Muscle Memory 101

What It Is and How to Build It

*Disclaimer: I’m going to be talking about gaming a fair bit here as that’s what got me to do this deep dive in the first place, but the concepts stand for any skill-based physical activity — from learning guitar to learning how to dance.

I picked up my first fightstick a few weeks ago and, to put it lightly, the experience was humbling. The first few days I felt like I had feet for hands. Combos I’d been able to do on pad I dropped regularly, air dashes would never come when I wanted them to (mostly play DBFZ and some Guilty Gear), and supers were sketchy at best on the square gate. Then, the strangest thing happened, seemingly overnight my stick game got significantly better.

Do I still drop combos and fuck up supers? Absolutely. Do I do so nearly as often? Not even close.

The odd thing, however, wasn’t that I was getting better, it was how much faster I was getting better compared to when I’d first started playing fighters on pad. This sent me down a rabbit hole on muscle memory. I already knew what it was in a general sense, and that you built it by repeating a task over and over, but that was where my knowledge on the topic both started and ended. I wanted to know more. How the body and brain changed when you worked at something over a long period of time, why once you mastered something (like riding a bike) you never seemed to forget it, and of course how to develop muscle memory as quickly and efficiently as possible.

After a couple of days of research and reading, I decided to collect everything pertinent I found in one place and write it up in case anyone else was interested.

That being said, I’ve gone ahead and broken this article up into two main sections. First, what muscle memory is exactly and second, how to create it as quickly as possible. I’ve tried to keep this pretty short, but if you find it too long-winded and just want to see how to optimize your learning, go ahead and skip the next section. If you’re at all interested in how your body and brain change when you learn a new skill keep on reading.

What is Muscle Memory

Muscle memory — contrary to its name — is not stored in the muscles. It’s impossible for human limbs to truly remember things on their own. That being said, it is true that once you learn and practice a physical skill it becomes progressively easier to perform until you can do it, for the most part, without consciously thinking. Better yet, these skills tend to stay with you long after you’ve learned them. Riding a bike is the most common example, but the phenomenon applies to other activities as well, such as playing an instrument or picking up an old video game you used to love. Sure, you may not be as adept at the activity, but you’re definitely not starting from ground zero and with significantly less practice than the first time you learned the skill you can generally pick it back up rather quickly.

The reason for this is twofold. First and foremost, when you learn a new physical activity, the structure of your brain physically changes. As you come to master a skill, different portions of your brain begin to build connections via tissue called white matter. In MRIs taken of people learning to juggle, for instance, researchers discovered that after training juggling “there was an increase in the white matter connections between regions of the brain responsible for vision and regions responsible for making movement” [6]. Or, in other words, the brain began to change itself to develop greater eye-hand coordination.

This happens across the board whenever you learn a new skill. Your brain figures out which sections of your body need to communicate more closely and does what it can to facilitate that by building more pathways between them.

However, this isn’t the only part of your brain that changes when you learn a new skill. Grey matter, the brain tissue responsible for actual processing, also begins to grow in conjunction with learning a task. In another juggling study, it was shown that after practicing there were “increases in the grey matter parts of the brain…involved in the processing of visual information about moving objects” [6] which likely allows for the brain to more accurately process information on moving objects — in this case juggling balls.

The second reason we retain a given ability is likely due to the structure of the muscles themselves. In 2012 a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology showed that unlike previously thought even when muscles shrink, they stick around. As you practice an activity, and your body begins to grow stronger in the places it needs to maximize success you naturally put on muscle in the most used areas. This happens because the body promotes increased growth of muscle cells in the region. It was once thought that the reverse happened if a given activity was stopped — that the cells would die off and that picking up the activity again would require your body to re-grow the cells from scratch. However, this isn’t the case.

Rather than disappear, the cells simply shrink [1]. Then, once training in the activity resumes, instead of growing more cells again from scratch, the body simply allows the shrunken cells to expand. This is why it’s easier for an athlete to regain lost muscle they had years prior. The infrastructure to support the muscle mass is already in place.

While admittedly less so in video games, this phenomenon is exceedingly important for retaining skill in physically gated activities such as climbing or dancing where in addition to technique, a certain level of specific strength is necessary to reach proficiency. It’s why professional athletes are able to return to a competitive level of play a few weeks after recovering from a debilitating injury. Even if they lose muscle mass, the number of cells hasn’t actually decreased, and it takes far less energy (and time) for the body to grow cells than to both create and subsequently grow them.

Maximizing Muscle Memory

Speeding up muscle memory development is — admittedly — not a well-studied subject. While there are thousands of articles online (mostly targeted at musicians) that detail anecdotally proven methods for learning faster, I could only find a small handful of actual scientific studies. With that disclaimer being in mind, it appears that there are five key points when it comes to learning a task as quickly as possible:

1. Correctness
2. Focus
3. Duration
4. Variation
5. Rest

Correctness is likely the most obvious and well-known tenant on the list — you learn what you practice so you must practice correctly to learn a given skill. This generally means taking things slow and gradually speeding them up. While musicians do this a lot using a metronome the same can be done in video games. TheDoctorBlue, for instance, has a fantastic YouTube series that applies rhythmic theory to Dragon Ball Fighterz and walks you through learning advanced combos using a similar approach. He begins at 25% and slowly ramps up the tempo until you can pull the combo off in game.

Focus too is probably not surprising. If your mind begins to wander as you’re practicing, and you start dropping combos and fudging inputs more often than you’re nailing them you aren’t really getting much out of your practice session. This ties in tightly with duration — the next point on the list. It’s much better to have multiple, shorter focused practice sessions throughout the day than a single massive one where you constantly tab away from the game and pull up YouTube or Twitch.

The Pomodoro Technique is based on this. Invented in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo to help with efficiency, the technique uses a timer to break working sessions into short 25-minute intervals punctuated with 5 minutes of rest [7]. Each 25-minute work session is approached with a specific task in mind. Applying this to games — especially fighters — is absurdly easy.

Simply, pick a combo or a motion, set a short timer and just repeat it until the timer goes off. Take a small break, and then repeat with another thing you’re trying to learn. If 25 minutes is too long to focus, try 20, if that’s still too long, reduce it to 15, etc. until you find the sweet spot — a time where you end a minute or two before you lose the motivation to keep going. This advice was given to me by a guitar teacher years ago and has proven to be one of the most important keys to learning a new skill in my experience.

If you keep working yourself to the point of frustration with every practice session, you’re going to wear through your discipline rather quickly. Each session will become lowkey torture, and before you know it, one day off will become two, then three, then a week, a month, etc. If you stop yourself early however — when you still have the drive and excitement to keep going — you’ll skirt around this problem entirely. You’ll be excited to grab your stick (or pad, or hitbox) and work on whatever you’re trying to learn.

Ideally, every portion of your practice should end at a point where you still have the drive to continue.

Regarding variation, the next point on our list, a fairly recent study from Johns Hopkins discovered that by introducing slight changes to your practice sessions you can actually double how quickly you learn a task [2]. While traditionally people preach repetition until your fingers bleed this line of thinking — to quote the study — is incomplete.

“‘For skills to improve, we must update an existing memory with new information,’ the researchers conclude. If you practice the exact same thing the exact same way every time, you’re not layering much new knowledge over what you already know.” [5]

While you will need to invariably repeat something to learn it correctly, instead of doing the same thing over and over you should change up your routine and throw in similar activities that do not directly match the one you’re trying to learn. This could mean picking up a new character, or even a new game that uses similar inputs. It wasn’t hitting the lab in DBFZ that ended up fixing my IADs and quarter circles it was picking up Guilty Gear and messing around in Street Fighter V.

Not only was learning new games a low pressure way to get practice on the stick as I didn’t have an old point of reference to compare my performance to, but it was a good way to get exposure to movements I’d need across the board in almost every other game I play. This holds true at even higher levels.

Just look at SonicFox and how quickly they pick up pretty much any character in every game they play. They’re absurdly talented (there’s no doubt about that) but their malleability and ability to learn a new game or character almost instantly is in no small part due to the wide breadth of general knowledge and exposure they have to fighting games in general.

Finally, we reach the most important point on the list: rest. This is hands down the easiest, most glossed over, and ignored way to enhance performance. Good sleep can increase your learning speed exponentially.

When we try and learn something new, our brain replays the memory sequence over and over in our subconscious. During REM sleep, the same happens but roughly 20x faster [8]. Studies have shown that after a good night’s sleep, you can come back the next day and be 20–30% better at a task than you were the day before.

Furthermore, during sleep, our brain takes new information from the day and makes concerted efforts to tie it to older information stored in our memories. This ties into variation as if we give our brain a wide spectrum of similar memories to make associations with our learning will speed up as more associations are made.

It is important, however, to note that sleep is intelligent. It doesn’t improve the places where you’re already good at in terms of motor skills. Instead, it targets the places where you have motor skill deficits and works on improving them until they hit the same baseline as other similar skills [8]. This is one of the reasons beginners improve so quickly. All of their execution is subpar and so during sleep, their brain focuses on bringing it up to speed with the rest of their motor skills. It’s also a reason why it becomes increasingly harder for people at an advanced level to have rapid increases in skill.

Even with that caveat in mind, sleep is still an absurdly powerful tool. It’s when the majority of processing gets done [8] and in essence, ties everything you’ve learned that day together.

While there’s no guarantee that getting a solid 8 hours a night will make you the next Evo champ, there is evidence that getting less than 7 impairs your brain function which is definitely counterproductive when maximizing muscle memory.

Anyway, I honestly hope you found this helpful or at least interesting. I know it was long-winded in portions, but it’s a subject I found myself fascinated by and one I fully intend to keep diving into. If you have any suggestions on more sources I could pick through on the subject or even just some personal anecdotes on what practice strategies worked for you, please let me know. I’d really like to learn more about muscle memory development and visit this piece again in the future.

Sources

[1] Bruusgaard, J. C., et al. “No Change in Myonuclear Number during Muscle Unloading and Reloading.” Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 113, no. 2, 2012, pp. 290–296., doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00436.2012.

[2] Celnik, Pablo A. “Want to Learn a New Skill? Faster? Change Up Your Practice Sessions.” Johns Hopkins Medicine, Based in Baltimore, Maryland, 28 Jan. 2016, www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/want_to_learn_a_new_skill_faster_change_up_your_practice_sessions.

[3] Chodosh, Sara. “Muscle Memory Is Real, but It’s Probably Not What You Think.” Popular Science, Popular Science, 6 June 2019, www.popsci.com/what-is-muscle-memory/.

[4] Gundersen, Kristian. “Muscle Memory and a New Cellular Model for Muscle Atrophy and Hypertrophy.” The Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 219, no. 2, 2016, pp. 235–242., doi:10.1242/jeb.124495.

[5] Ingraham, Christopher. “Researchers Have Discovered a Much Faster Way to Learn New Skills.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 29 Apr. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/12/how-to-learn-new-skills-twice-as-fast/.

[6] Johnstone, Ainslie. “The Amazing Phenomenon of Muscle Memory.” Medium, Oxford University, 14 Dec. 2017, medium.com/oxford-university/the-amazing-phenomenon-of-muscle-memory-fb1cc4c4726.

[7] “Pomodoro Technique.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Sept. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique.

[8] Rogan, Joe, director. Joe Rogan Experience #1109 — Matthew Walker. Joe Rogan Experience #1109 — Matthew Walker, YouTube, 25 Apr. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig.