MUSCLE MEMORY

Muscle memory is a common term for neuromuscular facilitation, which is the process of the neuromuscular system memorizing motor skills. Even though the process is really brain-muscle memory or what some call motor memory, the nickname muscle memory is commonly used.

When an active person trains movement, often of the same activity, in an effort to stimulate the body’s adaptation process, the end result is to induce a physiological change such as increased levels of accuracy through repetition.

Individuals rely upon the body’s ability to assimilate a given activity and adapt to the training. As the brain and muscle adapts to training, the subsequent changes are a form or representation of its muscle memory.

There are two types of motor skills involved in muscle memory, fine and gross. Fine motor skills are very minute and small skills we perform with our hands such as brushing our teeth, combing our hair, or using a pencil or pen to write and even playing video games. Gross motor skills are those actions that require large body parts and large body movements like throwing sports (bowling, football, baseball), golfing, swimming, and tennis. The list goes on and on, from racing a car to archery.

Muscle memory is fashioned over time through repetition of a given motor skill and our ability through brain activity to remember it. When you first began to learn how to brush your teeth, comb your hair, or even drive a vehicle, you quickly realized it was not as easy as it looked.

As you reinforced those movements day after day after day, your neural system learned those fine and gross motor skills to the degree that you are no longer required to think about them, but merely react and perform.

Today, if you pick up your hair brush, you automatically have a certain motion, style, number of strokes, and amount of pressure as you brush your hair without thinking about each movement. When you drive your car, you just get in, start it and take off. It just happens without even thinking. That’s muscle memory. Think of it as a blueprint for the movement that is mapped in our brain over time creating motor memory.

For example, muscle memory starts with the visual cue. As our brains process the information about the desired activity and motion such as a golf swing, we then commit to that motion we think is correct. Over time, our accuracy and skills in performing the swing or movement improve.

Muscle memory is the control center of the movement. In maximizing muscle memory to learn a new motion you must practice that same motion over a long enough period so that it becomes automatic. This learning process could take months, even years, to perfect depending on the individual’s dedication to practice, and their unique biochemical neuromuscular learning system to retain that practice.

In detail, inside your brain are neurons (brain cells) that produce impulses, which carry tiny electrical currents. These currents cross the synapses (junctions) between neurons with chemical transporters called neurotransmitters to carry the communication. Neurotransmitters are the body’s communicative mechanisms and one of their many functions is to travel through the central nervous system and carry the signal from visual cue to the muscle for the contraction.

Although there are many types of neurotransmitters, the communicative ones primarily used in muscle memory is acetylcholine and the other is serotonin.

Acetylcholine is the major neurotransmitter used in memory, focus, concentration, and muscle memory. It is the substance that transports messages from one nerve cell to another. Acetylcholine is critical to the process of creating and remembering the muscle contraction. It achieves this through motor neurons (nerves that make the muscle contract).

Serotonin is imperative in the muscle memory process. Serotonin has multiple physiological actions at neuromuscular junctions where communication crosses over, this includes facilitation of transmitter release from nerve terminals and an increase in the communication to muscle fibers.

When a motor neuron depolarizes, an electrical current is passed down the nerve fiber and the impulse causes the neurotransmitter acetylcholine to be released to the muscle cell. Acetylcholine then binds with receptors on the muscle membrane to create the contraction. Over time, with acetylcholine the brain-muscle learns the chosen motion and induces it’s own form of memory. This process is also called neuromuscular facilitation. Once we create muscle memory and retain that blueprint in our brain we no longer have to think about the movement and free up brain activity for other activities.