What is muscle memory?

[jdurg]

I'm a fairly avid golfer, and one thing that myself and other golfers try to attain is a muscle memory of our swing. This is done by swining properly over and over and over again until you are able to do so without thinking about it. My question is, what is muscle memory? Is it a physiological change in the muscles or is it a psychological change? When I swing a club, it just feels 'right' when I swing it like I should. I can tell right away if my swing is bad or if my swing is good as soon as I start my downswing. The thing is, I'm not conciously thinking about the swing. I've just always wondered how and why the body is able to do this.

[Mokele]

It's between those, quite literally: it's in your ganglia, the nerve-clusters located alongside your spinal cord. They serve as what's referred to as a pattern generator. Your brain doesn't actually control how your muscles work unless it's a non-automatic movement.

 

Think of it like walking. You don't actually think "Ok, now I contract the femoralis, then the gastrocnemius, then...", you just decide you want to walk in a particular direction at a certain speed. This isn't actually an illusion, either. When Russian researchers, in the days before IACUC and other lab-animal-use protocols, cut a cat's brain from it's spinal cord, they found they could actually get the animal to walk, simply by stimulating a portion of the cord cross-section with a regular pulse of electricity. The frequency of the pulse controlled the pace. The cat would actually walk unassisted, though it could not consciously control direction, and would just run into walls and keep walking.

 

So, gruesome annecdotes aside, what you're actually doing is setting a pattern in your ganglion, so that all your brain has to do is send the "swing" command, and the ganglion will oversee the actual details of execution, such as timing of muscle contractions and alteration of the pattern in response to immediate sensory feedback.

 

Mokele

[Inferno]

An old muscle memory trick I learned in gym- walk to the middle of a doorway, and press your arms against the frame. (the outside of your wrists should be pressing against the frame) Press as hard as you can for 90 seconds, walk out, and your arms will 'magcally' float up. its old, but kinda fun.

[rakuenso]

any idea as to how to make our muscle memory neurons become denser and synapse faster? i'm getting sick of all these chords for the guitar

[radiohead]

I play a couple instruments. Guitar, tuba, trumpet, and some sax. Muscle memory is kinda like touch typing. You don't have to think about it, you just do. If you practice scales or chords, you gain muscle memory.

[zyncod]

Probably the easiest example of muscle memory is to start doing something repetitive, like walking or tapping a pen against a desk. If you do it for about 30 seconds, you'll realize you have to make an active decision to stop, even though you're doing something that burns energy. It feels very weird once you start thinking about it - like your body is something that you are not really attached to - and the longer you keep thinking about it, the more difficult it is to stop.

 

And "muscle memory" is supposedly why elderly people have more difficulty standing or walking without stumbling. Your brain is integrative on many levels - you can tell your body 'stand' without consciously realizing all that goes into standing. You receive balance signals from your inner ear and thousands of signals from your feet, legs, and buttocks that are used to contract or release many, many different muscles. Elderly people, while still adept at integrating all these signals and providing the automatic outputs, have lost much of the sensation in limb extremeties. So they don't have as clear a picture of what their balance situation is at any given point. Which is why some doctors have recommended that elderly people use shoes with many small bumps in the soles - to increase the sensations in their feet and make standing and walking less of a conscious (and slower) decision.

[Firedragon52]

I think this happens in jogging as well. After you run for a while, it just seems like you run without thinking about.

[chemstudent]

Yes the first responder is eaxactley right. It is all neurological and has to do with repetitive motor function and the brain recognizing it and simply repeating that simple function.

W