Why can’t we keep running forever? Why can’t we performs exercise indefinitely?
In: 1
First of all, Oxygen, you can’t run at your max speed forever because you’re burning through oxygen faster than you can breathe if you run at max speed for too long, you’re basically suffocating yourself. This would be what most people refer to as “Getting tired” when they run 100m at full speed and struggle to breathe afterward.
Second, Cellular Fermentation, Your body doesn’t just rely on oxygen to burn sugar for energy, your cell will perform “Fermentation” if it can’t get enough oxygen. Fermentation is a process to turn sugar into energy without oxygen but it produces Lactic acid. Lactic acid isn’t very harmful but too much of it will damage your tissue causing muscle fatigue.
With all things, energy in equals energy out.
We could have evolved to always operate where we spent all our energy as fast as we received it. But as an evolutionary advantage, our bodies learned to store energy, so that we could spend large amounts in bursts. This effectively makes us faster/stronger than we have any right to be, but we cannot maintain this peak level forever. But that does not matter, because most of the time you don’t need to be super fast/strong, just for that hour or two when you are hunting for your next meal.
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