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.
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.