The cells would consume more energy, so you'd need more food, so in conditions of food scarcity (i.e. 99% of our [pre]history) you would be at a severe disadvantage as your tribe would starve to death in conditions when more efficient homo sapiens would still survive.
There are other cell types that have a strongly increased amount of mitochondria like brown adipose tissue. They also don't have a "need" to perform some work constantly.
As with any cell function how much work mitochondria perform is highly regulated. Just because you have a lot of them doesn't mean you can't turn their function down.
Nadia Commenci was recruited as a gymnast at age five because she was too active and breaking the furniture at home. She made the first ever perfect 10 score in the Olympics. They didn't have a way to display it. It got displayed as 1.00 because they only had three spaces on the sign.
Her best friend became a professional ballerina.
I have heard that Chuck Norris does two workouts a day and if he skips one, he makes everyone around him crazy. If he does two per day, he's calm, cool and collected and fine to be around. If he doesn't, welp, he can't sit still and he can't control his mouth and he bounces off the walls and everyone can't stand him.
I also talked about the addiction process and mitochondrial function in a different comment.
> I have heard that Chuck Norris does two workouts a day and if he skips one, he makes everyone around him crazy. If he does two per day, he's calm, cool and collected and fine to be around. If he doesn't, welp, he can't sit still and he can't control his mouth and he bounces off the walls and everyone can't stand him.
this is a common theme among people who do lot's of sports. I did plenty of marathons, trail competitions in my time and a day without exercise felt like absolute agony mentally. There is probably also a psychological effect from missing the routine. Most sports addicts I know (including and especially body builders) have the problem of not giving their body enough recovery time between workouts causing them to actually perform less well, etc
I have a son that I put in gymnastics when he was a child. One of his teachers basically told us "Put him on Ritalin" because he never sat still in class. ADHD had already been ruled out, so this "Let's skip diagnostics and go straight to just drugging your kid for my convenience" attitude really pissed off my husband.
If he was exhausted enough, he occasionally sat still. So he was in gymnastics for a time and, when he was younger, I just made sure to take him to the park and stuff a lot so he could run around some every single day. Otherwise, there was no hope he would actually sleep.
> this is a common theme among people who do lot's of sports. I did plenty of marathons, trail competitions in my time and a day without exercise felt like absolute agony mentally.
And then along comes coronavirus, and the privation for exercise addicts while under quarantine is so much less than what many are experiencing, but it's real—and no-one takes "it's hard not to exercise" seriously.
Top endurance athletes do specifically targeted workouts which significantly increase their skeletal muscle mitochondria density. They don't appear to have trouble resting; rather the opposite.
Endurance athletes do not routinely exhaust themselves during workouts. Instead they work out to build mitochondria (among other goals). Hence the popularity of polarized training programs. Exhaustion impairs proper rest and recovery. Your suggestion is not consistent with what we see happening in humans.
They don't remain endurance athletes by skipping workouts for months on end. I've seen articles where some body builder got the flu, couldn't workout for a week or so and lost significant amounts of muscle mass, like 25 pounds.
You develop capacity like that, you use it or lose it.
And maybe I'm not making my point very well, but everything I've seen in life suggests such people do have a real need to workout regularly. It's not a "nice to have" for them. It's a "must have."
There was even a woman who was eventually diagnosed with a genetic disorder whose disorder had long been de facto managed by her very active lifestyle.
But I'm going to step away from this discussion. It's starting to look like a pointless pissing contest and that's not really my cup of tea.
Losing “water weight” is a thing. Boxers do it as part of their weight management before their weigh-ins. When I am well-hydrated I lose ~1.5 lbs of water weight just by sleeping (by weighing myself before bed and right when I wake up). If I take a piss it’s an even 2. And we lose a lot of body fluids when we have the flu.
That wouldn’t account for all 25lbs (which is a significant sum to be losing in a week — is that even factual,? Did this guy weigh 350 lbs lean?), but it could account for a good amount of it over the span of two weeks if he was really sick and also not eating well due to lack of appetite, diarrhea, sore throat, etc. How quickly did he get his weight back? Did he lose any significant amount of strength?
The flu is not the same as being out of the gym for a week. Although we do know that you will begin to lose incrementally more and more muscle mass the longer you’ve been out of the gym, being out of the gym for one week shouldn’t lead a bodybuilder to lose 25 lbs, and sometimes it’s even part of good training strategy to take a one week break from the gym to let the nervous system recover, which gets taxed just like the muscles do.
Src: I studied Biological Science at university
Also, during my histology course when we covered different muscle types, we discussed the topic of fatigue in cardiac tissue, but I remember being left with a feeling that we didn’t really know the underlying physiology yet (this would have been nearly a decade ago) but the main arguments were that cardiac muscle is not the same as skeletal muscle, whose differences can be seen under a microscope, and that the heart has enough time to recover when it’s not contracting.
Here’s a similar question — does the esophagus ever get tired? How about the diaphragm? Do you ever get tired of breathing?
I really don't remember the details and the original article may not have listed weight loss. It may have listed inches around his biceps lost.
I just remember it being hyped a bit concerning "yeah, he looks amazing -- but you can't take a break at all because when he had the flu, he saw crazy declines in a short period of time." I want to say a week, but that could be wrong.
I'm seriously bad with remembering names, titles, etc.
I also remember a friend who took up weight training after giving birth. She said she lost four inches around her waistline and only lost four pounds because muscle mass is generally heavier than other tissues.
I've had similar conversations with other women who were trying to lose weight or otherwise work on their physique. Some are downright disappointed by such results because they are looking for a specific number on the scale.
Sort of tangential: I knew a woman who quit smoking. Smoking suppresses the appetite and meets oral needs. People who quit often take up snacking as a substitute and their weight shoots up.
She said she would weigh herself and cry and her husband would basically talk her out of taking up smoking again because she was so upset at the weight gain.
Anyway, my mind organizes info its own way and I'm not always happy about it and it sometimes gets me into all kinds of social hot water because it sounds like crazy talk to other people. So this is probably not going to get better from here.
It isn't physically possible to lose 25 pounds of lean muscle mass in a few weeks. That's off by an order of magnitude, check the energy and mass balance calculation.
But frequent exercise is certainly a "miracle drug" in that it effectively prevents or treats a host of different medical and psychological conditions.
Edit: I will add that I am also, no doubt, basing it off of background knowledge about cell function. For example, mitochondria change and develop greater capacity to process X if you consume a lot of it, which is part of the addiction process and part of why withdrawal is a thing. If you consume a lot of, say, alcohol, you need to ramp down gradually so that the body can make changes at the cellular level to adjust to the lesser amount of alcohol and this is part of why cold turkey is so very hard and it is generally recommended that you taper off.
I used to ask smart people with PhDs and the like a lot of questions about cell function and read what I could get my hands on that could be followed by a lay person because I have a genetic disorder that impacts cell function.
Non-repetitive weight lifting wouldn't be a good example, but neither is anything in 10s of km.
Mitochondria produce ATP as energy. You can't store much¹ ATP, therefore mitochondria must be capable of producing ATP at your near peak output (say 10s average).
I'd look at anything with high >10s peak power (probably a bonus if it's aerobic). Many bodybuilding exercises would qualify.
¹ Lactic acid is a byproduct of ATP production, therefore ATP supplies surely last less, than what it takes to start producing lots of lactic acid.
