Exercise Physiology Lab Report

Over a three week period a test subject was instructed to come to the exercise physiology lab once a week. The purpose of the first week was to determine the baseline test data for the participant. During this first week, the subject was asked how many hours of sleep they had gotten the night before and how much they weighed. The subject was then instructed to put on a heart monitor and wear an O2 apparatus and begin running on a treadmill. This treadmill was set at zero incline for the beginning of the run until three minutes had passed. At the three minute mark the incline increased by 2.5%. After this the incline was continuously increased by 2.5% every two minutes. During this process, the VO2 and RER exchange rate of the subject was being tracked through the O2 apparatus. Their heart rate was recorded every 15 seconds. In addition, the subject was asked their perceived exertion at every increase in incline. The subject continued to run until they could not run anymore, at this time they would hop off the treadmill.

During the second week the subject was instructed to come 30 minutes early to drink a concoction, which did not include caffeine.

The subject was then asked to perform the same steps as last week in addition to getting their blood lactate taken before activity begins and again at every increase in incline. These processes were performed the following week as well, but the test subject was given a concoction that contained 250 mg of caffeine. This study was a double blind study in which the instructors, nor the subjects knew when the test subject was given caffeine. By having a double blind study all biases for how the data should turn out were eliminated. In addition, the professors, the test subject, and the research group were unable to skew the data because they were unaware of when the subject got the

caffeine.
To calculate the statistical measurements we used Microsoft Excel. We calculated the mean, standard deviation, and standard error (SEM) for the variables we measured throughout the study. We also found the statistical significance for the variables that we wanted to focus on. This significance was calculated using a TTest. A TTest measures the significant difference between the means of two groups. From these TTests we were able to identify the P value which determines if the null hypothesis is supported or rejected. If the P value is less than .05 it is considered to be statistically significant. The variables that we focused on specifically were the heart rate at anaerobic threshold, the time it took to reach anaerobic threshold, and the time it took to complete the test.