Exercising the Heart and Lungs
Article by Craig Freudenrich, Ph.D. Making the Heart Pump Harder Your heart, also a muscle, gets a workout during exercise, too, and its job is to get more blood out to the body’s hard-working muscles. The heart’s blood flow increases by about four or five times from that of its resting state. Your body does this by increasing the rate of your heartbeat and the amount of blood that comes through the heart and goes out to the rest of the body. The rate of blood pumped by the heart (cardiac output) is a product of the rate at which…