Is It Easier To Recover Lost Gains or Build New Muscle?

If the last time you did any serious physical training was way back when you were a high school athlete, you may believe that you’re starting over from scratch with respect to weight training when you make your return to the gym after several years away. 

Fortunately, it appears that this isn’t quite as true as we once believed it to be, as there is significant evidence that your muscles retain remnants of the training you’ve completed before.  

Your body possesses a physical cheat code that is installed in your muscle fibers thanks to your prior training, and is waiting to be put to use… provided you don’t wait too long to utilize it.

Your Muscles’ Memories of Past Successes

If you remember your glory days fondly, you’re not alone; your muscles do, too. Those memories — so to speak — are stored within your body’s myonuclei.

The concept behind myonuclei involves the notion of what is referred to as “muscle memory,”  albeit not in the sense that your muscles will reflexively replicate prior movement patterns. Instead, this concept assumes that your muscles can rapidly regrow to their prior dimensions more quickly than if they had never been developed to those prior limits before.

In essence, while it is obvious that muscles will ultimately atrophy and shrink when they are not in use, it is evident that your muscles will not lose — or are very slow to lose — their myonuclei. 

Or, to put it another way, if you have already done the work of inducing hypertrophy in your muscles, your myonuclei act as a natural shortcut, or growth hack, enabling you to rapidly recover your lost gains.

From the perspective of myonuclei, the old adage of use-it-or-lose-it doesn’t have quite the same ring of truth, because there is some lingering evidence left behind that you never completely lost it to begin with.

Do Myonuclei Provide a Permanent Advantage?

The landmark study that introduced the promising advantages of myonuclei to the world involved lab rats that had been given testosterone rather than humans. When human studies into myonuclei were conducted, the results were largely the same, but myonuclei were far less abundant in older study participants. 

This seems to indicate that there is a time limit to the retention of myonuclei, so you should be encouraged not to assume that your muscles will retain their bounceback potential for an indefinite period of time. Your myonuclei may represent a bank of brawn that you can make withdrawals from, but those investments depreciate over time, and may disappear altogether if you wait too long in between deposits.

How To Use Your Hidden Helper

Instead of considering how you can use myonuclei to your advantage, you should think about using them for motivation. Specifically, if you’ve ever achieved your ideal body type in the past and fallen off the wagon, you have an improved likelihood of being able to recover that body in a shorter length of time if you get down to business. 

However, that potential declines with the passage of time, so there is no time like the present to get back in the gym and start chasing your past glory.

Takeaways

1. Your body contains myonuclei that establish their presence based on your muscles’ peak state of strength and growth.

2. Even if your muscles atrophy, the myonuclei in your body remain present, and can make it easier for you to recover to your peak state of performance.

3. Although myonuclei benefit you by lingering in your body, it is possible to lose them if you wait too long before capitalizing on their presence.

4. If you have never worked out before, you should know that your muscles will record your progress as you make improvements, and will assist you in your efforts to recover lost muscle size and strength.