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Imagining exercise can strengthen muscle

Gondwanaland

Senior Member
Messages
5,092
This past night I dreamt I was riding a tall monocycle
2347845-clown-riding-an-unicycle.jpg
and woke up with PEM/fatigue :grumpy:
 

Mary

Moderator Resource
Messages
17,335
Location
Southern California
Allegedly :

Scientists discover just IMAGINING exercising can make you stronger, tone your muscles, and delay or stop muscle atrophy

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...r-tone-muscles-delay-stop-muscle-atrophy.html

PEM free GET?

I think I'll mentally jog down to the shops and grab some essentials:)

I think I'll imagine my house clean! :D (I hated house cleaning before I got CFS, still hate it but can't do it any more, and so hate having a dirty house - ya can't win!)
 

alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
Allegedly
That was my first thought when I read this several days ago.

This conclusion is probably bogus, given that a huge research base already exists and has other conclusions.

I looked into this idea nearly two years ago when I broke my leg.

Muscle strength may have nothing to do with their claim. In prolonged limb immobilization the brain connections that govern limb use atrophy. What they showed is that activating these pathways keeps them from atrophy for a bit longer. So the basic data is probably right, but the interpretation is probably bogus.

Prolonged immobilization will weaken a muscle, but the brain dysfunction is by far the most damaging. You can recondition muscle fast (unless you have something else wrong like ME) but the brain rewiring is hard to fix if it atrophies too much.

I have not read the full paper, so I don't want to state more. However I am extremely dubious about the claim.
 

picante

Senior Member
Messages
829
Location
Helena, MT USA
Prolonged immobilization will weaken a muscle, but the brain dysfunction is by far the most damaging. You can recondition muscle fast (unless you have something else wrong like ME) but the brain rewiring is hard to fix if it atrophies too much.
I went to a very talented and educated physical therapist about my low back pain, and this is what she found -- missing muscle-brain connections. Every exercise she gave me was designed to reconnect the brain wiring, as well as spare my energy stores. (Almost all of them are lying-down exercises.)

I have heard that babies dream about performing physical movements before they do them. It's why they spend so much time sleeping. (How on earth would anyone figure that out, though?)

When learning Argentine tango (or any other dance), it really helps to go over a sequence mentally. Over and over. The students who don't retain anything new from a workshop (most of them) are the ones who don't do this. Here today, gone tomorrow.

The brain is fascinating. When I was 16, my French teacher gave me a novel to read over the summer. I started dreaming in French. When I took Russian in college, French kept popping out of my mouth initially. When I taught college French, some students had interference from their first second-language. The brain just goes right into second-language mode, once it knows that mode. N'est-ce pas, @Gondwanaland?