Dr. Luc (Luke) van Loon

I mean, what are your real requirements?

Because pure on definition, if they tell me like, look, what will happen if I eat 25% less energy than I need?

then you die.

But people become healthier when they eat 25% less.

But that's something else.

That is, it's not that they end up eating 25% less than they need.

They're eating 25% less than what they're actually used to consuming.

And that's a huge difference between those two.

And that's what we often, of course, don't want to see because that makes our life more difficult.

Yeah, so the idea is that every exercise training induces stimulation of muscle protein synthesis and breakdown, so you recondition the muscle to become a better athlete in the next session and the next session and the next session.

Of course, the additional value of each session becomes less because we can't keep improving, so there's a leveling off of that adaptation.

Now, that's in short what training is, that every individual bout sets off this remodeling and the remodeling becomes more efficient over time and you become a better athlete.

Now, the muscle memory is an interesting one because then now people suggest like, okay, you haven't done anything for 10 years and then you start exercising and then somebody that actually was a very good athlete

builds up and becomes a much more rapidly increases his condition again, while the other one doesn't get the same gains.

Now, is that muscle memory?

And if there is such a thing as muscle memory, where is it residing?

Now, that's difficult because then you actually, there's a lot of explanations.

One, it could be genetics, that that person was already more active in the past because he was more prone to being a better athlete.

That's a possibility.

Secondly, that there's also something neuromuscular, that somebody picks up the exercise much easier and then gets bigger gains.