Muscle memory..

[Firbolg]

Heard about it plenty of times but is it real or myth?

If its real, what exactly is it? Do the muscles retain some physical properties or is it simply the brain remembering how to do certain things with/to the muscles?

[doc]

As far as I know, the muscles really do not remember anything; they just respond to impulses from the brain. When stimulated, acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, crosses over the neuromuscular junction (the area between the nerve endings and the muscle fiber receptor area), and stimulates the transmission of calcium through the muscle cell walls, causing the actin and myosin proteins within to contract. The end result of all of this, is the contraction of the fiber that is made up of cells, and the overall contraction of the muscle, which is made up of many fibers. Continued use causes the fibers to enlarge, which makes you look big and buff.

There is no mechanism, as far as is known, that I know of, for the muscle fibers to "remember" how far to release, or how much to contract. The pathways in the brain, starting from the motor strip on the lateral sides of the brain, proceed downward through the center of the brain into the spinal cord, with regulation of the impulses by some deeper structures within the brain, and some coordinative effects from the cerebellum. No doubt it is areas within the brain, that form new neural connections, which result in "muscle memory".

[blooming tianshi lotus]

You hear often that your muscles never forget. I think personally though that if you've "gotten there " before and know how to do it and fuel it and rest it etc , by remembering your methods and other contributors, it may help explain why this term was coined. Personally, no matter how bad my routine gets skewed , I always take comfort in the knowledge that I just need to trust and do what I know and it's never failed me yet.

I also think that one of the biggest parts of "muscle memory" and getting back to a previous stage, is the pain threshold ( or qi recruitment ). Speaking on totally lay grounds, that's all imo it comes down to. Once you've attained a certain lvl of effort ( as you no doubt did during various stages last time around), providing you've made the decision to go ahead and do it , it's too easy to at min reach your last lvl of effort and output and repeat the information you used to get you there before. In this way, I see it like pressing play or run on the programme and because it's done it before and needs less time tuning, your body responds quicker.

If we remember qi and methods etc as a feeling and process, I guess that makes it a "brain" memory.

Right???


BL