Muscle Fatigue Lab Report

Discussion:

Interpretation

The data collected during this experiment has shown that a relationship likely exists between the rate of muscle fatigue and the time spent performing vigorous exercise prior to the set of repetitive movements. This is likely due to a build-up of lactic acid and lactate as a result of anaerobic respiration occurring to provide energy for the muscle cell’s movement. As the pH of the cell would have been lowered, the enzymes necessary in the reactions would likely not be working in their optimum pH range, slowing the respiration reactions and providing an explanation to why the average number of repetitions decreased as the prior amount of exercise increased.

An unexpected result occurred during the final set of repetitions,

The main strength of this experiment, was that the measurements could be taken reasonably carefully, as the number of repetitions could easily and accurately be counted.

The only other strength of the experimental design was that its validity was reasonably high. This experiment directly tested the effect of prior exercise on muscle fatigue during physical exercise

One of the largest issues with the investigation was that, although the sample size of twenty would be considered good for many experiments, in this experiment it was far too small a sample to represent the rate of muscle fatigue for humans as a species.

Another weakness in the experimental design was that the reliability of the experiment was very low. As each test subject was only tested against each amount of prior exercise once, the impact of random errors is likely very large, which can be seen by the spread of the data on the graph. Although, this was attempted to be rectified by averaging the results of all four test subjects, it does not improve reliability too