Background: This lab is designed to test if a sports drink is more efficient at lowering blood pressure than regular water. Sports drinks are beverages that are intended to help athletes to replace water, energy, and electrolytes before and after activity. Electrolytes are substances that aid to trigger and sustain the heart’s electrical impulses. Some electrolytes found in the blood that are vital to the function of the cells …show more content…
My data shows that the trials without liquid had an average percent change of -76% for heart rate, an average percent change of -74.25% for the trials with water and a percent change of 43% for the trials with Gatorade. This data shows that the sports drink has a greater effect on lowering heart rate during exercise than only water. It seems that my hypothesis was proven correct in that the sports drink with electrolytes did have a greater effect on heart rate and blood pressure, although I did not expect such a great difference in statistics. In conclusion sports drinks with electrolytes do actually make a big difference in lowering the heart rates of athletes and thus could lead to better performance from those athletes. A follow up experiment could be preformed with different sports drink brands to see if one could lower the heart rate of the participant more