Apologies if I missed it, but could we have a member here give a CPR breakdown?
I took a class 25 years ago to obtain a guide license, and I did some google the other night, but honestly I think a summation here might be best.
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Decent training video on hands only cpr
AHA hands only 2 min video
Full AHA BLS certification
Call 911! Let the chest rebound, use your core not arms to push, 100-120 compressions a minute. Use other people if available, you will get Tired quicker than you would expect. You end up looking like you played pickup basketball after 5 minutes of CPR. Hard and Fast until help arrives.
It’s been a while, but as I recall you are supposed to go to the beat of Staying Alive (or Another One Bites the Dust if you’re morbid). Is that still true?
"I Will Survive" should work, too.
(Though it's a touch faster and would probably be a bit more tiring. It's about 112-117 bpm.)
I never connected the title of the song to the act of CPR until seeing this juxtaposition. Just thought that it was a good BPM.
Yeah let's stick with the Bee Gees tune over the Queen song.
Another former EMS instructor here and, given the interest, I wanted to emphasize the most important thing that
@Valek123 mentioned that could easily be missed:
core.
This is a sports board, yeah? So we know that people easily get distracted by the movements of the appendages when the real power comes from the core. So the issue isn’t really the tempo, but:
Leverage.
The problem with the videos is that they don’t generally explain how to get on that musical rhythm. The point is, you don’t do it with your arms. When you kneel there, don’t squat down on your ankles and try to push with your arms; as
@Valek123 indicates, you’ll exhaust yourself trying to do this with your arms, and you’ll likely get focused on getting the numbers in rather than on making sure that the compressions are deep enough to actually be moving blood—the point isn’t number of reps, it’s about blood movement.
Hips up, arms extended, lean over the patient and bend at the hips; let your body weight do the work.
Basic sports understanding of athletic exertion 101. You can’t do squats in the gym really fast if you’re doing them correctly, yeah? If you do them correctly, deeply enough to move blood, the pace actually comes quite naturally; if you can do them faster, it means you’re not doing them right.
And if you’re not letting your body weight do the work and rather trying to muscle it with your arms, you will get wiped out quick, and probably not accomplish much. It’s why so many of those videos bother me: They show proper technique, but often visualize the arms and then don’t explain the mechanics from the hip—the animated video that was the second
@Valek123 posted is a prime example of that, where the person is doing it right, but doesn’t explain and leads with a misleading and incorrect usage of arms (i.e. the angle; arms should be close to vertical so that you can use body weight rather than muscle exertion.)
My high school had a CPR certification requirement for graduation. I used to think that was kinda cool. Now that I’m older, I’d upgrade it to a First Responder certification, but only because I think a full EMT Basic would be too hard a roe to hoe…
But imagine how cool and revolutionary for our society that would be… if everyone had EMS training?