Amateur and pro athletes turn to engineers to analyze their every move.

Forty years after sending a man to the moon, scientists have figured out how to add 10 mph to a fastball. Joe Levecchio, a high school pitcher living in Daytona Beach, Fla., was scuffling along with a heater that barely crept above 80 mph, a speed that wasn’t going to blow away many batters or impress many scouts. It wasn’t for lack of trying: He put so much into every pitch that he strained his back. But that’s in the past. In just a few months, he gained both a 92-mph pitch and a scholarship to the University of Miami. All he needed was a lesson in biomechanical physics.

Every sport from baseball to badminton is really physics in action. The flight of a javelin, the spiral of a perfectly thrown football — any game you see is full of enough physics problems to fill a textbook. Players and coaches are undeniably experts in their sports, but it takes a scientist to understand the forces at work and to truly push the bounds of athletic possibility.

Mont Hubbard, a professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering and the director of the Sports Biomechanics Laboratory at the University of California at Davis, is a world-renowned expert in the science of sports. Some aeronautical engineers specialize in airplanes and space shuttles; Hubbard has studied Frisbees and bobsleds. He and his students are currently working on computer simulations and mathematical models for uneven bars routines in women’s gymnastics. Research in his lab has measured the joint strength needed to perform each move, knowledge that gymnasts can exploit with focused exercises.

Computer models show that the flashiest tricks are very sensitive to the body mass of the gymnast; it’s no accident that the best female gymnasts are pixies. Ultimately, Hubbard believes, his computer models could someday discover new moves that have never been tried in the gym. And although his lab has had grants from the U.S. Olympic Committee, he’s not especially interested in improving any particular athlete’s performance. Instead, he wants to understand each sport at its deepest levels.

In contrast to Hubbard, Levecchio has more than an academic interest in fastballs. To master his delivery, he visited the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala. Engineers there covered his body in reflective markers and tracked his pitching movements with cameras snapping 450 frames per second, a process called motion capture analysis. Computers modeled his motions in three dimensions and compared them with a database of elite pitchers. Levecchio learned that weakness in his abdominal muscles was keeping the springlike power in his lower body from reaching his arm. He also discovered that his pitching arm wasn’t fully cocked when he fired his pitch.

“It’s hard to be your best when you can’t see what you’re doing wrong,” Levecchio says. “You can pick up things on a computer that you’d never see on videotape.”

For more about the type of thinking goes into making sports equipment, check out this video from NBC and the National Science Foundation, about the science of skates:

There are even more science of the Olympics videos here.

Find out how engineers use helmets to detect football injuries here.

Find out how engineers design faster swimsuits here.

Find out how to make a perfect free-throw here.

Filed under: Biomedical, Computer, Mechanical

Tags: Biomedical, Biotechnology, Computer, Mechanical