We all want Know if and how you can return to form after an injury, illness, or long break. Muscles adapt in response to the environment. It grows when you work, and shrinks when you stop. But what if we could help them remember how to grow?
As a general rule, cell biologists do not enter a career by sprinting through the gauntlets of top-notch professional sports. However, in the years when Adam Sharples played in the UK Rugby Football League as the front row forward, he had been wondering about the cellular mechanisms that help muscles grow after different types of exercise.
The front row position in professional rugby means that you need to be “pretty big,” as Adam says. “I’ve been lifting gym weights since I was about 12,” he says.
He spent much of his teenage life training. When he was 19, he was playing Boxing Day matches on the heavy ground under his feet. He just planted his legs as the player from the other team worked on him and troked his upper body to the left. His right leg remained firmly stuck in the mud.
“That’s when I tore my ACL, but I don’t remember much about it. You should ask my dad,” Adam tells me with a wry smile. “He could tell you in detail. When it happened, how did it happen?” (Sports has the incredible ability to remember and become a language of love.)
Adam spent a year off from rugby and continued his studies, earning a master’s degree in human physiology. He was always interested in muscle and muscle growth, but the rest gave him time to think. ProRugby players were well aware that he was well aware and had a short career. The acknowledgement ultimately led him to pursue a PhD in muscle cell biology.
When we talk about muscle memory, most often we mention how our bodies seem to remember how we do things that we haven’t done for a while. For example, do complicated dances that you learned as a child, or do complicated dances. Over time, learning and repeating a particular movement becomes sophisticated and regular, and the same goes for the firing patterns of the neurons that control that movement. The memory of how that action is performed resides in motor neurons, not in the actual muscles involved. However, as Adam progressed through academic training, he became increasingly interested in the question of whether the muscles themselves possess memory at the cellular and genetic levels.
Almost 20 years later, Adam teaches and runs a lab at Norwegian Sports Science School in Oslo. In 2018, his research group was the first in the world to show that human skeletal muscles have epigenetic memories of muscle growth after exercise.
Epigenetic It refers to changes in gene expression caused by behavior and environment. The genes themselves have not changed, but the way they work does not change. For example, lifting weights makes it more likely that small molecules called methyl groups separate from outside a particular gene and turn on proteins that affect muscle growth. These changes persist. Once you start lifting your weights again, you’ll add more muscle mass faster than before. In other words, your muscles remember how to do it. They have permanent molecular memories of past movements. (mobile phone Muscle memory, on the other hand, functions slightly differently than epigenetic muscle memory. Exercise stimulates muscle stem cells to contribute to the nucleus growth and repair, and cell muscle memory refers to when those nuclei stick to muscle fibers for a while, even after a period of inactivity, and accelerates the return to growth when they start training again. )
