Have you ever taken months off training – maybe due to an injury, a new baby or crushing work deadlines – and come back convinced you were starting from zero?
Research from our team has some good news: At the cellular level, you probably weren’t.
New research hints that your cells might keep a record of your training history so all of your gains are not completely lost. But people typically understood exercise as something whose beneficial effects fade away over time: You use it or lose it. In recent years, however, scientists have started challenging the concept of “use it or lose it. We are exercise physiologists who study how cells remember exercise. Our lab and others have shown that the body is able to store a form of exercise memory across different organs. To study how this exercise memory works, our team of researchers use an ON-OFF-ON exercise training protocol in mice, which involves an initial four- to eight-week training period, followed by detraining – a period of no exercise – and a second training bout. This method allows us to examine how cells form a memory of exercise, maintain a record of exercise through detraining, and recall memories of prior training when exposed again to exercise. Researchers have hypothesized numerous ways that prenatal exercise may affect offspring. For example, maternal exercise might allow offspring to spend more time developing in the womb or lead parents to producer higher quality milk . But that assumption is now coming apart. We propose that every cell in the body remembers exercise, regardless of how little or how much someone trains. The question is how long these records are stored and whether researchers could prolong or expand each cell’s storage capacity. Better understanding of how cells learn and remember exercise, where they store memories and how those memories are preserved could help improve exercise guidelines for those who cannot exercise for prolonged or consistent periods of time.
For most of the past century, long before fad diets and fancy workout trends took off, exercise was considered one of the most effective lifestyle changes to lower the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, several cancers and early death for people of all ages.
Researchers previously considered all other cells to be memoryless ; a cell responds to a signal, then returns to baseline without keeping a record of that interaction.
