U.S. figure skating champion Amber Glenn’s preparation for this season included mastering her jumps, learning her choreography and tracking her brain waves.
Last January, Glenn won her first senior national title in her ninth try at age 24. Then in March, she placed 10th at the world championships in Montreal.
At both events, she opened her free skate by hitting a triple Axel, a jump only five U.S. women in history had landed before her. Then Glenn erred on easier jumps later in each program, citing a pattern of a loss of focus.
“I know I physically have everything it takes to be at the top,” she posted after worlds, “and I’m going to spend this off season digging deep doing everything I can to get to that point mentally as well.”
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Dr. Caroline Silby, Glenn’s therapist and sports psychologist, recommended neurotherapy.
Starting in late spring, Glenn had multiple sessions per week near her training base in Colorado Springs. Sensors monitored her brain activity while she did breathing exercises and listened to music. A sound registered to signal “any time my brain is going into the direction that it needs to be,” she said.
“It’s kind of like when dogs are trained with clickers,” she said. “We’re just training my brain to reduce the amount of adrenaline and try to control it, rather than let it control me.”
Glenn sees the neurotherapy as part of continued recovery from severe concussions in summer 2020 — when she passed out in a cryotherapy tank, fell through the door and hit her head on a shoe cubby — and in summer 2023 — when she and another skater collided in a practice accident.
She has also spoken about working to control her ADHD while competing. Last season, “it was kind of just go, go, go, go, go, and then I would just get exhausted, mentally and physically, and I would just come out of the moment,” Glenn said.
That has made free skates — which are four minutes — especially difficult compared to short programs — which are 2 minutes, 40 seconds. Glenn tweaked the order of elements in her free skate for this season, including moving a step sequence from the middle of her program to after her seventh and final jumping pass.
“Last year, she would be more easily distracted by things, and this year, she’s taken more ownership of how she trains,” said Tammy Gambill, one of Gambill’s two coaches, along with Damon Allen. “She commits to everything that she’s going for now. Where I think, before, she would maybe back off of something, or if something didn’t feel perfect, she would maybe bail out of it a little bit. But this year, she’s committed to everything and committed to her training and just her whole lifestyle of being dedicated to her goal.”
Glenn put the prep to the test three weeks ago at Lombardia Trophy in Italy, her first competition since March’s worlds.
Coach Allen was slated to possibly fly abroad for another competition the week before Lombardia. Glenn asked if he could stay with her for the final stretch of training.
“She’s like, ‘This season is important, because I’m coming off of a big high (winning nationals), and I need as much support as possible,’” Allen said. “I said, ‘Of course, I will be there.’”
Then, the week of Lombardia, Glenn shared with her 1.5 million TikTok followers that she was dealing with a personal challenge.
“That was very mentally taxing,” she said. “But I feel like because of what I’ve been doing over the summer, I was able to handle it much better than before.”
With Allen by her side at Lombardia, Glenn attempted a triple Axel in both programs for the first time. She landed both and posted the highest short program and free skate scores of her international career. She won her first international title.
Glenn’s total score — 212.89 points — would have won silver at March’s worlds, granted comparing scores between competitions is not quite apples to apples.
She still has room to improve — in the free skate, Glenn doubled a planned triple Salchow and had two negatively graded jumping passes in the second half — but she called her performance “a huge step, especially mentally.”
“I feel a lot more of a body-mind connection,” she said.
Last October, Glenn hit her first clean, fully rotated triple Axel in competition in her 14th time attempting the jump dating to January 2021, according to Skatingscores.com. She landed it at four of her five competitions in 2023-24.
Glenn added a second triple Axel — this one in her short program — for this season with a 2026 Olympic bid in mind. She last tried it in the short in 2021.
“Something really clicked last year, and the consistency rate last year was really high,” with the jump, she said. “So I figured, hey, I don’t want the first time I try and do it in the short again to be Olympic year. I want to have a season of competing it before I try to do it Olympic season because, obviously, my goal is to make the team. It would be great if I had it in the short program for, say, the team event. It would help push the team higher if I had the highest technical program possible.”
Lombardia set the table for the rest of the season: the top-level Grand Prix Series, where Glenn competes in France and China in November; the U.S. Championships in January and, if she makes the three-woman team, March’s worlds in Boston.
“There’s the generic answer of I want to do the best I can,” Glenn said. “I want to continue my upward trajectory of meeting my mental side to my physical.
“But if we’re talking like, hey, this is a goal that I set, I’m going to aim for it, and if I don’t (reach it), that’s OK, but I’m going to try my best: I really want to medal at both of my Grand Prix, and if that makes it to the (Grand Prix) Final (in December), then that’d be amazing. I would love to defend my national title and end up as high as I can at worlds, which, hopefully, is on the podium. If I continue my trajectory, then I do think it is possible.”
The world championships are at TD Garden, where Glenn won the U.S. junior title in 2014. That stood as the biggest victory of her career for a decade — until she won the senior U.S. title last January.
Now Glenn eyes her first Olympic team in 2026. At 26, she could become the oldest U.S. women’s singles skater at an Olympics in 98 years.
Glenn thought for a moment for a single word that reflected her offseason improvements.
“I’m more coherent,” she said. “Last year, I’d be thinking the right things, and I’d be trying to do the right stuff, but my body wouldn’t do what I was telling it to. It was a way that I never felt in practice. I only felt it in competition. Whereas here (to start the 2024-25 season), I felt a bit more in control, and I felt like I was able to trust myself to do the right thing rather than being scared that I’m going to mess up somehow.”
