During spring break, the 'Iolani Dance Team traveled to Anaheim, California to compete in the Sharp International Competition. Before the competition, we visited Sea World (SHAMU!), watched jousting at Medieval Times, and performed our competition routines at the happiest place on earth- DiSNEYLAND! :) In this dance, to the song "Black Horse and Cherry Tree" by KT Tugstall, my friend and teammate Chelsea was given a tumbling routine to do while the rest of the team lined up for a kickline. Right when this picture was taken, she was in the middle of a backhandspring. Looking back at this picture, I noticed that Chelsea was in "free fall" because the only force acting upon her was the force of gravity since she was not touching the ground. I remembered that all things in free fall (in this case, Chelsea) have a constant acceleration rate of -9.8 meters per second squared.
Hey thats really cool. I never looked at gymnastics from that perspective before. When i do flips i always just think jump high enough or far enough back to complete the flip, but thats cool that we could actually calculate how long we have before we hit the ground.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could do a back handspring. The best I can do is a cartwheel. haha ;) If you could calculate her velocity it would be so cool. Then you could tell Chelsea those values and it would be pretty freaky.
ReplyDeleteDancing is pretty legit. I like how you gave the background of the picture. I wonder what the physics are for when dancers use spotting to do that sustained spinning thing...
ReplyDeleteThat is one cool picture. It's cool that we can now notice the effects of gravity on our actions. In this case, Chelsea's cartwheel. I also thought about how her velocity reversed everytime her hands hit the floor and she flipped in a different direction.
ReplyDeleteThat is awesome that you guys got to dance in Disneyland! I thought it is pretty cool that chelsea looks like the displacement graph of an object in freefall.
ReplyDeleteThat's some legit dancing you do. Cool way of using physics to look at dancing, pretty smart.
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