Will a Faster Heart Rate make you Perform Faster?

The human heart is an anatomical awesomeness, that pumps about 6 liters of blood per minute, that's like a regular 5-liters can and 1 liter of Pepsi Cola can but for better understanding, 6 bottles of 1-liter Pepsi cola. This beautiful heart of ours can beat up to 35 million beats per year and it is cancer resistant. When I sit and think of how the heart works, it gives me these chills sometimes. How can something as small as a fist beat that much and pump that amount of blood per minute, then I ask myself, does the heart have its limit?

That question came to me after I ran a sprint from being chased by a dog. That dog event happened very fast. I went to see a cousin who lives on the island of Lagos and didn't read the notice close to his gate which showed he had aggressive dogs. Immediately I opened the gate, I saw two fierce-looking dogs coming towards me. I guess my adrenaline did the rest of the job, but when I stopped, my heart was pumping really fast and very hard.

Source

The heartbeat can also increase when people take stimulants or take energy drinks, but then you wonder, would the heart keep beating faster and faster if I keep doing these things? My honest and possibly disappointing answer for you is NO.

It is possible that you have heard that the heart is made up of cardiac muscles which contract and relaxes just like the skeletal muscles in the arm or the leg. the heart is also made up of conductive fibers, and it has chambers. You must be familiar with that, even Kinzy my cat knows that from looking at the heart picture in my room (Just joking). Unlike the skeletal system that receives impulses from the brain, the heart possesses its own electrical network which is not connected to the brain, that's why you can see it beating outside the body in hospitals or possibly in zombie movies.

The electrical system of the heart is made up of the sinoatrial (SA) node where the electric stimulus begins, then to the AV node, which then sends the stimulus to the heart's chamber muscles through the conductive fibers. Don't get confused, just see it like a battery that sends current through wires to power a bulb or something like that, I am not an electrical person, so I do not know much about bulbs and wires. That said, the electrical stimulus causes the atrium to contract and blood to fill it, then to the ventricles where the blood is pumped to the body. For easy understanding, once the blood has gone through this circle, it is regarded as one heartbeat.

Source

Sodium ion in the cell of the muscle is responsible for the action potential causing the cell next to it to open and this causes the electrical stimulus to cause a contraction. Just as you would think that if a glass of water is full, it would not accept more water even when it is under a waterfall, that is the same thing with the cells. When the sodium ion has reached its limit, more sodium won't go into the cells until it leaves the cell leading to a period known as the absolute refractory period where the heart resets causing the heart not to beat beyond what it should.

While the heart is working properly, there can be cases where there can be malfunctions where there can be accessary pathways leading to excessive heartbeat referred to as tachycardia where the heart goes at above 210bpm and up to 310bpm, that's like a car running at about 260 mph. Tachycardia in adults can begin when the heart even goes above 100 bpm, depending on the age of the adults. That's cool I suppose, you can imagine driving at such speed, you will be the king of the road I suppose. While you might have an accident later on, the heart isn't like that. You will not feel like any king, and neither will you have any form of superpowers. If you had such thoughts, you better erase them because non of those would be a reality. When your heart beats faster than normal when you have a condition, the heart would not pump enough blood to the body because the heart would not relax enough to have blood-filled into it.

So what should we expect from a person who is supposed to possess superpowers because it is beating extremely fast? First, the person would faint as a result of no blood circulating, then the heart tissue starts to die and it can get into heart failure. So while I was running and my heart was beating fast trying to pump blood to my skeletal muscles that needed oxygen to help me sprint if my heart rate continues at a higher beat, it wouldn't be pumping blood to the body anymore, rather it can be detrimental causing me to land at the hospital.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9536732/

https://www.ucsfhealth.org/conditions/heart-failure/symptoms

https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/heart

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3273956/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2669704/

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/01.RES.27.4.601

Hi, I am Tobi a writer, speaker, relationship blogger, and lover of good music. I love making friends and learning from people. Want to hear me speak on relationships and general life issues, you can find my youtube channel where you can listen and watch any episode for free, please do not forget to subscribe, friends. I sincerely appreciate every love I get from here, kindly do well to keep them coming.