I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “It’s just like riding a bike!”

There are actually two different applications of this concept when it comes to strength training.

The first has to do with learning the movement PATTERNS, and the second has to do with the actual muscle response when returning to an activity after a brief hiatus.

The first:

“Muscle memory is the act of committing a specific motor task into memory through repetition.” 

The more times you light up that movement pattern in the part of your brain responsible for motor skills, the less brain power it takes to repeat it successfully.

For strength training, it takes about 2-4 weeks to see these patterns solidify, also known as “newbie gains”.

Simply repeating the same patterns enables you to move more weight with less effort due to the neurological pathways created previously.

The second:

If you’ve been in the gym consistently, then take a few weeks off – you know the dread that comes along with that first day back.

But you should also know that getting your strength back the second time around (or third, or fourth) takes a little less time than it did initially.

THIS is “muscle memory”.

This is attributed to the cell called myonuclei which helps turns protein into usable fuel for the muscle. The number of myonuclei increase as we get stronger and what recent science has shows is that even during short periods of inactivity (3 months) despite muscle atrophy, the number of myonuclei stays the same.

THEREFORE, when we return to strength training, the above motor neuron muscle memory ALONG WITH the remaining myonuclei make it easier to rebuild strength & size.

So as long as you don’t take too much time off, you can rest easy knowing that your gains are safe for at least a couple of months.

*other notable things: people in these studies that were still physically active and had adequate protein intake even without specific resistance training, maintained more myonuclei during their time off than those who did nothing and ate too little protein.

TAKE AWAY: SOMETHING IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN NOTHING & EAT YOUR PROTEIN.