How does weight relate to force / power in a jump?

Extra weight will increase force because force = acceleration x mass, BUT more weight is harder to accelerate. What is the relationship between weight and actual force production? This gets even more confusing when considering power (power = force x velcoity).

The following two graphs show how mass related to mean force and power development in a single counter-movement jump, for roughly 500 tests in our database;According to our database of tests and the pearson product correlation, athlete weight is somewhat related to force and power output in a jump.

I think that the relationship that is seen here is mostly due to the wide variety of groups in our testing database. We have tested a lot of high level athletes as well as some younger athletes, I see two main groups by looking at the above graphs and I'm not convinced that weight makes much difference within them - weight only makes a difference between them.

It would be more interesting to see this type of information with a homogenous group of athlete's. I'll work on that for another day.

GC Time during aerobic intervals

This morning I ran an aerobic interval session and had one athlete wearing the A-Pod System. The workout was
- 2 sets of
- 6 x 100m run
- at 80% max speed
- 45 sec walk/jog between intervals
- 5min rest between sets


The graph on the left shows the athlete's 100m times for each interval.






This graph shows how average ground contact time related to running speed for each interval. Clearly, he ran faster with shorter ground contact times.

What does this mean? Do shorter contact times mean faster runs? Up to a point I'm sure, but this athlete was not sprinting at 100%.

Perhaps he was just lazy on his slow runs, but this athlete does run faster with shorter ground contact times. Maybe he should be trained to focus on high running cadence.

One of the main reasons for performing an aerobic interval workout is so athlete's can focus on maintaining proper form. In our next session I will be more diligent in cueing him to maintain good running form, I will post what the results look like.




Definition: Average ground contact time is the average amount of time that the athlete's foot was on the ground for each step in the sprint.