P.E - Biomechanics — 6-topic bundle

We can break down biomechanics into two main areas:
* Kinematics: This describes motion. It's about how things move, without considering the forces that cause the motion. Think about things like displacement (how far something moved), velocity (how fast it moved and in what direction), and acceleration (how quickly its velocity changed).
* Kinetics: This explains motion. It looks at the forces that cause, resist, or change motion. This includes forces like gravity, muscle forces, friction, and ground reaction forces.

You'll mainly deal with these three:

1. Displacement: This isn't just distance; it's the change in position from a starting point to an ending point, including the direction. If you walk 5m forward then 5m back, your distance is 10m, but your displacement is 0m. It's a vector quantity.
   • Units: meters (m), centimeters (cm)

Here's how we break it down:

When you or an object moves through a fluid (like air or water), it experiences forces. These forces are crucial in sports like swimming, cycling, running, and ball games. We're mainly concerned with two types of forces: drag and lift.

Drag is the resistance force that opposes motion through a fluid. It's what slows you down. The faster you go, the more drag you experience. Think about sticking your hand out a car window – the faster the car, the harder the resistance.

• Kinematics: Describing movement without considering the forces causing it. This includes things like speed, acceleration, and range of motion. For example, a sprinter's leg velocity or a golfer's club head speed.
• Kinetics: Analyzing the forces causing movement. This involves looking at ground reaction forces, muscle forces, and joint torques. For instance, the sheer force on a knee during a basketball landing.

When we talk about advanced biomechanics, we're moving from simply describing movement (kinematics) to understanding the forces causing it (kinetics), and how these relate to performance and injury.

Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels