Olympic gymnast Laurie Hernandez knows a thing or two about balance. On March 4, she came to Mayo Concert Hall as CUB’s spring lecture guest to share some of her best personal wellness tricks with TCNJ students.
Hernandez, a New Jersey native, became a household name in 2016 as a member of the gold-winning team at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She also took home an individual silver medal for balance beam.
Now she’s a drama and creative writing student at NYU and as a lover of fanfiction, her next goal is to be a voice actress for animation films: “I love a good story, I don’t really care what medium or form or shape it takes,” she says.
As she told her own story about performance anxiety, injuries, burn-out, and the joy of slingshotting scrunchies off balconies in the Olympic village, she urged TCNJ students to consider the following when taking leaps in their own lives.
1. Give yourself a break.
In 2016, Hernandez quit gymnastics for three days. “I felt so tired and so overwhelmed, I didn’t want to go to practice, I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to do anything.” Hernandez spent those three days sleeping and enjoying her mom’s home-cooked meals. What she discovered was that she didn’t need to quit gymnastics, she just needed a break.
“If you don’t learn how to rest, your body and your brain are going to pick when that happens for you, and it’s usually at the most inconvenient of times.”
2. Accept the big feelings.
“Picture them as little baby birds that you have to foster until they can fly again,” she suggests. “Sadness just has a chipped wing.It’s going to hang, and when it’s ready to go away, it will go away. Until then, you just have to let it in.”
For Hernandez, the big feelings manifested in performance anxiety. She’d think, “I’m going to have to do this routine on shaky hands and feet and sweaty palms whether I want to or not. Let’s just accept that that’s the reality, and we’re going to figure it out.”
3. Breathe.
Over the course of her Olympic career, Hernandez used breathing exercises to bring her nerves down to a healthy level (usually from a 12 to a six, she says).
Some of her favorites include: the box method, birthday candle breath, and the hand-belly breath. She demonstrated each of these exercises to the audience.
“If you feel yourself getting worked up or anxious, or if you have to present something, you have these tools. At some point, you’ll start to feel yourself relax a bit.
4. Seniors, you’re going to be fine.
In 2021, after injuries prevented her from qualifying for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Hernandez retired from gymnastics. She faced the same question that terrifies many college seniors: “What the hell do I do now?”
For Hernandez, that question was answered when she took her own advice, and took another break.
“I wrote all the time when I was a kid, I used to love writing books. It was one of my favorite things in the world. But I didn’t know I wanted to do that until I had a little break from gymnastics, when I had to consider ‘What does life after this look like?’ So, be patient with yourself, give yourself time, and you will find your footing.”
— Corinne Coakley ’25