What this means in terms of training is that your muscles know the blue print to your tai jutsu, even after several weeks, months, or years of inactivity. Of course, the longer the amount of time that has passed, the more time it takes muscle memory to recover.
On average, even after injury, you will notice your muscle memory within five weeks. Each week you can expect a different interplay of muscle strain, inflammation, and frustration. During the first week, your body will not respond as you intend it to. You may experience pain from lack of activity; you may also experience headaches as a result of muscle inflammation. This is a good week to apply hot or cold packs as necessary. It is IMPARITIVE that during this week your training is preceded and followed by extensive yet non-strenuous stretching. During the second week, you can increase the strain level of your stretching and the duration of your training sessions, but it is not yet time to "push it" (it’s not even a Good Idea). The third week you should set a regular routine that challenges your weaknesses while accommodating them. By the fourth week, this routine should approach your ideal training goals (for a light to medium training regime) even if it still falls short. By the fifth week, you will know which areas (of your body) still need time to recuperate and which areas you can start to push or play with in training.
The five-week recovery is not set in stone: some injuries don’t take much time to heal, and some take many months to heal. Also, if a return to training occurs many years later, it may take much more than five weeks to regain previously acquired skills, and to accommodate changes in muscular structure that have occurred.
After a certain level in this art, it is possible to go several years without any formal training and retain fluent tai jutsu. However, this takes years to learn, and results when your training practice melds into your daily life, outside of "training". Mental inducement of memory or states of mind/mood takes time to learn as well, but the process of discovering how to do so is part of the process of transforming training into naturality.
Once your training becomes your nature, you cannot lose it, or forget it. If you are injured, you will compensate for your weakness without compromising the integrity of yourself as an entire structure. This process takes decades, and is subtle, layered, and constantly becoming more so. This is why the masters of our art appear later in life; there are so many things to learn, and each of them take time, and while you can know them all and practice them all the time, it still takes decades for that to be reflected in your being. Hence the wizened sensei; hence many years between shodan and mastery.
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