SCIENCE OF FLOW SKATING CHANGE YOUR BRAIN

This is active meditation, creative problem solving, strengthening creative neural pathways, dopamine, mitochondrial density, heat shock proteins, vestibular system, new dendritic spines, cerebellar plasticity, depth perception. The tilt is everything. You're running a constant simulation of the future. You're not just moving through the city, you're evolving within it. Everybody loves neuroplasticity, right? Stay low. I've been raving about flow skating on this channel for almost 14 years, but the term flow state has far deeper origins than my usage. We've all felt that zone inside your bubble of concentration and full body involvement, where awareness and sensory perception are heightened while everything else not related to your flow ceases to exist. Even time. It's that zone where you accept and respond to the landscape rushing towards you, becoming one with all you see, feel, smell, and hear. While you're slinging yourself into turns and weaving a long continuous line containing some moments of perfection, however brief, you've entered the psychological state known as flow. This is a recognized mental state and it is powerful. If you want a deeper, further reaching breakdown from the father of flow state theory, you should check out Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I put the link in the video description and I've also cited other sources on the most sciency aspects of this video. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Yeah, try spelling that without looking at the description. So what's happening to you when you're in that zone isn't just my usual sentimental skate poetry. It's neuroscience and biology. Flow skating is a full system upgrade for your brain and body. Maybe not a full system. You have to work out too, right? First, the psychological benefits of flow skating or flow state. Complete immersion and focus. The mental chatter of your default mode network, DMN, the brain's daydreaming or even the dreaded looping circuit is quieted during flow. Your awareness and intensity are funneled into the present moment. This is active meditation, reducing stress and anxiety by giving your prefrontal cortex a break from worrying. A sense of agency and mastery. Those small moments of perfection release dopamine from your brain's ventral tegmental area. Dopamine is your brain's reward chemical which reinforces the and builds a deep seated confidence that you'll carry with you off your skates. I am absolutely incorrigible after a skate. Never ask me what I think of myself after I skate. It'll put you off your lunch. Creative problem solving. The city is a dynamic 3D puzzle. Navigating it improvisationally forces your prefrontal cortex to think divergently, strengthening creative neural pathways and making you more adaptable under pressure in a myriad of situations even when you're in shoes. Why did that become a thing? People in shoes is like suitcases with no wheels. When it comes to pure flow, in my highly biased opinion, mixed terrain skating or city skating reigns supreme as a channel to the ultimate flow state. Unlike the monotonous rhythm of smooth path skating where the brain and body can disengage on a constant regular stride, the unpredictable nature of curbs, turns, drops and hills demands total integration and dedication. Your mind must constantly process micro adjustments and your vestibular system is fully awakened by the shifts in tilt, rotation and elevation. The dynamic variation of street skating forces you into the present moment, creating a symphony of physical responses and mental focus that a more predictable environment just can't match. Let's talk about biology, the body. Flow skating is a series of complex movements that engages the entire body in a way that gyms can't replicate. Here's a super edited down list of what the right flow does for your body beyond the usual benefits of general skating. The tilt is everything. That deep committed tilt onto your edge is a constant battle against lateral g-forces. This eccentrically loads your glutes, vastus lateralis and core stabilizers, tendons and ligaments, building functional strength and proprioceptive acuity in your hips, knees and ankles. A full body workout, the stop-start variable intensity nature of urban flow creates a natural high intensity interval training, a hip session, minus getting shouted at and crawling on the floor. This has been shown to improve VO2 max and mitochondrial density more effectively than steady state cardio. When you're really caning it, legs burning, lungs heaving and sweating like prince andrew in a courtroom, your body will produce heat shock proteins which will repair your very DNA, make it less likely that you will make ---- copies of your own DNA for tissue growth and repair. Flow will bait you into longer more intense lines, which turns out to be great for you. The anti-repetition activity. Flow skating combats sedentary atrophy by forcing your body into multi-planar movements, sagittal pushing, frontal leaning and transverse by rotating. This improves kinetic chain mobility and fights the negative effects of prolonged sitting. I should have said prolonged scrolling. I've learned over the years that if you don't adopt many bodily positions regularly in physical play or training, your kinetic self will inevitably shrink and become more constrained and limited. Skating really baits you into great ranges of motion and uses a lot of commonly ignored but important muscles. Pair it with a little resistance training and you've got your full fitness needs covered. Here's where it gets really interesting, the neurological supercharge. Flow skating is a full brain workout. Flow skating doesn't just build muscle, it builds a better, faster, more concentrated brain. First, the cerebellum and vestibular system. These masters of coordination are exercised by the constant tilting and micro adjustments that provide a relentless high stakes challenge for your vestibular system. This torrent of balanced data is sent from the cerebellum which contains over 50% of the brain's total neurons. The cerebellum fine-tunes every movement for precision and smoothness. A 2017 review in the cerebellum journal, yeah I'm flipping through that one all the time, highlighted that complex motor skill learning like skating induces cerebellar plasticity, literally reshaping this critical brain region for better coordination and timing in all physical tasks. That's a lot. Environmental mapping which also involves the hippocampus. Your brain is constantly involved in creating and updating a 3D mental map. This tasks your hippocampus, the brain's GPS. Landmark studies on London taxi drivers found that spatial navigation training physically engages the posterior hippocampus. You're doing the same thing when you're whipping around the city. You're making your brain more spatially intelligent. Anticipation and prediction aided by the prefrontal cortex. You're not just reacting, you're running a constant simulation of the future when you're skating. Predicting pedestrian movement, a sudden uber u-turn, or the timing of the traffic light engages the prefrontal cortex in a high stakes planning exercise, sharpening executive functions like working memory and cognitive control. Depth perception, the visual cortex. Judging gaps and velocities relies on impeccable depth perception. This forces the visual cortex and associated dorsal stream, the wear pathway, to process complex motion parallax and binocular disparity cues at high speed, fine-tuning your visual motor processing to an incredible degree. I actually feel this scanning and quickening of my sight and processing of information when I'm skating down a street with moving obstacles and unfolding geography in the city ahead of me. Reactive movement and the corticospinal highway when you hit the dreaded snake or an unexpected crack, a split-second correction is needed. This isn't conscious thought, this reaction is mediated by the corticospinal tract, a direct superhighway from your motor cortex to your spinal cord. Every reactive maneuver sheathes these neurons and more myelin, the fatty insulation that makes the nerve signals travel faster or more efficiently. This is how skills become instinct or muscle memory. This process also heavily involves the basal ganglia, which helps select and execute automatic learned movements, freeing your conscious mind to focus on your objectives. Enhanced neuroplasticity, the brain that rewires itself. Everybody loves neuroplasticity, right? When you're improvising, you're forcing your brain to create new synaptic connections. This is neuroplasticity. Learning complex motor skills promotes the growth of new dendritic spines on neurons, physically changing the brain structure to learn and adapt faster. Wow, physical change in the brain. The mind-body fusion or sensor-motor integration. All these systems I've listed converge in a flawless conversation between your senses and your muscles. This sensor-motor integration is the bedrock of fluidity and efficiency. You're not just training your body, you're training your nervous system to control your body with more precision and less conscious effort. Your urban skating doesn't even need to be extreme. Just build in the variation with carves, turns, little jumps and drops that you know are well within your skills. It doesn't need to be fancy. That's actually counterproductive because when you load your line with highly technical tricks, it's very hard to stay in flow mentally and physically because the more difficult movements may not integrate seamlessly into your line. You'll have the sensation of continuously starting over when you're consciously trying to recall complicated techniques. When I watch an aggressive skating contest and one of the athletes does find pure flow, that skater will stand apart from everyone like crazy, regardless of who wields the heaviest hammer or biggest trick. In these cases, you can really see how the athlete is no longer pushing themselves but are being pulled by the power of their vision. You know that skater, the one that finishes the wicked line but just keeps on going. It doesn't seem like they can do anything wrong. It's almost magical. That's flow. But this only happens with mastery of the sport and aggressive skating. Flow skating on mixed terrain is accessible to anyone who can skate well and I think downhill skaters also experience a similar kind of flow that is also very potent except the variation is not nearly as wide as in the street skating. Over the rush, right? Of course, figure skating. Figure skating has deep flow and wizard skating has killer flow, second only to street skating, I think. Again, because of the lack of environmental variation and improvisational freedom, long wizard lines across mixed terrain could be the king of all flow and I have seen it but a truly long improvisational line is still quite rare in wizard due to the lack of power generating moves like strides and crossovers and I guess that's what causes their flows to be short-lived. There it is. More scientifically verified reasons that you must continue inline skating as a responsible adult. It would be reckless not to. So when you're out there blading the city, you're doing far more than skating. You're giving your mind to meditation, your body a uniquely potent workout and your brain a massive scientifically verified upgrade. You're reshaping your biology from the neurons up. You're not just moving through the city, you're evolving within it and this will give you clarity and ecstasy for hours after an all-consuming session. Okay, that's it.