The experiment aimed to establish a correlation between caffeine intake and the effects it has on both the pulse and respiration rates of an individual after undergoing moderate-intense cardiovascular exercise. Caffeine itself is one of the most heavily consumed drugs on the planet; it is estimated that over 90% of Americans consume caffeine daily (Richard Lovett, 2005, New Scientist iss. 2518) and is the most widely used stimulant in the world (Arcerio, P, Ormsbee, J, 2009, pg. 1). Caffeine stimulates the brain and behaviour, whilst enhances performance at simple intellectual tasks and at physical work that involves endurance (Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Research Foundation, 1991). Coffee is one of the most commonly digested sources of caffeine, and approximately 6g of coffee will contain 180mg of caffeine (University of Sydney School of Biology, 2010). Many studies have taken place to try and examine the effects of caffeine on enhanced endurance for athletes, the study “Performance and metabolic responses to a high caffeine dose during prolonged exercise" (Graham, TE; Spriet, LL (1991) indicated that endurance levels in trained athletes increased by as much as 44% after ingestion of caffeine. This suggests that in our experiment we will perceive an increase in performance in our subjects over the duration and upon completion of the moderately-intense cardiovascular exercise, showing that caffeine will alter the mean change in pulse and respiration to a significant degree Method
See School of Biological Sciences (2010) Results The results were obtained by testing the null hypotheses on both the mean change in pulse rate and the mean change in respiration rate, using raw data to create graphical representations of the two-tailed, two-sample assuming unequal T-tests (for working out of the T-test and the collected raw data see Appendix 2).
Figure 1 - Mean change in Pulse rate of subjects with/without caffeine Figure 1: Shows