neuromuscular facilitation

Neuromuscular facilitation, also known as muscle memory, is where your body remembers the motor skills you perform.

the normal context of muscle memory would be your body refining your movements that it is used to carrying out daily such as cleaning your teeth. Your body knows straight away without thinking how to hold the brush, how to move the brush and how much pressure to apply without thinking.

In the weight lifting world the meaning of muscle memory is where you may take a break from training and find your body lose some mass, but when you start training again the body remembers the movement from previous training. This means that the muscle memory gets the body to regain its previous mass very quickly so the hard training needed to gain the muscle mass in the first place is not required.

There is debate whether this is true or not but I can say that I myself have had this happen to me. I stopped training for three months and lost 7 kg in mass. When i started again I found my body only needed 6 to 8 weeks to return close to the size I was previously.

If you have trained in the gym before and are thinking of starting again then you may have the luck to have Neuromuscular facilitation (muscle memory) on your side so you return to peak fitness quite quickly.