Method
As a part of my experiment I am going to ask my twelve-year-old bother carry out an exercise of doing a 19 cm stair. I am going to check his heart rate by feeling for his pulse on wrist using my first two fingers.
The way I am going to plan this experiment is:
- By taking the resting pulse rate and writing it into my table;
- For a five-minute exercise break of 30 seconds will be taken for every half-minute of exercise in order to figure out the current heart rate.
- When the exercise is complete, the current heart rate will be recorded every minute until it returns to its normal heart rate.
Results Table
Analysis
From what the graphs below shows that the heart rate didn’t increase a large amount for the first minute but then it increased very steeply and rapidly for most of the rest of the exercises. Whereas, in the final minutes the heart rate did not increase much at all. I think this is due to the lack Oxygen in the muscles, also a lot of energy was used up during the exercise, this was because the body was not able to continue with aerobic respiration and anaerobic respiration took its place instead. This also was resulting in lactic acid being formed by the muscles. Finally, the carbon dioxide levels also rose, which also added to the heart rates rise.
After the experiment had been completed, the graphs also tells us that during the two minutes after the experiment the heart rate falls very dramatically but does not return immediately to the resting pulse rate. This is because while the exercise was happening anaerobic respiration began to take place therefore the body has a oxygen debt, which returned back when the person is resting. Which means, when the exercise has finished the body’s heart rate does not immediately back to its normal resting pulse rate. Two minutes after the exercise had been completed the decreasing pulse rate then begins to gradually fall, and the pay back becomes complete.
Evaluation
Even though I assume that my experiment has produced fairly genuine results, I am not really sure that my experiment was very accurate. For example, I cannot be sure that the step-up exercise that my brother has done was done at the same rate throughout that experiment. Likewise, I am not really sure that a 30-second interval was kept to the same this timing.
If I were going doing this experiment again, I would probably have to look more closely at the method of exercise I used. I think that if I used a piece of equipment like a running machine that it would produce more accurate results because then I would be able to guarantee that the exercise would have remained constant throughout the whole experiment.
Finally, if I had been able to use an actual ‘pulse-meter’ which might have helped the experiment to be more accurate. This equipment would have simply been strapped round the chest of the person involved in the exercise and would have measured your current heart rate. I think this because it would have produced a more accurate heart rate reading and it would not have been necessity to have to take a 30-second break during the exercise.
