InStyle
There aren’t many days a year where I can say I generally “don’t care” what my hair looks like. I’m usually pretty particular about what my bangs, my part, what have you. Turns out, me and David Boudia have that in common.
Now, I wish I could say it was that both of us had won gold at the London Olympics (I definitely didn’t take home the gold in 2012), but hey, we can’t have everything.
In honor of Head & Shoulders’ Shoulders of Greatness Campaign, which is an intiative all about the challenges athletes carry with them, we had the chance to chat with David about his crazy training sessions, stress, and, obviously, his grooming routine.
Since we’re very clearly #beautyobsessed, let’s kick things off with a look into his routine. Is he an after-shave kind of guy? Does he have to have product in his dive bag? What’s his grooming jam?
David tells me that he definitely takes more showers than the average Joe (chlorine will do that to you), but he’s v. into his hair.
While he says that Head & Shoulders has helped him stop worrying about dandruff, he also doesn’t fool around with styling.
“If you ask my wife, she’ll tell you that I’m annoyingly particular about how my hair looks. So, I gotta have that hard part—making sure it looks clean,” he says. “She actually cut the back of my neck with clippers and she said ‘Oops,’ and I turned around real fast and she freaked out. I’m like, ‘You can’t say oops when you’re cutting the back of my hair.’”
While that sitch sounds stressful (also kind of hilarious), David definitely has to deal with greater sources of stress — aka, acing his dives.
So how does he handle that anxiety?
“So the mental game for elite athletes is crucial, especially for my sport. When you’re diving off of a 3-story building and you’re mental game is off, then it’s not gonna build up. I had to learn from a really young age how to control my heart rate and use breathing exercises to make sure that my body and brain is calm and also visualizing it, so closing my eyes and seeing it in my head. So that often takes off a lot of stress,” he says.
And if you were wondering what types of workouts David is doing out of the water, he tells us that he’s training with exercises like squats, Pilates, yoga, and working on achieving a “rock solid core.”
Can you say intense?
But then again, with two Olympic medals to his name, his hard work pays off—without a doubt.
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