 All right. First question is from Waiko. Is muscle memory a real thing? Yep. 100%. I think it just seems like it, because it's a weird name, why people question it. How does your muscle actually have memory? It doesn't make sense. It has its own brains in there. Yeah. So if you've ever had a broken arm or leg or sprain that you've had to wear a cast on or a splint for weeks or maybe a month or longer, and then you know when you take it off and you look, we've all experienced this. If you've had a broken leg or arm or whatever, you take the cast off and most people, if they've never seen this before, are shocked when they look at their leg or arm. It's like so skinny, right? The muscle's totally atrophied because you weren't able to move. Yeah. Down regulates. Right. But then when you're starting to rehab and move, you find that the muscle comes back super fast. This is an evolutionary trait. It allows our bodies to kind of get back to where they were before, so we could get back to living our lives. And this is true if you build muscle too. If you train and build muscle and then you lose it, it's much faster to regain it than it was the first time around. Yeah. Do the muscles just shrink down? Obviously, you're not really getting rid of muscle cells. It's just that this is more of a central nervous system thing where then now it responds again and then makes it a priority. Well, wouldn't it be like, isn't it, it's more so like it's a neurological pathway that's been established and been connected very well. And so that still remains the same. The atrophy happens because you're not sending the signal for it to adapt anymore, so then it shrinks down. But then because the pathway has already been established really well, the minute that you decide, hey, I'm going to go back to lifting weights again, it remembers that instead of having to learn that. Like if you've never done a squat, there's a lot of stuff going on a neurological level, the body learning how to communicate in order to perform that. Once you've done that for hundreds, thousands of times, you've now established that pathway. Once you learn to ride a bike, you can ride a bike forever type of deal. You may not have ridden a bike for 10 years, but you get back on, your body remembers how to do that right away. I would think that it's a very similar adaptation process for building muscle, again, is that you've established a pathway, a very strong pathway. Even if you stop lifting weights, sure the muscle atrophies because you're not sending a signal that you need muscle and it's an expensive tissue, so it shrinks or whatever, but then the pathway still is there. That communication has still been established. Yeah, there's a few theories. That probably plays a role. Then the other thing that they've observed is when muscle cells grow or hypertrophy, the number of satellite cells in muscles increases. These satellite cells are important. They play a role in muscle protein synthesis, which is the fancy term for building muscle and recovery. Now, when you shrink that muscle, those satellite cells don't go away. If you increase the number of satellite cells through the first round of building muscle, but then you atrophy muscle, although the muscle fiber gets smaller, those satellite cells stick around, so then when you go and lift weights again, it's primed to respond faster. I mean, no joke, it might have took me years to gain 15 pounds of lean body mass on my frame working out, like years. It might have took me five years of consistent, hard, good training to gain 15 pounds. I could stop working out and lose that 15 pounds in a very short period of time, six months to a year, especially my diet was bad. I'm sure that 15 pounds would be gone. If I started lifting weights again, what took me years before would take me months. I could very easily rebuild that muscle in a very, very short period of time. I remember when I had shoulder surgery, as an adult, I had my AC joint resected a little bit on my left shoulder. I had to wear a brace or a cast or whatever. When I took it off, it was like totally atrophied. My shoulder was atrophied. My arm was atrophied. My pec was atrophied. All the muscles that helped move the arm were totally, totally weak and skinny. I started working out and lifting weights. It literally within a month or a month and a half, all that lost muscle flew back on my body. This is the good news for people who, because I've gotten this from clients, like, oh, if I work out and build muscle and I stop when I lose it, which, yeah, of course you will, but it comes back faster because you gained it the first time. No, this is for all you young lifters that are just getting started or in the first couple years of lifting. This is the exciting part, is it does get easier. It gets much easier as you get older. The more you've been doing this, the longer you've been doing it for, the easier it is to maintain muscle mass or rebuild it. I just had this conversation with Katrina literally yesterday. I was getting out of the shower and she was making a comment about how much my body's changed just in the last two weeks. She goes, it frustrates me sometimes to see how quick you can change. I was explained to her, so you can understand that I barely got her really strength, like programming, strength training, right the last five years. Sure, she was an athlete and she exercised and she did a lot and she was in shape most of her life, but she hasn't been like really strength training until like the last five, six years of our relationship. I said, you've got to know that I've got over 15 years, damn near 20 years of real consistency and some like a lot of hours in the gym of lifting. It was a long grind for that first decade to get to a point, but now that I've gotten to that point and I've gotten all the way up to where I've been 230 pounds and single digit body fat, my body has got used to that. So even when I fall way off, lose all kinds of muscle, it doesn't take very long. If I adjust to a diet, I get back in the gym and start training again, my body remembers it comes right back. Yeah, I was always telling clients this because it gets so frustrated and they're like new to the experience of lifting weights and it's like, you can't be so hard on yourself. You literally, that's all dependent on how long you've been in the gym and training your body and these patterns. So the more like you train your body and these patterns, the more hard wire it is, the more it, the quicker it responds. Once, you know, you've been off for a bit, you come back. That's still a loud signal that all of a sudden gets turned back on. So yeah, when you get to the point where you've put so much work in, now you have to do is maintain that's the ideal place to be. Yeah, as an adult now, it is like, it is so easy to maintain, you know, a 200, 205 pound physique, relatively muscular, relatively lean, super easy. Oh, it took my whole life to hit 200 pounds. It took forever. Oh, when I was younger, I remember the first, you know, when I was, I was like, I had to fight to stay above 200 pounds and the, anything out, if I was just off with anything, I'd shrink really quick. But now that I've maintained that for so long, it's easy. It's actually a piece of cake. I don't have to work out nearly as much or as hard to maintain the muscle that I've built through the years. And there's something called muscle fiber hyperplasia. This probably happens after years and years and years of consistent intense training where muscle fibers actually, you actually increase the number of muscle fibers you have. So although muscle fibers shrink and grow, once you increase the number, the evidence suggests that the number of muscle fibers never goes away. So if you had that muscle hyperplasia going on, and you've been training for a long time, that makes muscle memory even more of a powerful thing. And I've experienced this with clients. I've had old, I've seen old clients who are in their seventies who had a long history of strength training and then stop for decades. And you can still see it. You can still see it. Well, Ben Pacolski, he's an example of this. I mean, we talked about that. That was one of the first things that we theorized with him when we were off air talking. He's like, this dude has literally, he was trying to, trying to lose a hundred pounds of muscle. He was like, literally fasting, not eating hardly anything forever, not weight training for a long time. And he still looks jacked, you know, but that dude has put so much time under the iron for so long. And for sure, he's probably built a bunch more. Oh, you look at my dad, my dad's hands and his forearms, just permanently strong and muscular, just because he's been working with them for, for, since he was a kid. So yeah, the longer you stick with it, the easier it is to maintain, which is, which is great news.