neurons (nerve cells) that stimulate your muscles, telling the muscle fibers to contract. It is well established that during weight lifting, only a small percentage of neurons for the working muscles are recruited. The more weight you lift, the more neurons are involved and you may think you’re starting from the same place, this greater strength would enable faster progress.
Then again, it’s also possible that the ease of retraining has nothing to do with your muscles: it could all be in your head. The first time you trained, you didn’t know how much you could lift. So you increased weight cautiously. When retraining, you already know you can handle increasing weight These more rapid weight increases produce quicker gains in strength and size.
Passage B Pumping up is easier for people who have been buff before, and now scientists think they know why— muscles retain one aspect of their wither from lack of use.
Because muscle cells are huge, more than one nucleus is needed for making the large amounts of the proteins that give muscles their strength. Previous research has demonstrated that with exercise, muscle cells get even bigger by merging with stem cells that are nested between them. The muscle cells incorporate the nuclei extra cell nuclei are killed by a cell death program called apoptosis.
In a recent study, researchers regularly stimulated the leg muscles of mice over a two-week period, during which time the muscle cells gained nuclei and increased in size. The researchers then let the muscles rest. As the muscles atrophied, the cells deflated to about 40 percent of their bulked-up size, but the muscle proteins again, providing a type of muscle memory at the cellular level.
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