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For decades, coaches and athletes have relied on timing gates as the method for assessing sprint performance. By setting gates at fixed intervals—such as 10m, 20m, and 30m—we’ve measured how long it takes an athlete to cover each segment of a sprint. This method provides a “time over distance” view: how many seconds it takes to complete a known distance.
But as technology advances, so too should our understanding of speed. A more performance-relevant metric is now emerging—“distance over time”—and it’s fundamentally changing how we assess sprinting.
Time Over Distance: The Traditional View
With timing gates, you measure:
• How long it takes to reach 10m, 20m, 30m, etc.
• Splits between intervals, e.g., the difference in time from 10m to 20m
• The focus is on when an athlete gets to a fixed point
While this is useful for benchmarking and basic comparisons, it lacks precision when trying to understand how an athlete accelerates, how velocity changes, or where inefficiencies occur.
Distance Over Time: A Smarter Approach
Instead of asking, “How long did it take to reach 10m?” we now ask, “How far did the athlete travel in 1.5 seconds?” or “What distance did they cover between 1.5–3.0 seconds?”
This shift matters because:
• Speed is distance divided by time—not time divided by distance
• Acceleration patterns are better understood when tracking how distance accumulates each moment
• It reveals how quickly an athlete gets up to speed, and whether they maintain or lose momentum during specific time windows
This time-based view is only possible using modern tools like video analysis or motion tracking software like VueMotion—not fixed gates. It allows a continuous, dynamic capture of sprint performance including the ability to track instantaneous speed.
Why Timing Gates Fall Short
Timing gates are blind to what happens between the start and each gate. They cannot:
• Detect how much ground is covered during specific time intervals
• Reveal fluctuations in acceleration within those fixed distances
• Account for stride variability or biomechanical efficiency
For example, two athletes might hit the 10m gate at exactly the same time, but one may have covered more distance in the first1.5 seconds and less in the second half, revealing critical differences in acceleration strategy.
Practical Example
Let’s compare two metrics:
With the distance-over-time approach, we gain insights such as:
• When peak acceleration occurs
• How consistent the stride is
• Whether the athlete is decelerating too early
• Where asymmetries or technical faults may lie
The Bottom Line
Time-over-distance is a legacy of older technology. It gives us basic benchmarks.
Distance-over-time is where modern sprint profiling is heading—it tells us how fast, how early, and how efficiently an athlete moves.
For coaches and performance teams, this shift offers deeper understanding, more precise interventions, and faster improvements.