Blog #15: Physiology Experiment Update

Our experiment is up and running! We've tested ourselves twice and started doing an actual trial today in class. Our big focus now is getting people to be our subjects in order to run our experiment. We have more athletes than non-athletes right now on our data list, so we need a few more athletes and several non-athletes. We're hoping to get a lot of trials done tomorrow as well as Friday. Each trial doesn't take much longer than three minutes we've discovered.

75 yards is indeed enough distance in order to get one's heart rate higher. We also have decided to our subjects count their pulse every fifteen seconds rather than thirty, which is what we initially thought would be best. With a smaller time interval, we believe we'll have more precise results. We start timing the subject for fifteen seconds while they count their pulse immediately after they complete the physical exercise. Then they rest for fifteen seconds, count pulse for fifteen seconds, etc... until their heart rate is back to its initial number. From practicing on each other and doing one trial today, we've noticed that it takes most people 1-2 minutes for their heart rates to return back to rest. The trend that is also apparent is that it takes athletes a shorter amount of time to return to rest than non-athletes, which theoretically makes sense if they exercise on a more intense and regular basis (they're used to the exercise & "cooling down").

It's interesting that we're keeping track of the time to rest. We could've even compared that for athletes and non-athletes for our experiment, but instead we are testing to see if there's a correlation between height and heart rate. My hypothesis is that the taller you are, the higher heart rate you will have (initially). Whether or not you are or aren't an athlete in season will dictate the final heart rate (after the exercise). I think this because people who have more height may have higher heart rates because it takes more energy and effort to keep their bodies moving than people who are not as tall. We haven't really discussed our hypothesis yet as a team, but we will ASAP before we really start doing a lot of trials. We'll test everyone in our bio class and hopefully have other volunteers from outside of it participate. This has been a fun experiment so far, and the results have been interesting!

Blog #14: Physiology Experiment Update

We have added several changes to our physiology experiment design today in class. We decided to include the athlete vs. non-athlete variable into our experiment for more accurate, precise results and because both groups could create a possible source of error if one were not included, which we could help eliminate by using both groups. The next question we had was: who do you consider to be an athlete? The juniors in our class all participate in some form of physical activity for a minimum of thee hours a week. With that in mind, there is a difference between lacrosse players who play two hours every day five days a week and people in a Yoga class who do yoga for one hour a day three times a week. So yes, we all exercise and keep our bodies moving, but some at higher intensities than others. We decided that when we do our experiment, we will ask our subjects how often they exercise per day. If it's two hours or more, we'll consider them athletes, and if it's less, they'll be in our non-athlete experimental group. This just made the most sense for our age group and lifestyle. It'll be interesting to have a bar graph that will compare (side-by-side) the heart rates for athletes and non-athletes who are similar in height. Will the 5'6" athlete have the same heart rate as the 5'6" non-athlete? That's what we want to determine.

This means that we will need more girls as subjects for our experiment. As of right now, we're hoping to have 12 girls of varying heights who are athletes and 12 girls of varying heights who are considered non-athletes in our minds.

In addition to adding that variable, we also changed the type of physical exercise for our experiment. Instead of running up and down stairs at a fast pace, we are going to measure out 75 yards for our subjects to run (25 yard increments, so each subject will pivot and go in the other direction twice). We hope that they'll run as fast as they can to get their heart rates up. We tested this ourselves today with about 65 yards, and our heart rates increased substantially from our resting heart rates. The 75 yards compared to the stair runs will be less dangerous and more convenient, for we can measure 25 yards out in various locations on campus.

Lastly, we decided that when we time our subjects' heart rate to rest, we are going to do it in fifteen second intervals because it will be easier to keep track of. With these tweaks in our experiment, we are about ready to randomly select our subjects and have them do some running and pulse checking! We also need to complete some further research in order for us to come up with a reasonable, educational hypothesis before we officially start the experiment. It's been a fun experiment design so far!

Blog #13: Intro to Physiology Experiment

For our final experiment in Research Biology (revolving around physiology), we have decided to perform an experiment based on heart rate and physical activity. Lucia, Mary, Melissa, and I want to test whether or not there is a correlation between heart rate and height. Therefore, the purpose of our experiment is to determine whether or not being taller means having a higher heart rate after doing physical activity or vice versa. Our current hypothesis is that the taller the person is, the higher her heart rate will be after taking part in some type of physical activity. We think this because taller people most likely have a higher heart rate because their bodies will be working harder to keep them moving and breathing compared to shorter people because they are bigger in size. We are going to test our experiment by choosing a minimum of twelve junior girls at Emma Willard School and having them partake in two stair runs in our science building. We are going to check their heart rate (pulse) before they move up and down the stairs and after as well as timing how long it takes their heart rate to go back to its normal rate (recovery time). In order to get the most accurate results as possible, we want to have our subjects run up and down the stairs as fast as possible to really get their hearts pumping. We considered adding the athlete vs. non-athlete variable into our experiment but decided to not have that be a part of our experiment in order to keep it more simple. However, that could be a possible source of error in our data because athletes might have a better recovery time, and their heart rates may take longer to rise if their endurance is better than a non-athlete. We will obviously need to test girls who are different in height while having a mix of short, medium, and tall girls. More details and info to come!

Our procedure will look something like this:

• measure height
• check pulse for 30 seconds
• have them do the stair run (up and down three flights of stairs two times)
• check pulse for 30 seconds
• time how long it takes to get to recover back to initial heart rate
• record all info