Every Thursday, I take a tennis class and yoga lesson. These activities have been teaching me a lot about correct ways to perform movements, and the reasoning behind the techniques. As of late, they have enabled me to become much more self aware. One difficulty I have encountered in both, is properly balancing myself. In tennis, an issue I have been struggling with is ‘coiling’ my body to exert more force when hitting the ball. In yoga, I have had issues ‘centering’ myself in order to remain grounded enough to maintain certain poses. I have been taking a basic physics class this semester, and during the past week, the topic has focused on forces, and their interactions with objects, and their motions. I enjoy thinking about physics, and this week, during my lessons, I had forces on the brain, and attempted to apply my new knowledge.
At tennis class, I concluded that Isaac Newton’s 2nd law, F=ma, is the reason for the technique of coiling. Coiling increases your acceleration, because uncoiling involves a change in direction and a change in velocity, which are both accelerations, therefore increasing the total force you can apply to the ball. Also, I realized that normal force is a reason behind why you should push one leg off the ground when uncoiling. Normal force, is the force applied by an object to its supporting surface. According to Newton’s 3rd law, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, the same amount of force you push off the ground with, should be applied back to you, by the ground. This would, therefore, also increase the amount of force able to be exerted upon the ball.
In the yoga lesson, I felt that the concepts of normal force and Newton’s 3rd law could be applied as well. Both could explain my current inability to properly balance. Standing incorrectly, could, instead of evenly distributing my weight, focus it all on one particular area, causing a massive force on one particular part of my body, straining it, instead of alleviating the stress by spreading the force out over a larger area. If I could manage to focus, and evenly distribute my weight, my balance should drastically improve.
On a new path 