Does resting between sets help athletes who are weight training lift more weight

Question

Does resting between sets help athletes who are weight training lift more weight? An experiment was conducted where the 50 members of the varsity football team were randomly assigned to one of two treatments. In both treatments, subjects were asked to bench press 75% of their maximum bench ress weight. The first treatment was sets of 10 reps with a 5-minute rest in between sets. The second treatment was sets of 10 reps with a 2-minute rest in between. Each athlete continued to do sets until exhaustion and then the total number of reps was recorded. 24 (a) What were the explanatory and response variables in this experiment? (b) How was randomization incorporated in this experiment? Why is this important? (c) What variables were important to control during this experiment? (d) Could the players be blind in this experiment? Explain why this is important. (e) State the hypotheses we are interested in testing. () If the experiment provides convincing evidence that players with longer rest periods have a greater ABILITY to lift weights, can we conclude that the rest was the cause? Explain.

Explanation / Answer

(a) The explanatory variable is "Resting Period between reps" and the response variable is "Ability to Lift weight".

(b) The randomization in this experiment was incorporated by ensuring that the 50 members of the varsity football team were RANDOMLY assigned to one of the two treatment groups. This is important because our goal through this experiment is to establish if there is any relationship between "Resting Period" and "Ability to lift weight". If we don't assign members to one of two treatment groups randomly, it can very much possibly happen that all those members who are inherently already having greater ability of lifting the weight get allocated to one group. If such thing happens then we may not attribute the change in response variable to the Explanatory variable alone because there are confounding effects present.

(c) Following variables were important to control in this experiment : 1. Inherent ability(Independent of the resting periods) of the members to lift the weight. 2. The level of physical tiredness at the begining of the experiment 3.The type of food consumed by the members just prior to experiment.

(d) It is advisable to keep the players blind because it will ensure that the players do not try to put additional effort in lifting the weight for longer time due to motivation gained by looking at other members and getting into mutual competition. This is very crucial variable to control because we want to understand only the effect of "resting period" on "ability to lift the weight". If we dont keep them blind, the desired relationship will be contaminated due to presence of confounding variables.

(e) Null Hypothesis : Total number of reps are same in both the treatment groups: one with 5-minute rest in between sets and other with 2-minute rest in between sets.

Alternate Hypothesis : Total number of reps is higher in the group with 5-minute rest in between than the group with 2-minute rest in between.

(f) Yes, we can concude that the test was the cause because as discussed in part (b), (c) ,(d), there has been enough care taken to control the undesired variables affecting the relationship being studied.

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