Scientists confirm the best way to make swings go HIGHER

For thrill-seeking kids, there’s nothing more exciting than trying to get a playground swing higher and higher.

Now scientists have developed a mathematical model to explain this intuitive movement.

Researchers at Jumonji University in Japan have worked out equations that allow a person to lean forward or backward at any point during the arc of a swing.

They solved these equations for different swing sizes and for different sequences of upper body movements to find out which combination caused the swing to gain the most height.

Analysis showed that the best time to lean back depends on how high the swing already goes.

When the arc is small – as is the case when you first start swinging – the person should move their upper body back when the swing is at the bottom of the arc and move forward.

But once the swing begins to gain height, the person should start leaning back sooner, when the swing has reached the furthest part of the backswing.

To test whether people knew this instinctively, the researchers built a swing in a lab and recruited 10 students to try it.

All said they had played on swings before, but never explicitly learned how to move to get the swing higher.

When they studied images from their experiment, the team found that participants naturally conformed to the rules derived from their mathematical model.

“Children don’t know the laws of physics, but somehow they embody them and can swing very well,” said Chiaki Hirata, one of the study’s authors. New scientist.

Write in the journal Physical assessmentthe researchers suggest that swingers unconsciously respond to a centrifugal force that causes them to lean back at certain points of the swing arc.