For Your Amazing Heart

It’s not that big, roughly the size of your fist, and weighs between 8 to 10 ounces. But during your lifetime, your heart performs some amazing feats of strength and stamina. Here are a few fascinating facts about this life-giving organ.

The average human heart beats 72 times a minute, 100,000 times a day, 3,600,000 times a year and 2.5 billion times during a lifetime!

In one day, your heart pumps 2,000 gallons of blood to carry oxygen to the 75 trillion cells in the human body.

Your body has about 5 – 6 quarts of blood. Every minute, your heart circulates all of this blood three times throughout the body. In one day, the blood in your body travels about 12,000 miles or about halfway around the world!

Every 24 hours, your heart produces enough power to drive a truck 20 miles. During an average lifetime, that’s enough power to drive a truck to the moon and back.

During the average lifetime, the human heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood, enough to fill three supertankers! A kitchen faucet would have to be turned on all the way for 45 years to equal this amount.

Grab a tennis ball and give it a good hard squeeze. That’s roughly the amount of force your heart produces with each beat.

Have you ever wondered why your heart goes thump-thump? That’s the sound of the four valves of the heart closing.

Your body’s blood vessels are just as amazing as your heart. The smallest blood vessels, capillaries, are about the size of human hair; the largest, the aorta, is the size of a garden hose.

The total length of all the arteries, veins and capillaries in your body is about 60,000 miles, enough to go around the world 2 ½ times!

Sources: American Heart Association, webmd, livescience.com, Mayo Clinic