Facts About Your Heart.

Here are seven great things you probably never knew about your heart.

Many people think the heart is on the left side of their chest, but the heart is actually located almost in the center of the chest, between the lungs. It's tipped slightly so that a part of it sticks out and taps against the left side of the chest , which is what makes it seem as though it is located there.

Give a tennis ball a good, hard squeeze you're using about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood out to the body. Even at rest, the muscles of the heart work hard - twice as hard as the leg muscles of a person sprinting.

The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on the other hand are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.

The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime- that's enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.

A woman's heart typically beats faster than a man's. The heart of an average man beats approximately 70 times a minute, whereas the woman has a heart rate of 78 beats per minute.

Because the heart has its own electrical impulse , it can continue to beat even when separated from the body , as long as it has an adequate supply of oxygen.