On the heat production associated with muscular work

On reading Prof. Macdonald’s paper it appeared that it might be interesting to see if his results connecting the heat production and muscular work could be expressed graphically or by means of some simple formula. The tables in his paper give the heat production in calories per hour of a number of individuals when doing a carefully measured amount of mechanical work on a kind of treadmill or cycle. This amount of work is kept constant for each group of observations in the paper. On plotting these as is done in fig. 1, it is clear that the points lie very approximately on a straight line, and it is easily seen that the equation to this line, may be written H = 128 + W/0·256;