Can Figure Skaters Defy Gravity? with Dr. Deborah King

Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

Sony Music

Science, Self-improvement, Comedy, Education, Society & Culture

4.9 • 21.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2022

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens when you add JVN to E = mc²? You get an episode of Getting Curious all about physics, explored through one of Jonathan’s favorite topics: figure skating! This week, Dr. Deborah King joins Jonathan to break down the biomechanics behind skating techniques, the cutting edge technology she’s using to research ice sports, and how we can watch the winter Olympics like scientists. Dr. Deborah King is a professor of biomechanics in the Department of Exercise and Sport Sciences at Ithaca College. She began her work with figure skating in 1993 while with the United States Olympic Committee Athlete Performance Division and has continued to work with the sport for the last 21 years. Her work in skating has included studying the biomechanics of figure skating jumps, focusing on 3D kinematics of national and internal level figure skaters, studying injury demographics in competitive and non-competitive skaters, and developing an instrumented blade to study impact forces in figure skating. Find out what today’s guest and former guests are up to by following us on Instagram and Twitter @CuriousWithJVN. Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com. Check out Getting Curious merch at PodSwag.com. Listen to more music from Quiñ by heading over to TheQuinCat.com. Jonathan is on Instagram and Twitter @JVN and @Jonathan.Vanness on Facebook.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Vaness and every week I sit down for a gorgeous
0:04.4	conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.
0:09.2	On today's episode, I'm joined by Deborah King where I ask her, what's the physics of ice skating?
0:17.9	Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Vaness. We have such an exciting episode for you today.
0:23.5	Deborah King is a professor and the grad chair of exercise, science, and athletic training at
0:28.6	Ethic a College. She specializes in the biomechanics of sport performance with a focus on drum roll, please.
0:37.6	Competitive figure skating. This is such a major episode. I think anyone that listens to this podcast
0:43.8	knows that I'm like almost medically compulsively diagnosed with figure skating obsession.
0:50.0	So the perfect person to ask Deborah King, what is the physics of figure skating? And first of all,
0:56.8	how are you? I'm doing great. Thanks. Oh, what a big question is the physics of figure skating.
1:02.9	Where should we start? I would love for you to kind of share with people. How does someone
1:08.8	become an expert in this? So went to college and I actually majored in math and I get the
1:13.6	question all the time. How do you go from math to biomechanics and exercise science? But math is like
1:19.7	used in physics. It's like how you understand physics in the world and the universe. And I just
1:25.2	loved sports. I did sports growing up. So I thought, how could I use math and I almost majored in
1:31.6	physics? So how can I use math and physics and sports? Pre-Google, right? I'm old enough
1:37.2	pre-Google. Did some searching in the library and found this field of biomechanics. And it just
1:42.0	like was perfect. So I went on and did graduate work and biomechanics.
1:46.0	So then how did you get into like figure skating? Were you obsessed with it when you were little?
1:49.4	So we watched the Olympics all the time going up when I was little. So that was like every four
1:54.0	years. You watch the Olympics. But I actually sort of fell into it when I was doing my master's
1:58.8	degree. You met Samherst. My advisor was like, would you be interested in doing a assistantship
	...

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