Charlie, I can’t seem to convince my dad that hand timed sprints are a minimum 0.24 sec faster than electronic timing.
Could you please explain to me as best you can why this is so?
Thanks!
My finger slipped and I just happened to catch the dot turning colour. .004! Pure luck, as I averaged around.200 for the rest.
Is it possible to train a sprinters reaction time ? TiMo got out of the blocks in .104 secs for his world record. Was it luck or did he train for it ?
I have trouble starting and stopping a stop watch in much better than 180 mSec (two actions) - so how does someone get 69kg out of the blocks in close to half that time ?
quikmick,
the .24 is for human reaction time… what is there to explain? the computer on the FAT system is hooked up to the gun. It starts right when the gun is fired. My guess is smoke does not appear at least until .1 and if you are going by sound then forget it because the speed of sound travels even slower. the farther away the race the more off the hand timing will be. I believe a 200 is the worst hand timed race because looking all the way down and across the track makes it hard to judge.
With hand timing, the gun smoke must be reacted to while the finish is anticipated. If there’s no smoke- only sound, the differential is much greater than .24.
What happens if you have a stopwatch,simultaneously say go and hit the stopwatch and have the runner start running on your go.
its obviosly more accurate but not practical . so if it was a 100 or 200 that starter/timer would have to run over to the finish line and it would still be off because as charlie said they would anticipate the finish. and this would only work for one runner at a time. that is why its not practical.
That’s how I get timed,the guy with the stop watch is at the finish line.His arm is in the air and he lowers it,yells go and hits the stopwatch simultaneously.The go is the thing that I am running on.
how come it takes around 0.24 secs to react and press a button on a stopwatch, but sometimes not more than 0.1 secs to react at the start of a sprint? Does it have something to do with the size of the action - massive movement in sprint start vs. tiny movement to press button, or is it to do with arousal levels in athletes vs. starters?
quickmick - get your dad to try this test
http://www.fetchfido.co.uk/games/reaction/reaction_test.htm
Then the penny should drop.
Trying that test actually answered my question above.
Alternatively: http://www.geocities.com/cooljava4u/background/reactionback.htm
or http://www.alphacouriers.freeserve.co.uk/reactiontest.html
That’s a great test Jimbo. I found that my reaction to the last dot was much quicker than the previous dots. Up to half a second. Interesting.
those were great. woke me up a little quicker this morning.
will try them again later today, should do better then.
That’s a great link.
My best in seconds is 0.199s, and my best average is 0.249s.
What are your guys bests???
great link. Tried it this morning and my best avg. was .191. About 1 hr after my gym workout my best avg. was .169. My best single is .151 (small circle) and .152 on the big circle. I will try again after tempo this evening to see if there is any noticable improvement or lack of it!
My best for the Big Dot was .145 My best for one of the small dots was .132
Best average was .161 best average with big toe was .212. Thus illustrating Charlies point regarding delay differences between the brain and hand and brain and foot 
I tried using my foot. Got .100 and broke the mouse.
So it takes atleast .24 on average to react to the smoke, but how much slower at the other end are the timers? I have watched my coach press the stopwatch reacting to the athlete crossing the line and the beep only goes when the athlete is atleast 2m past the line. Much of the .24 would be cancelled out due to this. The timer may feel they have pressed the button accurately, even though there has to be a delay, but it takes someone else to watch the timer and the athlete to see the difference.
My best for the big dot is 0.145 and slightly slower for the small dots. BUT yesterday I tried it on my dad’s slow computer (90 MHz) and could just barely get below 0.20. It could be because of the different mouse but I suspect the result is actually computer dependant as the input has to go through both the web program and Windows.
I am 32 years old and interestingly my dad who is 60 y.o. was just a tad slower than me with 0.21. My sister who is the youngest at 21 did worst with 0.23.
Anyway this got me thinking. Could there be a correlation between reaction time and CNS fatigue caused by sprint and weight training? Can it be improved by athletic training?. Is there a correlation between reaction time and overtraining? It would then be useful to monitor your reaction time just as you do with your heart rate?
I found a somewhat interesting study at http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9514251431/isbn9514251431.pdf
A battery of different non resisted motor skills were tested and among these the simple reaction time. One group followed a weight training program and there was a modest improvement in motor abilities after a ten week program. There was NO reduction in motor skill immediately after the strength training session.
However the study concerned untrained individuals and the weights were 50% of 1RM. In other worlds - the study really doesn’t answer any of my questions.
I also got inspired to start on a project I have thought about for quite some time. Last year my company finished a decathlon game, Fila Decathlon, running on Game Boy Advance. This used the standard button mashing technique for running while the jumps and throws added additional button presses that actually made those events rather complex and difficult to master. If we had the time we would have included test events like flying 30m, vertical jump, bench press, 5 alternate leg bounds and of course starts from blocks for reaction time. These test events would naturally only make use of a single button press technique and together they could tell your potential in the more complex competition events and consequently also in the total decathlon. Just like in real life then.
Well, perhaps such a test of different button presses could actually be a useful test of motor abilities in real life - to monitor the state of your nervous system? At least it would be fun. So I am pondering on developing a stand alone game of such test events for mobile phones. To make it more challenging as a game, the test events could together constitute a “test event decathlon”.
Well, if I have the time I might very well try it.
Some of the timers at our local meets are age 70 + - lol - old timers literally
some German guys came over last year and couldn’t understand how they’d got .5 slower in one week :sing::