Hey League!
I was listening to Katie Bowman’s “Move Your DNA” podcast last week and went down my own thought rabbit hole. I’d love to hear your thoughts, too!
The podcast covered some recent health and fitness news, and one point in particular caught my attention. It was based on this study and summarized in this article. Basically, the study suggests that even if you take a break from resistance training–maybe due to a long vacation or an injury/illness–even if you lose a little ground, your muscle memory will allow you to make progress faster when you return to your workouts.
Muscle memory has been around for a while, the difference here is that the study suggests the proteins in the muscles can “remember” training for as long as 2 months, not just the couple of weeks previously suspected. That doesn’t mean you won’t lose any strength if you take a month off, but it does mean when you get back to it, you’ll get back to where you were pretty quickly. That’s great news, as I know myself and others have gone down the “What even is the point, I didn’t work out for a month and now I’m starting at ground zero.” It’s not true!
I was out rucking when I listened to the podcast and my thoughts wandered to something related that has seemed to be true for me over my lifetime – that being highly active for the first 30 years of my life seems to be the baseline my body functions at. I wondered how much our earlier years of activity impact our later years.
Even if I go a longer period without doing strength workouts, when I get back to it, I am able to make progress faster. The first few workouts might be painful (mostly mentally as I have to set everything lower than what I last recorded) but it only takes a few weeks to work up to where I was previously. Even if it’s been more than a couple of months, such as when I was recovering from hip surgery. I dragged my feet getting back to strength training because I didn’t want to “start over” but I jumped in a few weeks ago and have been surprised at how fast I’ve mostly worked back to where I was more than a year ago.
The first 30 years of my life were highly active, including my work. I was active through college and then I worked 8-12 hours a day on my feet, unloading trucks and climbing ladders. I rode my bike to work. I went for walks with my kids, pulling them in the wagon, after work. Then, I took a sedentary desk job and even though I still worked out, the impacts of losing 8-12 hours a day of activity in my job took a toll and I gained weight and lost strength.
But unlike the magazine articles suggested, I didn’t lose weight by going for walks at lunch time and reducing alcohol consumption. It was so frustrating! Here, all these people I knew could make a smaller change and see big results, regardless of what their goals were. The only time I had success was if I was doing hard workouts at least an hour a day. I don’t see results unless I return to a higher overall activity level throughout the day.
It made me wonder how our early years of activity play into muscle memory, and how long that lasts because I’ve seen it in my own life several times now and it’s fascinating to observe. As soon as I return to an activity level that more closely matches my first 30 years, I can lose weight and put on muscle. But not otherwise. I don’t get results from a 45 minute lunch walk and 30 minutes of body weight exercise 3 times a week, and yet some people do see results from those things.
These days, I ruck in the morning, I do a 60-80 minute strength workout most afternoons, I take a walk in the evening and then I hike on the weekend. In addition, I still do the other things I’ve always done, like getting up to move around many times a day – watering the garden, playing with the dog, doing some stretching and mobility if I’m on the computer a lot. But when I match my higher activity levels from my first 30 years of life, not only do I get the results I want, but I feel much better. My body simply does not do well with too much sedentary activity even if I make a point to take a lot of movement breaks. It’s as if my body’s baseline expectation is higher because for 30 years that was my norm.
It all makes me wonder, based on the study, if we have degrees of muscle memory that go back further than just a couple of months. It’s a hard thing to study, because asking people to be sedentary for a long period just to study them has ethical concerns. But I wonder if we could gain insight by gathering detailed histories as well. Sometimes, I think we fail to recognize that our bodies don’t exist just in this moment. They are an accumulation of a lifetime of experience and how we “train” our bodies throughout our lives probably has more impact than we understand yet. But we’re also incredibly adaptable and we can make changes that impact the rest of our lives starting right now.
It all makes me wonder, based on the study, if we have degrees of muscle memory that go back further than just a couple of months. It’s a hard thing to study, because asking people to be sedentary for a long period just to study them has ethical concerns. But I wonder if we could gain insight by gathering detailed histories as well. Sometimes, I think we fail to recognize that our bodies don’t exist just in this moment. They are an accumulation of a lifetime of experience and how we “train” our bodies throughout our lives probably has more impact than we understand yet. But we’re also incredibly adaptable and we can make changes that impact the rest of our lives starting right now.
What you have learned in your life? How has the trajectory of activity impacted you over decades?
- Kim
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