MUST YOU STRENGTHEN YOUR HEART

  Amar Nath Mukherjee

We appear into this world along with a costliest possession, about which we do not have a clear idea or understanding of its working; We know quite well about our Bank Balance and about our Properties that we have in our possession, the total quantity of Jewellery that we keep in our Bank’s Locker but we do not know or have a scant knowledge about the functioning of our Heart; because of that we are just not in a position to take care of our most valuable possession “The Heart”.

If we can get to know the answers of the following questions only then we will be able to increase our awareness level, consequently we will be able to take care effectively to maintain a healthy heart by adopting necessary changes in our lifestyle and our food habits.

The questions are as follows –

1.         Since when our heart starts beating?

Heart starts beating when we are about two & half months’ old in our mother’s womb (in foetus stage).           

2.         How many times it beats per day?

For a normal adult the heart beats on an average 72 times per minute which is equal to (72x60x24) about 104000 times in a day.

3.         What does it do by beating so many times?

Basically heart is a muscle pump and in every beat it squeezes about half cup i.e. about 70 ml of oxygenated blood in the aorta (the main artery of the body supplying blood from the heart to circulatory system).

4.         What is the physiological impact of heart beating?

While the blood delivers oxygen to the trillions of cells in our body, it also carries nutrients obtained from our food intake (small intestine), over and above the circulating blood acts as a detergent which cleans up toxins viz. metabolic waste, carbon dioxide etc.

As stated above, the heart is squeezing about (70x104000) seven thousand five hundred liters (approx.) of blood in a day to perform the above mentioned activities i.e. to deliver oxygen, enriching body cells with nutrition and cleaning of waste materials from our body.

5.         How it is functioning (modus operandi)?

Our heart is performing this enormous job even before our birth till this day without any perceptible interruption. When we sleep it does not stop its activity. It will only stop to herald the end of our biography.

6.         What are the advantages in its way of working?

Since heart is a forcing pump, propelling the blood into the arterial network and the skeletal muscular activity is essentially required to get blood back to the heart and here the muscles act as a sort of muscle pump.

In view of the above there are two distinct advantages of the heart –

a)         It does not have to do both the functions i.e. forcing out then suck in for return which results in heart getting half second of rest in between the two strokes – Systolic and Diastolic. During diastolic phase heart muscles relax and allow the chamber to fill with veinous blood. If it were otherwise i.e. doing forcing and suction both, our life span would have been halved.

b)         The other advantage of heart is that it gets half second of rest in between two strokes, therefore in a day it gets about 14 hours of rest (in 100000 beats or 50000 seconds or 833 minutes or about 14 hours); consequently heart works for 10 hours and its total resting time is 14 hours.

7.         What are the disadvantages?

The heart is the strongest muscle of our body and the leg muscles are the largest muscles (quadriceps) as a result our leg muscles largely contribute to the transportation of our veinous blood back to the heart. That is why they are termed as our second heart in our circulatory system.

Hence our cardiac function is heavily dependent on the skeletal muscle pumps of the legs for the return journey of the blood to the heart and this is the heart’s disadvantage.

8.         What needs to be done for its hassle free

            working?

How to make our circulatory system hassle free as far as possible? Before going into the details we must consider the following facts –

Our skeletal muscles are voluntary whereas the cardiac muscle (heart) is involuntary, i.e. it cannot be worked out as we do in our skeletal muscle, hence it is to be worked out indirectly to make it strong. Now what is to be done about it? By certain activity we have to increase the demand of oxygen in our system and the moment the increased demand is created our heart will automatically respond by increasing the cardiac outputs whereby the demand of additional oxygen is met by augmenting higher volume of oxygenated blood as desired.

This is possible only when we engage ourselves in some form of aerobic activity like Brisk Walking, Jogging, Swimming, Skipping etc. Basically aerobic activity is a kind of language with which we tell our heart to augment supply of oxygen by squeezing out higher volume of blood in our circulatory system.

For example, when our heart is beating normally i.e. about 72 times per minute and in each stroke about 70 ml blood is squeezed out, that results in about 5 liters (70x72) of blood is being circulated per minute.

Now with aerobic activity heart beat is increased to about 125 to 130 times per minute. Consequently about 9 liters per minute will be the rate of blood circulation.

Therefore, higher the volume of blood circulates in our body the basic function of the blood which are earlier stated, will reach at its peak.

Throughout the day about 7500 liters of blood passes through our blood vessel.

By our regular aerobic activity we can gradually clean out the scum/atherogenic deposits from the blood vessel.

Our body also tries to increase the HDL level which effectively cleans LDL deposit in the arteries. Arteries become flexible which reduces the chances of Arteriosclerosis.

The aerobic activity increases the strength of our heart muscles. This is the only reason why long distance runners/racers have a very low resting heart rate, which is as low as 40 times/minute. Their heart forces about the same volume of blood which an ordinary man’s heart does it at 72 times per minute.

The inference is that if we keep our heart strong we can make a healthy living.

Bibliography:

1.         Anatomy of Hatha Yoga, By Dr. H. David Coulter

2.         Yoga Self Taught, By Andre Van Lysebeth

3.         Know Your Body, By Dr. J.D. Ratcliff

4.         Heart Health, By Dr. Robert Ascheim & Dr. Deborah Ascheim.

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