Unit 1 C4: Cardiac output (Pearson BTEC Sport & Exercise Science)

This is a fully-resourced lesson which describes and explains how cardiac hypertrophy affects the cardiac output, stroke volume and resting heart rate. The lesson has been specifically designed to cover the first part of point C4 in UNIT 1 of the Pearson BTEC Level 3 National Diploma in Sport and Exercise Science specification.

The lesson begins by challenging the students to recognise that the left ventricle has the most muscular wall of all of the heart chambers. This allows the stroke volume to be introduced as the volume of blood ejected from the left ventricle each heart beat and then a quiz competition is used to introduce normative values for the stroke volume and the heart rate. Moving forwards, students will learn that the cardiac output is the product of the stroke volume and the heart rate. The main part of the lesson looks at the adaptation of the heart to aerobic training in the form of cardiac hypertrophy and then the students are challenged to work out how this would affect the stroke volume, the cardiac output and the resting heart rate. A number of tasks are used to get the students to explain why the resting heart rate decreases and to calculate the changes in cardiac output. One of the two tasks has been differentiated and this allows students of differing abilities to access the work.