Muscle Memory

I had another interesting discussion today with my students.  The topic was the term "muscle memory".  I want to share my thoughts on the topic with all of you.  The most important thing you need to know is that muscle fibers have "no memory".  If you pull out a muscle fiber and apply an electrical stimulus to it, you will see it contract.  When you remove the electrical stimulus, it will relax.  You can do this ten times, a hundred times, even a thousand times and every time it will do the same thing.  That's all a muscle fiber does.  There is nothing to memorize.

Learning requires a permanent change in the long-term memory of a motor program (i.e, the pattern and intensity of electrical signals to the muscles that create the movement).  Motor programs are stored in long-term memory (LTM) and LTM is part of the brain.  The problem is this: I hear people use the term "muscle memory" when they are talking about learning a motor program.  This unfortunately leads to incorrect ideas about how we learn to perform movements.  People believe all you need to do is move the body a few hundred times and the muscles will remember what to do.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Click on "read more" for an explanation of how movements are actually learned.