How does one build better muscle conditions in elephants?
I assume one way is varying terrain to rly work out the legs
It's a multitude of factors. Varied terrain, space to roam, social factors, having opportunities to use ALL their different muscle groups, and more.
Think, in the wild, elephants are often roaming multiple dozens of kilometers a day, moving between water, foraging, and resting areas, and even when staying relatively local due to resource abundance, they are still in motion almost constantly. They are getting up and down regularly, moving over varied terrain, up and down hills, through swamps and bogs, up and down riverbanks, etc...They're also doing all sorts of things to acquire food, pushing down and debarking trees, digging, getting down on their "knees" and tusking the earth, stretching, reaching, standing up on their hind legs, and going through all sorts of motions and forces to acquire the best and most preferential food.
They're also interacting dynamically with each other, bulls fight and travel vast distances in search of cycling cows, calves are playing and interacting with each other, cows are constantly moving the herd to where ever they need to go.
Think about how different that is, in comparison, to how life is for so many elephants in captivity. Even in spacious exhibits with varied topography, unless a solid enrichment and feeding plan is in place, there is not real incentive for the animals to move around much beyond shuffling 50 feet between their food and water sources. Lots of herds possess either only a single calf at a time, or are non reproductive altogether. There is no dynamic social structure or social excitement.
There is no real need to work different muscle groups, simply standing there and using their trunk to bring hay to their mouths is all that is needed for the average captive elephant. Many also eventually stop laying down (although this is thankfully becoming less and less common as husbandry advances occur) which further causes muscle atrophy.
