What is Muscle Memory and How Does it Benefit Athletes?

Have you ever performed a task that you haven’t done in a while and wondered how you were able to successfully complete it? This is called muscle memory.

Muscle memory is a neurological process that allows us to retain a degree of information around certain motor functions and perform them without any conscious effort. Now you might be asking, what is a motor function? A motor function is any activity that results from stimulation of motor neurons that involves reflexes and voluntary and involuntary muscle contractions.

You will hear a lot of athletes talk about training and muscle memory and how it affects their performance and their fitness levels. Athletes train for long because muscle memory allows them to perform certain movements faster, more accurately, and more efficiently without them having to even think of it. It becomes second nature to them, which helps them constantly compete at the highest level.

Almost every high school athlete wants to be the best at their sport, but very few focus on the basics and run the same drills like clockwork, improving their motor functions. A piece of advice to all athletes is to look for a strength and conditioning coach. Like muscle memory, our bodies have a propensity to respond well and hold onto strength. See, we have many components of fitness such as muscular endurance, speed, power, etc, but strength is the class that these components fit into. Focusing on strength will directly translate into any sport and improve the longevity of an athletes career.

To become a world class athlete, you need to refine and perform the basic skills and movements better than your competition. To sum it up, hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Muscle memory doesn’t just pertain to the muscles we can see. Attitude and mentality are learned through repeated behavior. This is why we see tennis players lose a match from being two sets up or football teams drawing a game from a 3-0 lead. Repeating positive affirmations and training your mentality to build resilience under certain circumstances is what helps athletes bounce back after major setbacks such as injury.

This of course takes time, so start off slow, build yourself up one step at a time. Muscle memory doesn’t just form from one day to the next, it’s a gradual process. Stay disciplined, stay focused and trust the process. Studies have shown that habits and patterns are built not from time, but from frequency. Muscle memory is simply a movement pattern that has been repeated multiple times over a period of time. The more frequently you run drills or practice a skill, the faster you will build your muscle memory and the stronger it will become.

By gsport Intern, Jessica De Lira