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. Mr GrayJanuary 4, 2018 at 2:31 PM

    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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Physics of Spiderman

Over this past weekend after I finished working on my homework, I decided to relax and watch a few movies before going asleep. Among the movies I watched was Spider-Man 3 from 2007 and despite the movie flaws I was interested by the scenes that showed Spider Man shooting through the sky with the use of his webs that come out of his wrists. Due to this, I decided to make my blog post about the physics of Spider-Man's slingshot. After doing some research, I discovered just how much information there is on the physics of Spider-Man and how elements of Spider-Man can be used as examples for most topics learned in mechanics. For this investigation, I will not be using the horrible cliche and terrible CGI infested mess that Spider-Man 3 is but instead the all around superior Spider-Man movie of Spider-Man 2 to investigate the physics of Spider-Man's web propelled slingshot.  I want to talk about what happens in terms of physics when Spider-Man launches himself across a dista...
Post a Comment
Read more

2017 Physics Nobel Prize - Capturing Gravitational Waves

 2017 Physics Nobel Prize - Capturing Gravitational Waves Gravitational Waves Captured by LIGO Who?  Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne - LIGO/VIRGO Collarboration What?  Observation of gravitational waves for the first time using LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Where?  Two locations in the US - Hanford and Livingston. (See figure 1) Figure 1: LIGO in the US When?  14 September 2015 HOW?  The scientists captured gravitational waves by using an interferometer. The LIGO interferometer is a more glamorous interferometer than the original Michelson interferometer. It works through using light waves to measure gravitational interference (i.e. waves). First, one needs to understand the parts of an interferometer. The LIGO interferometer (and most) is shaped as an L. It has two 4 km vacuum tunnel arms with a mirror at each end. At the center of the arms, there is a beam splitter. Th...
Post a Comment
Read more