Have a Heart
Here is an interesting way to look at the long term health of your heart.
Generally the higher your fitness levels are, the less times your heart has to beat every minute. This is explained as Cardiac output, which is made up of beats per minute multiplied by amount of blood pumped per beat. As we get fitter, the number of beats per minute can decrease because the amount of blood pumped with each beat increases, therefore we get the same Cardiac output with less beats of the heart per minute.
With that fact established, let’s plug in some numbers. Let’s say a fit person’s heart beats 60 times per minute and an unfit person’s heart beats 80 times a minute. Also let’s look at these numbers between the ages of 20 through to 60, because this is the age range that most of us will try and improve our health. So;
I. If your heart beats 60 time a minute, that’s 3600, and hour, 86400 a day, 31536000 a year and 1261440000 times over 40 years. That’s approximately one billion two hundred and sixty one million times.
II. If your heart beats 80 times a minute that’s 1681920000 times over 40 years.
This means a fit persons heart will beat 420 480 000 times less over forty years.
Very roughly, with some more calculations we can see that the fitter person’s heart could beat for 53 years to reach the amount of beats the unfit person’s heart reached in 40.
The human Heart is an amazing organ, which pumps oxygenated blood around our body our entire life without fail, but remember, it is a pump, and pumps do wear out – So look after it.