Cardiovascular System and Physical Fitness

Cardiovascular System and Physical Fitness
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Cardiovascular System and Physical Fitness
1. Introduction
1.1. Background
Sports and exercise physiology is a growing science and has major implications towards athletic performance. It lays the foundation for assessment of various physiological, psychological and anatomical variables that influences the performance of an athlete on the field (Haskell et al., 2012). Understanding such variables is extremely important from the perspective of designing various training programs as an individualistic approach for each athlete (Haskell et al., 2012).
One such physiological variable that needs to be regularly assessed for evaluating the cardiovascular fitness of an athlete is Cardiac Output. Cardiac Output refers to the volume of blood pumped out by the ventricles per minute. The average cardiac output of a normal person is approximately 5 litres per minute (Brandon, 2009).
Often the cardiac output is expressed as cardiac index. Cardiac index is calculated as cardiac output per square meter of the body (or simply body surface area). Cardiac output is calculated as a product of stroke volume and heart rate. Stroke volume represents the volume of blood pumped out by the ventricles per heart beat (Brandon, 2009). The average stroke volume of normal heart is approximately 70ml per beat and the average heart rate is 72 beats per minute. Therefore, the cardiac outp…