I know a lot of people like it, but it’s not nearly as common as it is in other animals. All other animals I can think of actively seek out and enjoy things like running, jumping ect. It seems to come naturally and be painless while for us it takes training and pushing through pain. Why? How? Does it hurt them too but they don’t care or?
In: Biology
> All other animals I can think of actively seek out and enjoy things like running, jumping ect.
Well, no, they actually don’t much of the time.
Humans like many other animals evolved in an environment where starving to death was a very real danger. Avoiding death by predators or lack of resources was the main focus of daily life, so our instincts and biology reflect that.
Muscle is very useful in that it allows us to perform significant physical feats, but it is also a resource-intensive tissue to maintain. Having a lot of muscle mass will increase the calories burned every day, so an animal that is all beefed up to fight some predators or sprint like crazy is also at increased risk of starving to death when times get tough. Our bodies then try to adapt to a balance of “just enough muscle to get by” and then devotes any excess calories to building fat that can be burned in times of insufficient food.
These days of course we have plenty of food to go around at all times, and we would really prefer to have excess muscle and very low body fat. But our bodies are still adapted to the times when having too much muscle and too little fat will kill you in short order, so we generally feel like being lazy and cultivating mass.
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