Here’s a curious fact for you: The center of mass of a high jumper doing the Fosbury flop crosses under the bar.
Do you know what that means? It means that you don’t have to jump as high as with other techniques to jump just a high.
Here’s how this works:
What does it mean to “jump as high as you can, please!”? Imagine having to calculate how high you can throw a ball. If you do the calculations, you will probably use SUVAT equations in one form or another. When throwing an object, these calculate the trajectory of the center of mass of the object.
See, here’s the thing in Olympic high jump. The task is not to jump as high as possible. The task is to cross a bar at a certain height.
Think about it.
And if you find out you want to know more, then just head over to the page where I found the image above. It’s quite intriguing, and not even just about science. The whole thing says something about our own perception and communication of things, too.