Why discus throwers become dizzy

And it's all here on video. Congratulations to the winners! We hope you'll enjoy your Periodic Table table trophies. Our own experiments with half-drunk cups of coffee and the native fauna of magazine offices were not enough to garner nomination this time around, but we'll just try harder.

Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Already a subscriber? Want more? More From Discover. In contrast, discus throwers, though they do fix their gaze, do it in only two of the steps in their routine, and thus "spot" a lot less, makin it more likely that they will become dizzy.

Not only that, discus throwers have to JUMP, while hammer throwers do not, and that jump may upset the vestibular system even more. So if we want to stop discus throwers from getting dizzy, we need to try and get them to fix their gaze on a single target more than they already do. Dizzy discus dudes don't focus! The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Scicurious has a PhD in Physiology from a Southern institution.

She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at a celebrated institution that is very fancy and somewhere else. Her professional interests are in neurophysiology and psychiatric disorders. She recently obtained her PhD and is pursuing her love of science and writing at the same time. She often blogs in the third person. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.

See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. For a discus, the throwing can be broken down into 11 steps, like so: With the final result looking like this Throwing a hammer, on the other hand, has 15 steps, and looks like this: With the final result more like this: But I keep looking at them, and they keep looking awfully similar especially since they both apparently require very hardcore soundtracks.

And what they got was a difference in something I immediately identified as spotting. Can we build a new normal?

For the latter, we compared the determining features of gesture, gaze stabilization and projectile trajectory in both sports. A total of 22 high-level sportsmen in these 2 disciplines, half of them practising both sports, were interviewed.

Slow motion video recordings of discus and hammer throwing were examined to determine the visual referential, head movements and plantar surface support area involved at each stage of the motions.