Fitness Facts

Here are a few fitness facts you may not know!

1. The human body has more then 650 muscles.
2. Each muscle fiber is thinner than a hair and can support up to 1,000 times its own weight.
3. By the age of 65, individuals who haven't engaged in exercise on a regular basis may incur a decrease in their muscular strength by as much as 80 percent.
4. About 42% of the more than 10,000 runners who finished the 1989 New York Marathon were over the age of 40. Of these, 56 runners were over 70-years-old. The oldest finisher of the race- in 6 hours and 43 minutes- was 91-years-old.
5. Your lungs are light enough to float on water.
6. It takes only about 23 seconds for blood to circulate throughout your entire body.
7. Between birth and old age, you will walk about 70,000 miles. Walking is one of the best activities you can do to keep your heart-lung complex in good working condition.
8. Aerobic exercise is one of the best preventative medicines available and one of the cheapest.
9. All factors considered, several cardiovascular-related, physiological differences exist between men and women-- most of which place women at a disadvantage in aerobic endurance activities.
10. People with more education tend to be more physically active.
11. The heart is a hollow, muscular organ that is roughly the size of a man's fist, averaging approximately 5 inches in length, 3.5 inches in width, and 2.5 inches in thickness. It weighs about 10.5 ounces in the male and 8.75 ounces in the female.
12. Although you can't just go to a human spare-parts store to buy a new replacement body part, organ transplants take every day. The cost of a transplant to replace either your heart or lung would be approximately $100,000 each.
13. Placed end to end, the blood vessels in your body would stretch almost three times around the equator.
14. If you can't carry on a conversation while you're exercising, you may be training too hard.
15. Consistent exercise teaches your body how to be an efficient fat-burner, rather than a fat-storer.
16. If you are 25 pounds overweight, you have nearly 5,000 extra miles of blood vessels through which your heart must pump blood.
17. Muscle is the primary target organ of aerobic training. The effects of aerobic training on muscle involves the use of oxygen as it relates to energy production.
18. Research shows that cardiac rehab programs that include exercise reduce risk of death by 20 percent.
19. When you stand up, if you didn't have valves in your veins, all the blood in your body would literally fall downward, filling up your legs and feet.
20. Aerobic training improves the condition and efficiency of your breathing muscles so that your body can utilize more lung capacity during exercise.