you can feel your heart fighting away every time you put your hand to your chest but do you have any idea what's really going on in there or what keeps your heart ticking as it should every day your heart beats about 100,000 times sending 2,000 gallons of blood surging through your body although it's no bigger than your fist your heart has the mighty job of keeping the blood flowing through 60,000 miles of blood vessels that feed your organs and tissues food water and oxygen are essential for the existence of human life blood transports all these substances through various channels called blood vessels blood vessels involves arteries veins capillaries to keep the blood flowing throughout our body we have a pumping system and the heart is the pump which is composed of muscle that pumps blood throughout the body beating approximately 72 times per minute of our lives the human heart has four chambers the right atrium the left atrium the right ventricle and the left ventricle there are four valves in the heart these valves are tricuspid valve mitral valve a or take valve pulmonic valve these valves are one-way valves now you have seen the structure of the heart let us find out how it works the blood becomes oxygen-rich by absorbing oxygen in the lungs the function of the heart starts when oxygenated blood is carried from the lungs to the left atrium of the heart by means of the pulmonary veins the left atrium relaxes this blood is pumped into the heart when the left atrium contracts the left ventricle relaxes simultaneously the left atrium pushes the blood into the left ventricle through the one-way valve when the left ventricle tracks the blood is pumped into the aorta which carries oxygenated blood to the different parts of the body except the lungs oxygenated blood reaches the different parts of the body through the blood vessels called the arteries the arteries gets branched into capillaries which then reaches to the different organs of the body the blood and becomes deoxygenated and the blood capillaries gets mixed and form thicker blood vessels called the veins the veins carry deoxygenated blood to the heart the blood vessels that carry deoxygenated blood heart are known as the vena cava the deoxygenated blood from different parts of body enters the upper right chamber of the heart which is called the right atrium tracted allowing the blood to flow into the right ventricle which contracts with the expansion of the right atrium through the one-way valve the right ventricle then contracts pushing the blood into the pulmonary artery the pulmonary artery carries the deoxygenated blood to the lungs for oxygenation the lungs oxygenate the blood by exchanging of gases and flows back into the heart through the pulmonary vein and starts the circulatory cycle all over again