Biology Report

FITNESS IN DIFFERENT GENDERS AND ITS RELATION TO CHANGE IN PULSE RATE

INTRODUCTION

The human body requires a continuous supply of blood for survival. An adult needs 5 litres/minutes of blood during rest and up to 30 litres during heavy exercise (Seeley 2007). One way of measuring the amount of the blood pumped around the body is by measuring the heart rate or pulse. The pulse could be modified according to the needs of the body and therefore can be different according to one’s gender, fitness, lung capacity and other variables.
According to previous studies, during exercise there is a smaller change is the pulse rate in fit individuals in relations with those who are unfit (Tremnlay & Chiasson, 2002). It is also stated that generally males have a higher physical potential compared to females (Zemva & Rogel, 2001). In this experiment we are investigating the difference in the heart rate changes between the people who could do fewer than 25 push ups and those who could do 25 or more push ups (The number of push ups gives us an idea of the subject’s fitness.). We are also comparing the physical abilities of males versus females. The aim of this experiment is to illustrate how fitness levels affect the pulse rate and how gender affects the potential physical abilities.

METHOD

See School of Biological Sciences (2009) in order to access the full method.
Refer to the Appendix to find the Null Hypothesis (HO) and Alternate Hypothesis (HA).
RESULTS

The following results were obtained by testing null hypotheses on mean change in pulse rate and mean number of push-ups as stated in the Appendix, using two-tailed, two-sample assuming unequal variance T-test.   (See appendix for raw data and working-out of t-tests)

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Figure 1: Mean change in Pulse Rate of Subjects who could do less than 25 push ups and 25 or more push ups.

The mean heart rate change for subjects who could do fewer than 25 push ups was 52.7, and the range was 10-80 beats/min. For...