We all want Know if and how we can go back to form after an injury, illness or long break. The muscles adapt in response to the environment: they grow when we put the work and shrink when we stop. But what happens if we could help them remember how to grow?
As a rule, cell biologists do not enter their careers crossing the high -level professional sports glove. But in the years when Adam Sharples played forward in the Rugby Football League of the United Kingdom, he found himself questioning the cellular mechanisms that helped the muscles to develop after different types of exercises.
A position at the forefront in Pro Rugby means that you must be, well, “quite big”, as Adam says. “I was in the gymnasium raising weights at the age of about 12, I think,” he said.
He spent a large part of his teenage life in training. When he was 19 years old, he played a boxing match on soggy soil that was heavy under the foot. He had just planted his foot when an opposing team player tackled him, which turned his upper body to the left. His right foot remained firmly stuck in the mud.
“This is where I torn my LCA, but I don't remember much. You should ask my father, ”said Adam with an ironic smile. “He could tell you per minute, in detail: when it happened, how it happened.” (Sports, I remember, has the remarkable ability to be a language of love.)
Adam took a year of rugby leave and continued to study, ending his mastery in human physiology. He had always been curious to know muscles and muscle growth, but the hiatus gave him time to think – rugby players, he was well aware, have a short career. This recognition finally led him to continue a doctorate in muscle cell biology.
When we talk about muscle memory, most of the time, we refer to the way our body seems to remember how to do things that we have not done for some time – to cycle, to say or make a complicated dance that we learned in childhood. When you learn and repeat certain movements over time, this model of movement becomes refined and regular, as is the shooting scheme of neurons which control this movement. The memory of how to perform this action lives in our motorcycleurons, not in the real muscles involved. But while Adam followed his academic training, he became more and more interested in the question of whether the muscle itself has a memory at the cellular and genetic level.
Almost two decades later, Adam teaches and led a laboratory at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo. In 2018, his research group was the first in the world to show that human skeletal muscle has a epigenetic memory of muscle growth after exercise.
Epigenetic Referring to changes in the expression of genes caused by behavior and the environment. The genes themselves are not changed, but the way they work is. When you lift weights, for example, small molecules called methyl groups stand out from the outside of certain genes, which makes them more likely to turn on and produce proteins that affect muscle growth. These changes persist; If you start to lift weights start again, you will add muscle mass faster than before. In other words, your muscles remember it: they have a lasting molecular memory of the past exercise which makes them ready to respond to the exercise, even after a break of several months. (Cellular Muscle memory, on the other hand, works a little differently from epigenetic muscle memory. The exercise stimulates muscle stem cells to contribute to their nuclei to the growth and repair of muscles, and cellular muscle memory refers to the moment when these nuclei remain for a certain time in muscle fibers – even after periods of inactivity – and help to accelerate the return to growth once you start to train.)
