Biology Experiment on Heart Rate

Introduction: In year 10, biology, we have been studying the heart: the functions of the heart, the parts of the heart (ventricle, atrium) and heart problems. Besides that we have been studying the heart rate of humans. We were asked to create an experiment to see what affects heart rate. We discovered that diet, stress, cholesterol level, excitement, mass, age, temperature and exercise affected the heart. Diet and exercise were the only 2 doable and so my partner and I chose exercise. We determined that as the intensity of an exercise increased so did the heart rate of the person performing it.

Hypothesis – I predict that as the intensity increases during exercise the heart rate will also increase. I think this because your body needs oxygen in order to efficiently break down glucose and process it into your cells. As the exercise intensifies, you need more energy and therefore more oxygen. Your blood carries oxygen from the lungs to your muscles. To keep up with these increased oxygen needs, you have to have more blood going to your muscles. As a result, your heart pumps faster, sending more oxygenated blood to your muscles per second.

Aim- To determine if the intensity of an exercise affect the heart rate of a 15-year-old boy.

Apparatus
- 2 stopwatches
- 1 laptop (beep test)
- 1 fire glass long tape (min. 20 meters)
- Chalk to mark 20 meters (start to finish)

Method
1) Get beep test ready on laptop from - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0U_yQITBks -
2) Bring five male subjects ready at the starting line to run the beep test.
3) Mark 20 meters on the ground outside on the AstroTurf using a fire glass long tape. (Start to finish)
4) Only after the first beep goes and not before, must subjects start running.
5) When s...

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...executed was on the AstroTurf outside the school. This could have affected the subject’s performance and how the results were measured. To improve this, the experiment should have been carried out in a science lab on a treadmill so that the environment is constant and so that the heart rates are easier to measure. Thirdly, the temperature of when the experiment took place was about 10°C which may have affected the subject’s performance. If this experiment were recurrent then 5 subjects would do it inside (room temp. 21°C) using the treadmills and wearing the right clothing, and another 5 would do it outside to see if this factor did in fact affect the results and cause them not to be as accurate as it could be. Then we would be able to compare the two temperatures. Overall this experiment ran smoothly with some problems, which can be improved as I explained above.