Monday, November 9, 2009

Stopwatches And Their Many Uses

By Oliver Richard

Stopwatches have many uses, but nonetheless the main function is to keep and measure time. This is why coaches, athletes and sports times use stopwatches to set up time indications or keep track of progress by using the clocked times for future reference. However, other types of stopwatches also have other purposes.

A stopwatch is basically just a hand held device that's used as a timer for various sports activities. From track & field activities, swimming, motor & car racing, etc, this kind of watch is highly useful for evaluation during training sessions.

Stopwatches are very handy for coaches that need to time the athlete's performance. To start timing an event, you simply push the button one time and when over you press it again. These are operated manually and used by coaches and trainers in their training and timing of the athlete's performance.

A stopwatch can either have analog or digital technology. It usually resembles a small pocket watch but some designs are made to be worn on the wrist. The big clocks that you see in arenas such as basketball and hockey stadiums are called stop clocks (just in case you're wondering).

The stopwatch with digital technology is most likely more accurate than the standard analog stopwatch. The analog stopwatch, though, is a great gift for trainers and coaches who have just won some kind of competition and this is a practice often done by teams of students in high school or college.

The basic analog stopwatch is still a useful little device for timing lap time, running time and countdowns. The features that are on the digital stopwatches are good should you require better accuracy for the use in laps and other activities but also over all sport evaluations.

There are stopwatch models that allow for storing records of up to 50 lap times, while others only hold up to 10. Other digital designs allow for calculation of speed and time as long as the distance of a lane or track is known. This is done by entering the distance into the stopwatch. The watch then evaluates the previous records of the athlete and will come up with an average time of how many minutes or seconds it would take to cover the given distance.

Lastly, stopwatches are basically used as timers for a countdown. The watch will count down to zero after you have entered a specific time and pressed the start button. This makes them valuable to coaches, athletes and trainers when working out, because you will have the time needed for an exercise or can keep an eye on when the exercise has exceeded the warm-up period.

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