Heart Beat Health
Investigate the difference in students' heart rates before and after mild exercise.
Lab Summary
Investigate the difference in their heart rate before and after mild exercise.
All types of exercise involve muscle movement, from aerobic sports like running to strength-building sports like weight training. During exercise, the rest of your body systems work together to help your muscles generate energy, get rid of waste products, and release heat. As long as your muscles receive enough oxygen to continue to work, you can keep exercising. Otherwise, you become fatigued and will be forced to stop moving. So the harder you are exercising, the harder your heart will have to work in order to keep supplying your muscles with oxygen. And the more effectively your circulatory and respiratory systems work together, the more efficiently oxygen will be delivered to your muscles.
What makes a trained athlete different from a normal individual? All of those hours spent exercising cause the athlete's heart to be able to pump more blood with each beat, and also result in a lower resting heart rate for the athlete. There is a limit to a human's maximum heart rate. But if the athlete's resting heart rate is lower than the average individual's, then he or she will be able to increase his or her heart rate during exercise more than the normal person will be able to. As a result, more oxygenated blood flows efficiently to the athlete's working muscles. Measuring the difference between your resting heart rate and your heart rate during exercise can give a relative indication of your overall fitness level.
The PASPORT Exercise Heart Rate Sensor measures a subject's heart rate before, during and after physical activity based on electrical signals generated by the heart muscle. A belt worn around the ribcage houses a wireless transmitter. DataStudio software uses the voltage output from the receiver to produce a graph of the heart rate.
Hypothesize: What is your average heart rate at rest? How quickly will it increase, and how high will it get, as you perform mild exercise? How quickly does your heart recover after exercise ends?
Published; May 2003
Downloads
- Heart Beat Health (11 KB, .zip)
Includes experiment setup and procedures
Here's What You Need
U.S. Educator prices shown.
Probeware
PASPORT Exercise Heart Rate Sensor (PS-2129A) - $125
Measures the electrical signals from the cardiac muscle, allowing the heart to be measured even during exercise. For use with PASPORT Interfaces.
Xplorer GLX (PS-2002) - $349
The Xplorer GLX is a data collection, graphing, and analysis tool designed for science students and educators.
Other Materials
- Optional: exercise equipment such as hand weights, jump rope, etc.
