Alabama STEM explores is made possible by the generous suppor of Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology Southern Research Solving the World's Hardest Problems, the Holle Family Foundation, Alabama Works.

Alabama STEM Council.

Alabama Mathematics, Science, Technology and Engineering Coalition.

Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative.

It's a long walk home, and this is definitely one heavy backpack.

My heart is really pumping.

Do you ever notice how your heart beats faster when you're doing something active?

I wonder why that happens.

Let's find out.

Thanks for joining us on today's episode of Alabama's STEM Explorers and Katherine.

And I'm Anderson.

And today, Anderson and I are at Southern Research in Birmingham, Alabama.

I was just telling Katherine about how my heart was really pumping.

I could feel it through my chest something heavy, right?

Yeah, my backpack with a lot of books.

Man, that does sound heavy.

Well, it's true that your heart beats faster any time you're doing any sort of exercise.

And your heart is actually the hardest working organ in your body.

I thought my eyes would be the hardest working organ because I used them all day long.

That's a really good point, Anderson.

And it's true that your eyes work pretty hard, but your heart is working even while you're sleeping.

And it is the main organ in the circulatory system.

And the heart is enclosed by a double walled sac called the pericardium.

And that acts as a shield to protect the heart from outside damage.

Kind of like a football helmet.

Yeah, exactly like a football helmet.

And the heart is made up of four chambers.

You had the left in the right atrium, in the left, in the right ventricle.

And the heart is regulated by a pacemaker, and that's foun in the tissues of the upper wall of the right atrium.

So I don't understand how the heart actually beats.

Yeah.

So that beating is your heart pumping blood and the heart is made up of two pumps.

You've got one pump that receives blood and then another pump that sends blood out to the rest of your body.

Does that make sense?

I still don't understand why my heart beats faster during exercise.

That's a great question.

And I have an experiment that we can do to investigate this.

But first, you've got to suit up.

Here is your lab attire for the day.

Oh, yeah.

Let's go.

This doesn't look like a laboratory, and we're definitely not wearing lab coats.

You're right, Anderson, in the cool thing about science and being a scientist is we don't always work in a laboratory.

The world is our laboratory, and we can do experiments pretty much anywhere.

And so today that just happens to be the Southern Research, Gym.

And so what we're going to do in the gym is we're going to calculate your resting heart rate and then we're going to use some data from some exercises to calculate your target heart rate zone.

So the first thing is, first, we want to calculate your resting heart rate.

The way that we are going to do that is we're going to measure your pulse.

So take your your second finger and your middle finger and put it on your neck, mixture windpipe and start counting.

And so to our viewers at home, you can calculate your heart rate, too, by doing just what Anderson is doing.

And your heart rate is based on a 60 second or a one minute window.

You don't have to wait for 60 seconds.

You can count in 15 or 20 seconds and then just multiply that number to get to 60.

So what did you get, Anderson?

I got 20.

So 20.

So 20 in 20 seconds would be 60.

So your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute.

So what I want you to do now is I want you to hop up on this treadmill and we're going to get to work.

Are you ready?

Yes, I'm ready.

All right.

So the first thing that we are going to do is we are going to have you walk at a comfortable pace.

And so we're going to have you walk at two miles an hour.

So two miles an hour?

Yeah, two miles an hour.

Do you think your heart rate is going to increase at two miles an hour, just walking a steady pace?

Probably not.

Probably not.

This is pretty easy, right?

Right.

All right.

Cool.

All right.

We'll let you walk.

Yeah, we're walking down the street.

We're walking down the street.

All right.

Now we're going to stop it.

And I want you to calculate or test your test, your pulse count.

And tell me what that is.

That is 30, 30.

OK, so 30 times three would be 90, 90.

So you're walking so well as you were walking, that heart rate is 90 beats per minute.

So one more thing I want you to do is I want you to hold these weights.

You're going to do the same exact thing.

Nothing too fancy.

You're going to hold the weights by your side.

We're going to start you at the same speed.

And do you think that holding weights while you walk is going to increase that heart rate?

No, these are very heavy.

Yeah, it's pretty easy, right?

I don't know.

Maybe it will.

Maybe it won't.

We will see.

So we're walking the walk where walk, walk, walk in and do a little dance.

OK, I know you're not dancing.

We're just walking we're just walking?

OK. All right.

And now we're going to stop that.

And now I want you to check your heart rate or check your pulse one more time.

I'll take these.

Thank you.

Anderson is counting, and you guys can try this at home, you can do whatever kind of exercise you want.

Maybe you want to do some jumping jacks, maybe you want to do some push ups.

The world is your laboratory as well.

What'd you get?

40, 40.

OK, so 40 times three is one hundred twenty.

One hundred and twenty to one hundred and twenty beats per minute.

So even though you might not have felt like you were doing any more like of an intense exercise, that extra weight was causing your muscles were having to work harder.

And so any time your muscles work harder, those muscles are going to need more more blood and oxygen to flow to them.

And that is the heart has to pump that blood to that's going to make the heart have to work harder.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

We're going to crank this bad boy up.

And I want you to start working up a sweat.

We're going to get.

Really?

Yeah.

You're going to get intense.

All right.

We're to know.

We're going to try to work out a lot.

You're going to get crazy pump of that jam pump it up.

All right.

OK. All right.

Now, come on down here.

I want you to do some jumping jacks.

All right, let's go.

Chop, chop, chop.

We're doing jumping jacks.

We're doing jumping jacks.

All right.

Jump, jump, jump.

All right.

One, two, three.

Let's go faster, faster.

Turn around to the camera faster.

There you go.

All right.

We're doing jumping jacks.

All right.

Good job, Peterson.

And now you can stop.

Let's take that pulse.

Take that heart rate or you're tired, aren't you?

I'm tired just watching you.

So.

All right.

We're taking it.

All right.

Counting, counting, counting.

In 20 seconds, would you get 60?

60.

So 60 times three is one hundred eighty.

One hundred and eighty.

So one hundred and eighty is after you've been working out for a long time.

So what we're going to do now is we are going to do some fun math to see if that number fell within that target heart rate zone.

So here we have this is this is Liz.

She works here in Southern Research and she is going to help us plug in these values and do the math.

And so your resting heart rate, do you remember what it was?

It was 60 beats per minute.

So we're going to have 60 beats per minute up there.

OK. All right.

And now you're max.

Heart rate is based on your age And so you just take two hundred and twenty and then subtract how old you are.

So Anderson is 12.

So we subtracted 12.

That gives us two hundred and eight beats per minute.

So now that we have your max heart rate at two hundred and eight beats per minute, we can now calculate your heart rate reserve.

And so the way that you do that is you take your max heart rate.

So two hundred and eight, you subtract out your resting heart rate, which is 60 beats per minute.

And that is going to give you your heart rate reserve, which would be one hundred forty eight.

Perfect.

Yes.

One hundred and forty eight beats per minute.

And so now that we have the heart rate reserve, we can calculate your target heart rate zone and we can start to compare tha pretty high number that you got after all those jumping jacks.

So what was that?

One hundred and eighty.

So we'll go ahead and write that down there.

One eighty, because we want to see if one hundred and eighty falls within this range.

And so now to calculate the low end of your target heart rate zone, what we're going to do is we're going to multiply 70 percent by your heart rate reserve.

So one forty eight.

That is perfect, perfect.

And then we are going to add your resting heart rate.

All right, and then Liz is excellent, at math she's going to go ahead and fil in those numbers for us.

And this is going to give us the low end of your target heart rate zone.

And so that zone is based on percentages.

So it's the low end will be 70 percent of that heart rate reserved in the high end will be eighty five percent So we're going to continue this process through the next steps, and we'll let Liz do that for us.

She is excellent.

You do so much math in her head She is a genius here.

So there we go.

In the low end of your target, heart rate zone is one.

Sixty four in the high end is one eighty six.

So now that we have all of this data, we can look at it and we can say, OK, your low end of your target heart rate zone is one.

Sixty four in the high end is one eighty six.

And so we've written out Anderson's range down here and we can see that that one eighty beats per minut that falls within the range.

So good job.

Anderson was right there where he should be for the best cardio vascular exercise.

So that's it.

You all get working out.

Hi, my name is Anna, and I was wondering, why do we have eyebrows?

Eyebrows aren't just decorative.

Eyebrows have two main purposes.

One, to keep things like rain, sweat from rolling down your forehead into your eyes.

And secondly, they can be used for communication.

The muscles in your face and your eyebrow hair can help you make all kinds of facial expressions like surprise or angry.

Some people can try their eyebrows and make all kinds of facial expressions Who?

No eyebrows can be so entertaining.

Can you just raise one eyebrow?

Finally, learn a few years why wanted to become a doctor, and it was my mom.

This lady right here.

So I was told when I was born that she would introduce me in her arms as this is my doctor.

And so all of my life, I knew I wanted to be a doctor.

I did not know why.

And that's how I became a doctor.

it was my mom, I was just a farm boy.

I grew up on a farm.

We raise pigs.

We raise cows.

But it was all basic stuff.

So it really wasn't until I got into college that I really fell in love with chemistry.

So I'm one of those people where the spark of anything didn't occur when I was little, but it was actually in college as a doctor.

What I do.

I practice prevention.

And so I try to people who have high blood pressure.

I work with helping them to keep their blood pressure control, those who are diabetics, to help them to keep their diabetes control and their nutrition.

When I was training, it was all with your eyes and your ears as to how you examine the patient.

I think the future of medicine is is beyond how we can even think.

There's been a huge advance in cardiology because of the new machines, the new tests that were able to do the new MRI as the new CAT scans.

I know now they use their cell phones just to play games for they're going to be using their cell phones to help them make diagnoses when they become doctors.

Any opportunity that a young person can have to partner with someone or shadow someone in the fields of engineering and the science they should do, because that's going to help them a lot.

Hi, I'm Nilah, and this is my friend Neil and we're here at the Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology NIlah, Any guess why I have all of these bottles of red liquid on the bench?

I don't know.

Maybe you were in the mood for some cherry Kool-Aid.

I am a big fan of cherry Kool-Aid, but that's not what these represent.

OK.

This actually represents the amount of blood that we would find in my body if we took all my blood out.

That's how much we would have.

About five liters.

Really?

Yeah.

OK, how much blood would be in my body?

OK, so let's take this away.

And that's about how much we would have in yours about four liters And all of that travels through your body every minute.

Wow.

Yeah.

And do you know what actually makes it travel through your body?

What what pumps it through your body, your heart?

Yes, that's absolutely right.

In fact, your heart is called a double pump.

Any ideas why it might be called that?

No, I didn't know it pumped blood twice.

It actually doesn't necessary.

Well, yeah, it does pump blood twice.

Once it pumps from your body into your heart and on to the lungs, and then it pumps from the lungs back into your heart and out to the rest of your body.

OK. Yeah.

So it's kind of a two circle.

You know what?

Let's use a model.

OK, make it a little bit easier.

All right.

OK. Just red water.

No actual blood in this episode for anybody that might be squeamish or might be wondering if we might be like vampires.

OK, so we're going to imagine that this is the blood that is in your body.

OK. And this is the blood that is in your lungs.

OK. And we're going to use these to represent the pumps of our heart.

And each time here, grab that when you squeeze.

And then let go.

So this is the pumping action of part of your heart.

OK, we've called it a double pump.

So let's stick one in.

Put put the long tube in there.

Let's put the short.

You've been here.

And so squeeze it.

And what you're going to see is we're going to pull it up through here and then we're going to pump it into this one.

So we pull it up and we pump it.

And so this is what part of your heart does it pulls the blood from your body into your atria and into your ventricle, and then it pumps it to your lungs and in your lungs It comes to your lungs full of carbon dioxide.

And then do you know what happens in our lungs?

Don't they expand and expand?

We expand and we expand.

They expand when what?

When we breathe.

That's right.

And we breathe in what oxygen.

That's right.

And do you know what we breathe out?

Carbon dioxide.

That's right.

So the blood that comes up to our heart from our body is carrying lots of carbon dioxide.

That's the waste from your cells.

And it comes to your lungs and the carbon dioxide is given off We breathe it out and then the oxygen we breathe in.

So that's one side.

And that let's do the other side.

OK, let's use your other hand.

Oh, keep that one in there.

All right.

And now let's just pump here for a second.

No pump this one.

Oh, all right.

So now what's going to happen is the blood from our lungs comes back to our heart, to our atrium and to our ventricles.

And then the ventricle on this side, the left side is the strongest part of your heart.

And it pumps it all the way back, all around the rest of your body.

OK, so now let's let's let's get some double pump action going.

Yeah, there we go.

So you are pulling in blood from the body to the right side of the heart, sending it to the lungs.

It's picking up oxygen, coming back to the left side of the heart and going out to the left side of going out to the body.

All right.

Good.

So that's the double pump concept.

OK. Now, let's actually this doesn't really model what your heart looks like.

This is kind of an upside down model because it's got you know it has the ventricles up top and the ventricles are actually on the bottom.

Let's just look at the actual OK, that might make more sense to move that out of the way.

OK, here's our model has a bunch of numbers on it.

It does have a lot of numbers.

Each of those numbers tells you about some part of what goes on in the heart.

It's a really complicated structure.

Can you find No.

One right here?

That's right.

Number one.

And then number two.

Number two is right here.

Those are ventricles three.

That's in the atria and then four.

That's right.

So it's the four chambers are atria and our ventricles.

OK.

The right side in the left side.

Now let's actually look.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of cool, isn't it?

Yeah.

Kind of weird.

Yeah.

This is what the inside of your heart looks like.

Except it doesn't have all those numbers on it.

Yeah, actually, look at the inside of your heart or my heart.

But so just like our double pump model, the blood comes from our body into the atrium, down to the ventricle, the right ventricle, it goes out to the lungs, gets oxygen, comes back into the left atrium, down to the left ventricle, and then it gets pumped out to the body.

Oh, OK. Any idea how fast that blood moves?

Um, I'm guessing like I'm not sure.

Are you a runner?

No, I'm not either.

I'm not either.

But a fast walk is about four miles an hour, and that's how fast the blood moves through your body at about at about that rate.

So pretty.

Pretty quickly.

Yeah.

If we were to put all of the parts of your all of your vessels, which is where the blood then travels through your body, all the veins in the arteries, if we were to take all those ou and stretch them end to end.

OK. And you that would be about 60000 miles of vessels.

Wow.

We could circle the earth three times with all of the vessels that are in your body.

Wow.

Yeah, that's a lot.

Yeah.

Pieces.

So when we did the pump, I don't know if you heard it, but there was kind of a clicking sound.

Yes, I heard it.

Press the pump.

Your heart has a clicking sound as well.

It has a it has a rhythm.

lub dub, lub dub, lub dub.

And those two sounds, the clicking sound is because there are valves in the pumps that close to keep the water from flowing backwards, OK?

Your heart has valves that close to keep the blood from flowing, say, back from your ventricles into your atrium.

OK. And so the lub dub sound is the sound of those ventricles actually closing to keep the blood from flowing.

OK. All right.

Let's do one more activity before we started.

We figured out that your heart beats at about seventy two beats every minute.

Yes.

So every minute lub dub, lub dub is happening seventy two times.

Let's figure out how many times your heart beats over the course of the day.

All right.

Seventy two beats per minute.

How many minutes in an hour?

60.

OK. All right.

So what are we going to do there?

What kind of math do we need to do to figure this out?

Would we add seventy two beats every minute?

Oh, three minutes every hour.

Multiply.

OK, so go ahead and do that.

How many how many hours in a day?

Twenty four.

Yep.

OK, well, there we go.

Your heart every day.

A hundred and 3000 beats every single day of your life.

Wow.

Yeah.

Your heart works hard.

Yeah.

So you've got to keep your heart healthy.

Exercise, good nutrition, getting good sleep, all those things to keep this lub dub, lub dub working throughout your entire life.

Yes.

Well, as far from me, how I fell in love with fitness Actually, my dad, he had open heart surgery at one point.

And, you know, he he got inspired after that to start working out and start moving.

Well, I realized if I continued to go on his path, I would have it would have happened to me as well, too.

So basically, I just started working out and just kind of got into the industry and then, you know just kind of fell in love with it, got inspired to start helping.

Other cardiovascular health is really important.

Whether you taking the stairs, you doing the Stairmaster treadmill or anything to get the heart pumping is really good.

Technology has advanced tremendously.

So someone can come in with the smartphone and it can track their steps.

We actually have equipment here that has a Life Connect app where you can download an app.

It'll tell you see the adjustments, it'll give you workouts.

And not only that, you don't even have to be in a gym to do that.

You can do it at home.

It's in the as far as the equipment is just so much advanced now with computers and, you know, just different things like that.

So I would say we've come like we've come really far from 20, 30 years ago with technology to to help you achieve whatever fitness goals you have with being in this type of industry.

It's so rewarding because you get a chance to see people from their starting point and they get a chance you get a chance to watch them grow.

You build connections is so reward and you're actually doing something positive for them.

You're actually helping them, helping them feel better, helping them live better.

And it's something that is just so priceless.

And if I had to say something to a young person out there, I would tell them this field is a lot rewarding just because whether it's you know, Ann that's, you know, fifty one that wanted to lose 30 pounds.

And I remember having a conversation when I signed her up three months ago.

Now, you know, she's lost the 30 pounds.

And she's telling me, Jacoby, like, I'm so happy that, you know, I walked into this gym and I was a part of her fitness journey.

So that's so rewarding.

Thanks for watching.

Alabama's STEM Explorers.

If you missed anything or you want to watch something again, you can check out our website at Alabama STEM Explorers dot org.

Maybe you have a question we could answer here on the show and you might grab a cool T-shirt.

Feel free to send us a video question or an email on our website.

Alabama STEM Explorers dot org.

Thanks again for watching.

We'll be back next week.

Alabama STEM explores is made possible by the generous support of Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology, translating the power of genomics into real world results.

Southern Research Solving the world's hardest problems.

The Holle Family Foundation established to honor the legacy of Brigadier General Everett Holley and his parents, Evelyn and Fred Holley, champions of servant leadership Alabama works a network of interconnected providers.

Connecting business and industry needs to a highly skilled and trained workforce.

Alabama STEM Council dedicated to improving STEM education, career awareness and workforce development across Alabama.

Alabama Mathematics, Science, Technology and Engineering, Coalition for Education, advocating for exceptional STEM education in Alabama.

Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative, the A initiative to improve math and science teaching statewide.