How The Heart Pumps Blood

How exactly does the heart pump blood and manage to keep you alive?

From the video above you can see how the normal heart pumps blood throughout the heart into the lungs; which keeps you alive and living every day, without even having to think about it! Amazing right?

So what exactly is the pumping of the blood called?

Blood pressure.

Blood pressure is a force that sends the blood through the circulatory system. Women normally have a lower blood pressure then men tend to do. Although, textbook perfect blood pressure is 128/80 depending on who you are, and what your blood pressure ranges, it could be a little different and thats okay. If your blood pressure does tend to get really high or low, they have certain medicines that can regulate it. The higher it is, the more your heart is working to get the blood throughout your body. This is not a good thing!

Before we get started here is a picture that shows what is going on and explains each part of the heart!

So lets talk about HOW blood flows throughout the body.

The heart consists of four chambers. Two atriums, and two ventricles. The atriums are found in the upper part of the heart and the ventricles and the two lower chambers. These chambers are what pumps the blood through the heart and into the blood vessels. The chambers are also split into two different sections: right and left. They do this for the purpose of where the blood goes into. The right side of the heart pumps blood into the lungs, and the left side pumps blood into the rest of your body! (So you can imagine that the left side is a LITTLE bigger (: )

Your body contains about 5 liters of blood and your heart pumps it all through your body about 70 times per minute! Therefore, this means that the heart has to go through one cardiac cycle in .8 of a second and afterwords take a slight rest! That's a whole lot of work for one organ in the body to do! Basically in .8 of a second the right and left atria contract, the right and left ventricles contract, and the atria and ventricles rest. The period of time that the heart is resting is when it allows the blood to drain from the ventricles because it is not contracting (this is called diastole). When your heart contracts, to get the rest of the blood from the atria to the ventricles, the ventricles are contracting to push the blood throughout the blood vessels (This is called systole). This cycle repeats, and repeats every second of your life!