Your heart is actually a fist-sized muscle, like your arm or leg muscles, but it does a very different job.
It doesn’t make you move, but it does move blood around your body. It has an important job because blood carries oxygen and nutrients around your body.
The heart works like a car engine, taking blood in on the right side and pumping it up to your lungs. The other side takes blood back from your lungs and around the rest of your body. Your heart is pumping all of the time – that’s when it beats, usually about once every second.
Did you know?
The human heart will pump 160 million litres of blood in an average lifetime!
