How Olympic Figure Skaters Train, and What You Can Borrow

An Olympic free skate can look like magic, with four minutes, a handful of quads and somehow enough breath left for the choreography at the end. What's behind it is years of practice sessions, off-ice work and patient coaching, most of which nobody ever films.

This page looks at how the best skaters in the world actually prepare, using what skaters and coaches have said in public and what happened at the Milano Cortina 2026 Games. Then it looks at the parts you can borrow for your own skating, whatever level you're at.

There's no single Olympic schedule

Plenty of articles promise an Olympic skater's daily schedule down to the minute, and most of them are guesses. Training looks different for a singles skater, a pair team and an ice dance couple. It also shifts through the year, as new programs are built in the off-season and polished before competitions.

What most elite training has in common is a mix of on-ice sessions, where skaters work on jumps, spins, footwork and their programs, and off-ice work for strength, power, flexibility and dance. Around that sit the less glamorous parts, like physio appointments, video review, school or a job, and sleep. If someone quotes you an exact number of hours, treat it as one skater's routine, not a rule.

The team behind the skater

Ilia Malinin is coached by his parents, Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, who both skated at the Olympics themselves, and the ISU's biography of him also lists the veteran coach Rafael Arutyunyan among his coaches. Malinin told NBC Sports in 2022 that having his parents as coaches helps a lot mentally, because they know a bad practice might just be a bad day.

Ice dance takes the team idea even further. Thirteen of the 23 ice dance teams at the Milano Cortina Games trained at the Ice Academy of Montreal, the school Marie-France Dubreuil, Patrice Lauzon and Romain Haguenauer founded in 2014. That included the gold medalists, Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron of France, and the silver medalists, Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who spent most mornings that season skating just meters from the team that beat them.

Sharing coaches with your biggest rivals takes some nerve. Chock has said it was up to her and Bates to speak up for the coaching time they needed. Alysa Liu made her own calls too. When she came back from retirement in 2024, she went back to coaches Phillip DiGuglielmo and Massimo Scali on her own terms, and two years later she was Olympic champion.

Beyond the coaches, an elite skater's team often includes a choreographer, a strength and conditioning coach, a physiotherapist and sometimes a sports psychologist, though every skater's mix is different.

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How the big jumps get built

Skaters learn rotation for the big jumps off the ice first, with jumps and turns on the floor. On the ice, many coaches use a harness, which lets the coach take some of the skater's weight so they can feel the rotation and air position without crashing every time. Then come the falls, a lot of them, until the timing settles.

Malinin shows how long that takes, even for a natural jumper. He said he started working seriously on the quad Axel in the spring of 2022. On September 14, 2022, at the U.S. International Classic in Lake Placid, he became the first skater to land one in competition. He also said the timing came easily in practice, but that competition adds nerves, a feeling most of us know from much smaller jumps.

Mikhail Shaidorov of Kazakhstan shows the other side of it. He said he had tried a free skate with five quads about three times in competition that season without landing them all. In the Milano Cortina free skate he landed five quads, climbed from fifth after the short program and won Kazakhstan's first Olympic gold in figure skating.

Training follows the rulebook, and the backflip was banned soon after Terry Kubicka did one at the 1976 Olympics, and it stayed off-limits until the ISU dropped it from the list of illegal moves in 2024. Malinin brought it back at the Milano Cortina Games, and our story on the backflip's return has the whole history.

Run-throughs and stamina

A senior free skate lasts four minutes, give or take ten seconds, and the short program two minutes and forty seconds. That doesn't sound long until you try to land a jump in the last minute on tired legs. It's why elite skaters spend so much practice time running their programs, sometimes in sections and sometimes all the way through with the music.

Run-throughs also teach a skater to carry on after a mistake, to pace their energy and to know exactly where each element sits in the music. A full run-through in front of a coach is the closest a skater can get to competition without a judge in the room.

Off the ice

A lot of an Olympic skater's progress happens off the ice. Strength work and plyometrics, the jumping and bounding drills that build explosive power, help with jump height, while core work helps with spins and a tight air position. Ballet and dance have long been favorite off-ice tools for body control and line, and skating workouts like the one TRIA's physical therapists publish add plyometric drills to help skaters land harder jumps.

Recovery is part of the work too, and top skaters plan rest, sleep and physio into their week rather than squeezing them in. If you want to add off-ice work yourself, our off-ice training guide and stretching routine are good places to start. Build up slowly, and check with your doctor first if you have joint problems.

Training for pressure

The hardest part of the Olympics may be the part you can't practice on an ordinary Tuesday. Malinin arrived in Milan as the two-time world champion, led after the short program, then fell more than once in the free skate and finished eighth. Afterward he wrote about the pressure he had been under and the online hate that came with it. Weeks later he won his third straight world title in Prague.

Skaters prepare for pressure in lots of small ways, like run-throughs with an audience, mock competitions and the same warm-up routine before every skate. Liu's coach Phillip DiGuglielmo told KQED that she sees a competition as a chance to share her art with the audience, not a make-or-break moment.

What adult skaters can borrow

You don't need Olympic hours to train well. The habits that matter most are cheap, like running your program or test pattern all the way through, even when it's messy, filming yourself now and then so you can see what your coach sees, and doing a little off-ice work between sessions.

Pick one main goal at a time, the way an elite skater builds toward one jump, and give it months rather than weeks. Our goal-setting guide can help you plan it. Leave room for easy days and rest, because recovery matters for adults just as it does for Olympians.

Liu made her own calls, and as an adult you choose your coach and your goals too. If the fit isn't right, our guide to choosing a skating coach can help you find someone who suits the way you want to skate. If you'd rather watch the experts for a while, our explainer on every Olympic figure skating event is a good place to start.

The training details here come from what skaters and coaches have said in interviews, and every skater's program is different. Talk to your own coach before you change how you train.

Sources

Results come from the official Milano Cortina 2026 results. Training details come from interviews and reporting by the outlets below.

• Olympics.com, Figure skating medallists, Milano Cortina 2026.
• International Skating Union, Ilia Malinin (USA) lands first quad Axel (September 2022), and NBC Sports' report on the same competition.
• International Skating Union, Ilia Malinin skater biography: his current coaches.
• Reuters, "Mighty Montreal ice academy skaters vie for gold at Milano Cortina" (February 2026).
• The Astana Times, Kazakhstan's Shaidorov wins historic Olympic gold in figure skating (February 2026).
• NBC Sports, report on Alysa Liu's comeback, and KQED, interview with Phillip DiGuglielmo (March 2026).
• NBC Sports, on the backflip's return.
• George Mason University, Ilia Malinin wins his third consecutive world championship (March 2026).
• ISU results, Milano Cortina 2026 men's singles result, and NBC News, Ilia Malinin's Instagram post mentions 'invisible battles' and 'insurmountable pressure' (February 2026).
• The ISU's program length rules, and TRIA and HealthPartners, figure skating strength and conditioning exercises.