Trying to figure out how I can adopt this for my class. I am still Figuring out how I want to structure my class. I was thinking we could do the pacer test every Friday and then record our recovery heart rate with our heart rate monitors.

I don't know if I care too much if they are not improving. I would like for them to of course see growth or maintaining a healthy level, however, I also like the idea of them just monitoring and analyzing why or why not they had growth.

Will share with what I come up with.

Hey, Alex. Thanks for the question. Ideally, if you were doing a cardio unit, over time, you would hope that there would be some training affect and the heart rate would decline somewhat while the laps increase. Realistically, as has been discussed many times on Twitter, I'm not sure that given the time most PE Ts have with their students a desired training affect would occur as a simple result of even daily PE. However, I could imagine that, if you had some students who's heart rates did decline, it could be a decent teaching opportunity to discuss what activities they are doing outside of school.

Also, I think I would add recording the heart rate prior to exercise and something related to the time it takes for the heart rate to return to it's resting rate, as that would, also, be an indicator of training affect. In this case, these were young students doing this and the main goal was to learn to take their heart rate, perhaps provide some motivation for them to complete more laps in the time allotted and begin to understand the role of heart rate in exercise and health. I'm sure it can be developed quite a bit further for older students and I'd be happy to work on that with you if you see some value!

Becky, are you able to explain more about this activity? Looks really interesting. I was curious what the heart rate and laps correlate to?