WHOOP Podcast - Malaika Mihambo, Olympic long jump champion and German Sportswoman of the Year, discusses overcoming self doubt on the way to the top

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

This week’s guest is Malaika Mihambo, the reigning Olympic, European, and World champion in long jump. Malaika has been named the German Sportswoman of the Year for three consecutive years, the first person to accomplish that feat since tennis legend Steffi Graf. Malaika speaks openly about the self-doubt she experienced leading up to the Tokyo Olympics, and details how writing in her journal and using mindfulness practices helped her overcome the anxiety she felt approaching the Olympic competition. She also discusses her journey to sport (2:02), staying grounded (3:45), preparing for Tokyo (6:31), journaling (9:37), the night before winning gold (12:30), believing in yourself (18:09), mindfulness and meditation (20:34), using WHOOP (24:49), being a vegan athlete (27:38), and habit tracking (32:40). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

what's up folks welcome back to the whoop podcast where we sit down with top athletes scientists experts and more figure out what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak i'm your host will amid founder and ceo of whoop and we are on a mission to unlock human performance okay we've got a great guest this week malika mahombo the german sportswoman of the year for the last three years and the reigning Olympic World and European Champion in Long Jump. This is also good timing because we just launched in Germany. That's right. The Whoop app is completely in German.

It's completely translatable. There will be more languages coming. And given our big German launch, it felt appropriate to sit down with one of Germany's biggest athletes, Malika. Malika and I discuss her journey to the top of the track and field world. Believing in yourself, even when you're faced with, with a lot of self-doubt, being critical in a constructive way and not a destructive way, how she focuses on the process over results, her journal the night before she won an Olympic gold

medal, this was particularly fascinating, and how she uses whoop in her life and how it plays a critical role in her performance. As a reminder, you can get 15% off a whoop membership. If you use the code will, that's W-I-L-L, the W-W-Mership comes with hardware, software, analytics, our latest whoop four and more. All right, without further ado, here is Malika Mahamba. Malika, welcome to the Whoop podcast. Thank you for having me, yeah. Well, congratulations on your recent gold medal. Amazing to see the success that you've had over the course of your career. I want to go back in time first and ask you, did you always know that you were going to be an Olympic athlete, did you always know you were going to be a professional athlete? Was this something

that you were drawn to from a young age? I was definitely drawn to it, but it was never like it was sure I would reach it. So it was more like a dream becoming true finally. But I started to dream about being an Olympic athlete when I was about 12 years old, when you recognize that you're really good at what you're doing and that you can keep up with everyone. Even if the level of the competition that's rising, you're still under the top three. You've been crowned the German sportswoman of the year for three years in a row, 2019, 2020 and 2021, and you're the first woman to do it since Steffi Graf, obviously the talented tennis player. Is all, you know, is hearing that surreal at all for you, or does it kind of feel

like an inevitability in the way that you've approached your training and your competition? It's difficult to say because, you know, I'm really, for sure, happy. I'm somehow proud. But in the end, it's just on the outside. In my inside, I'm still the same, just a bit more grown up and I learned so much about life. But it doesn't really matter if I win a competition or if I lose, if I'm Olympic champion or if I'm just a normal sports person. And so for my self-image, it's not really changing anything. So if you say it somehow feels, oh, yeah, well, I did this.

But in the end, you know, in my daily life, I'm not thinking about it all the time. So it's like doesn't really change anything about me. Well, what are ways that you've stayed grounded during this success? Are there certain habits of yours that you practice, that you feel like keep you centered? and keep you grateful and also it feels like just in the brief time we've spoke keep you very humble. First, I think I'm somehow socialized to it

because my mother always told me that no matter what I achieve or I don't achieve, in the end, it does not matter anyhow at all because she's going to love me anyway, either way. It doesn't matter what I do or what I'm not able to reach. so it's not about grades in school it's not about achievements in sports and i think this kind of grounded me really to learn that love is and solve love is not dependent on what you're doing in my life i'm also focusing on meditation and self-reflection so this is also really helpful

to help me be a better athlete but in the end also much more happier person and a better person, I guess. Yeah, it sounds like you have a real sense of belonging from the way your parents raised you. And, you know, it feels like you have a very sort of calm attitude towards competition. You know, I've talked to a lot of athletes at this point. And some are extremely competitive in a very outward way. And I'm curious how you think about your own competitiveness. Obviously, you've had enormous success. Is it possible that the nature of the sport and of long jump makes you be very focused on your own performance versus that of anyone else? In a way, yes, because I think it's easier if you say, let's say play on your own

because I can do my attendant. At the first moment, it's just about me doing my sports for myself. So it's easy for me to focus on myself, to master myself, master my body, master my mind in this very one moment that I have. you could say it's a really huge internal process that's going on and that's how I focus on it because for me you know the competition is outside but for me it's more about myself how I can grow how I can improve how I can work on my coordination on my rhythm on my sprint technique on my jumping technique it's more about this and in the end on the second

glance, I see, okay, this was worth the second place or seven meters or something. So it's first about giving my best in this moment. Let's talk about the internal process, you know, leading up to a competition. So, you know, you just want a gold medal in Tokyo. What was your routine the night before the morning of and even right before some of the competition. We had a really, really great time in the pre-camp that we were doing in Miyazaki. It's a small town with the coast, so we were close to the water and could enjoy it every day and was like really sunny weather or warm weather. So it was really, really nice time. It was somehow like holiday. So we really did a training there in good conditions. And,

So I think that was part of the success, just, you know, having like a couple of days relaxing and just let the soul breathe. And then we went to Tokyo in the Olympic village and it started to get more focused. Before that, I was not really thinking at all about the competition in Tokyo. I was just there in Miyazaki enjoying the time. But yeah, before the final, I was really. really nervous. I was super nervous. So nervous that I knew I could not sleep at all. And sleep is very important. So I know I had to do something about it. At first I think I had a meditation. I was just trying to focus and a good breathing, calm down. And after the meditation. How long did you

meditate for? I don't know, not so long, 10 or 20 minutes, something like that. Before sleep, I was already sitting in my bed. And I was then journaling. Because I was nervous, I had self-doubts. I had trouble believing myself. So I just started journaling and writing down all the things that were bothering me, all the fears, all the doubts.

and then I just wrote them down and put them just aside and then I went to sleep and I had the best sleep during the whole stay in Tokyo so I was really well prepared for my competition and the next day I just stood up with a good feeling that I could like this could be my day

and that I could use this chance And I was confident about what I could do. And I was really, like, motivated and happy to have this opportunity. So it was the, I think, yeah, the best conditions to start a competition. Yeah, what a great attitude, you know, happy to have this opportunity. That seems like a great attitude to go into a gold medal competition. In terms of the journaling, what exactly did you focus on? Were you journaling things that you were grateful for?

Were you journaling things about the long jump or training? Were you writing about family members? Like, what did that look like? Last year was not really easy for me. I had this doubt that I had all the year throughout the whole year that I'm actually not there where I want to be, that I'm not as good as I could be. Because, I mean, 2020 should have been the Olympic Games,

but they were postponed and in that year I was jumping from a short approach and then 2021 coming back to the long approach was not working for me at all so that's why I struggled and then I was like okay can we just go on and have an additional year for me to prepare because I'm not there where I want to be so and I was really struggling with it because it doesn't matter what you try and you're not there where you want to be and you're not there where you want to be and you're not as good. This makes something with yourself, with your self-esteem,

with your self-worth, with your believe in yourself. And it was a really hard time. But I somehow started to realize that I have to believe in myself from the deepest of my heart. Because if I don't do it, no one else can do it for me.

And I knew that it was not as good as I wanted it to be, but that's all I had. So I think I focused on, this kind of things that you feel somehow weak about your training condition, weak about because then first it's just, you know, about technique and you're not good at it and you're not jumping as far as you want, but then it becomes like, okay, maybe you're just, you're not able to do it anymore. You're not good enough. And then it becomes to something that it's goes deeper and there's more than just a question of technique so um yeah focused on that it was

a question of believing in myself or not even if i know that it's that the odds were not perfect and it was not easy and thank you for sharing all that so the practice then of journaling and driving towards belief, did that take the form of affirmations where you're, you're literally writing, I'm a phenomenal long jumper? Was it more specific than that? Or is it, I'm going to win a gold medal? You know, what drove towards that belief? I think there were some kind of affirmations, but actually, I don't know what I was writing down. I mean, I could get my journal and have a look at it and that I can tell you. Yeah, let's look at it.

I think people would be fascinated to know what an Olympic gold medalist writes right before winning a gold medal. So I wrote that I was really exhausted from all the tension I had, from the fear of losing. But it was also the fear of losing, like losing the first number one position because I was competing there as the world champion. and I wrote much down to let go of all those feelings to tell I told myself that everything is good but it was also like it was really cheering for myself it was pushing myself telling me

that it will be good that I'm good and that I will take the strength from the first competition from the qualification and put that and the good feeling I had there into the final and that I know what I have to do and then I will do it and I'm going to do it so then I wrote down all the aims I have or the goals so it was my goal to believe in myself all the time through the whole day and the whole competition to take life easy as a game to be in the moment and give everything I have to be my own master and that I will will walk down from the stadium from the place with a really good feeling that I want to feel love for myself and that I will feel all the support and love I have from others so that was the things

that I was writing down in my journal before wow that's awesome what a beautiful what a beautiful journal entry and so cool that you can look back on it after now having won and been such success you know i asked you to go deep on that because i think a lot of people listening to this myself included you know have aspirations and faced out and how do you overcome doubt and i think the mistake that a lot of a lot of people make when they look at someone like you who's who's had this enormous success is there's almost like this assumption that you were able to do it without doubt you know you were it came easier to you for some reason and you know you know you know you're you know, I can't do that, but she can. You know, that, again, that sort of concept of self-doubt.

And I think that there's so many mechanisms to overcome that and to really work towards that. And in many ways, that's an aspect of why I like doing this podcast, because you get to pick up different techniques or ideas that you can then apply to your own life around performance and around mindset and around setting aspirations. and meeting them. So I think what you just shared is really beautiful. And yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, you're welcome. But that's true. You have a really great position there hearing all those people talk about their way to success. And yeah, it's always good. And that's what I love about having such conversations because it's so inspirational and the moment that you hear something like that and you just somehow turn it into something that you can work with and get it into. your own life. Yeah, and I love the way you described sort of airing out everything that was on your

mind. You know, you're having trouble sleeping and you realize you just have to put some of it down on paper. Like, you feel these doubts, you feel these fears, but you know that you're going to overcome that. You know that you're going to bring love to the competition. You know you're going to have a good feeling the day of. Like, it's really nice thinking through what you just did. And there's a great business example. There's plenty of examples that other people can use. as they think about their own lives and that's sort of the day before the big presentation or am I going to get a promotion or am I going to close the deal, you know? I think it's a beautiful connection between sports and the rest of the world. Woop has become this pretty successful company

and it's grown enormously, but there were a lot of stages along the way where I had real doubts with myself and, you know, I had some similar techniques along that way. I, I, I, I, I, had some similar techniques along that way. I wrote affirmations. I don't know if I've ever been talked about this, but where, you know, I would write line after line after line saying, like, I will close this round of financing. I will get this deal done. Because sometimes when you don't believe it, it makes it a lot harder, and you have to really talk yourself into it. You feel a little crazy, or at least I felt a little crazy, doing some of that. But it worked, you know. And so there's something to be said for it. And I think there's also a level.

of acceptance that comes from it. You know, you have to accept vulnerability in order to take these processes on. You know, I'm amazed in listening to you how vulnerable you describe certain aspects of your training or your technique. I think that's an asset for you. Yeah, I think that's also something I learned. I don't know if you can relate to it, but what made this victory so special to me was not being the Olympic champion in that competition but realizing that I'm on the right

track and that I'm really thankful for being on this track and what I've learned and the greatest lesson of that year was it's easy to believe in yourself when you have success but it's not if you don't and if you know that you're not at your best but still I learned that I'm great for who I am and it's not about what I reach, what I'm going to reach.

It's about just being committed to myself and in the sense that I really cheer for me, that I'm my biggest fan, and I think I was in that year. I like that. And that was really cool. Because like I said, if you have a run and everything works out, it's easy to. to believe if you have the success. I think that's right. I mean, I think you develop a better toolkit

when there's doubt and hardship and difficult circumstances, right? And then you overcome that to have the success. I'm sure you've had the race where going into it, you knew you were going to win and then you won and that was that, right? And in a way, it's more powerful when it's that internal, struggle that you have to overcome because that gives you this feeling like you can take on a lot more. But I think it's also about being open to yourself and just say, okay, right now I'm not there where it should be and be critical but not destructive but more like in a constructive

way, being realistic but still optimistic and be like, okay, you can do better. I'm believing in you. Do you find that you set a lot of specific goals for your? yourself or are you more process focused and the goals you know the the rest kind of takes care of itself like right now is one of your goals to break the world record um not really and trying to um yeah trying to give my best some more focus on the process because i think it's better to focus on the process because then you're focusing on what you can do right now what's how you can improve what you can do better and i think if you just aim for i don't know let's say the world record and you just have a number in your head but you don't have a plan how like how to achieve it

you just have a number yeah that's interesting i mean i've spoken to a lot of athletes and i've heard both sides of it let's talk for a second about your meditation practice you know you strike me as someone who's very mindful and calm and it's got a good demeanor what what uh how often do you do that and what are your intentions for it? It depends, you know. I started 2018 and since then I'm trying out different kind of meditations and I have different kind of meditation routines. And I think they were all useful for the time I use them.

But right now I'm trying to meditate every day for like 25 or 30 minutes. Well, that's a good amount of time. I do 20 minutes a day. Do you have a specific type of practice, or is it mostly closing your eyes and breathing? Yeah, right now it's breathing, exercise, and then some kind of five minutes where you just try to not think about anything, not try to focus on your breath, just be present. That's my meditation right now. That's great. And do you find that you're thinking often about training or long jump or performance during it?

Or will you be thinking about all sorts of different things or nothing at all? Well, I try to think nothing at all. But I think this is easier if you're like in a meditation retreat and you're out of your daily life. Then it's really like really working out really, really good. But if I'm at home, I'm more like, okay, I have to do this, and well, this happened today. And that's how I think about it. So it's, yeah, more difficult for me to stay calm and, like, have silence in my mind. But still, I just try it every day and I'm not judging me for, yeah, having daily things in my mind.

Yeah, meditation became more fun for me when I decided that the goal was not to think about nothing, but to more or less spend time alone with your thoughts. And interestingly, if you really embrace that, that's one actually, it seems like you can all of a sudden be thinking about nothing, which is a pretty cool moment too. What's been your favorite book or a couple books related to mindset? I think The Seven Habits is a book that I think many whoop users have read for for sure yeah that's a good one yeah but i also liked from erich from i don't know if it's

the same in german because i think it was written in german then it's in english that's the title it's about having or being or to have or to be so it's more about focus on who you are and not about what you have and also see how the society focus often on the things we have and not on the person we are and the society we are and we want to be or we should be we need to be so i think books like that are also really inspirational well speaking of uh of translation whoop is now in german have you tried the app in completely in german yeah i i did so now I'm using it in German. I mean, it's easier, right?

German is my mother tongue, so I was happy for sure to have it in German, but I think that throughout the years, I was also good with English. Okay, well, you naturally are multilingual, but hopefully it sounds just as good in German to you as it did in English, if not better. Yeah, but it's still, I look at my phone and see, like read it. to myself and I'm like hey whoop why are you doing my talking German to me right now but it's cool yeah sure and I think many people that we're struggling with English are now able to use it and I think that's a really good thing let's talk about your training and also about

whoop because I understand you've been on whoop for a little while yeah I am when did you when did you start using it I started in 2020. At first it was just something like, I don't know, it was in the first lockdown. I was trying all kind of stuff. And a friend was recommending me whoop like, I think just even a year or something.

I was all the time like, yeah, okay, maybe. Yeah, well, I have a look at it. Yeah, okay. But then it was the lockdown and I was like, okay, why not? I just give it a try. And then I got myself. a whoop and I was just wearing it at first because I was not really training so I was just

getting used to it. I think in the season that is now starting we're trying really to focus more on the feedback of my whoop and I think it had it like since October until the competition season started and exception okay that the training can But it was really all the time in my optimal optimum performance level. So it was really balanced between recovery and training. And I think this was really good. And I had no injuries, no problems, nothing. It was just really healthy and having a good training.

Awesome. Well, we love to hear that. So it sounds like you would use your recovery score as one mechanism to determine how much strain or how much training to take on. yeah i was all like often telling my coach okay right now it's like um i'm in a i'm in the red um so i don't have a really good recovery and he was like okay yeah then we don't do too much today and we were also having a really easy training somehow i don't know how to explain it but it was really also focused on um recovery so i had like four hard training sessions

a week and then I had two really easy ones and one day completely off so this was really good for the beginning but now we have to get a bit more to work so right now it's about really just pushing through the next weeks of training so I'm not sure how my recovery will and my body will react to that but maybe I'm good prepared now and like you know I'm ready to handle more than I could in the winter season I understand you have a vegan diet is that right it's vegetarian but yeah one meal a day every day is like definitely vegan but yeah when I'm on competition it's really hard for me to keep on a vegan diet because I'm having certain food allergies. So sometimes it's more like I try to eat what I get because that's not

so much sometimes. What allergies? I'm lactose intolerant, which makes me often very difficult at restaurants. Yeah, that's something. But I think I'm even more difficult because I have gluten allergy. So everything that contains weeds and cereals and I'm also allergic to eggs, which it also makes difficult of your vegetarian and you're not even able to eat eggs so even like breakfast is sometimes difficult and then I have some allergies concerning fish but that's not a problem since I'm vegetarian so you actually have a very restrictive diet yeah too and when you travel like especially for a competition do you have to bring food with you almost to make sure that you can have what you can eat i think sometimes it would be better because being a vegetarian

and having food allergies is like really a bad combination for being in the in yeah in hotels because they have like really not even like often not really healthy but yeah sometimes i don't know they're not neither prepared for vegetarians or vegans uh no are they prepared for people that having foot allergies? So being a person that is vegetarian and having foot allergies is really, really troublesome. So sometimes it would be better to bring my own foot, I guess. But I did not start it so far.

But I was thinking about that, yeah. Well, you know, there's a lot of athletes or people who lift weights or they want to be high performance that say you can't recover properly if you don't eat meat. or you're not going to get enough protein if you don't eat meat. What are some of the foods that you rely on? Obviously, you're an incredible athlete. And what would you say to them? I think it's not necessary. But I think I'm not the only example for this.

There are also several vegan athletes that are really, really good. So it's not even about eating any kind of animal product. I rely on, I have like a vegan protein. shake but it's more it contains not only proteins but also some kind of carbs and also minerals and vitamins because you need them to process the proteins and build muscles so it was really focusing on a product that is giving me all of that I need for building methods and in my diet I really like lentils I'm a really big lentil fan

and I think it's really good for me and I can digest it well but I also like yeah sure tofu chickpeas so there are like several things that you can eat to get some proteins

I try to mix it so that I have all kind of proteins and acids amino assets that's how i tried but it's for me it's not like science you know i just eat what i'm what i feel well with so it's not that i know exactly of every product which kind of amino acids they contain and how i have to mix them that i have the right proportion of all of the essential ones so yeah so that's interesting so you're not you're certainly not someone who measures her food like you don't have a specific meal that you have to eat the night before competition no that absolutely not there's no such routine i did weight my food but it was all

but it was just the proteins that i know okay i have a lot enough proteins so that's the only kind of food um waiting thing that i did obviously you're an incredible professional athlete do you think if you weren't a professional athlete at all you would get value out of whoop definitely because i'm interested in how my body works and i was i think i'm like really super focused on my health and my mental being and my physical being so i think it would still make me fun to you know see the tools and track my habits and see how they affect my body but yeah sure i think i would not deal so much with uh recovery and training maybe i would just train as i would or maybe i wasn't i was not that sporty at all but i think it's

like yeah it's in it's in your bones right so you cannot do anything about it yeah this is like an alternative reality we're talking about where you're not an olympian but you know mostly i wanted you to speak to the value that I think anyone can get out of hopefully the product. And it's also why we're excited to be expanding in more markets because, you know, the majority of people on whoop today are everyday consumers who want to be healthier, want to be fitter, want to lose weight, want to get more sleep, you know, want to figure out a few things about their lifestyle or their behavior that they can change or improve. So it's an aspirational audience, but it's not necessarily an athletic audience or a fit audience it's a group of people that is motivated to like you said

understand their bodies and so that's what uh that's what we're focused on over here at whoop yeah and i think it's like a really cool tool to help people to to get all those insights because it's not so easy to get them i mean there's some habits where you're at the first moment you try it and then you're like okay this is really good but sometimes things need more time and then it's easier to check it um to see what brings which results malika this has been a real pleasure uh very grateful that you're on whoop and and proud that you're on whoop so thank you for that and and you know thank you for everything you shared today i really enjoyed the uh the journal entry personally and everything you said about mindset and performance and hell so um thank you for that and and thank you for

for coming on the Whoop podcast. Yeah, sure, you're welcome. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I'm really happy to be here. Happy to hear your insights from Woo. I'm happy to be Whoopi. Thank you to Malika for coming on the Whoop Podcast. If you enjoy this episode of the podcast,

please leave us a rating or review. Don't forget to subscribe to the Whoop podcast. Check us out on social at Whoop, at Will Ahmed. And don't forget, you can get 15% off a Whoop membership if you use the code Will, W-I-L-L. That's all for now, folks. We'll see you next week.