The Myth of Muscle Memory

 Muscles are Dumb!

There I've said it and I'm sticking with it. Muscles are not capable of remembering anything. Muscles are simply a contractile unit that resides inside a pocket of fascia. The only thing a muscle cells/fibers are capable of is contracting and then releasing that contraction when the antagonist to it contracts. And this is all done under the control of the central nervous system (CNS). No where in a muscle--at least the one's I've studied--is there a biological memory function.
So don't worry about your muscle remembering some embarrassing thing you did at a party.

Why remember the bad stuff?

Often times the muscle memory function is attributed to a lack of the muscle's ability to relax, or what's commonly called a "holding pattern". This is where the attribution of muscle memory normally happens, the holding pattern is considered the proof of memory.
The holding pattern is normally associated with some type of injury to the tissue and an associated protection--"the muscle is protecting the the joint...". This isn't that far off the mark. What's happening is that the CNS at some point in time decided that the survival of the body was at risk and decided to sacrifice mobility for stability. And then it could have forgotten about the fact that it left the muscle cells/fibers turned on.

[Working muscle requires energy--this is why we get warm or hot when we workout. The body has a built in conservation program which will cause the fascia to change shape to assume the shortened state of the muscle--remember that a muscle is only a pocket of fascia filled with contractile fibers. This shortened fascia is one of the many types of adhesion found in the fascia. (We can differentiate a fascial adhesion from a muscle holding pattern by the presence or absence of heat. Working muscle requires energy and produces heat. A fascial adhesion use a different kind of bond.). Other adhesions can be caused by a dehydration of the extracellular matrix (ground substance) which makes up the majority of the fascia tissue matrix, allowing a hydrostatic bonding between fascial fibers...pretty heavy, eh?]

There is a sequencing of therapeutic interventions that can be applied to release the adhesion/s and reset the CNS to allow the return of normal movement. Too often this isn't followed and the therapist resorts to the "muscle memory" scenario as an excuse for the lack of muscle "relaxation". Or, it could be that the original injurious condition still remains either in a deterioration of the body or in a CNS confusion. It could also occur if the therapeutic intervention being used is causing pain which in turn causes the CNS to protect again...a vicious cycle.
More on this later.
The next time someone tells you your problem is Muscle Memory ask them how.