Figure Skater Isabeau Levito's Simple Mental Performance Tip

When figure skater Isabeau Levito steps onto Olympic ice, she's not just thinking about her triple jumps. She's thinking about exactly when to breathe.

The 19-year-old U.S. national champion says the simple act of breathing at the right moments is what separates a struggling performance from one that flows naturally. "If you time your breathing right, the rest of it is just autopilot," she told Women's Health in Milan before her Winter Olympics debut.

It sounds basic, but Levito says forgetting to breathe happens more than people realize, especially while maintaining a smile for judges. After just 30 seconds of shallow breathing, she's already feeling the impact. "I'm absolutely swamped, and I'm like, 'Wow, I'm so screwed,'" she explains.

She weaves intentional breathing into her choreography, treating it as both functional and artistic. In her short program set to "Almost in Your Arms," she opens with a deliberate exhale, spreading her fingers and floating her arms across her body. "The best dancers I see use breathing in their choreography," she says.

Balancing the explosive power needed for jumps with the soft emotion of storytelling is one of figure skating's toughest challenges. "There's got to be a little switch before you jump," Levito explains. That mental transition gets easier when breathing becomes part of the routine rather than an afterthought.

Why This Inspires

Levito's approach reminds us that elite performance often comes down to mastering the basics we take for granted. While most athletes focus on bigger, faster, stronger, she's finding her edge in something everyone does 20,000 times a day without thinking about it.

For the 2023 national champion, skating is 90% mental. "In skating, it's very much mind's the limit," she says. The physical difficulty matters less than the mental game of managing fear and staying present.

Between training sessions at her first Olympics, Levito has been trading pins, making friends in the Olympic Village, and sneaking in time with her true passion: reading. At 15, she devoured 90 books in a year, though Olympic training has slowed that pace. She's currently working through a neuroscience book about gender and the brain.

When competition begins, all those hours of training will kick in automatically, as long as she remembers one simple thing: just breathe.