The Flight Motion Measurement of Yamawaki on Horizontal Bar

This study focuses on measuring the flight height and flight time of the Yamawaki exercise in men’s artistic gymnastics using a state-of-the-art human pose estimation model. The Yamawaki is a popular exercise recognized for its technical difficulty and visual appeal. We utilized the ViTPoseB model for human pose estimation to automatically track 17 body keypoints during the exercise, eliminating the need for labor-intensive and costly traditional motion capture methods or manual marking of keypoints. Our approach, validated by Kinovea and Tracker software, provided accurate flight height measurement with a mean absolute error of 1.78 cm. We used Pearson’s correlation to analyze the measurements further. The result between flight height and flight time shows a correlation $(r=0.97)$. The gymnast’s height correlates $(r=0.99)$ to the flight height. Exploring the application of human pose estimation in the kinematic analysis of human movement can offer a new perspective to improve training techniques in gymnastics.