Physical activity is important for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Our body’s biological systems are adapted to work together in order to regulate the functioning of our body during physical exercise. These mechanisms ensure that every single cell receives a sufficient supply of nutrients and oxygen during greater physical efforts and energy consumption. With regular exercise, our body develops certain adjustments to recurrent physical exertion, including lowering the heart rate during exercise, which is a regulation normally attributed to being physically fit or in top condition. The population is becoming more and more conscious about the importance of being physically active. However, with the progress of technology, extended working hours, and various sedentary tasks, we find less and less time for doing sports. A person’s attitude towards physical activity should be shaped earlier in life, which is why this thesis focuses on the habits of primary school teenagers – how often do they partake in physical activity outside of school, what does being active mean to them, and how does it affect their body. Although these young teenagers are being intensely drawn into the world of computers and videogames, a connection between smart devices and exercise can be made. Good examples of such a connection are sports applications that can be installed on any smart phone for free. The Sports Tracker App, for example, resemble some functions of a personal trainer. It monitors individual trainings and the user’s overall progress, and can be used as motivation for young teenagers to exercise more. The survey performed on primary school students, we assert that the majority of the respondents are aware of the importance of physical activity, even though most of them do not exercise in their free time. The majority of respondents are not familiar with sports applications, but do wish to learn about them and possibly use the obtained data on their physical activity to monitor their training course and progress in a more interesting way.
One of the goals of this thesis is to monitor the way our body adjusts to regular running exercises by lowering the heart rate, which has decreased after forty days of regular training for approximately 6.64 beats per minute. The thesis also addresses the influence of the temperature of the environment on the heart rate, which was not correlated with heart rate.
|
