Your Muscles Retain Memories of Strength and Weakness

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EEvery time you throw darts, ride a bike, or even exercise, you’re engaging your muscle memory. New research from the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences published in Scientific advances shows that our muscles also retain a memory of weakness – and this changes with age.

Research by Adam P. Sharples published in 2016 showed that there is an epigenetic component to muscle memory. Sharples and his team studied participants’ genes after two different periods of resistance exercise with a rest period in between. They found that exercise caused muscle cells to upregulate the expression of certain genes – a pattern they also remembered at rest.

So if muscle use causes up-regulation of genes, can non-muscle use cause down-regulation? To find out, Sharples and his team reversed their previous study, looking at genes expressed in the muscle cells of young adults who had undergone repeated leg immobilization. They discovered a protective pattern of gene expression, with relevant genetic pathways less disrupted during a second period of disuse. In other words, the muscles of young adults proved resilient.

Read more: “The importance of muscle”

But what about muscle aging? To study the effects of inactivity on gene expression, Sharples and his team compared young and old rats with similar paw immobilizations. They found that the muscles of old rats developed a detrimental memory of non-use with repeated periods of inactivity leading to the suppression of the relevant genes.

Basically, research suggests that repeated inactivity causes the muscles of young people to develop an expression pattern that helps them recover, while it causes the muscles of older people to develop an expression pattern that makes them more susceptible to muscle wasting.

“Muscle carries a history of strength and weakness, and these molecular memories can build up over time to shape its response when inactivity recurs,” Sharples said in a statement. “Understanding how muscle stores these past experiences of use and disuse is essential for designing better strategies to support recovery from illness, injury or age-related decline.” »

Next, Sharples’ team works with the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark to identify modes of exercise that produce the most beneficial expression patterns for aging muscles. Until then, we might all want to do a little more physical activity to give our muscles the best memories while they’re still there.

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Main image: Line Addict / Shutterstock

• Jake Currie

  Published on February 25, 2026

  Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.