Muscles don't have memory. At least that is true for endurance training. That is what researchers have found out during a recent study. While there might not be muscle memory for such activities, the research has also found that other parts of the body may remember training done.
Long-term memory for muscles does not occur for endurance activities as swimming, biking or even running, according to a study conducted by Malene Lindholm of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, as reported by Science News reports.
That doesn't mean that endurance training isn't good, however. Endurance training has been found to be good against diseases as diabetes, heart disease and even for some types of cancer. Endurance training helps in raising metabolism, but the research focused on the issue on how long these improvements would be retained by the human body's muscles.
For the study, Lindholm and her colleagues took 23 sedentary people and had them kick one leg 60 times a minute for 45 minutes. The study went on for three months wherein the subjects did it for four times a week. After that, they had nine months off and then did the study again, but this time with both legs, according to Live Science.
The team took samples of the participants' muscle tissues before and after the study period to analyze them. The team looked for changes in mRNAs in the samples taken. What they found out was that there wasn't any difference in gene activities among trained and untrained legs.
"The training effects were presumed to have been lost," Lindholm observed about the results.
While muscles' memory during endurance training might not be permanent, other organs do remember training. The heart and the cardiovascular system could regain previous fitness levels, for instance.
The study also involved endurance training. In strength training, muscles do remember their training, but that would be in terms of muscles getting bigger and stronger. Muscles tend to get bigger as they add more nuclei. Endurance training then might not retain how the muscles were trained, but in terms of muscles gaining strength, there might still be benefits to it.
iTechPost has other health news, such as early prostate cancer detection can increase survival rate.
