Lindsay Williams, static jump.

I think that maybe I didn't have the right attitude for our max strength testing. First of all I felt like I was back in a physics lab with force plates and displacement measuring devices on a much bigger scale than I've played with before. And mostly what I did in physics lab was play with the equipment so I was at the start thinking "what fun!" instead of "okay, time to work" which is maybe what I should have been thinking. How can you not be excited about good old Newtonian physics where physics still makes intuitive sense.

And then the tests themselves made me laugh too. The first one was a static squat. Per Lundstam, who was running the tests for us, set up the squat bar so that it was at rest at the height of the lowest point in the squat (quads // to the floor). Then we'd get under the bar and try to lift it. But I think we had 150kilos on the bar so, um, nothing moved. (We were standing on a force plate so Per measured how much down force we created.) I couldn't help but laugh at Lindsay, who was my testing partner, because it was the most anticlimactic strength test I'd ever seen.

Next was the static vertical leap, which is what Lindsay's getting ready to do in the photo. Holding the bar across her shoulders she'll go down to a squatting position and stop when the dowel hits the safety bars on the side of the cage. She'll hold that position for a couple of seconds and then jump. There's a belt around her waist that is connected to a cable that's rigged up above the weight cage to measure her displacement. Per takes a zero at her standing position and uses that to measure her vertical leap. He also gets a force graph for the jump from the force plate. After Lindsay it was my turn and on my first practice jump I fell over because I tried to go all the way down to where Lindsay had the side bars set and it was way too low, so I made it all the way down and then toppled.

The last test was a simple vertical leap. Still holding the dowel behind our shoulders so we couldn't use our arms, but we got to start from a standing position so we could drop down and then spring.

Not gonna lie, I was a little perturbed to be the object analyzed instead of on the computer pulling numbers out of graphs and putting them into equations.

Labels: photos, strength