I often receive questions about the subject of losing muscle mass due to leaving the gym, either due to injury, stress, or laziness, as everyone is afraid at this point that as soon as I leave the gym and exercise, I will lose my muscles.
In fact, the human body is always trying to get rid of any additional burden on it that it does not need, such as muscles, if you do not use them. Once you no longer use those muscular muscles by lifting heavy weights, the body gradually begins to reduce and get rid of them, so you must take this into consideration that without weights. Heavy, no muscles and vice versa, no muscles without heavy weights.
In various sports training circles, the term muscle memory is often used. The name muscle memory is given to the adaptation of the body’s muscles to the work performed as a result of repetition, where the muscle group harmonizes and coordinates in a distinctive way, which causes the brain to issue commands to the concerned muscles to carry out the required tasks on your behalf…and these types of behaviors were one of them. The reasons for human survival and continuity, but in sports, they may be completely fatal because athletes always need to develop their level of performance, and therefore this memory must always be renewed by adding new efforts and movements to it.
This term muscle memory logically explains the cause of muscle spasm in an experienced athlete who tries to play a sport other than the one he is accustomed to, even if it is in the same context, as his muscles are not accustomed to this type of effort, as his muscles do not have the memory required to perform this effort. Which means that he needs time to get used to the new sport, which also explains the weakness in athletic performance after the break and the difficulty of performing some old movements after returning from vacation, injury, or break…as the muscles need a period to rebuild their memory again.
Regardless of the period in which you left exercise, which is not supposed to be very long, you decide to return to exercise, you will notice that in a standard period that is much less than that period during which you built your first mass, your muscle mass has returned to you, and this is all thanks to muscle memory, in fact. There is no muscle memory in a muscle, it is just a term.
What actually happens are two things, one of which happens inside the muscles and the other inside the central nervous system:
Once you master how to perform the movement for a specific exercise, this information is stored inside your brain in the cerebellum, and the more you perform the same movement, the more effective you will be in performing the exercise, and even when you leave the exercise for a long time, your return to performing the exercise with perfection will be immediate.
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