Posts Tagged ‘cardiac output’
People who engage in sports should know that it is all about output. Cardiac output, to be exact. Put simply, the cardiac output is the amount of blood pumped around the body at a given time.
The cardiac output is a product of the heart rate and the stroke volume. This means that the faster and/or harder the heart beats, the higher the cardiac output. Mathematically the cardiac output can be symbolized in the following equation:
Cardiac Output = Heart Rate X Stroke Volume
Is this equation important for a person practicing sports? Of course it is… If your goal is to increase the cardiac output, you should know what its components are. In most people one of the rate limiting factors for their achievements is the limitations of their heart and cardiac output. This means that a person can not raise his or her pulse for ever or increase the volume of blood coming out of the heart with each beat as much as they would like. There is a limit to ones cardiac output and this limits a persons achievements.
Cardiac function and cardiac output are usually the limiting factors in a person’s ability to perform physical activity. In most cases a person will have much more respiratory reserve than cardiac reserve. Of course, in person’s in whom there is a lung disease (acute or chronic) this may not be the case, and the lung function may be the limiting factor, but this is not true for healthy people.
