Cardiovascular Physiology: How Fit is Your Heart?

Cardiac Output is the volume of blood in mL pumped per minute by each ventricle of the heart. You can find cardiac output by taking the amount of blood pumped from a ventricle in a single heartbeat (also known as stoke volume) times how many times the heart beats per minute (heart rate). With that being said, cardiac output is affected by exercise by making the heartbeat faster and pumping more blood out with every beat. Cardiac output is generally pretty consistent when the body is at rest though. These factors can then affect the blood pressure, just as any other activity or event that would speed up the heart. My group hypothesized that in general; cardiac output will increase while exercising. People who exercise 3 or more times a week will have a larger increase in cardiac output during exercise and also a quicker recovery rate than those who don’t work out at all. However, after performing the experiment and graphing the data we concluded that our original hypothesis was incorrect. We somehow confused ourselves and ended up predicting the opposite of what should/does actually happen. The correct hypothesis would’ve been, In general cardiac output will increase during exercise. People who don’t work out at all will have a higher cardiac output than those who workout on a regular basis (3-5x’s/wk). After seeing the results the second hypothesis makes so much more sense. People who workout on a regular basis will generally have a lower cardiac output because their cardiovascular health should be much better than those who don’t work out at all.