Here are some facts about your heart you may not know.

- When you place your hand over your heart, where do you put your hand? Many people put their hand on the left side of their chest. The heart is actually located almost in the center fo the chest, between the lungs. The bottom of the heart is tipped to the left, so you feel more of your heart on the left side of your chest.

- Hold out both your fists. Your heart is about the size of both fists.

- 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.

- When feeling a pulse, what you feel is the blood stopping and starting as it moves through your arteries. The average pulse rate for an adult is 72 beats per minute.

- 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 human body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute. In one day, the blood travels a total of 19,000 km (12,000 miles) – that’s four times the distance across the US from coast to coast.

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

- Lub-DUB, lub-DUB, lub-DUB, sound familiar? If you listen to your heart beat, you’ll hear two sounds. These “lub” and “DUB” sounds are made by the heart valves as they open and close.

- Your system of blood vessels – arteries, veins and capillaries – is Over 60,000 miles long. That’s long enough to go around the world more than twice.

- An adult woman’s heart weighs about 8 ounces, a man’s about 10 ounces.

- Blood takes about 20 seconds to circulate throughout the entire Vascular system.