Sunday, October 11, 2009

The Many Uses Of Stopwatches

By Oliver Richard

There are many uses of stopwatches. Of course, its main purpose is to count the time in order for an athlete, coach, or a whole team, to set up time indicators or to mark a progress for future reference. There are others, so if you want to know more about the many uses of a stopwatch, then read on.

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.

Although there are different designs and models of stopwatches available, the modern stopwatches can come with a lot of functions, features and modes. This still does not make the traditional stopwatch useless, though. In fact, the standard stopwatch is still able to serve its purpose and is capable of countdowns, recording running times and timing laps. The modern stopwatches do have the advantage of having easier access and higher accuracy, on top of the basic functions of tracking laps times and calculating evaluations.

Some models are capable of storing up to 50 lap times, whereas other stopwatches can only save up to 10. Some of the digital stopwatches also calculate the speed and time if you know what the distance of a lane or track is. All you have to do is enter the distance and the stopwatch will do the rest, like evaluating previous records for a particular athlete and then providing you with the average time in minutes or seconds that is taken to cover the entered 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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