Right now, your heart is pumping blood all through your body.
There are about five quarts of blood in you. It is moving through more than 60,000 miles of blood vessels. That includes arteries, veins, and capillaries. That’s pretty far. It’s more than two trips around the whole Earth! A heart works constantly. In an average life, it beats 3 billion times without stopping once. Pretty good for a muscle the size of a fist and lighter than two baseballs!
Why does it work so hard? You! It keeps you alive. Your heart’s main job is to pump blood through your body all the time. That blood contains cells and chemicals. Without them, you would die. If certain chemicals are low or missing, your body systems go out of whack. If a virus invades, blood brings an army of white blood cells to fight it. Red blood cells carry oxygen. Muscles and organs—especially the brain—need a steady supply of oxygen. After just a few minutes without oxygen, the brain begins to die.
Treat your heart right, and it will keep going and going.
