The Effect of Movement Pattern in Flight Phase for Long Jump Performance

Abstract

The long jump is an athletic event consisting of four phases viz. approach, take off, flight and landing. Three techniques are mainly used in long jump and they have different air dynamics. The purpose of the study was to find out the body surface area change with the time during the long jump flight phase and how it affects the performance. The data were collected from six national senior male long jumpers in Sri Lanka at the national trials in 2022. Two best performers were selected from each three techniques. Their performances were recorded in the frontal and sagittal planes using two cameras (50Hz). The coordinates of each athlete’s center of gravity were analyzed for each frame from start with take-off to landing phase using the Kinovea (version 0.9.3) software and surface area was calculated using Adobe Photoshop (version 2020). Hence, the area of particular position can be calculated using pixel ratio. The space calibration was completed from frontal plane and sagittal planes separately. The Frontal surfaces of jumpers were calculated. The correlations between performance and surface area in the flight phase was analyzed using the Pearson correlation method in SPSS (version 28.0.1.1) statistical software. According to the results, the changes of surface area and the performances of three techniques were significantly different (p<0.05) with a negative correlation. Therefore, surface area of athlete body in flight phase is inversely proportional to the long jump performance for the 21 positions of entire 50 frames of the movement pattern at the points of 0.06T, 0.11T, 0.17T, 0.26T, 0.43T, 0.51T, 0.54T, 0.57T, 0.6T, 0.66T, 0.71T, 0.74T, 0.77T, 0.8T, 0.83T, 0.85T, 0.88T, 0.91T, 0.94T, 0.97T and 0.98T (where, T is the flight time) for each technique. Therefore, the long jumpers have to minimize surface area of the body on frontal plane to optimize their performances.