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!