The circulation of blood and lymph around your body is of paramount importance for your health, you don’t just get inconveniently cold hands and feet through poor circulation it is more involved than that.

The circulatory system is described in anatomy (structure) and physiology (function) textbooks as being a transportation system. Your bright red blood (arterial) transports oxygen, sugars and proteins to your cells and your dark red blood (venous) takes away the carbon dioxide and other cellular wastes. If you are more at home with engines it is a bit like how your fuel and exhaust system operates, any interruption to the smooth flow of fuel and waste gases causes performance problems.

So central to how we operate is circulation that all the things that make us ill or kill us do so partly or fully via the circulatory system and it is not just cell food and waste that gets ferried through our inner “canals” it is our hormones too. We all make jokes about our hormones (and those of other people) but they are really no laughing matter because without them we couldn’t grow, reproduce, have sex or many other important and interesting things.

Pretty well everything works better if you have good circulation, at the “big” end of your circulatory system  the heart pumps your blood through your blood vessels and the rising and falling pressure in your chest when you are breathing is what pumps (at a much slower rate) the lymph around your body. Lymph is partly identical to blood but is straw coloured and clear (not unlike urine) and blood is red and is thicker, both are very important to our survival as is the “tubing” that channels it, our lymphatic and blood vessels.

At the “small” end of the circulatory system are our capillaries, many so fine and narrow that microscopic red blood cells can only float up them in single file. If our largest arteries and veins (eg aorta and vena cava) are the super highways of the body the capillary beds are the lanes, driveways and internal roads of our homes, factories and shops, all the little things that make the big things work.

All of the advice and explanations that are offered in these pages relates to and affects the circulation. If you have a reasonably good imagination and reasoning powers it is easy to get an idea how things like smoking, dehydration, poor diet, flabby muscles, droopy posture and lazy lungs might not help you have good circulation.

This article relates to most of the other blogs written in bodywork, even those offering Chinese medicine perspectives on human emotion because our emotions and thoughts can effect our circulation too. If you are often angry and have a bad heart it is like you have one foot in a coffin and the other one on a banana skin, it is a dangerous luxury to have both.

If you think that you may have a circulatory disease don’t self diagnose see a doctor and think of all those tiny rivers inside of us as a beautiful wilderness that is worth protecting.