There are several factors as to why I predict that the heartbeat will increase in a smoker and a non-smoker. Due to the toxic chemicals such as nicotine and tar that are found in cigarette smoke your heart rate will increase, this will cause your blood vessels to contract. The tar, which is found in the cigarette smoke, irritates the air passage and Carbon dioxide then reduces the ability of blood to carry oxygen through the bloodstream. I predict that the non-smokers heart rate should be smaller during exercise as they have a healthier more effective heart. Oxygen is easily pumped around the body this reduces the amount of work that the heart has to do therefore decreasing the pulse rate.
Plan:
The resting pulse rate will be taken and recorded for both the smoker and non-smoker. The heartbeat will be taken by placing your two middle fingers on your wrist were your artery crosses with the bone. You must ensure that you do not use your own thumb as this contains a pulse itself.
The results will then be recorded of the resting pulse rate and placed into
my results table.
One-minute star jump exercise will begin.
When the star jump exercise is complete I will then record the heart rate every minute using a stopwatch, until it returns to it’s original resting pulse rate.
Key Factors: In order to make my experiment a safe one we had to follow many obvious rules by making sure that the area we used was open and away from other people to avoid injury to others. We made sure that proper footwear was worn and that shoelaces were tucked in. The same and even surface area used each time. Through out the exercise several safety rules have to be followed.
Analysis: After reviewing my results, which are displayed in the graph, I have come to the conclusion that my prediction was correct. As we can see from my graph the smoker’s heartbeat is much higher this is because the heart has to work much harder to pump oxygen around the body. The smoker’s heartbeat is roughly ten times greater then the non- smokers, this does decrease as the pulse rate returns to normal. I can see that both heartbeats reach a peak after one minute of exercise. I notice from my graph that both pulse rates return near enough to its original resting pulse rate. The non-smokers heartbeat does increase and become stronger as it has to transport more oxygen and carbon dioxide to and from the muscle cells. Although the non-smokers heart is working hard we can conclude from the graph that the smokers pulse rate is working much harder.
Evaluation: From my result table I able to conclude that although due to time restrictions my results are accurate apart from one, this is the first result from the smokers pulse rate after 3 minutes of exercise. I think that my method that I used was successful and accurate as only one of my results were anomalous. An improvement, which I could have made, was spending more time on the exercise. I found the practical easy as it was simple to do but I found the writing up of the experiment much more difficult,
