Last Updated on October 8, 2022 by Pets Feed
But before asking the cat what their gym routine or diet is, the cat actually has very few options to be so defined.
According to person bsmith2123 who posted the image, this feline suffers from myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.
People were surprised to see the Sphynx cat sitting by the window and it looked like it could be a gorilla.
One user wrote: “I bet it purrs like a motor.”
Another said, “The cat will hold you until you submit.
A third added: “This is the cat she tells you not to worry about.”
Disease
Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy is a rare condition that causes an animal to continue building muscle even if it does not intend to.
Myostatin is a protein made by the body that inhibits the growth of muscle cells.
Most bodies are made up of mixed signals that tell us to build muscle or stop muscle from growing. It’s a balance that makes most of us look pretty normal.
However, if there are deficiencies in the myostatin protein, a person can build up most of it and appear to be exercising non-stop.
Cattle, sheep, whips and humans have all shown evidence of a lack of myostatin and it appears the deficiency can occur in cats as well, as the feline demonstrated on Reddit.
It is a fairly rare disease that only occurs when there is a mutation in a genetic process.
Popular Science writes, “We each have two copies of the gene that codes for myostatin. Inheriting a mutated copy makes you heterozygous for the gene, and animals with this model are exceptionally muscular and strong without being so overtly abnormal.
“It’s only when you’re homozygous, which means you have two mutated copies, that you become some kind of anomaly.”
Interestingly, not all that muscle is necessarily a good thing when it comes to an evolutionary perspective.
While you might think that all of these animals would have outperformed the competition, some species may be negatively affected by volume.
It’s definitely worth having just one genetic mutation, rather than the two that create all that muscle. Greyhounds and faster horses have been shown to be heterozygous in separate studies.
So while some people want to look absolutely muscular, it may be more beneficial to still have some myostatin in your body.
Images: reddit
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