On the final Sunday of the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games, podiums had been claimed by skiers, skaters, and hockey players representing dozens of nations. From overtime thrillers on the ice to gravity-defying runs down slopes, it can be easy to think that these incredible athletes are simply superhuman.
However, the science behind Olympic success is less flashy than the spectacle fans see on their screens. It lives in sleep schedules, in taper weeks, in muscles warming up properly in subzero air, and often, it’s in knowing when to rest.
As Harvard Medical School Associate Professor Edward Phillips put it, Olympians are “on the razor’s edge of pushing, pushing, pushing—but not too much.”
Phillips, who directs the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and serves as Whole Health Medical Director of the VA Boston Healthcare System, approaches athletic performance by contrasting elite athletes with the broader population.
“For the 99% of the population, exercise is a benefit,” Phillips said. “The people at the highest levels, the exercise becomes a stress itself.”
That distinction reframes how we think about Olympic bodies. For most of the world, movement functions as medicine. For Olympians, movement is their livelihood, and at times, a physiological strain that must be carefully managed.
“At the level that they’re at, they’re sort of on the razor’s edge,” Phillips explained.
The choices are microscopic: “Do I do the next rep? Do I do one more lap around the ice rink?” Athletes are constantly driven to push themselves further in hopes of succeeding in their respective sports.
“It’s easy to fall over to the other side,” Phillips warned. “Where now they’re getting injuries. The stress is causing problems. They can’t keep up with their nutrition. They’re not sleeping well.”
Sleep, Phillips emphasized, is a fundamental aspect of elite athletic training.
“Sleep is sort of a hot area,” he said, noting that most people, students included, underestimate its physiological power. Getting sufficient sleep, he explained, does everything from “literally, kind of cleaning out your brain” to stabilizing mood and regulating appetite.
When representing your country on the world stage, there isn’t much room for error.
“If an athlete is working out too much, and it starts to disrupt their sleep, then they’re going to be put into a negative cycle,” Phillips said.
He then offered advice that applies as much to the midterm season as it does to training for the Olympics.
“If there’s a choice between exercise or sleep, always take the sleep,” he said.
That’s not exactly what one might expect to hear from someone who works with elite athletes. However, it captures the paradox that peak output depends on disciplined recovery.
Phillips also described the strange psychological dysregulation that happens before a major event. In marathon training, or something like a 50-kilometer cross-country Olympic race, athletes train intensely and then taper. Cutting back right before the biggest moment can feel, as he put it, like being “a caged animal.” The instinct is to do more while the scientific advice is to do less.
That tension between the urge to keep pushing and the need to rest is built into the process. True well-being, Phillips noted, requires balance. But peaking at a specific moment often means temporarily disrupting that equilibrium in order to perform at the highest level.
While Phillips focuses on balance and stress in the present, Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, takes the analysis millions of years prior.
For Lieberman, the Olympics reveal both what humans evolved to do and how far we’ve pushed beyond it.
“We have, all of us, evolved to be athletes,” Lieberman said. “Hunter-gatherers, for millions of years, had to walk long distances every day. They had to run, they had to climb trees, they had to do all kinds of things.”
To succeed on the Olympic stage, athletes must perform at a high-level speed that our ancestors never needed to hit in order to survive.
“We never thought to stand on one line and run as fast as we can 26.2 miles to another line,” Lieberman said. Nor did we evolve to hurtle down icy slopes at top speed in pursuit of a finish line.
When fans watch the Olympics, what they’re watching, the professor explained, are “the extremes of human capability,” not normal evolutionary behaviors.
Still, evolution provided humans with the tools necessary to compete on the world’s biggest athletic stage.
“We are loaded with [adaptations] from head to toe,” Lieberman said.
Chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, are relatively inactive by comparison, walking only a few kilometers a day. Humans, by contrast, evolved under strong selective pressure to sustain high levels of physical activity and energy output.
Our anatomy reflects that evolution. Lieberman pointed to our ability to sweat and regulate heat, the “springs” in our feet, our long tendons, and the gluteus maximus, which is actually a running muscle.
“You don’t really use [the gluteus maximus] when you walk,” Lieberman said. “But, it’s really important when you run.”
Winter sports test those same evolutionary adaptations in a very different environment.
“Your muscles need to warm up to perform optimally,” Lieberman said.
In winter conditions, that warm-up becomes even more critical, because cold increases vulnerability to injury. That evolutionary reality shows up most clearly in how athletes prepare to compete in the cold.
Jonathan Williams, an athletic trainer on Harvard’s Sports Medicine staff who works with the men’s ice hockey team and the Nordic and alpine ski teams, described how cold conditions can impact intense athletic competitions. In freezing environments, Williams explained, muscles tend to tighten and take longer to warm up, which can increase the risk of strain if athletes aren’t properly prepared.
In reality, most Winter Olympians have spent years training in cold conditions.
“You can’t train for the Winter Olympics unless you’re in a winter environment,” Williams said.
Over time, the body adapts, not just physiologically, but also behaviorally. Athletes learn how to layer properly, how to structure warm-ups, and how to manage exposure.
Williams described how elite programs track training load to prevent overuse injuries in repetitive sports like skiing and skating. Coaches monitor both short-term (acute) and long-term (chronic) load, watching for sudden spikes.
“You don’t want to increase by more than 50% per week,” Williams explained, noting that rapid volume increases are often how chronic injuries emerge.
Williams also pushed back on the idea that elite athletes are simply born different and then magically appear on the Olympic stage. Yes, he acknowledged, they are gifted. But what often gets overlooked is the decades of training that precede a single Olympic moment.
Many competitors, Williams noted, have been training since they were four or five years old.
“That’s 15, 20 years of figure skating experience,” the trainer said.
What gets overlooked isn’t just talent, but the physiological and technical adaptation built over thousands of hours of rigorous preparation.
And what about the long-term cost? Do Olympians inevitably pay for peak performance later in life?
Williams avoided drawing a simple cause-and-effect conclusion. Injury risk is real, especially in sports that involve high speeds and jumps, but he resisted a simple cause-and-effect narrative.
“I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion,” Williams said. There are plenty of non-athletes with arthritis, too. It’s not as clean as “do X, get Y.”
So what does any of this mean outside of the Olympics?
Phillips’ message was simple. Winter isn’t inclement weather that forces humans to stay inside; it’s actually an invitation to move.
“You can always do more than you think you can,” he said, arguing that watching the Games can push people to challenge their own limits.
Together, they suggest that Olympic greatness is built on adaptation, disciplined recovery, and years of accumulated training.
The science beneath the Olympic spectacle is that gold is not built on endless intensity. It’s constructed on adaptation, restraint, recovery, and thousands of untelevised decisions not to push too far. Maybe that’s the part that actually matters on the other side of the screen.
— Staff writer Tamar H. Scheinfeld can be reached at [email protected].