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
I don’t think there are any animals other than dogs, which have been specifically bred, that love running around for fun. Maybe you could name an example and that would clear things up more.
Perhaps domesticated pets (especially dogs and cats) might like “exercising” as part of play, but any wild animal out in nature is doing its best to not waste any more calories than necessary to support its life. Even the “play” of young wild animals is actually training for the future rather than exercise for its own sake.
As for humans, perhaps most people hate certain exercises, but probably nearly everyone could find some form of exercise they actually enjoy. I dislike just running, but I have no problem running several kilometers in a soccer game.
Humans typically do enjoy movement. Exercise generally releases endorphins.
However, individual humans may not enjoy individual movements. Some people love running. Some people hate it. Some people enjoy lifting weights. Some people hate it. Biking. Soccer. Judo. Etc. there is individual preference. Similarly, various animals of individual species have also shown preferences in activities.
I think what people actually hate is pointless busywork, and exercise is exactly this; running nowhere, lifting heavy things and then putting them back down, etc…
If the exercise comes during something else, i.e climbing a mountain or labouring on a task, then people probably don’t care.
> 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.
I think it basically comes down to our options for entertainment. If a horse could remain stationary and receive dopamine from watching TV they would probably do it, and might even abscond from more difficult tasks in order to seek easy pleasure.
Lions spend most of their times either asleep or trying to sleep
They are still fast and strong because they were born like that
Their lazy state is already incredible, if they trained more they would be much strongger
Human natural state is just not as strong
Read “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding”
by Daniel Lieberman. Humans AND animals are trying to conserve energy as much as possible. We now know that we need to exercise to stay healthy, so many of us try to, against our instincts to be lazy.
Humans have a complicated relationship with exercise. Unlike animals, we’ve got all these distractions, plus it’s often painful. A lot of us just want the easy way out!
In a nutshell, we were built to live very different lives than we do today.
When surviving was the name of the game, spending any energy that didn’t net you food, shelter, mating, etc was just a dangerous waste of calories.
We evolved so that fatty, calorie-packed foods taste good for pretty similar reasons. Lots of calories = energy = survival. If you ran out of energy before you could hunt or gather your next meal, or spent significantly more calories than you earned from that meal, you were in trouble.
Now, as some people have already pointed out, there are circumstances in which humans do enjoy exercise. It releases endorphins, so it’s not a clear cut “bad” thing to our brains. However, the lack of motivation that you see in people is often driven by this, our bodies or “lizard brain” generally won’t prompt us to go and spend precious calories unless it gets us something.
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