The biggest number on the force plate is rarely the useful one

Peak force is easy to read off a jump test and nearly useless for an athlete who gets a tenth of a second.

Stand an athlete on a force plate, ask for a maximum jump, and the software hands back a peak force figure. It is a satisfying number. It goes on a spreadsheet, gets compared across a squad, and occasionally gets used to decide who is progressing. I would throw most of that away.

The reason is time. In a countermovement jump the athlete has as long as he likes to load and unload, a good half second or more of contact with the ground. In a sprint at top speed the foot is down for roughly a tenth of that. In a long jump takeoff or a high jump plant it is not much longer. Whatever force an athlete can eventually reach is beside the point if the event does not give him time to reach it.

What you actually want is the rate. How quickly force rises from the moment of contact, and how much of it is delivered inside the window the event allows. Two athletes with identical peak numbers can be completely different animals, one of them a slow powerful pusher who is excellent in a weight room and mediocre on a track, the other producing eighty percent of that peak in a tenth of the time and beating him by three metres.

Coaches know this in their bones and the testing culture still drifts back to peak values, because peak values are stable, easy to explain to an athlete, and do not require anyone to argue about how to define the onset of a force trace. Rate measures are noisier. Noisy numbers make uncomfortable reports.

There is a fair pushback here. Peak force does track general strength, general strength does underpin everything else, and an athlete who cannot produce a large force will never produce it quickly either. You have to build the ceiling before you worry about how fast you can reach it.

Agreed, for a nineteen year old. For a mature athlete two seasons from a Games, the ceiling is largely built and the only question left is timing.

Measure what the event measures. The event does not wait.