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

Aerodynamics of a Golf Ball

One may wonder how a small golf ball can travel at incredibly high speeds for such long distances.  While the swing of the club is a major component, the structure of the golf ball is quite important.  Unlike a baseball or tennis ball, a golf ball has dimples all over it (usually 336 dimples).  These dimples allow the golf ball to travel without facing much air resistance.  This diagram shows how air travels around the golf ball. The dimples on the golf ball also prevent drag that would occur in the wake region, resulting in further distance.  Also due to the contact with the club during the swing, the golf ball has backspin during its entire flight.  This diagram shows the motion of the golf ball mid flight with the lift force of F. There are hundreds of different types of golf balls that a player can choose.  Some show little affect to a player's game while others can alter their performance completely.  Personally, I prefer Callaway Supers...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Would Happen if Everyone in the World Jumped at Once?

Hypothetical and far out questions are what create great physicists and allow for us to discover and test things that have never been thought of before. Even as kids, we let our minds wander and ask questions that we never knew could be proved or disproved by physics. One question that I, as a young questioning child, and many other highly regarded physicists ask is simple; what would happen if every single person got together and jumped at once? This situation is completely unlikely to ever happen, so the only way we could ever know what would happen is through physics. Okay, so lets set the scene. Everyone, all 7 billion people, could fit into an area the size of Rhode Island, so lets assume that everyone did  travel to the smallest state in the US.  Finally, in unison, all 7 billion people jump. The push against the earth doesn't affect the earth at all, considering the Earth outweighs everyone by a factor of a mere 10 trillion. Even if the Earth were rigid and responde...
Post a Comment
Read more