Chest pain can be a worrying symptom. Most chest pain is not from the heart and a good description helps your doctor to work out what is going on.
People have heart pain when the heart muscle is short of oxygen.
This occurs in two main situations. Angina is pain experienced when the blood flow to heart muscle, is insufficient to supply enough oxygen. Because the artery is not completely blocked there is usually enough blood getting through when the heart is not stressed, so there is no pain at rest. On exercising, eating a meal or going out in the cold weather, the heart has to pump harder to keep up with the body's demands for oxygen. At this point the narrowing in the artery becomes significant and the heart muscle cannot get enough blood to nourish it with oxygen.