Eileen Gu Has a New Mindset on Recovery

Eileen Gu is one of the most impressive people on the planet.

At just 21 years old, Gu is arguably the best competition freeskier in the world. She has multiple X Games and Olympic medals to her name, and is amongst the world's highest-paid female athletes due to lucrative endorsement deals. She made international headlines earlier this year for being just the third skier featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition.

She's busy, no doubt about that.

Like most modern celebrities, Gu is active on Instagram and regularly engages with her followers. Most of her posts feature lifestyle snaps from her global travels, but a recent post about offseason recovery stood out to us at POWDER.

In a post on Monday, July 14, 2025, Gu revealed that she had just enjoyed the first spa day of her life, which may come as a surprise considering her jet-setting and lavish lifestyle, but it was the rest of the caption that grabbed our attention.

Gu, in a rare insight into the challenges of being a world-class athlete, admits that she struggles with taking time to recover. Read below:

"I’d always thought of the need for recovery as indicative of lack - lack of fitness when it came to training volume, lack of mental resilience when it came to metabolizing difficult emotions, lack of toughness when it came to taking hard hits," writes Gu. "For the last few years, it’s felt as though I’ve been pitting my mind against my body - and I learned that my willpower was stronger than my bones every time."

Based on the snaps she shared below, Gu is making a conscious effort to reverse this negative way of thinking about recovery. Keep reading for more insight from Gu.

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