The karma of throwing – Reasoning why protesters couldn’t hit targets by throwing shoes while players do it all the times
Recently, a protester took off his shoes and flung them in the direction of the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. A little while ago in Birmingham, a protester threw his shoes at the Pakistani President Asif Zardari and before them all; George
W. Bush got shoes thrown at him by a journalist in Iraq. The common feature of all these incidents, besides the fact that they were all protesting something, was that they all missed. Throwing is a big part of a lot of sports, from baseball, to cricket, to
the Javelin, to American football, and being able to throw properly is both a science and an art. Maybe these protesters should take some lessons from watching athletes so they at least hit their targets next time.
Throwing is a big part of many different sports today. The list of sports which feature throwing objects is very long but a few of them can be mentioned. The first is baseball; in the sport, the ball is pitched to a batter and then it is thrown back to one
of the four bases. Cricket also features throwing in it for the essential aspect of getting the ball back to either the wicketkeeper or the bowler to try and run out a batsman. A special type of throwing is involved in American football because of the need
to get an odd shaped ball to fly all the way down field. There is whole type new of skill needed to throw a javelin, a shot put or a hammer down field during an Olympic competition. As anyone who has ever tried to do so will know, it is not easy to throw a
projectile very far, and the fact is that it requires a lot of practise.
There are several aspects to throwing; there is physics, which is a large part of it, there is also biomechanics and there is also exercise physiology involved. On the physics side of it we see that to be able to throw something requires an understanding
of angles if one wants to learn how to throw farther. Whenever anything is thrown, the launch angle is checked along with the attack angle and the launch height. Physics of throwing should not be ignored because if someone wants to improve their throwing abilities,
they need to understand how the angles come into play in the throw as well as seeing how far the distance is and how best to get the ball there. A lot of times a sportsman will do this unconsciously due to the numerous times they have thrown the ball before.
Biomechanics in throwing is the study of how much power the ball or projectile is thrown with. It relates to different muscle groups involved in a throw; some muscles contract while others expand and a study of which ones do what and strengthening them,
can increase the speed and distance of a throw. Exercise physiology takes into account the physics of throwing and relates that to the muscles identified through biomechanics and comes up with a solution as to how to improve the performance of an athlete in
regards to throwing.
The three protesters in the last few months, who threw their shoes at various heads of state, should have really studied the science behind throwing. All of them missed; the shoes thrown at Bush went wide but only because he ducked, so the Iraqi journalist
who threw the shoes was the best out of the three. Then a few months ago a man threw his shoes at the Pakistani president, Asif Zardari, who also missed. Recently another protester threw his shoes at the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard in protest
over the Iraq war. He also missed it. The interesting part of this would have been if any one of these protesters had actually hit their target.
In the future, it will be interesting to see if protesters do some practice and study the physics of throwing. If they worked on their angles and power a little bit more and took lessons from baseball players and cricketers, they might be able to hit future
leaders who they are protesting against.
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