Did you know that the average heart pumps an astonishing 2,000 gallons of blood per day, and that your heart is the hardest-working muscle in your body? Did you also know that you have a “second heart” in your lower legs that helps in this Herculean effort?
In this blog post, Dr. Satjit Bhusri and the vascular team here at Upper East Side Cardiology want to dive into how blood travels through your legs and whether exercise can help you avoid or minimize varicose veins, which affect nearly one-third of the general population.
The entirety of your blood circulates around your body three times every minute, and your heart is the primary muscle that’s propelling this amazingly fast movement. But your heart does get some help, especially in those areas of your body where gravity and distance make the job a little tougher.
We’re talking about your feet and lower legs, where calf muscles help push your blood back up toward your heart. Each time you take a step, blood pushes up from your foot and into your calf, where muscles keep the blood flowing up to your thighs and then into your body.
This system is so integral to your circulation that we often refer to the muscles in your lower legs as your second heart.
Now let’s quickly look at how varicose veins form in your lower legs. In most cases, these veins develop because of faulty valves in your veins that don't close all the way, which allows blood to spill backward. This blood engorges the vein and sends it toward the skin’s surface.
If we connect the dots between what we’ve learned so far, it makes sense that stronger calf muscles might be able to keep blood flowing in the right direction — up — to get rid of varicose veins.
Unfortunately, this is not the case — once varicose veins form, they’re there to stay, unless you have us remove them. That said, we don’t want you to throw in the towel on exercise.
For starters, exercise is a great way to prevent future varicose veins as you strengthen your calf muscles to keep the blood flowing in your lower legs. As well, exercise can also temporarily reduce the appearance of varicose veins as blood pumps more vigorously through your legs.
So, we feel that a great solution is this: Come to us for some quick vein treatments to get rid of existing varicose veins. Once your legs are free from these veins, get going on your exercise program to boost your second heart so that varicose veins are less likely to form down the road.
To schedule your vein treatments, we invite you to contact the Vein Institute in our New York City office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Click here, or you can call us at (212) 752-3464.
