An Experiment To Find Out the Effect of Exercise on health and the heart rate

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AN EXPERIMENT TO FIND OUT THE EFFECT OF EXERCISE

AND HEALTH ON HEART RATE.

PILOT EXPERIMENT

I carried out a pilot experiment to identify any problems that may occur before I carried out the final experiment.  I tried out various different exercises such as running, skipping and jogging on the spot.  From all of these I have decided to make my participants jog on the spot for up to 10 minutes.

To start off the experiment, it is important that I measure the participant’s pulse rate.  For my pilot study I first checked and recorded the participants pulse rate before carrying out the experiment.  I then told the participant to start jogging and told them not to stop until I said so.  After one minute of my participant jogging on the spot I measured the pulse for one minute and then recorded it.  I recorded my results from this experiment on a piece of paper under the heading participant one.  The participant was then told to jog on the spot again but this time for two minutes.  This experiment was conducted in exactly the same way for 10 minutes.

Form this pilot study I found out that jogging for ten minutes would be a long period of time and the participant may not have enough time so I decided to decrease the amount of time to five minutes instead.  The reading of the pulse also seemed to take a long time and so I decided to check the pulse for 30 seconds and to then times my result by two.  (To get the total for one minute.)  I also found it very difficult to record my results on a plain piece of paper so I have decided to prepare a results table before hand.

I have found that my results were very erratic so I have decided to repeat my experiment.

FAIR EXPERIMENT

To make the experiment fair it is important that I control my variables.  A variable that affects my experiment is the time used for the experiment.  It is very important that I control this variable so during the experiment I would make sure that all the participants spend approximately five minutes in total on the experiment.  To help me control this variable I could use a stop watch to record the total amount of time it took for the experiment to be completed.

Another variable could be the time it will take me to measure the heart beat.  It would really help if I had a machine which could record the pulse rate for me as it could speed up the experiment slightly.

It is also important that I do the experiment at the same time and place if possible so that any other variables can be controlled.  If I did the experiment at more or less the same time I could also keep the temperature constant.

Other factors that may affect my results include the temperature.  If I was to do this experiment in hot weather then the participants would already be hot and would find the experiment even more tiring and so I may not be able to finish all the experiment at the same time.  This would then lead to another problem which is the pulse rate.  The pulse rate will no longer stay the same as it pumps at different levels.

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A factor that I will be able to control during the experiment could be the time which it will take for one person to do the experiment.  It is important that I don’t take too much time on each participant as the process could be very tiring and the participant may have to leave for reasons such as going to work etc.

I can control who will take part in my experiment too.  I will have one participant who is healthy and one who is unhealthy.  It is also important that I find a suitable place to do ...

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