What Makes Simone Biles The GOAT, Scientifically

This episode explores the scientific principles that make Simone Biles an exceptional gymnast, focusing on physics and biophysics.

1. Newtonian Physics in Action: Gymnastics is a vivid demonstration of Newtonian physics, with athletes constantly manipulating their bodies to optimize performance.
2. Biophysical Complexity: The human body's biophysical properties are essential for understanding athletic feats, involving trillions of cells and complex muscle movements.
3. Cognitive Mastery: Elite gymnastics requires not only physical excellence but also intense cognitive focus to manage distractions and execute complex maneuvers.
4. Scientific Implications: The discussion extends to how scientific understanding can further enhance athletic performance, hinting at future advancements.
5. Mental Challenges: The phenomenon of "the twisties," a mental block experienced by gymnasts, illustrates the critical mind-body connection necessary in sports.

1. Introduction

Overview of the episode's theme, focusing on the scientific and physical elements that define elite gymnastics. Regina Barber sets the stage for the discussion.
Regina Barber: "Happy Olympic short wavers!"

2. The Science of Gymnastics

Dr. Bertley explains how gymnastics serves as a perfect example of physics in motion, particularly through Simone Biles' routines.
Frederick Bertley: "Gymnastics... are a perfect personification of Newtonian physics."

3. Anatomy and Physics in Motion

Detailed analysis of how gymnasts use their understanding of physics and anatomy to defy gravity during events like vaults.
Frederick Bertley: "Gravity wants to do one thing only, pull you down."

4. Cognitive and Physical Synchronization

Discussion on how athletes synchronize their cognitive and physical abilities to perform complex maneuvers in seconds.
Frederick Bertley: "You are 100% a Newtonian physics experiment."

5. Overcoming Mental Blocks

Exploration of the mental challenges athletes face, like the "twisties," and their impact on performance.
Frederick Bertley: "What the twisties have highlighted is that there still is this neurocognitive connection."

• Understand Basic Physics: Appreciate how everyday physics applies to sports and use this understanding to analyze movements.
• Focus Training: Incorporate mental focus exercises into regular training to enhance concentration.
• Visualization Techniques: Use visualization to improve technique and prepare mentally for physical execution.
• Stress Management: Develop strategies to manage performance anxiety which can impact physical execution.
• Continuous Learning: Stay informed about scientific advancements that could enhance personal or athletic performance.

Another Olympics, another set of stellar performances by the U.S. women's artistic gymnastics team. Thursday, the team won two medals in the women's all-around final: a gold for Simone Biles and a bronze for Sunisa Lee. The medals add to the team's overall count, which also includes a gold for the women's team final. Simone and Suni are expected to lead the team to more medals in the coming days. Each day the gymnasts compete, we are left to pick our jaws off the floor and wonder: How do they do that? So we called up one of our favorite science communicators, Frederic Bertley, to explain just that. He's the CEO of the Center of Science and Industry and our gymnastics physics guide for the day.

People

Frederick Bertley, Simone Biles

Guest Name(s):

Frederick Bertley

Content Warnings:

None

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Regina Barber
You're listening to short wave from NPR.

Happy Olympic short waivers. It's been a rush to watch some of the world's best athletes push themselves to the limits across all of the different events. Like Simone Biles, who's repeatedly gone viral for all of her innovative moves and wins, including Thursday when she won the gold for the women's all around gymnastics final.

When gymnasts like Simone fly through the air, twisting, flipping, jumping, all I can wonder is, how does she do it? Then I think physics.

Frederick Bertley
I am a kind of a lover of physics and gymnastics, probably better than any other human endeavor, are a perfect personification of newtonian physics.

Regina Barber
That's Frederick Bertley. Or Doctor B. The CEO of the center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio. As a fellow science communicator, he's fascinated by how the human body is pushed to its limits in all of the Olympic events, especially gymnastics.

Frederick Bertley
The biophysiology of the human body is not a static thing. It's made up of trillion cells. You got fluids flowing through your body, your muscles are moving in different directions, and you're trying to apply, you know, basic newtonian physics to all of your events.

Regina Barber
Plus, each skill happens in a couple blinks of an eye. So these athletes are making all of these decisions while they're flying through the air.

Frederick Bertley
When you talk about like, what's going through the mind of a gymnast, for me, it's really amazing. There is a pseudo intellectual muscle memory in the gymnast at the highest level. Because whether you're tumbling, whether you're hitting that palma horse, whether you're on the uneven bars, or doing a loop on the ring, you are 100% a newtonian physics experiment. Later on, muscle tissue cells, you know, liquid and oh, that little thing called the brain where you have to completely shut down any kind of distractions and focus in a hyper way to execute.

Regina Barber
That, that activity which the us gymnastics teams have done repeatedly. Like Tuesday's team final, when the women's team beat the runners up, Italy with a massive 5.8 point margin.

And when the men's gymnastics team won their first team medal since 2008. Okay, doctor B, it feels like every year gymnastics and athletes in other sports are breaking more records or doing harder skills. Are athletes getting better?

Frederick Bertley
The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is yes, because.

Regina Barber
So today on the show. Yes, because from launch to mid air flips and twists, we get into the impressive physics behind your favorite gymnast. What happens when this mind body connection breaks down? Plus, how science could continue to push forward human progress.

I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to short wave, the Science podcast from NPR.

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Regina Barber
Dot okay, Doctor B, let's like start when a gymnast launches themselves into the air, like the vault competition. Like, what's involved there?

Frederick Bertley
Yeah. So the anatomy of the athlete is critical. We just gotta start with that. But now you got the athlete and their anatomy whipping down that thing. They're about to hit the springboard to do the vault. Well, there's this real thing called gravity. Gravity wants to do one thing and one thing only, pull you down to the center of planet Earth. So you now have to somehow, through your muscular buildup, through your kinetic motion, through your understanding of momentum, hit the springboard in a certain way, shape your body in a certain way.

And then, of course, as you're springing up, you're further going to hit the actual vault. So you're going to hit that with your hands and push off with your hands, all trying to defy gravity to get enough lift, enough height to do whatever maneuver you want to do. And then each time you're trying to do your maneuver, whether it's a double flip pike twist into this, you're trying to do that. There's the acceleration up into the air. Then you hit that point where like, if you remember your, your Bugs bunny roadrunner, now you're no longer ascending. You are at zero acceleration, and now you're descending, and that's gravity pulling you down, but you still have velocity that's making you go kind of forward. And so now you have to continue your tricks. Manage. Oh, gravity's pulling me down more now, and so I have less time to finish off this trick.

Again, it is really a symphony of newtonian physics applied in a biosystem with things that change all the time and just really some cognitive mastery by the athlete to pull it all off and make it stick.

Regina Barber
Yeah, it's mesmerizing. Okay, so once you're in the air, gymnasts flip, and they twist, but these things are like different forces, like flipping versus twisting. Like, from a physical perspective, let's go through what that difference is.

Frederick Bertley
Yeah, I mean, so let's go back to the vault. Sometimes they do a front flip in the air. So that's basically your forward velocity, your forward momentum, and then your front flip. So you're flipping about a center of mass, kind of your core. Right. If you're doing, as Simone biles likes to do, what's called the biles one and balsu, where she does a flip, she actually keeps her body fully straight. And so she's flipping again. She's just not just. She's doing a flip around one focal point, if you will, one fulcrum. But imagine you're now doing that flip and to your point. Now you're adding in a twist.

So now you're interjecting a second completely different moment with its own trajectory, its own vector in a different direction. And you have to reconcile that with your initial one that's flipping in the other direction. So that ultimately, in the case of gymnastics, you need to land on your feet. So it gets hyper complicated when they do one flip or one revolution versus two revolutions versus two revolutions, and then a third one in a different direction versus two revolutions and two other twists in another direction. And they keep adding these additional moments of inertia, these additional vectors, to a situation which, by the way, it's done in, like, 3 seconds.

It's miraculous, in a way, right?

Regina Barber
And then the uneven bars event, right? Like, when you see their, like, body be straight, and then they suddenly pull in their legs and then they spin faster. Right? Like. So now we're talking about angular momentum. And then if you pull up your legs, your mass gets concentrated closer to that, you know, axis of rotation, and that means you're gonna have a different spinning speed. And that whole process that we're talking about is called conservation of angular momentum.

NPR
Right?

Regina Barber
So I don't know if doctor B, you like to do this demo, but the whole thing where you're, like, on a stool and you have your arms out. Guilty.

Yeah. And then. And then you pull your arms in. Well, you have your arms out. You're on a stool, you have your arms out, and you're spinning on the spinning stool, and then you pull your arms in, and suddenly that spinning speeds up. Right? And figure skaters do it. Right? So, like, do you see that?

Where else are they doing that? You know, dealing with angular momentum.

Frederick Bertley
So definitely in the par, in the uneven bars, because you see them kind of flowing through in the pike position, and they'll bend their legs up, etcetera, but then they'll jump, let's say, to the high bar, and then they start extending their body, keeping it straight. And you can see their velocity picks up faster and faster and faster. So they go from a kind of crouched position to extended position.

Where else do you see it? Definitely, obviously in the floor.

In the floor maneuvers. Again, when you see them running down, and they'll jump and they'll do a straight flip where their bodies perfectly straight versus now they tuck into your point. You know, tuck in their arms, tuck in their knees, and now they're doing twists. And that slow kind of vertical flip speeds up into this incredible twist, and then it might extend back as they land, so it can appear all over the place. But, yeah, I love the analogy used because I am guilty as charged. For those of you who haven't done this, sit in your office chair that rotates and just spin around and bring your arms in, and you can see, wow, that is what a. What a gymnast or a figure skater will do. And that's exactly right. The conservation of angular momentum.

Regina Barber
And like you said, doctor B, this all happens in, like, seconds, which is really hard for me to comprehend. And, like, sometimes in these few seconds, an athlete can actually freeze up, which in gymnastics is called getting the twisties.

This happened to Simone Biles during the Tokyo Olympics. She had this, like, dangerous mind body disconnection midair and couldn't perform skills she'd done thousands of times before. Like, how does something like this happen?

Frederick Bertley
Yeah, I love the fact that. That they've come out and described this as the twisties and gymnastics.

One, because it is a real thing, but two, it also is there in other sports. I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of these things that they're doing, it comes into a combination of physical muscle memory and almost a programmed cognitive script. Like, you know, they're not literally standing at the, you know, ready to do the. To do the vault understanding before they run, thinking, okay, I'm going to run at this velocity. I'm going to hit the vault here. That's programmed in their system at this point. But what the twisties have highlighted is that there still is this neurocognitive connection.

You get the jitters, you get a little scared. You get something that just breaks that kind of cognitive, physical connection. And this is so important because you don't have the chance to reprogram when you're in the air. And so what is amazing for me, and I remember Simon Baz, I remember Tokyo. They, you know, at one point, they dragged her through, you know, and we're talking about, oh, she let the team down, she's a quitter and all these really negative things. And to her credit, first of all, she just, you know, weathered it, and now she's crushing it again at the next olympics. One of the greatest, actually, us gymnasts ever. But what's amazing to me is how it doesn't happen more often.

Regina Barber
Right, right. So, like, how do you see all this, like, scientific understanding of physics, of kinesiology, which is like, you know, the physics of the body and how it moves, how do you see it being used in the future to, like, push olympic sports to the next level?

Frederick Bertley
Yeah. And that. This is something that really fascinates me, this idea of, as we continue to break records, will we reach a zenith?

And I don't know. My guess is the record breaking gaps will be longer and longer. The only reason why I say that is the evolution of the human body isn't that fast. You're talking about these micro.

I beat it by a thousandth of a second, or I did another half twist in this incredible gymnastics move.

So the technology we have and the advancements in understanding all aspects of what you just said, the physiology, the kinesthesiology and all that stuff, gets us really close to maximizing what the physical body can do.

Then there's genetics. You can never account for that. But I love the fact, and this is what's really interesting for me, I love the fact that a typical athlete will still endeavor to chase that sport because the odds of being a gold medal winner, championship winner in baseball, or a record setter in a given event, it's like winning the lottery, right? It's so small. But you. You set your mind, I'm going to be the best at. And that confidence and fortitude to work that hard, train that hard, and be the best that you can be. And hopefully move that needle a little bit. That's amazing because obviously it's hard to break a record.

Regina Barber
Thank you so much, Doctor B, for talking with me about gymnastics. As always, it's a pleasure to have you on.

Frederick Bertley
Well, from one Doctor B to the next, it's absolutely so great to speak to you. Thank you so much.

Regina Barber
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.

Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to short wave from NPR.

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