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Your Body’s Most Important Muscle
By murray | May 28, 2009
The Heart
Ask any Hamilton Personal Trainer, Without a doubt, the most important muscle in the body is the heart. This powerful muscular pump keeps the cardiovascular system going, circulation the blood to deliver oxygen and 
nutrients to every cell in the body, while removing carbon dioxide and wastes. In the average adult the heart beats about 40 million times a year, pumping approximately 17,200 litres of blood daily through more than 100,000 kilometres of blood vessels. The heart can be separated into two functional divisions: the left and right side. The right side receives the blood when it returns from the tissues and pumps the blood to the lungs where the carbon dioxide is removed and the blood is replenished with oxygen. From the lungs the blood travels back to the left side of the heart, and from there it is pumped out through the arteries to all the body tissues.
When your body is resting, about 70 to 80 ml of blood is pumped from the heart with each beat. Since an average person’s pulse is about 60 to 70 beats per minute, the total amount of blood pumped per minute (or cardiac output) is about 5 litres. During exercise your cardiac output can increase up to 5 fold or more.
Like all other muscles, the heart becomes stronger and more efficient with regular physical exercise. Just as training with a Hamilton Personal Trainer and strengthening the muscles requires specific activities (i.e. weight lifting), the heart requires cardiovascular or aerobic exercise to improve its strength and function. During aerobic exercise, the working muscles require a much greater supply of blood to get enough oxygen and nutrients to fuel the physical activity. The cardiovascular system reacts to this situation by diverting blood away from inactive tissues like the digestive system. This makes more blood available to the heart to be delivered to the active muscles. To increase delivery of blood, the heart 1) beats faster (increased heart rate), and (2) pumps out more blood per beat (increased stroke volume). After several weeks or months of repeated, regular cardiovascular exercise your heart becomes more efficient at delivering blood throughout the body, both when you are resting and during exercise. A trained athletic heart can be 25% to 50% more efficient than the heart of a sedentary person. The heart of a person in good cardiovascular condition may work less, rest more, and therefore may last longer. A well trained athletic heart can pump the same amount of blood with 50 beats per minute that the average person’s heart pumps with 75 beats per minute. Because the trained heart is far more powerful and efficient,t. ot , it may beat an average of 6 to 12 million fewer times per year. Think of all the heart beats you will save with a program of regualr cardiovascular exercise!
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