Equipment: Stopwatch - for timing the length of time for each exercise
Skipping rope – for completing the exercise
Method: The equipment will be taken to level ground, and my pulse will be taken for
1 minute and recorded. Then the 1 minute of continuous skipping will be
completed at an average speed of one jump per second, and the pulse rate
immediately taken after the time for 15 seconds, multiplied by 4 and
recorded.
There will then be a rest period of 3 minutes, before the exact same timed
exercise will take place, straight after the pulse has been taken after resting.
The process of measuring pulse rate, followed by exercise and then
recording pulse rate again, will be completed once more for 1 minute of
skipping, and then carried out for 2 and 3 minutes of skipping exercise.
Again, each time will be repeated three times to create an accurate average
and all results will be recorded in a table.
Fair Test: For this investigation, we have decided to make it a fair test by making
sure that the following points are true;
I will average 1 jump per second when I complete the skipping. This is so
that my speed will stay regular and my style will stay constant.
Throughout the experiment, I will stay as the person doing the exercise,
and Sona will time and measure my pulse. There could not be a fair change
because everyone has individual characteristics which could affect the
results i.e. resting pulse rate.
We will repeat each exercise 3 times, so that we can record accurate results
and get an average for the different times.
After the exercise is done, there will be a 3 minute rest period to lower the
pulse rate back to its resting state. This enables us to record accurate
results for measuring the effects of exercise on pulse rate.
When recording the resting pulse rate, we will time it for 1 minute every
time, because this gives the exact average beats per minute for
the person. After the exercise, we decided that we will time the pulse rate
for just 15 seconds, and then multiply the number by 4, as this is just the
right amount of time as for the heart rate not to decrease.
Hypothesis: I predict that with the increase in time when the exercise is completed,
the pulse rate will also increase. Although, because skipping is an
aerobic exercise, I also think that as you increase the amount of time,
your body anticipates the amount of exercise being done and starts to
become used to the increase in pulse rate and can cope with it better.
Whereas, for smaller amounts of time, your body carries on working
harder to deal with the stress because it does not know how long you are
going to carry on, and so anticipates that you need the increased amount
of oxygen.
Results:
The two graphs below show the pulse rate before and after exercise;
From these two graphs and the one on the previous page, we can see that exercise clearly does have an effect on pulse rate, as it has risen considerably compared to the resting pulse rate. When the amount of time was increased for the skipping, the pulse rates varied quite a lot. We expected that the pulse rate would increase more steadily than the results have shown, because although the highest rate was for 3 minutes of activity, it also showed one of the lowest rates of the experiment.
For the graph that shows the increase in pulse rate we can see that there have been some anomalous results. We found that when the skipping was completed for 2 minutes, there were big variations in the increase in pulse rate. It ranged between the three attempts from 43 to 86, which was quite unexpected as we thought that there would be a lot more steady increase.
I think that the reason for the varying results, is that the stress that the body was under was not art all anticipated during the exercise as expected. This, in my opinion is slightly strange, but our results prove that we had some very unexpected results. But looking at our results from an overall perspective, they did to a certain extent agree
with my prediction. Pulse rate was definitely affected by the aerobic exercise, and did increase by a decent amount, and the pulse rate did not rise by a large amount when the amount of time was increased to 3 minutes, which is what I predicted.
Our method for testing the prediction was suitable, and the experiment worked well and produced enough information in order for us to analyse. The anomalous results that we witnessed actually helped me to come to different conclusions and were not bad results for us to have.
To improve the experiment to get some more reliable evidence, I think we could have maybe used some more varied times for testing the effects of exercise on pulse rate, in order to get more constant results to analyse. But apart from that I think that the experiment that we carried out worked well enough, and gave us some interesting and varied results. To extend the investigation, we could have changed another variable to help get different aspects of results for example; type of exercise
length of time for the exercise
the rest periods the no.of seconds pulse rate is
measured for before/after exercise
Overall, the experiment we completed produced some unexpected results, but allowed us to analyse the results more carefully. After looking at all of the results, I have come to the conclusion that exercise does have an effect on pulse rate, and as the amount of activity increases so too does your pulse rate, but only up to a certain point.
