How do champion skaters achieve their amazing jumps and spins? Brain science reveals clues.
Pam Belluck is a neuroscience journalist and figure skating enthusiast.
The recent World Figure Skating Championships had exciting results, including a 19-year-old American landing a quad axel and a 40-year-old pairs athlete becoming the oldest woman to win a world figure skating championship. As a neuroscience journalist, I wondered how the brain works when skaters jump, spin and move across the ice at lightning speed. Here’s what the scientists found:
When most of us step onto an ice rink, the sensation of sliding starts a chain of brain signals that tell the body to lean forward to avoid falling. But repeated practice dulls that reflex for skaters like Ilia Malinin, the American who was the first to land a quadruple axel in competition and whose 2024 World Championships free skate score was the highest ever. In such elite skaters, the brain receives the sensation of sliding and reconnects connections in the cerebellum, an area associated with balance.
Brain scans of speed skaters have yielded more clues about the cerebellum. Studies have found that parts of the cerebellum are larger in short-track speed skaters than in non-skaters, especially the right side. This is probably because the right side is activated when a speed skater balances on the right foot to turn left on track curves.
Another brain network helps skaters perform complex routines. The basal ganglia receive signals from the motor cortex as skaters jump and spin in the air. When skaters practice programs repeatedly, this network organizes the movements into chunks and sequences, fostering faster recall and muscle memory. In competitions, this helps skaters continue their performance even after tripping or falling.
The activity of this brain network likely helps Nathan Chen, the 2022 Olympic champion in men’s figure skating, when he performs a quadruple lutz, one of the most difficult jumps. He begins to skate backwards, extending his right leg. Pushing off his right leg, he crosses his legs while going up high and then spins four times in the air. Landing on the right foot, he sweeps his left leg back for the finish.
Figure skating brains suppress the feeling of dizziness after lightning-fast spins. The spinning causes the fluid in the inner ear to slosh around. In most people, it continues to relax for a while after the rotation stops, which causes dizziness because the brain mistakenly assumes that the rotation is continuing. The skaters brain learns to distinguish when the spin has actually stopped, allowing them to maintain their balance.
The way the brain adapts to rotational movement helps facilitate the unusual spins of skaters like Michelle Kwan, a five-time world champion known for being able to spin in both directions without pausing. In one performance, she did a left spin followed by a right camel spin with her leg extended, then spun left again with a sit spin that blossomed into a standing Y-spin.
Photos by Ng Han Guan/Associated Press, Mark R Cristino/EPA-EFE, via Shutterstock and Tingshu Wang Tpx/Reuters.
