Nowadays, health and fitness are all the craze - anyone who spends any decent amount of time on social media would have undoubtedly come across some sort of health and fitness content by chance even if they are not directly following health and fitness accounts. Build your body this way, look after your body that way, make your body - you get the point. There is a lot of information available on how we can make our body’s healthier and fitter. But, what exactly is our body?
Making sure we start from the start, we thought we would begin our quick bits on health, fitness and recovery by focusing on what we are actually trying to look after. Now, the human body is a massively complex organism, so we are just going to cover the highlights - the really interesting or juicy information that makes us, well ‘us’.
First off, think of your body as a collection of systems - with each system working together to help keep us going. Kind of like all the cogs in a watch. There 12 main systems which keep us functioning on a day to day basis - from making sure our hormones are in check, to keep all the vital nutrients which we need working their way around our body and even down to making sure that we don’t keep any toxins in our body for longer than our body would like.
All of these systems sync and keep us going from one day to the next, and just in the way when a cog in a watch goes, so the watch stops. If you face any major health issues with a particular organ/system, don’t ignore it and do the proper recovery - you never know how far the implications of it can spread.
Working down from our systems, we have our vital organs - all 5 of them. Think of these as the ‘protect at all costs’ organs. They are:
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Our brain - basically where all the magic happens. Our brain acts as the central computer for our body and keeps everything in check;
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Our heart - remember how one system kept pushing all our vital nutrients around our body? Yeah, we can thank our hearts for that as they keep pushing nutrient-rich blood to all the right places;
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Our kidneys and liver - whilst these organs have an array of functions, particularly the liver, they both primarily aim to clean up the toxins within our bodies and make sure they exit the body before doing any unnecessary damage;
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The lungs - take the all so important oxygen from outside our body’s and into our blood whilst also making sure that the Carbon Dioxide that is in our blood is removed and expelled from the body.
Those are the basics and the really important parts, but our body also has some pretty interesting facts - some which are fascinating and mind-blowing, to say the least:
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At birth, we have about 300 bones - but as we grow up some of these bones fuse together leaving most adults with roughly 206 bones.
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There are over 600 muscles in the human body - yip, from breathing to talking (which uses 72 muscles on its own) to walking, there are a huge number of muscles working together;
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There are 230 movable and semi - movable points in the body (so when someone complains of joint pain, there are lots of places where they could be in pain!);
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Human bones are as strong as steel but roughly 50 times lighter;
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Muscles make up roughly 40% of healthy adults body mass.
So there are a few quick facts about the human body - you are a lot more impressive than you thought! Make sure to stay tuned to the blog as we start to focus on individual areas of the body and how you can keep them healthy - meaning that you are healthy, and a healthy human is a happy human!