Muscle memory discovery ends 'use it or lose it' dogma

Re:Muscle memory discovery ends 'use it or lose it' dogma by CptFribble on Monday February 18, 2019 @01:11AM (#19188929)

Yes and no. Individual fibers are either On or Off, but individual fibers are grouped into bundles, and any one muscle is composed of many bundles. When you flex a muscle to move a thing, your brain only recruits some of the bundles. The exact amount is determined by some combination of your willpower, focus, training level, and adrenaline.

As you train (that is, try really hard to lift something heavy), you teach your brain that you're going to be lifting heavy things a lot going forward, which makes your brain recruit more muscle fibers when you actually go ahead and lift the thing.

So you're right in one sense, and incomplete in another.

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Re:Muscle memory discovery ends 'use it or lose it' dogma by IshKebab on Monday February 18, 2019 @04:20AM (#19189494)

That can't be everything though because otherwise your body wouldn't physically change when you train and they clearly do.

Also why wouldn't evolution just make us all strong all the time if it only requires neurological changes?

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Re:Muscle memory discovery ends 'use it or lose it' dogma by PeterisP on Monday February 18, 2019 @10:15AM (#19191205)

Strength is generally an evolutionary drawback, in most cases the benefits of extra strength doesn't outweigh the calorie cost of building maintaining it.

For very costly things like strength and brainpower, evolution is ensuring that we have as much as we require, and not a single bit more; and has all kinds of processes for actively reducing strength that you had unless you have both extra calories and the demonstrated need to use that strength; because it saves calories.

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Re:Muscle memory discovery ends 'use it or lose it' dogma by ashelmire on Monday February 18, 2019 @06:19AM (#19189967)

It’s not everything. See muscle hypertrophy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_hypertrophy

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Re:Muscle memory discovery ends 'use it or lose it' dogma by adrianN on Monday February 18, 2019 @06:40AM (#19190031)

Probably a combination of not needing to be very strong (we don't use raw strength to hunt very often) and a metabolic cost.

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Re:Muscle memory discovery ends 'use it or lose it' dogma by noir_lord on Monday February 18, 2019 @08:35AM (#19190496)

Metabolic cost is a big factor.

It's one of the theories of why homo sapiens out competed neanderthal basically everywhere, we can survive the lean times better.

Iirc they required about twice the average intake of an anatomically modern homo sapiens.

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Re:Muscle memory discovery ends 'use it or lose it' dogma by afiori on Monday February 18, 2019 @06:45AM (#19190046)

because the more fibers you use for small movement the more energy you consume and higher the risk of actual damage

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