Let’s get straight to the point: muscles have no memory that controls their activity. Muscle memory (more properly, movement memory) resides in the brain, a product of brain-conditioning, i.e., learning.
Patterns of muscular tension result from that conditioning, acquired by learning and by incidents of injury and/or stress.
Think about it: muscles act in patterns of coordination. How can any one muscle control the activity of other muscles? What would be the mechanism? Willpower? Telepathy? And without the ability of a muscle to control other muscles, how could their activity by synchronized in coordinated movement?
No. Something must centrally control and regulate all muscles to enable coordination, and that something is our nervous systems, the seat of movement memory.
Whether learning to walk or to dance, if you want to change muscle memory, or movement memory, you have to do it by training your nervous system — and if you’re stuck in a tension pattern from an injury, you have to do it by training your nervous system — by un-learning the dysfunctional pattern and learning a healthy pattern of function, i.e., healthy movement.
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Completing Your Recovery from an Injury
learning coordination with somatic exercises