Heart how much blood

The left ventricle pumps the oxygen-rich blood through the aortic valve out to the rest of the body. How does my heart maintain its normal function? To do this, your heart needs to: Regulate the timing of your heartbeat. Your heart's electrical system controls the timing of the pump. The electrical system keeps your heart beating in a regular rhythm and adjusts the rate at which it beats. When the electrical system is working properly, it maintains a normal heart rate and rhythm.

Problems with this electrical system can cause an arrhythmia, which means that your heart chambers are beating in an uncoordinated or random way or that your heart is beating too fast tachycardia or too slow bradycardia.

Keep your heart muscle healthy. The four chambers of your heart are made of a special type of muscle called myocardium. The myocardium does the main pumping work: It relaxes to fill with blood and then squeezes contracts to pump the blood.

After pumping, your heart relaxes and fills with blood. The muscle must be able to relax enough so that it can fill with blood properly before it pumps again. The health of your heart muscle affects both its contractility and its ability to relax, both of which determine whether your heart is able to pump enough blood each time it beats.

Problems with the contractility of your heart can be caused by problems with the muscle itself such as a viral infection of the heart muscle or an inherited heart muscle disorder or by problems with the blood supply to the heart muscle such as reduced blood flow to the heart muscle, called ischemia.

Your heart muscle needs its own supply of blood because, like the rest of your body, it needs oxygen and other nutrients to stay healthy. For this reason, your heart pumps oxygen-rich blood to its own muscle through your coronary arteries.

As a kid, your resting pulse might range from 90 to beats per minute. As an adult, your pulse rate slows to an average of 72 beats per minute. The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose.

Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair. Your body has about 5. This 5. In one day, the blood travels a total of 19, km 12, miles —that's four times the distance across the US from coast to coast.

The normal heart is a strong, muscular pump a little larger than a fist. It pumps blood continuously through the circulatory system. In a year lifetime, an average human heart beats more than 2. The circulatory system is the network of elastic tubes that carries blood throughout the body. These blood vessels carry oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood to all parts of the body. These are the blood vessels that carry oxygen- and nutrient-depleted blood back to the heart and lungs.

The heart has four chambers through which blood is pumped. The incredible things we know about your heart and blood. Share using Email. By William Park. Your brain might stake a claim to be the most complex object in the Universe, but your heart and blood are pretty fascinating too.

William Park rounds up some intriguing facts. Your heart pumps a lot of blood Your heart is an incredibly hardworking organ. How much blood does my heart pump in a year? But why have different types? Why not have one universal blood cell make-up?