MUSCLE MEMORY - TRUTH OR FICTION?
Muscles don’t have individual consciousness and therefore cannot have memory. Only one animal I know of is the exception to this rule and has brains in each limb - it’s one of the many ways that an Octopus is almost an alien life form. Yet ‘muscle memory' is one of the most often used phrases by shotgun coaches both game and clay so it must mean something, surely?
To unpack what is going on when we practice a particular action (several things are happening at once) we must realise that the simple fact that we get better at a particular action the more we practice it has been known about for millennia. Gary Player the Golfer summed it up nicely:
"I was practicing in a bunker down in Texas and this good old boy with a big hat stopped to watch. The first shot he saw me hit went in the hole. He said, “You got 50 bucks if you knock the next one in.” I holed the next one. Then he says, “You got $100 if you hole the next one.” In it went for three in a row. As he peeled off the bills he said, “Boy, I’ve never seen anyone so lucky in my life.” And I shot back, “Well, the harder I practice, the luckier I get.”
Muscle memory as a concept is not without its detractors. I once watched a respected coach snap back during a discussion with other coaches when the phrase was offered “How many times?” he exclaimed, "Muscles don’t have memory!” What he meant by that is easy for anyone who has played any sport or indeed spent time in a gym to understand. Namely that regularly doing a physical activity means the muscles employed not only grow, but also become more efficient at the task. This increase in size and stamina has obvious consequences for your performance - you get better. But what our stroppy coach might not have known is that it goes far deeper than that.
It takes a beginner some time to get up to a level of performance. When you have some time off an activity or sport you will find that it takes less time to get back up to the previous level than it did to learn it, even if the break has been a substantial one. The muscles themselves may have reverted back to normal size, or become out of condition for the task, but that may not be as big an issue as you might think. After all, you don't forget how to ride a bike.
New research leads us to believe that the increase in muscle cells and their performance during the learning phase of an activity like shooting, has an echo if these muscles are then allowed to atrophy through time away from the gun. Muscle cells are different from others in the body in that they contain more than one nucleus. The bigger the muscle, the more ‘myonuclei’ they contain. The myonuclei hang around despite the fact that the muscle cells they belonged to may have degraded through inactivity. This driving force that all cells contain, may spark back into life as it is stimulated by your renewed practice. This is one reason we can get back up to a level more quickly than it took to learn it.
Learning to ride a bike is an episodic memory that requires certain muscles to perform tasks in a sequence for it to work. This memory and its relation to your balance (a key part in bike riding and shooting) does not come from the muscles themselves even if their size and stamina may be a factor in their performance. This is a recipe for success that comes from the brain.
While different muscles have the ability to flex and relax extremely quickly to get a gun swinging, and they receive their nutrients to do it from the blood stream, the electrical signals that are also necessary come from specific parts of your brain and travel through the central nervous system (CNS) to the necessary muscles. The stronger the electrical signal, the faster and more accurately this takes place and the better you will shoot.
These electrical signals generated in the motor cortex of the brain travel from the brain through the CNS to get our feet to move, our gun to mount and our body to begin its whole motion that constitutes a good gun swing. Remember all of this is a response to the information our eyes are transmitting for processing to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain about the movement of the bird. If you look at it this way, there is an awful lot to do in a very short space of time. It may give you an edge if these signals are as fast as possible.
Repeated practice of our gun mount stimulates the establishment of these neural pathways as we are learning to shoot like water flowing over rock. Not only that, but once they are established, the axons of a nerve cell that transmit this signal over distance through the CNS have a protective sheath made of myelin. This fatty substance acts as an insulator in the same way as the covering on an electrical cable. Without it, the strength of the electrical signal becomes weaker and you won’t shoot as well. More practice ensures this sheath is maintained by our bodies and the signals are protected.
Happily for us carnivorous shooters, a diet with a generous content of animal fats helps in the repair and production of myelin which ensures that the pathways we have worked so hard to establish, remain. It has also been recognised that Vitamin D is essential to the proper function of the cells that repair the myelin sheath - the oligodendracytes. Our best source of Vitamin D is summer sunlight and the NHS website suggests that most of us are deficient in Vitamin D in a British winter through no fault of our own. The NHS website also suggests that red meat and oily fish are good sources of Vitamin D and that we might also consider a supplement in winter.
So is muscle memory a useful term? In part, yes. It is an easy-to-understand phrase that sums up and a great deal of complicated information into one bite-sized chunk. It might not be entirely accurate, but if we look after those aspects of our brain and train to improve them, our accuracy might just improve.