Neural Switch

A neural switch is any point in the vault where the athlete must recognize that one action has finished and initiate the next.

Switching is not free. A voluntary reaction to a simple signal — one stimulus, one prepared response, an elite sprinter under peak arousal — takes 80 to 85 milliseconds. That is the floor of trained human performance, not a typical figure.

A switch in the vault is slower than that floor, because it is not a simple reaction. It requires a loop: receive the position signal, process it, send the reaction signal, and only then does the motor unit respond. Verifying a position against an expected one is a comparison before a decision, which takes longer than responding to a starting gun.

Set that against the interval from leaving the ground to releasing the pole, which runs between roughly 1.10 and 1.55 seconds. A single switch at the sprinter’s floor consumes around 7% of the whole window. A realistic one, with position verification, costs considerably more.

This is why a technical model containing decision points produces passive phases whether or not the athlete performs well. The time is spent on recognition and initiation rather than on energy entering the system.

What follows from it. The model does not aim to make switches faster. It aims to remove them. A continuous action has no position to verify and no decision to make, so the cost is never paid.