6.6 A few final thoughts

This final section has concentrated on the heart, the lungs and the blood – the body's cardio-respiratory system. We saw briefly how the body takes oxygen in through the lungs, and discussed the importance of this for athletes in various sports. To understand the role of oxygen in the body and its importance to athletes, we had to draw on information that we had discussed in earlier sections about the way oxygen is carried in the blood and the way that the heart pumps blood to different parts of the body.

This highlights an important point that you should remember. As we've seen, most things that we talk about in the body are interlinked. So, in the activity about high-altitude training, we had to use our knowledge of the lungs and the blood to understand how this would affect the body. In order to provide a more complete response, we need to think about how the oxygen is used in the body, as well as how it is absorbed. I hope it's becoming clear that we cannot really talk about the heart separately from the blood, or the blood separately from the lungs, or even the cardio-respiratory system separately from the digestive system or the muscular system.

It is worth going back and looking at your notes for this whole course.

You should have made notes for each section. Often, things that we write down as notes make sense to us when we write them but not so much sense a few weeks later. This is because when we write the notes, our heads are full of all the information in that section and so we just need one or two words to allow us to remember something. A few weeks later, though, all we have is those few words and sometimes that is not enough. So take the chance to look again at your notes. If something is a little unclear or if you can't remember what something means, go back and look at the section again and make your notes a little clearer.