Which factors affect the human heart rate?

GCSE Science

GCSE Biology Coursework

Brainstorm to show the research into what affects your heartbeat!

Shocks Exercise

Your age

Meals Fatty foods

Diet Smoking

Jogging

Holding your breath Stress

Your heart pumps blood around your body. Every time the heart beats it pushes a ‘surge’ of blood down your arteries. You can feel this surge of blood as a pulse.

Your pulse rate is the number of pulses you can count in one whole minute.

Your pulse rate tells you how frequently your heart is beating. You can take someone’s pulse by putting your fingertips against a pulse point and counting the pulses for one minute. In the experiment I will be counting for 15 secs, because otherwise the pulse will be back to normal by the time you start to exercise again. But I will then times by 4, which will give me an average heartbeat per minute.

Your blood carries oxygen and glucose to your cells. The cells use the glucose and oxygen for respiration.

Respiration is when the energy that our bodies’ need is released from our food, releasing this energy is Respiration, which happens in every cell in our body. The food is usually glucose otherwise known as sugar, but other foods may be used.

This can be written as an equation:

Glucose + oxygen ---------- Water + Carbon dioxide + energy

This energy that is released is needed by the muscles to move over body, that is why the heartbeats and increases like it does.

The factors that can affect ones heartbeat are in the brainstorm above, but are also listed below: exercise, diet, smoking, jogging, drugs, stress, fatty foods and many others.

I am going to pick one of these factors and investigate it; the factor that I am going to investigate while doing this coursework is Exercise.

Exercises can affect the heartbeat as it raises the heartbeat and increases the flow of blood. You need to get oxygen into your system and glucose to your muscles your muscles need glucose for energy, to get your muscles moving.

For this you need to get your blood pumping faster, which your heart does. Your breathing also increases to so you have a bigger intake of oxygen

Planning and Prediction.

Throughout this investigation I will be measuring the increase of speed in my pulse, and I will be recording these results after a minute of exercise.

This is a preview of the whole essay

For this you need to get your blood pumping faster, which your heart does. Your breathing also increases to so you have a bigger intake of oxygen

Planning and Prediction.

Throughout this investigation I will be measuring the increase of speed in my pulse, and I will be recording these results after a minute of exercise.

I will have a member of my group exercise for a total of 5 minutes, but after every one minute I will be stopping the group member and checking their pulse for 15 secs. The reason that I am not checking their pulse for longer than 15 seconds is because the pulse rate will have time to descend back to normal speed, which will then make my investigation an unfair test. At the end of the experiment I will time my pulse readings by 4, which will allow me to get the heartbeats per minute.

My prediction.

I predict that after doing one minute of exercise from a resting pulse, the pulse will start to increase gradually. So I predict that once I check and read someone’s pulse I will hope to find that it has increased to a higher reading than what it was when the member of my group was resting. I believe this is because the blood needs to get around the body a lot quicker so therefore the heart has to eat faster for this to happen, and because your muscles are in action/ being used then glucose is needed around the body to all the muscles in a quicker time so this is another reason why the heart needs to beat faster. Because the heart is beating faster to cater for the needs of the body, we found that the pulse and heart rate have significantly increased.

Equipment

The equipment I need is as follows:

Stopwatch

Table to record results

Pen

Tennis courts

Member of my group (to carry out the exercise)

Method

Grab a stopwatch, and the table for results
Measure the resting pulse for around 15 seconds.
Carry out 1 minute of exercise, i.e.- running around
After the minute is up, re-measure the pulse for no longer than 15 seconds, record in results table.
Once you have measured the pulse, begin running again.
Then carry out steps 3 & 4 until you have exercised for 5 minutes.
At the end of the 5 minutes, Re-do the experiment 3 times. Which will allow you to have a variety of results. (3 different results for each minute0
When you have completely finished times each result by 4 this will allow you to get the beats per minute.

Results

This table on the previous page shows the pulse rates after 15 secs, I will now conduct a table of pulse results after 1 min.

Attempt 1 Attempt 2

Attempt 3.

So from the 3 above tables you can see I have worked out the Pulse rates per minute. I worked this out using the following equation (PULSE*4=) The reason I times the pulse result by 4, is because it was 15 secs which was ¼ of a minute, so I need for of them so I times by 4.

This next table will show you the AVERAGE BEATS PER MINUTE.

Analysis

On the pages before you can see that I have drawn a couple of graphs.

** One graph shows the average pulse rate per each min

** The other shows the heartbeats per minute.

My prediction was correct. I found out that the more you exercised then the faster your heartbeat got, I also found out that your pulse rate is dramatically increased from what it was when you were resting. So this is exactly what I predicted therefore I was correct.

You can see from my graphs, many strange and odd results from the graph, which tells me the factors which weren’t reliable (which I listed above) such as the resting heart beat appears to have a higher average heartbeat than the heartbeat averages for 1min, 2min, and 4 minutes. I believe if the theory is correct, which is that after exercising the heartbeat and pulse rate should rise dramatically, but this doesn’t

match up with the results shown on the graph.

So I have found out that in MOST cases but not all cases the heartbeat and pulse rate does increase after exercising when started after measuring a resting pulse, but as we have found out from this experiment and drawing the graphs that sometimes this doesn’t always happen, this could be for a number of factors which I will look into when conducting my evaluation over on the next page.

Evaluation

My results, I don’t believe are reliable and accurate because we carried this investigation out on 2 different days. I believe this could of affected the results because of the following reasons:

The weather was different, one of the days it was quite cloudy and cool, whereas the other day it was nice and warm.
The person exercising could have been in different state of health, for example they could have had a cold.
Each part of this experiment was carried out at different times in the day, the first part was carried out early in the morning, and the 2nd half carried out late afternoon.
I could have timed the resting pulse for longer than 15 seconds.

I think if these factors were correct and satisfactory then I believe we would have more reliable results to go by, and that we wouldn’t have as many odd results as we have seemed to of produced, which I identified in my analysis.

My measuring wasn’t 100% accurate; I haven’t identified what measuring wasn’t accurate. But there obviously was something not quite right because I have produced such odd results.

If I ever carried out this experiment again, to improve it I will have to make sure that all these factors are accurate. I will make sure that the whole experiment is carried out on the same day, within the same space of time to allow the weather conditions not to affect the results. I will then make sure that the stopwatches I used are in working order and completely accurate, so I then will receive accurate and satisfactory results.

Yes I believe I did gather enough results to judge my prediction, as my prediction was correct but it would of helped if the results I gathered were more accurate.

Further investigations that I could carry out to investigate the heartbeat could be that I could experiment using a person who smokes, to carry out the exercising. As we have already identified when researching into this topic of “Factors, which affect heartbeat” so this could give us some clearer results. If I carried out this experiment using a smoker, then I predict that the results would be lower than the ones I have now, as the person I used was a non-smoker in very good health.

I could also use people who are slightly overweight, who smoke, very thin. I could even completely change my experiment and carry it out so someone holds his or her breath instead of exercising.

Conclusion

From this experiment I haven’t really found anything out, I have just confirmed what I already knew. Which is “After exercising the pulse and heartbeat will get faster, as the blood is needed to be pumped around the body a lot quicker, as the muscles are in constant use, and they need the glucose which is carried in the blood.”

So I have found out that the faster the heart beats then the more oxygen is breathed in and the faster your heart beats to help transport this oxygen and glucose which are in the blood to all the working muscles around your body.

By Lucy Nicholson.