If you can, look at your belly button and its relative placement on your body. Have you found it yet? Well, that little nubbin where at one point your umbilical cord was has a lot to do with just how successful you are in the swimming pool or at a foot race, according to a team of researchers lead by Andre Bejan of Duke University. As it turns out, the belly button is the center of the body, and the higher or lower the navel, the higher or lower your center of gravity. This gives some body types an advantage over others, depending on your event.
“What matters is not total height but the position of the belly button, or center of gravity,” Professor Bejan told AFP. “It so happens that in the architecture of the human body of West African-origin runners, the center of gravity is significantly higher than in runners of European origin.” This higher belly-button placement gives West Africans a higher center of gravity, and thus longer legs, which are an advantage in running. Meanwhile, the lower belly-button placement of Europeans gives them an advantage in swimming, thanks to a longer torso that proves to be a boon in swimming.
Of course, whenever you’re dealing with race issues, there’s a thorny problem as no one wants to subscribe to some inane theory about why race X is better than race Y at activity Z, but the records studied by Bejan and his multi-racial team go back 100 years, and the belly-button difference seems based more on the actual shape of the body, with no real racial aspect.
Tags: belly button placement and academic skills, leg length and athletics, athletics, how the body determines different athletic skills, origin and athletics, race and athletics, area of origin and body type, belly button placement and body shape, medical news, sports, the human body, International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics, Andre Bejan, center of gravity
