A lot of gym lovers struggle to gain muscles in the most effective way possible. They are consuming various supplements to speed up this process, train hard every day, eat a lot of natural protein such as meat, eggs, etc. In other words, do everything to achieve their goal.
In this article, we have talked about muscle memory and the ability of satellite cells to donate their nuclei to the damaged during the training cells and, thus, build your tissues. It’s a fact that doing the same movement leads to a more difficult process of gaining weight. You must do a harder workout every time to achieve the desired results as your body needs less effort to perform the move you have done yesterday. With every training, there are fewer damaged cells needed to be recovered with the help of satellite cells.
Thus, there is one question a lot of people are interested in: if your muscles have a memory, and doing the same exercise a lot of times makes it harder to build the exact muscles because our body gets accustomed to the repetitive moves, can the breaks aid in faster muscle gain?
There was interesting research with two groups of people who had just taken up the sport. The first group had to lift weights every week for 24 weeks. The other group had to lift weights for 6 weeks, then take a break for 3 weeks, then lift weights again for 6 weeks, and take a break for 3 weeks, and do the last rep of training for 6 weeks. After this 24-week session, both groups achieved almost the same results and gained almost the same muscle even though the 2nd group did 25% less training.
There can be a lot of reasons why it happened including the fact that those people were beginners, and the beginners gain weight quickly regardless of taking breaks. Also, the people who trained with breaks didn’t gain more muscles. They gained the same amount as the first group. And we don’t know what the results would be if this continued for years. Volume and intensity are the most important things when it comes to training whether you take a break or not. Yet taking a long break once you decided to gain muscles wouldn’t speed up this process. Instead, it will result in less tissue growth.
