What’s your hardest working muscle?
What is the hardest working muscle in your body? The title may have given it away, but it is your HEART.[i]
It works 24/7 to pump blood to all parts of your body to provide nourishment and oxygen.[ii] The myocardium, the muscular wall of your heart, keeps your heart beating and mumps about 59ml of blood with each contraction or around 9,450L a day!. This blood goes through around 96500km of blood vessels.
Your heat beats around 40 million times a year and around 2.5 billion times by your 70th birthday![iii]
How does the heart work?
Your heart has four chambers arranged in a sort of 2x2 grid.
The top chambers are called the atria and the lower two are the ventricles.
When you breathe your lungs take in oxygen.
The right atrium and ventricle pump blood to your lungs to the lungs to pick up this oxygen.
The left side of the heart then pumps this oxygenated blood through your body.
https://youtu.be/GE0HlVTTgFc
This is controlled by the heart’s build in electrical system which controls your heart rate. It creates electrical signals which cause the atria to contract and relax which pumps the blood around.[iv]
What has this got to do with fitness?
Usually, we think that if we want to make something last longer, we should be gentle with it and take it easy. This may be true in many cases, but not so with the heart. Making your heart work harder consistently through moderate to high physical activity makes your heart stronger.[v]
Our heart is a muscle and like other muscles it gets stronger when we work it more. When we exercise, we increase our body’s demand for oxygen and nutrients which makes our heart pump harder and faster. Over time, our heart gets stronger and can more efficiently pump more blood with each beat.
Conclusion
There you go, your hardest working muscle is your heart muscle which works all day and all night to keep you alive. You can help strengthen it and make it more efficient with consistent moderate to high intensity exercise. Why not give it a go?!
[i] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-the-tongue-is-the-strongest-muscle-in-the-body/
[ii] https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/heart-health-education/how-your-heart-works
[iii] https://www.livescience.com/32823-strongest-human-muscles.html
[iv] https://www.chop.edu/pages/how-normal-heart-works
[v] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-making-your-heart-work-harder-lowers-your-blood-pressure/
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