Skill Bridges, Part II: How Energy Exchange in Skiing, Skating, and Cycling Transforms Your Trombone Sound

By Dr. Logan Chopyk – San Diego Trombone Lessons

Whether you’re learning trombone, teaching brass, or performing professionally, you can borrow experiences from other activities to teach yourself to play trombone with flow, efficiency, and joy:

The way you surf a wave; carve snow on skis; shred with a longboard on asphalt; take high speed turns in cycling or in a car - is the same way you should surf the sound with the air at the bell of the trombone.

This interplay between air and sound — what Jan Kagarice calls the sound membrane — is what Arnold Jacobs’ famous “Song and Wind” is all about. 

By using our experiences riding energy exchanges in sports or other instruments, we can gain insight into accessing the most ideal way of playing trombone (song and wind) while accessing flow states to improve performance and learning outcomes. This is a Skill Bridge: taking something your body already knows and applying it to something you’re learning.

The Sound Membrane: Where Air Becomes Resonance

When you resonate the air column inside of the trombone, something remarkable happens:

1. Wave energy in the air column reflects back towards the player.

2. That air forms standing waves—oscillating zones of higher and lower pressure.

3. The wave energy causes the lips to vibrate effortlessly.

4. The reflective wall at the bell becomes tangible to the player and becomes the source of musical intention and its accompanying airflow.

Acoustician Arthur Benade showed that brass instruments do not amplify a lip buzz. Instead, the horn’s resonant air column drives lip vibration.

This means the trombone is not something you power with effort. Instead, it provides the conditions for resonance that you surf—just like skiing on snow or skating on ice. The sensation between these activities is remarkably similar.

What Skiing, Skating, and Cycling Teach About Trombone Playing

Skiing: Flow Over Force

A skier who tries to “force” turns quickly becomes stiff, unbalanced, and exhausted. But when they accept the mountain’s energy and ride the feedback of the snow, the body becomes fluid and efficient.

Trombone works the same way:

• You don’t force air.

• You glide on the resonance already in motion.

• Your body organizes itself around flow, not effort.

This is exactly Jacobs’ “Wind and Song.” When the sound leads, the air follows, and the body responds automatically.

Skating: Stability Through Interaction

On skates, stability comes from tiny, constant interactions between blade and ice. The surface gives you feedback thousands of times per second.

That micro-feedback is exactly like the standing wave in the trombone:

• Subtle

• Responsive

• Alive

• Self-regulating

The “locked in” feeling of a resonant note is the same kind of partnership with the surface skaters feel: smooth, supported, effortless.

Why Energy Exchange Fixes Chronic Trombone Problems

Response problems

You’re trying to "do" something instead of letting your expectation of the blooming of the sound to teach the air how to provide an articulated sound. 

Endurance issues

You’re fighting the horn instead of using its acoustic energy.

Range limitations

Efforts to force the lips into vibration actually blocks the air resonating the air column, making high notes more demanding to play, sharp, and the tone suffers.

The Science Behind This Skill Bridge

Motor learning research

Gabriele Wulf’s decades of research shows that an external focus (sound, airflow, resonance) outperforms internal focus (tongue, lips, jaw). Players using external focus learn faster, perform better, and recover from tension more easily.

Acoustics of brass playing

Benade, Fletcher, and Rossing confirm that standing waves—not lip motion—create resonance, meaning brass players must partner with the air column, not force vibrations.

Flow states

Csikszentmihalyi’s work shows that deep performance emerges when attention is fully absorbed in the task, not the self—exactly what Skill Bridges create.

Cross-training and transfer of learning

Motor learning literature confirms that skills from one domain (skiing, skating, cycling) can enhance performance in another through shared movement principles.

The Takeaway: Don’t Force the Trombone — Ride Its Waves

The biggest shift for advanced players is understanding:

You are not the generator of sound.
You are the rider of resonance.

Just as a skier rides the mountain and a skater rides the ice, the expert trombonist rides the energy in the horn.

This is the heart of Skill Bridges.
This is the sound membrane.
This is Song and Wind.

If you'd like to explore these concepts more deeply, I’d be happy to work with you through San Diego Trombone Lessons—in person or online. Many of the most profound breakthroughs begin in unexpected places: on the trail, on the ice, on skis, or on the open road.

Annotated Bibliography

Benade, Arthur H. Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics. 2nd ed. New York: Dover, 1990.
Definitive work on the physics of brass instruments. Explains standing waves, resonance, and why the horn—not the lips—drives vibration.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo5954978.html

Biasutti, Michele. “Strategies for Improving Performance in Music: A Study of Advanced Music Students.” Musicae Scientiae 21, no. 2 (2017): 178–195.
Peer-reviewed study connecting flow, attention, and performance preparation in musicians.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1029864915623714

Coker, Cheryl A. Motor Learning and Control for Practitioners. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Accessible overview of motor learning concepts including transfer, practice variability, and attentional focus.
https://www.routledge.com/Motor-Learning-and-Control-for-Practitioners/Coker/p/book/9780367430876

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Foundational text on flow states and peak experience—critical for understanding musical immersion.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/flow-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi

de Koning, Jan J., et al. “The Biomechanics of Speed Skating.” Journal of Sports Sciences 23, no. 12 (2005): 1147–1158.
Explains the physics of skating, force return, and glide—excellent foundation for sound membrane analogies.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640410500127954

Federolf, Peter A. “A Biomechanical View of Skiing Techniques.” Procedia Engineering 34 (2012): 500–505.
Peer-reviewed biomechanical analysis of skiing energy exchange and feedback.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705812018233

Fletcher, Neville H., and Thomas D. Rossing. The Physics of Musical Instruments. 2nd ed. New York: Springer, 1998.
Highly respected and deeply detailed explanation of instrument acoustics, including brass standing waves.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4419-3123-2

Foster, Carl, et al. “The Mechanics of Running.” Sports Medicine 14, no. 5 (1992): 299–312.
Classic paper describing ground reaction forces and rebound mechanics in running—useful for breath-flow analogies.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-199214050-00002

Schmidt, Richard A., and Tim Lee. Motor Control and Learning: A Behavioral Emphasis. 6th ed. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2019.
Authoritative textbook on motor learning, contextual interference, and transfer of skills—central to Skill Bridges.
https://us.humankinetics.com/products/motor-control-and-learning-6th-edition-with-web-study-guide

Wulf, Gabriele. Attention and Motor Skill Learning. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2007.
Foundational text explaining external focus, automaticity, and optimal performance—directly relevant to brass pedagogy.
https://us.humankinetics.com/products/attention-and-motor-skill-learning

Wulf, Gabriele, and Rebecca A. Lewthwaite. “Optimizing Performance Through Intrinsic Motivation and Attention for Learning: The OPTIMAL Theory of Motor Learning.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 23, no. 5 (2016): 1382–1414.
Major peer-reviewed article linking attention, motivation, and performance—supports the Skill Bridges framework.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-015-0999-9

Bertucci, William, and Benoît Grappe. “Pedaling Technique and Markers of Efficiency in Cycling.” Sports Medicine 39, no. 11 (2009): 865–879.
Studies energy return and efficient motion in cycling, paralleling smooth resonance-based airflow.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/11317850-000000000-00000