eli5: why do we need to workout to be jacked, why cant our bodies make us naturally shredded
In: 90
It costs your body a lot of energy to maintain the gains. Your body likes to be very careful with how it uses it’s energy. Unless you convince it that you’re going to be doing a lot of strenuous physical activity all the time, and so you need that muscle mass, it won’t make the less-energy-efficient option. (That option is growing muscle and getting jacked.)
Maintaining large amounts of muscle mass is a massive energy drain, requiring large amounts of calories.
In a society where food is often scarce, like we evolved in, maintaining lots of muscle is a disadvantage if it’s not needed.
So, your body will only build muscle if it thinks it’s needed.
It’s inefficient to have all that muscle if you aren’t going to use it. Our bodies want to store energy, that’s why we get fat. It’s counterproductive to burn calories if it’s unnecessary.
Our bodies are designed to adapt to the situation/environment we are in.
When you need to lift heavy weights on a daily basis the body adapts to make things easier for itself: you develop muscles <- the muscles are an adaptation, not the status quo.
When you don’t need to lift weights anymore, there is no need for the body to put energy in maintaining those muscles so your body downsize to whatever is necessary at the moment.
This doesn’t apply just with muscles. Something similar happens with runners: they need more oxygen due to their training so the body adapts and the blood volume increases over time. When they take a break from running the blood volume returns to normal.
Because of two factors:
* Building and even just maintaining existing muscles uses a ton of calories. A jacked athlete’s muscles would burn thousands of extra calories a day just sitting on the couch vs a non-muscular person.
* We evolved in an environment where calories were scarce and unpredictable, so it was dangerously wasteful to be carrying more muscle than you absolutely needed.
So that’s the system we developed – your body will develop an amount of muscle that matches how much strength you seem to typically need. It adds more muscle if it’s getting used to full capacity often enough, and will remove muscle that’s not getting used for the sake of energy savings.
The answers are mostly because of energy costs but in that case, why are some people naturally more muscular?
Depends on your definition of jacked, I guess. Plenty of people can get Shredded by just eating well and working out moderately. I’d consider otter mode jacked in this example.
Along with the other comments, it’s also useful to keep in mind that humans are evolved to favor endurance over muscle strength. Even a ‘weak’ human has muscles that can far outlast many animal species, and some human hobbies like running or even walking marathons would be literally impossible for most other species to perform safely.
You can see exactly the opposite in cats (small or large). They’re evolved to be naturally very muscular and strong for their size (including housecats, which is why they can climb so well), but have very little endurance to the point that they sleep most of the day and are basically unable to perform long chases.
Large muscles are a body’s response to a stress, in an attempt to adapt.
Large muscles use a lot of extra energy, and we evolved to be able to conserve as much energy as possible. That is why it is so easy to gain weight and so hard to lose weight.
Your body is constantly trying to optimize energy usage, and if the muscle are not needed, it will shrink them.
Jacked and shredded are very different descriptors.
Jacked is big muscle. Shredded is visible muscle.
The real answer is that you just have to watch what you eat and your statement may be proved untrue with the right genetic specimen.
I grew up with a buddy that lived his 20s eating top ramen for dinner most nights, played videogames and worked in a bar. He had a 6pack always because he avoided sugar primarily. Didnt do soda or energy drinks and was always super cut.
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