Hello and welcome to pursuing health. I'm Dr. Julie Foucher, family physician and former CrossFit Games athlete.

Here I bring you information and inspiration to help bridge the gap between

fitness and medicine and support your journey toward your healthiest self. Thank you so much for

joining me. Now let's get started with this week's episode. Today I wanted to talk about a tool

that I was first introduced to as a very little girl

that has served me well, but is something that I forgot about for a while and have recently

started to play around with and apply to different areas of my life.

Now, growing up, I experimented with a lot of different sports as a young kid, and it was around third grade or so

that I first started gymnastics. And I very quickly fell in love, and this became my main sport.

It wasn't long before I was involved in 15 to 20 hours a week of practice and meets on the weekends,

and it just became my life and my

identity. And gymnastics is a sport in which you, of course, need to practice the physical

aspects of it over and over and over again, the skills and the routines, repetition after

repetition in order to build that muscle memory.

But you also need to practice the mental aspect of the sport as well,

in order to be able to perform under pressure in front of an audience at a meet on a 4-inch balance beam up in the air.

And I will always remember and always be grateful for the coaches that first introduced me to the

tool of visualization.

We would end a long, rigorous practice where we would be doing our routines over and over

and over again and our muscles were exhausted.

But then they would lie us all down on the floor and say, your muscles are

exhausted, but you can still practice in your mind. And we would practice our routines over and

...