From what I've been taught, the pumping of the blood involves the heart and the muscles in the extremities. So, when a man runs or walks, the muscular contraction of the extremities add to the pumping mechanism of the heart. Also, the Arteries and arterioles are arranged in parallel, rather than serial fashion, reducing the stress on the cardiac muscle. When the human body is most immobile (sleeping), he is in supine position, which also limits the stress on the cardiac muscles, as gravity need not be overcome in supine position. The veins in man has valves to trap blood from back flow; varicose veins result from the venous valve malfunction. Arterial blood is shunted via pressure gradient in the system; so, vasodilation and contraction efficiently direct blood to necessary areas. In case of cardiac arrest, CPR can circulate blood through the body to supply necessary oxygen to affected areas. It may not be too far fetched to assume that the cardiac muscles alone can pump blood to needed areas when man is not active.
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Thank you so much for the response! You seem to be much more versed in the psychological processes of the heart. I would love to know your opinion then on this paper http://www.rsarchive.org/RelArtic/Marinelli/, it gets into a lot of the finer details of my claim!
"It may not be too far fetched to assume that the cardiac muscles alone can pump blood to needed areas when man is not active."
The article claims:
I would love a critique as I'm in the process of formulating my opinion on the matter. Enquiring minds need to know :)
I will read the article, but from reading the excerpt, I think the author is of the assumption that all muscle fibers uniformly contract at a given moment. Cardiac muscle structure is an interesting anomaly; it is a skeletal muscle, like those in our extremities, but is not under conscious/voluntary control (which makes sense, since we would have people dying daily because they forgot to start their heart!). The voluntary skeletal muscles in our extremities can lift quite significant amount of mass with only 10-20% synchronous muscle fiber contraction. The Olympic athletes can recruit 30-35% of synchronicity in their skeletal muscle fibers voluntarily.
The cardiac skeletal fibers likely are operating at much higher synchronicity (someone should do a study on the synchronicity of cardiac muscle fibers). There are reported cases of women who lift automobiles to save her child; a phenomenon explained by increased synchronicity of skeletal muscle fibers. Of course, if we all operated at 100% synchronicity, we would need to be constantly eating, so I think 10% synchronicity to survive is a good thing.
I think the synchronicity of muscle fibers, rather than the size of the organ, may explain the incredulous power of the organ.
Fantastic!! I love this. Thank you for taking the time to write this up! This to me adds so much more depth to the story. It's much more complex than the definitions I was finding of a heart that just pumps blood by force through tubes (essentially). This makes the whole process much more fine-tuned synchronism and beautiful. Also, explains how blood flows prior to heart development.
Astonishing! You just expanded my mind :) Thank you!
Side thought. This fits in perfectly with me redesigning my fitness routine. For some reason this gave me the idea that I will need to be employing more synchronistic flow of movements in my fitness opposed to rigid uniform movements I have used in the past... Not sure why this connection was made, just was!
It seems like you will be incorporating some Chi-gong type routine. I think I saw a documentary about "internal" vs "external" kung-fu techniques on youtube, where "internal" techniques involve energy flow and such. I think the "internal" method utilizes synchronous recruitment of skeletal muscle fibers described in terms of energy flow, but it could be something entirely different and I am imputing my framework unjustly.