by Asher Price
The froghopper, Burrows explained, combined and exploited the best biomechanics of other creatures, making it a world-champion jumper. “There are two basic body designs for jumping that enable many animals to escape from predators, to increase their speed of locomotion or to launch into flight,” Burrows wrote in his Nature article. “Animals with long legs (bush babies, kangaroos and frogs, for example) have a levering power that enables them to use less force to jump the same distance as short-legged animals of comparable mass, whereas those with short legs must rely on the release of stored energy in a rapid catapult action.” (Put us warm-blooded humans in the bush babies’ category: That’s why champion high jumpers tend to have long legs, to use as giant levers as they flip themselves skyward.)
The froghopper has “developed the most amazing mechanisms for jumping,” Burrows tells me. The froghoppers exert a force roughly 400 times their body weight on the ground, about three times as much as your average flea, and 150 to 200 times as much as a human. Another way of thinking about it: If an adult human could exert that kind of force when jumping, she could clear the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
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To visit Burrows, I boarded a 9:45 train one bright weekday morning at London’s King’s Cross Station. It was a clear day, recalling the London “spread out in the sun / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat” that Philip Larkin described in his train-ride poem “The Whitsun Weddings.” Rebecca and I were visiting England chiefly to see her brother Ben and his family. Besides novel-writing and teaching, Ben has carved out an essayist’s life as the go-to guy among English periodicals for something literary-minded about the sporting scene. Forty years old, and the man can still throw it down. But what with the responsibilities about the house and his teaching obligations and the shortage of basketball rims around London, he seldom finds himself on a court nowadays. Even so, when he and I play—I in the best shape of my life, he in average shape for him—he can still cruise by me as if I’ve stopped to lace my sneakers.
Eleven minutes after pulling out of King’s Cross, I saw my first horse in pasture. Happy horse, happy pasture, very England. “All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / of being in a hurry, gone,” wrote Larkin, looking out on a similar landscape, and sitting there I felt a momentary reprieve—a sun-basking exhalation—from the constant haste of my upward rush. As we sped by the backs of houses, the tableaux had the distant ring of familiarity for me. As a 13-year-old trailing my academic parents, and then, later, as a graduate student myself, I had done my time in England. An hour later, after the train pulled into Cambridge station, I stepped out to the meaty, buttery smell of a platform vendor’s Cornish pasties, and long-suppressed memories of execrable English public-school food wafted through the olfactories of my mind. I walked up the High Street, past a kebab joint with menus in English, French, Spanish, and Korean plastered to the windows, and across the way, a World War I memorial—a dutiful young soldier, forever striding with rucksack and rifle, a grim, defiant expression wiped across his thin-lipped face.
Burrows’s office was in the zoology department, just off the sort of pretty, winding cobblestone street that English university towns do so well. The shelves were jammed with vials, each containing a dead insect, as if suspended in mid–buzzy leap. I had come hoping to learn something about the elusive mechanics of jumping, and about why some species had been selected for their leaping ability. For years, Burrows had performed locust surgery, perfecting, like one of those artists who paint landscapes on a grain of rice, superfine movements with forceps to implant electrodes on nerve cells only 30 microns in diameter, about the size of a very fine human hair. But promoted to department chair, where he had to busy himself with the muck of academic administration—faculty complaints about parking permits and the like—he fell out of practice. By 2003, his best days of locust surgery behind him, he decided he needed something new and engaging. That’s what brought him to the froghopper.
The insect was selected for its jumping prowess either because jumping is a more efficient way to get from one tree to the next than crawling down and back up again, or because it’s a very fast way to “get away from nasty things that want to eat them,” Burrows told me. Jumping gets you out of a bad situation faster than flying, which requires the beating of wings to take off—imagine how long it takes a helicopter to get its blades up to speed before takeoff.
How fast is the froghopper’s jumping action? An average human being’s top reaction time is 200 milliseconds—that’s how long we need, minimum, to recognize and dodge a baseball headed for our face or, put more poetically, to identify emotions in the countenance of a fellow human. The froghopper can jump in about one millisecond. So fast, Burrows told me, that something beyond muscle contraction must explain its jumping ability.
I was interviewing Burrows at his desk, which is tucked beneath a window in one corner of the lab. In front of me, in some vials, sat some insects. They were froghoppers, he said. Still alive. He had captured them the previous evening with his eight-year-old grandson in his backyard garden. He took down a butterfly net—a short-handled one with an old, beaten canvas bag attached, its holes minuscule—and, in a brief hand ballet, gracefully whooshed it this way and that along the ground in a demonstration.
“May I tap them?” I asked, nodding at the vials, as if I were a kid wondering about banging on an aquarium glass.
“Of course,” he said.
I tapped—and not much happened. Just like at the aquarium.
Minus the specs, maybe it was the Clark Kent of insects: mild-mannered, vast powers concealed.
The discovery of the froghopper’s jumping talent and technique put Burrows’s career on a new trajectory, so to speak. His mind captured by the ingenious jumping mechanisms, he started to look at how other insects measured up as he sought to secure the froghopper’s title of highest jumper. He filled books and binders with notes—the spine of one reads, simply, “Jumping Cockroaches.” In his lab, he set up a mini-theater to measure and record the insects’ jumping. They were placed in a small glass box, brightly lit by a half-dozen or so lamps, as if on a stage. A foot away sat a video camera capable of taking 100,000 frames per second.
He showed me some of the films. They were beautiful. A lacewing tumbling through the air, in floaty slow motion, and an exquisitely defined silhouette of a praying mantis, perched at one end of its stage as it prepared to leap—and then did, its long abdomen curling forward in a show of fingernail-sized core strength. It was the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Muybridge photos. I could have watched for hours. It was this film work that clued Burrows in to the coordinated mechanisms that explained the insect’s spectacularly quick jumping ability.
When I saw him, Burrows was excited, in his modest way, about a forthcoming article in Science (something most scientists hope for their entire careers), about a juvenile insect that jumped with the use of gears, the first detected in nature. The insect had developed a mechanism of interlocking gears, like those in an old wristwatch, to make sure that its legs sprang simultaneously.
I asked him if an individual insect could perfect technique, if it had the smarts and creativity to improve what it was born with. If, through practice or insight, it could stretch the evolutionarily determined radius of its species’ abilities.
“I shouldn’t think so,” he said.
As I was leaving, Burrows asked what I knew about the Fosbury Flop. Only that it’s the standard high-jump technique, I said. He smiled a small, knowing smile. As a young post-doc out of Scotland, Burrows had been doing research at Oregon when he decided to attend one of the school’s famed track-and-field meets. It was there, at a track meet in 1967, that Burrows saw a pale whippet of a man, from the state school down the road, using an unorthodox, nearly backward high-jumping technique, flinging his head and shoulders back-first, his belly to the sky, to clear an ever-higher bar. This man, in short, was doing what none of his prized insects seemed capable of—jumping beyond
his apparent mechanical limits with sheer ingenuity and unorthodox technique. The man was Dick Fosbury.
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From the armswing to the stretch of the Achilles, jumping is surprisingly complicated for such a simple maneuver. Biomechanically speaking, the goal of the jump is to raise the center of mass following foot-to-ground contact. So the upward force at the feet has to be greater than body weight to produce upward acceleration and liftoff. Of course, Sargent was right: Whatever force you generate in the first stage of the jump is followed by the decelerating effect of gravity while you’re in the air. Remember, you can’t add force once you’re airborne, because your feet are no longer touching the ground. “As our upward velocity and consequent shortening velocity of the muscles increase, the ability of the muscles to produce force decreases,” Arthur Chapman writes in his textbook Biomechanical Analysis of Fundamental Human Movements. “In this sense jumping is a self-defeating activity.” (Good old Arthur, always there with an encouraging word.)
Force, you might recall from basic physics, is mass times acceleration. A big dude like me needs more force to generate an equal amount of acceleration as a little guy. Acceleration is key to jumping—it’s why Todd Wright is fond of saying that he wants his players to push through the ground as quickly as possible. And that quickness comes from those fast-twitch muscles. That’s where the plyometrics and the weightlifting—the sweat equity of this endeavor—are meant to help. Stronger muscles, recruited more quickly, mean more force applied to the ground, faster. Stretching is crucial here, too: Just as you can get more force from a hammer if you swing it over a greater arc, you can push through the ground with greater force the higher up you can bring your knees when bounding toward a leaping jump. The bigger the motion, the more opportunity to apply force: Work is force times distance, and power is work divided by time. “The less ankle flexibility you have, for example, the shorter the arc through which you will be able to apply driving force against the ground,” John Jerome writes in Staying Supple, his treatise on flexibility. “With a briefer arc, you’ll expend more energy to attain the same speed.”
Directing myself upward as efficiently as possible will also require some old-fashioned improvement of my biomechanics. Newton’s third law of motion holds, famously, that “action and reaction are equal and opposite.” The recoil of a fired handgun, for example. To get a sense of this, get on your bathroom scale and quickly raise your arms above your head. The scale, you’ll notice, will spin rapidly as if you’ve grown in weight. In effect, you’re jumping, even if your feet haven’t left ground. That’s because the muscular force required to push up your arms is also pushing the rest of your body down toward the earth. The reverse, of course, is also true: Get on the scale with your hands above your head. Now rapidly drop your hands by your sides. The scale, as your arms move through the air, will lighten. You’re falling, now, as your body pushes force skyward. Thus, the first lesson of biomechanics: The armswing is an important part of the jump. (These things have been examined closely: Jody Jensen, a University of Texas exercise science professor, titled her PhD thesis “Intersegmental dynamics: Contribution of the armswing to propulsion mechanics in the vertical jump.” Seriously.)
With roughly eight months to go in my dunking year, fundamental questions involving the physics of explosion remained ahead of me: Should I, for instance, undertake the running one-foot leap or the quick two-foot plant-and-jump? Some dunkers, like Jordan, are known for their running leaps; others, like Amar’e Stoudemire, a forward for the Knicks, typically jump off two feet. That difference gets at the idiosyncrasy of human movement even as we’re trying to reach peak performance: Why, for example, is there not a single, obvious way for a baseball player to hold a bat as he awaits a pitch? Professional golfers talk about tinkering with their swing, as if there isn’t an empirically, precisely correct style. When I played Little League baseball on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, sandlot fields where dads tossed out kitty litter to soak up unwanted puddles and where both teams carefully walked before each game to pick up shards of broken glass, I modeled my stance after that of Darryl Strawberry, my hero on the New York Mets, who pulled his tall, skinny body in tight, like he was stuck in a crowded elevator. He held his bat up and back and erect, close to his shoulder, as if he were in a color guard, bearing the American flag, churning the bat in small, menacing little vertical circles as he awaited delivery of the pitch: the straw that stirred the drink. That stance was just about the opposite of the pose struck by his teammate Lee Mazzilli, he of the matinee-idol looks, who trailed his bat, limply, almost indifferently, behind him, hanging it just parallel to the ground. He won quicker bat speed, perhaps, because he didn’t have to bother dropping his wrists as he swung. But he lacked Strawberry’s power. A friend of mine, a baseball scout, tells me that the variety of stances and pitching motions comes down to the fact that “bodies are different.” “Tall pitchers throw differently than short pitchers,” he said. “Guys with quick arms—looser tendons, better fast-twitch muscles, et cetera—have different mechanics than guys with slower arms.” That must be part of it: “Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions,” Thoreau wrote. But I suspect that body movement is like language and accent: You wring out, like a sponge, the steady stream of material and activity in which you soak. The idiosyncrasies of body movement are true in everyday life, too—far removed from the peak moments of hitting a ball or going up for a dunk. Even in cases with an agreed-upon, ideal, set way of doing things, we humans naturally deviate: In elementary school we painstakingly learn to write in print and script, along a sheet of horizontal dotted lines; still, as if we had fallen from a Tower of Babel of penmanship, we have among us a thousand ways of writing (to the extent we handwrite at all anymore). If Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man exemplified what our ideal proportions and postures ought to be, we rarely resemble his noble form. You can tell that just by looking at the postures or sitting positions of any dozen people on the subway. (Do you cross your legs or not? If so, right over left or left over right? At the knee or at the ankle?) The sloppiness of human idiosyncrasy doesn’t help when you’re trying to dunk a basketball. And all my kinks that Polly and Jamie had identified many months before had to be slowly unraveled. Physical habits had to be unlearned as I rebuilt myself. Not such an easy task.
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Dick Fosbury always loved track and field, but the thing was that he was not all that good at it. Tall, thin, awkward—“a grew-too-fast kid,” his Medford High coach would say—he chose the high jump, an event that, like the dunking of a basketball, favors an explosive jump. He had cleared 5′4″ in junior high, a decent height, by means of the obsolete scissors technique—the athlete, like a sped-up cancan dancer, throws one leg and then the next over the bar. But then his progress stalled: to all appearances, he was another earnest but unremarkable young athlete. In high school, his coach pressed him to use the conventional jumping technique of the period. Known as the Western roll, or the belly roll, it requires the jumper to leap over the bar as if mounting a horse—facedown, flinging one leg over the bar and then the other. But young Fosbury did not take to the Western roll. Even at 6′4″, he found himself struggling to match heights that were routine for his shorter teammates. He was not advancing—using the Western roll, he was backsliding, actually, failing at one meet to clear the opening height of 5′3″. As the team made the trip to yet another track competition, in Grants Pass, a tiny town in southwest Oregon, a frustrated Fosbury, just a 15-year-old ninth-grader, told himself that if he couldn’t surpass 5′4″, he was through with the sport.
And so it was at a track meet in 1963 that a gangly boy began quietly tinkering with his cherished scissors technique. After matching his old junior high mark, he began to improvise: Instead of keeping his upper body erect, or even leaning slightly forward, as his legs scissored over the bar, he began throwing his hips higher—and his shoulders started falling backward in reaction. On his next jump, Fosbury cleare
d 5′6″, pleased, if slightly befuddled, by the ease with which he suddenly had made a new height. Still, he was mostly ignored as other jumpers continued their warm-ups. Then, flinging his shoulders back a little farther, as if he were laid out in a chaise longue, he cleared 5′8″. Now Fosbury had won onlookers, especially coaches. He was doing just about the opposite of the belly roll. He was belly-up! And instead of a foot being the first thing to clear the bar, it was his head and shoulders that were leading the way. Finally, the bar was set at 5′10″, and Fosbury, his shoulders fully thrown back, as if he were lying flat on a flying carpet, floated over. At a single meet, he had achieved a full half-foot improvement over his previous best mark. “Fosbury flops over bar,” read a newspaper photo caption back in Medford. And suddenly the Fosbury Flop was born. Just a weird oddity? Perhaps. Most high jumpers stubbornly stuck with convention, but Fosbury, who would study engineering in college, continued to tinker with his method. The brilliance of the flop was that it allowed him to clear the bar without necessarily lifting his center of mass (the point on the body where the mass above and below average out) over it; with his pelvis uplifted but his arms and legs dangling on either side of the bar, as if bridging in midair, his center of mass could technically sit below the bar even as each bit of his body, part by part, topped it.
Fosbury, it would turn out, was not merely a daring teenager with a quirky innovation: As he grew into his body, he grew into his technique. In 1968, a scant five years after nearly quitting the high jump altogether before backing into the flop, he earned a spot on the U.S. team for the Mexico City Olympics. Pitted against competitors who persisted in the Western roll’s belly-down method, Fosbury, with his odd technique—not to mention a suspense-building habit before each attempt of clenching and unclenching his fists, sometimes for several minutes—endeared himself to the foreigners. In the end, to cries of acclaim, he delivered, taking gold with an Olympic-record height of 7′4¼”.