Amazing facts

Ever tried squeezing a ball repeatedly for a couple of minutes? Your arm muscle will soon tire and if you do it too long, you might even have a stiff arm the next day.  Your heart muscle does this same amount of work every single minute of your life, about 70 times each minute, even when you’re sleeping.

By the time you are 70 years old, your heart will have beaten over two and a half billion times, pumping blood over 19,000 km every day, which is the same distance as flying from London to Hong Kong and back.

In a day, your heart pumps around 7,200 litres of blood, which would be enough to fill a small paddling pool.

Unlike the octopus that has three hearts, we only have one and while it’s only about the size of a mango, it does an incredible job.

The heart beat sound you hear comes from the valves inside your heart opening and closing as they allow blood to flow into the different chambers of the heart in a strict sequence.  Listening to a heart beat can be very soothing and many people wonder at the sight of an unborn baby’s tiny heart beating on a scan, the first sign of new life.

A baby’s heart is very small and beats faster than a grown up’s at around 120 beats per minute. But one of the fastest heart beats out there belongs to the humming bird – 1,200 beats each minute as it flaps its wings furiously to hover near that nectar–rich flower.