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Physics of Ice Skating

Good Essays

Many everyday activities, and sports involve physics. During the Olympics, you saw the graceful performance done by the figure skaters. Figure skating involves a lot of physics. These principles include friction, momentum, and Newton’s Third Law. These core principles plays a big impact on the performance of figure skaters. Before understanding the physics of the ice skater’s motion, the first thing to comprehend is the skates itself.
The major parts of figure skates are the boot itself, and the blade. A figure skater performs a spin by rotating the blade backwards as the skater spins on a fixed point. This fixed point, is also known as the balls of their feet. The skater also has the toe pick, a rigid part of the blade located at the front of the blade, touching the ice. This allows the skater to put a forward pressure down without sliding forward and falling backwards. It also helps keep the skater’s balance. When the skater performs a jump, he or she pushes off the toe pick, jumps, lands on the toe pick, and then rocks down to the blade. This also adds stability. The design of the blade allows the skater to rock down to the blade from the toe pick due to the curvature of the blade. This is called the rocker. The skater imparts the momentum from its opposite leg, back into his lower foot and then continues to move. This leads to the movement of the figure skater and the laws and principles of physics used to perform them.
Figure skating involves ice, which means there

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