Skip to main content

Track Long Jump Drill: Falling Out of a Chair


     For most of break, Girls Indoor Track had practice. One of those practices Meghan, Daniella, and I decided to learn more about the physics behind one of the long jump drills we do at practice. Basically what the drill is, is someone sits on a chair while another person pushes from behind. It is meant to have jumpers practice their landings in the pit. Using Logger Pro, one could find Daniella's distance, height, and x,y velocities.
Distance
     This is Daniella's distance when she was pushed out of the chair. Using the measurements 2.3 and 3.5 meters (from the graph), we found that Daniella moved 1.2 meters.
   





     Using Logger Pro, we could also find her x and y velocities. As you can see Daniella's velocity in the y direction was small and negative because the height of the chair wasn't very high and her fall did not have a lot of momentum in the y direction.

Y-Velocity
   










     Daniella's velocity in the x-direction on the other hand was big and negative as well because she was pushed out of the chair and to the ground.
X-Velocity
Track involves a lot of physics as do all sports and if runners and jumpers knew the physics behind their actions they could improve their times and scores. Runners can figure out what block height would give them the most push forward and they could also take into account the friction of spikes and the track. Using a drill like the one we did for long jumpers, can help those jumpers find the maximum distance they could add to their score. For example, 1.2 meters is about four feet which is a huge distance to be able to add to your jump score. Watching videos of their jumps and seeing these graphs can help jumpers to perfect their form when landing in the pit.




Comments

  1. I feel like I've seen this blog entry before... weird.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Physics of Black Holes...Or Lack Thereof

Isabella Jacavone To comprehend how the universe works, we must dwell into the most basic building blocks of existence; matter, energy, space, and time. NASA's  Physics of the Cosmos program involves cosmology, astrophysics, and fundamental physics intended to answer questions about the elusiveness of complex concepts such as black holes, neutron stars, dark energy, and gravitational waves. In this blog post, I'd like to elaborate on a subject that is very intriguing  to me; Black holes. And more specifically, what would happen if we got near one. A black hole is anything but a hole, but rather an immense amount of matter compacted into an extremely small area. A black hole is caused when, hypothetically, a star four times more massive than our sun collapses into a sphere no bigger than 600 square km. To put that in perspective, that's about the size of New York City. B lack holes were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which showed that when a...

Physics of Sound Dampeners and Active Noise Cancellation

Physics of Sound Dampeners and Active Noise Cancellation Sound dampening foam panels in a recording studio. ANC headphones worn by pilots and/or passengers in consumer aviation aircraft.  Acoustic treatment of soundscapes has grown alongside the sound production industry. Whether through absorption panels, diffusors and cloud panels to treat a space or headphones placed directly over the ears of listeners, acoustic treatment comes in many forms. Environments are treated acoustically to absorb excess sound to prevent sound levels from crossing a threshold above which the desired goal cannot be had. Before getting into sound dampening, we must discuss sound. Sound is produced when an object vibrates (a form of oscillation) and temporarily displaces nearby air molecules causing a wave effect as the displaced molecules collide with their neighboring molecules. Sound waves are fluctuations in pressure as the initial displacement of molecules experiences collisions that in ...

The Physics Behind the Rail Gun

Magnets and Magnetic Fields: Magnets are well known for their ability to repel and attract other magnets and various pieces of metal, but what people seldom understand are the physics at work that cause such occurrences. Magnets are everywhere, from within TV's and cellphones, to the Earth itself, and they are all producing magnetic fields. For a particle, a magnetic field can be defined to be "a vector quantity that is directed along the zero- force axis" with a magnitude equal to the dividend of the magnetic force and the product of the particle's charge and speed, and for a bar magnet, the field is best demonstrated as arcs going from one pole to the other. With that said, magnetic fields can also be created; the basic principle of electromagnetism is that the movement of electrons through a conductor produces a magnetic field in the region around the conductor. This is the fundamental principle behind the workings of the rail gun. Unlike a bar magnet, a ...