Sprints - Height does matter!

Whaaat? wrote:

answer to your question wrote:

stride length won, not height.

No relation between the two, huh? Bring on the midgets with insance stride length then... Usain better watch out!

Everyone, let this thread die. Why do you keep arguing with an obvious troll in a thread started by the same troll? Stop responding.

mdmd wrote:

Whaaat? wrote:

No relation between the two, huh? Bring on the midgets with insance stride length then... Usain better watch out!

Everyone, let this thread die. Why do you keep arguing with an obvious troll in a thread started by the same troll? Stop responding.

Thanks for your contribution. I guess I'm troll because I'm proving you yahoos wrong. Is that the new thing on Letsrun?

Of course it matters. Well proportioned mass on a larger frame is a huge advantage. Bolt seems about on par with most of the worlds top sprinters from start to 40 yards, but he is completely in a league of his own after 40. Its clear his stride length just eats up the track, and taking less steps seems to allow him to decelerate less at the end of races. As long as Bolt doesn't start too poorly, he wins most races. If he gets a good start, he breaks records.

Therefore..... becauseee the levers are longer the.......

stride

is also longer.

/thread

The OP is reaching for the answer that he won because he took longer strides because he is taller, therefore taller > shorter at running.

But, as has been pointed out repeatedly on this thread it is just not that simple, and to think it is means our education system has failed the OP.

Also, how it follows that this is any kind of argument about whether Bolt dopes or not is beyond me.

That's some bullshit. I'm 4 feet 9 inches tall, and I could break the 100m WR if I wanted to.

Wrong, of the sub-9.90 crowd only 3 are over 190cm, Obikwelu, Bolt and R.Bailey. 7 under or at 175cm.

Dafuq wrote:

Wrong, of the sub-9.90 crowd only 3 are over 190cm, Obikwelu, Bolt and R.Bailey. 7 under or at 175cm.

Forgot to add that the average height of the sub-9.90 sprinter is about 180cm, and that there are many in that list that are actually 180cm.

Why does nobody understand stride length... It has nothing to do with how long your legs are. Its just how hard you are pushing off the ground. Maybe you could argue Bolt's longer legs allow him to generate more power, but the fact is he is pushing off the ground harder than the other athletes to move faster (in fact a lot harder since he has more mass to move as well).

think about it wrote:

Why does nobody understand stride length... It has nothing to do with how long your legs are. Its just how hard you are pushing off the ground. Maybe you could argue Bolt's longer legs allow him to generate more power, but the fact is he is pushing off the ground harder than the other athletes to move faster (in fact a lot harder since he has more mass to move as well).

We don't want to think about it. We just want to argue with any OP, and also scream doper.

NO

Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce is 4'11" and the fastest woman in the world.

Case closed.

Bay Area wrote:

Strength is related to muscle cross sectional area, not length, so they would only be 4x as strong.

Skater wrote:

To see the height factor more clearly:

However, if you have a supreme specimen such as no-one will deny Gay or Bolt to be, and you produce a 2x taller clone out of them, understand what happens:

2x taller

2x wider

2x deeper

=8x heavier (no typo)

=8x more strength

=8x more power

=4x more air drag

=faster than the original. Not by a factor of 2 perhaps, but by quite a bit.

Should be 4x for Force production but still 8x for power. Force in muscles goes like cross sectional area and hence the square of height but taller people also have longer levers so power goes like the cube. But this is all assuming that bigger people are shaped exactly like smaller people which isn't really the case anyway. It's a worthwhile first argument but I don't think it can be taken too seriously without supporting data.

think about it wrote:

Why does nobody understand stride length... It has nothing to do with how long your legs are. Its just how hard you are pushing off the ground. Maybe you could argue Bolt's longer legs allow him to generate more power, but the fact is he is pushing off the ground harder than the other athletes to move faster (in fact a lot harder since he has more mass to move as well).

It's not just about how hard you are pushing off the ground. Sprinting is also about matching the speed of your foot with the speed of the receding ground just before foot strike.

How hard you push sets the period of time spent in the air each stride but that's only half the battle. After all you can push really hard and spend a lot of time in the air each stride while running in place.

A man twice as tall might be many times heavier but only a few times stronger.

He would not be able to stand. Tallest man was 9 ft and he had difficulty moving around.

Basic engineering says that you can not just built something bigger. Gravity is the problem.

Obviously height is advantage in top speed endurance but it hurts your start. What we have in bolt is a 200/400m type who is so fast that he can win the 100m too. Maybe if more tall sprinters trained long to short and got lean and strong enough they'd win 100s too but there's a reason why even the tallest sprinters and NFL players aren't as tall as NBA players.

Also Yohan the beast Blake is only about 5 10 and he was much faster than 9.9 in peak form.

Doo wrote:

geneticist wrote:

Longer legs cost more however, and are more likely to have muscle tears/injury.

This argument has been made before, and if it were true we'd see nearly every sprinter well over 6 feet. The opposite is true, most sprinters are under 6 feet.

So why doesn't some 6'10 guy come along and beat Bolt?

Carrying it to its logical extreme, how long would you expect a person so tall that he had a 100m stride length to run 100m?

I would assume the reason we don't see ridiculously athletic 6'10 men winning sprint competitions is because they're already earning millions of dollars playing basketball.

Please give examples of 6-10 guys who are faster than Bolt (or Gay for that matter).

Blake could be faster or could have been...

Also, he's a fair bit shorter than Bolt

Earlier in the thread someone mentioned how football and basketball takes away tall sprinters/athletes. This is true.

Calvin Johnson the WR for Detroit runs a 10.2 100m. Trey Hardee was basketball and football guy in high school runs a 10.2 in the decathlon - 2X -World champion.

Both are legitimate 6'5" athletes and are pushing 6'6".

Damien Warner from Canada is 6'3" (short; but only 1 inch shorter than Usain) runs a 10.2 100m - basketball player.

Although considerably shorter Andrei De Grasse also was a basketball player. The ONLY reason he runs track is because he could not find four other guys to play with him to form a team for his high school basketball squad. The basketball coach told him there was no team since he was the only guy to show up for practice.

Basketball and football "steals" obscene amounts of track talent. I use "steal" since many great athletes in basketball and football are just sitting the bench or are getting injured playing a contact sport - going to waste.

Donald Thompson - high jump, won the Gold at the World Champs. in less than a 1.5 years of training and he play on a small basketball program. he has a fast run-up.

Dopings do not work on tall sprinters having elite physiology. Only YAMS.(also in cases where possessing of two wangs)

My guess is that height helps in sprints but it's not one of the most important factors. Since the percentage of people above a given height falls faster than exponentially above about ~6' 2" (~185cm), it's unlikely for great sprinters to be really tall--there simply isn't a large enough pool of tall people worldwide.