A friend of mine sent me an interesting question, “why is the Fosbury flop a more efficient way to jump over a bar”. The friends name is Per which would be quite a good name for a Physicist, meters Per second, Kilogrammes Per meter cubed etc. I wasn’t sure of the answer so looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered that with this technique the centre of mass of the jumper stays below the bar so you don’t have to jump so high. At first I wasn’t convinced, surely you still have to get each part of your body over the bar. Eventually I convinced myself thinking about throwing a stick over the bar. If you through the stick up vertically then to clear the bar the centre of gravity has to get much higher so clearly has to be given more energy than if the stick was thrown up horizontally. So even though in both case the stick got over the bar the position of the centre of gravity is what counts. Now, if the stick could bend as in the diagram below then it could get over without having to be thrown very high at all. According to this snakes should be very good high jumpers. If I could invent a method that kept my centre of gravity about 2m below the bar then maybe I’d be in with a chance.