Although we might think that we have other very strong muscles, the truth is that the strongest of all and the most important is the heart. A muscle with an extraordinary capacity, capable of generating energy throughout the day to move a car for 20 miles and capable of pumping up to 5 liters of blood every minute.
Throughout our lives our heart will beat about 3,000 million times , since it is one of the few organs that we have that never rests. This is thanks to an electrical system that controls the speed of our heartbeat, which beats 115,000 times a day.
Pure energy
The heart is a source of energy, a muscle full of power. Over 24 hours, about 100,000 beats will be able to pump about 8,000 liters of blood . This incredible muscle begins beating long before we are born, in our mother’s belly, which already contains incessant beating of the heart.
If our heart were a fountain, for example, thanks to its energy the blood would reach up to 10 meters in height.
And is that the heart performs the greatest physical work of our body pumping every day at a speed of about 1.6 meters, and throughout our lives we could fill 1.5 million barrels of blood.
A fine-tuned network
The heart uses a network of connections thanks to the capillaries. There are 80,000 kilometers of connections within our body that serve so that the heart, when pumping blood, reaches any corner of the body.
In addition, to maintain a healthy heart, it is necessary to oxygenate it. This is achieved by increasing the blood vessels in our body. Exercising is a good idea to oxygenate the heart, and if we do it while listening to music, our blood vessels will increase in diameter by up to 25%.
That does not stop beating
The heart is one of those organs that can never stop beating. If this happens, the rest of the body will end up shutting down forever. It weighs between 200 and 450 grams and is the size of a perfect closed fist.
It is such a perfect muscle that even outside the human body it can continue to beat due to the electrical impulses it generates.
Increasingly fragile
According to the World Health Organization, 7.2 million people die each year from heart disease . The problem is that during the last century this figure has been increasing, especially in the more developed countries.
Poor diet, sedentary life and habits that are unhealthy are making the heart become increasingly fragile. Estimates suggest that this figure will rise to 23 million deaths a year in 2030.