You’re motivated, you work out, you work hard, and six months later you’re twice as strong as before and looking better than ever. And then, BAM! you get hit with an injury, or get busy with work, or even just lose motivation and you stop working out for three months. You lose all the results you worked so hard for, but now you want to get back into it.
You’re motivated, you work out, you work hard, and this time… only two months instead of the six months that it took the first time, you’re back to where you were before.
What’s going on here is a concept that some of you might be familiar with known as muscle memory. The theory is that if you’ve trained then you take a break, coming back to where you left off is much easier than getting there in the first place.
Two things are happening here, one of which is happening within your central nervous system.
Whenever a motor skill is learned, such as a squat, the information is stored within the brain region known as the cerebellum.
Even after taking a long break from squatting, once you go back, your neuromuscular system is already programmed to complete the movement efficiently. This is also why we can still ride a bike, swim, and also pull off those awesome dance moves, even after not doing them for a long time.
That’s why you only need to train two months, hypothetically, instead of the initial six months to get back to where you were before.