A quick thought on superstardom vs championship
I ran a poll on Instagram and I’ve found the results interesting so far.
I’ll likely talk more about it next week, but for now, I want to hear your thoughts.
Would you rather be a superstar on a winless team or ride the bench on a state championship team?
If you’d rather be a superstar on a winless team, click here.
If you’d rather ride the bench on a state championship team, click here.
A deep dive on some nerdy physics stuff
I know, I know. You’re here because you want to be crazy fast, strong, and explosive.
In the wise words of the great philosopher Cardale Jones, “We ain’t come here to play school.”
So, why am I talking about nerdy stuff if you just want to be a better athlete? Well, the nerdy stuff is the foundation of how we can get you to be a better athlete.
If you understand the fundamental basics of how we move, you can make way better training decisions and become way more athletic.
So, please, bear with me today. I’ll try to keep it entertaining.
Newton’s Laws
We’ve established that you’re here because you want to be crazy fast, strong, and explosive. I think that’s a good thing.
In fact, the ability to perform fast, strong, and explosive movements is an essential component of athletic performance.
There’s an extra emphasis on movement, because that gets lost in the shuffle. People overcomplicate it. All athletic endeavors are the just coordination of a bunch of different movements.
If we want to understand athleticism, then we need to understand movement. If we want to understand movement, then we need to understand physics. More specifically, we need to understand a branch of physics: mechanics.
Mechanics tells us that all movement requires a preceding force. A force can be defined as any interaction that, when unopposed, will result in a change in motion of an object.
A simpler way of defining it would be as a push or pull on an object.
Athletic endeavors require force to be produced, applied, and altered in various manners, depending on situational context.
Athletes must be able to produce a ridiculous amount of force in a ridiculously short period of time and apply it in the correct direction at the right time.
If you really break athleticism down, it becomes abundantly clear that the underpinnings of different physical abilities (speed, strength, power, agility, etc.) are the same: the movement created is dependent on the orientation, magnitude, rate of production, and timing of the preceding force(s).
We can’t talk about force without going straight to the GOAT: Sir Isaac Newton.
Newton’s Laws of Motion are the foundation of mechanical physics and are crucial for understanding how to improve athletic movement ability.
1) An object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion.
An object’s tendency to stay at rest or in motion is called inertia. Importantly, inertia tells us that unless an outside force acts on it, an object will maintain a constant speed and direction.
Momentum is essentially a quantification of inertia. Momentum is equal to mass * velocity (p = mv).
In order to stop something from moving an impulse equal to the object’s momentum is needed. Impulse is equal to force * time (J = FΔt).
Think about an athlete sprinting and about to make a 180° cut.
In order to stop her forward momentum, she must apply an impulse equal to her mass * velocity into the ground.
If she weighs 55 kg and is moving at 6 m/s, her impulse has to equal to 330 N*s.
Typical ground contact times when changing direction can be around 200 ms (0.20s).
To stop herself in three steps, she would have to apply 550 lbs of force in each step!
2) Force = Mass x Acceleration
By now, we know that force matters, like a lot.
Newton’s 2nd Law tells us how we can actually calculate force.
The bro version is “big and fast = high force, small and slow = low force.”
Mass is a fundamental measure of inertia, representing an object’s resistance to movement.
Acceleration is the rate of change in velocity.
If a big (large mass) object accelerates rapidly, the force must have been high. If a small object accelerates slowly, the force must have been low.
3) For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.
This means that anytime a push into an object, the object pushes you back just as hard.
This is extremely important for movement. Everytime we move, we apply a force in the direction that is opposite of the way which we want to go and rely on the reaction force from the ground to propel us forward.
If I want to sprint forward, I need to put my force backward into the ground. If I put it straight down into the ground, then I’ll stand straight up.
If I want to cut to the right, then I need to push the ground left. The ground will push me to the right.
If I want to be explosive and accelerate quickly, I need to put a lot of force into the ground. If I’m gentle and act like I’m stepping through a field of daisies, I’m not going to accelerate quickly and powerfully.
An extra note on science
Science is dope. But, I hated it in high school.
I am obsessively fascinated by anatomy and physics. There are so many cool examples of how it plays out in the real world.
So, why are students taught boring, useless things like the difference between a saddle, hinge, fibrous, and amphiarthrosis joints at the beginning?
I’m no educator, but I know that people become a lot more vested in what you say if you hit ‘em with a good hook up front.
There are some really good teachers out there who do make science cool. So, thank you to those who make the effort.
More from me…
- Check out the most recent podcast episode where I talk about 3 things that I think every hypermobile athlete should know. Just click here!
- If you think this newsletter doesn’t suck (or maybe you even enjoy reading it), I would really appreciate you sharing it with some other parents that might benefit from reading it. You can just send them to gtperformance.co/free and they can subscribe there!
Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about long-term athlete development!
Best,
Zach
Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS