Journaling, juggling and meditating: How 3 Team USA athletes get in the zone for the 2024 Paris Olympics

Their athletic ability may seem superhuman, but even Olympians — both veterans and first-timers — are still learning to handle the pressure that comes with performing on the world stage. Nerves, self-doubt and countless other stressors can rattle anyone, which is why these athletes headed to the 2024 Paris Olympics make sure they’ve got wellness practices (and the odd superstitious ritual) they can rely on when they need to stay sharp, focused and feeling like a winner.

So, what works? As the Summer Games get underway, three members of Team USA share the tools — from journaling to juggling — they leaning on.

Evy Leibfarth, canoe/kayak

The second-time Olympian says she experienced a lot of stress during her first Games in Tokyo three years ago. Since then, she’s worked with a sports psychologist to find tools to manage it.

Color breathing and visualization are two practices she relies on to keep her calm and focused before a competition. “You assign a color to every emotion in your brain,” Leibfarth tells Yahoo Life — blue for anxiety, white for calm, red for ferocity and so on. “Then you visualize yourself breathing in the emotions that you want and breathing out the ones you don't. So I'm usually trying to breathe in aggression and confidence before a race, and breathe out anxiety and doubt.”

Physical training also helps to make her feel in control — especially when it comes to kayak cross, which requires athletes to launch themselves into the water from a ramp two meters off the ground.

“I am pretty scared of heights, so it took me a little while to feel comfortable going off of it,” she says. “That's obviously the most important part of the race — to get ahead off the start.”

Leibfarth spends time at the gym working on strength training and running. But having quick reflexes is also vital to her sport.

“I have these lights that I put all over the wall and I try to hit them as fast as I can when they light up to work on reaction time,” she says. “I do a lot of juggling also. I'm terrible at it, but it helps me with reaction-time training.”

Nick Itkin, fencing

For Itkin as for Leibfarth, the Tokyo Olympics were a big learning lesson. “I knew there was gonna be pressure, but I didn't really know how to handle it and I feel like my body just kind of froze a little bit,” the fencer tells Yahoo Life. He feels more prepared going into his second Olympics.

“In the morning, I'll do a quick meditation before a tournament,” he says, adding that he usually just finds a meditation video on YouTube to guide him. Breathing is something he’s been focused on not only to get into the zone but also to remain present during a tournament. “I used to have a lot of moments where I would get caught up with the emotions of the bout and I didn’t let myself breathe, which is one of the things that helps blood come to your body. So I’ve learned how to breathe properly while I'm fencing.”

A superstitious mid-match routine also keeps him centered. “I'll change my T-shirt after every single bout to make sure I’m not super-wet — otherwise, your clothes are heavy,” he says. “But I'll have a certain rotation of shirts that I need to wear.”

Megumi Field, artistic swimming

Field, a first-time Olympian, tells Yahoo Life that she likes a routine when it comes to how she physically prepares for a performance. (She’s the same way with her meal prep.)

The 18-year-old says she spends nearly an hour every night stretching and massaging her muscles. “It calms me down, especially the night before I'm about to compete,” Field says. Using the same tools as she does at home, like a percussion massage gun and a heated mat, helps to take her mind off of the nerve-racking fact that she’s really at the Olympics.

As a pregame ritual, Field and her team spend time doing their hair and makeup before changing into their swimsuits. Then they meet up to listen to their competition music and visualize the performance while lying on the floor in the legs-up-the-wall pose. This helps to de-stress and improve circulation, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

“We try to say that we’re not a superstitious team, but I don’t know. … There are a few things that we feel we have to do exactly the same way [before each performance],” she says. “I have to hold this person’s hand or I have to look this person in the eye.”

They don’t rely on those repeated behaviors to perform well, per se, but instead to keep themselves relaxed. “As a team, we’ve been to a lot of competitions together and we know that we get the best results when we just focus within ourselves,” Field says. “We call it our little bubble.”

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