Your Amazing Body

We live in it 24 hours a day for a lifetime and yet we know more about our cell phones and how to program our TV so we don't miss our favorite show than we do about our own body. Here are a few of the amazing things that your body accomplished just today.

Your heart beat anywhere from 60 to 100 times every minute

Imagine doing biceps curls at that pace! That’s about 100,000 times a day—and up to three billion times in the average person’s life. What’s also very impressive about the heart is its ability to adapt to our lifestyles. During a vigorous workout, more than 70 percent of the heart’s output fuels your working muscles, for example, compared with just 20 percent while you are less active. You have about 100,000 miles of various blood vessels, laid end to end, and your heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through them every day. 

You breathed 25,000 times—without trying 

If you had to consciously choose to breathe that often, you’d never get anything else done. Or be able to sleep. So thank your brain stem for making the habit of breathing automatic. Curious why you need to inhale and exhale so often? Well, humans have a very high metabolism; at rest, you demand about seven to ten ounces of oxygen each minute. And your lungs are perfectly designed to handle these truckloads of oxygen. They contain about 300 million microscopic air sacs called alveoli, which provide the surface area roughly equivalent to half a tennis court to bring oxygen into the body while releasing carbon dioxide.

You produced about six cups of saliva 

Yes, that’s a lot of spit, but saliva is one of the body’s most underappreciated fluids. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to taste or swallow food. Or form words. Saliva is also a potent germ fighter: Its enzymes clean your mouth and prevent tooth decay and infections. No wonder animals lick their wounds.

Your kidneys cleaned and recirculated almost 50 gallons of blood

That’s about three times as much as a medium-size car’s gas tank would hold. To fully appreciate the wonder of the kidneys, which form the most high-tech filtration system you’ll ever encounter, all you have to do is look at someone on dialysis due to poor kidney function. People need a machine about the size of a mini fridge to filter their blood, adjust electrolyte levels, and get rid of waste, while your body accomplishes this without any fanfare using two small organs, each about the size of a computer mouse. Your kidneys also help maintain the proper level of hydration. When you’re drinking a ton of water, they excrete more, turning your urine a clear or pale yellow color. When you’re dehydrated, they cling to as much fluid as possible, so your urine becomes more concentrated, making it look darker (like apple juice).

Like any other machine the body does break down for a lot of different reasons. Our goal at COR 619 is to help educate you and then motivate and guide you to avoid the main stressors that start the downward spiral which leads to an unhealthy life of disease and sickness.

Thanks for reading our blog. If you have any questions on this or any other health and fitness subject please email us. Also, if there are subjects that you would like us to cover we want to make sure we cover them in future blogs. 

Steve & Paula Dibbins
cor619fit@gmail.com