The Greatest Recovery Device Is Your Mind, According To the Pros

When Michelle Parker began freeskiing competitively at 15 years old, she didn’t have a coach. There wasn’t a team trainer, and the only extracurricular training she did was high school PE, which, more often than not, was just skiing. It was the same for Bobby Brown, who started competing around the same age as Parker.

Today, professional athletes are upheld as purveyors of health and wellness. Skiers post their gym routines to Instagram left and right, and are sponsored by nutrition companies as often as ski brands. As the next generation of freeskiers is coming up and making waves, Parker and Brown’s generation has tapped into a kind of longevity that’s become a phenomenon.

No longer does turning 30, or even 40, mean the end of a professional athlete’s career. And although it wasn’t always this way, skiers like Parker and Brown have come a long way since their days of being ‘park rats, and skiing pow’ into careers that have lasted 20+ years.

Parker is one of those people who can’t get enough of the mountains. If it’s not skiing, she’s mountain biking, climbing, or walking her rambunctious 1-year-old dog, Cardi. Throughout her 20s and early 30s, Parker rarely worried about her fitness. After all, she played outside so much that she often got full-body workouts and felt healthy and strong while skiing. 

However, like many skiers, Parker has dealt with her share of knee injuries. Following her first knee surgery at 18 years old, Parker was in the gym for 4 to 6 hours a day. Her job was to ski, and she needed to get stronger to do that, but like many folks when they return from injury, eventually time in the gym and physical therapy gave way to Parker’s old routines. A second knee injury at 21 put her back in the gym, only for the same thing to happen again.

“I’ve had six knee surgeries, so every single surgery I would do that. But I always resorted to coming back and being outside as much as possible,” said Parker. “I never had a consistent routine until, I wanna say, the last two years. I couldn’t even imagine spending as much time in the gym as I do now.”

Her last knee injury was the real turning point. Parker tore her meniscus while skiing in the park, and for the rest of the season, she knew something was wrong, but didn’t want to have another knee surgery, so she ignored it and went on to direct a film with Arc’teryx, and film with Warren Miller, TGR, and Matchstick Productions all in the same season. In the spring, she went in for an MRI and finally got her knee scoped, as they say.

Following that surgery, Parker started spending a lot more time at Red Bull’s Athlete Performance Center in Santa Monica, where she was paired up with one of the same physical therapists who had worked with Lindsey Vonn. Parker found herself spending a week or two at a time at the APC rehabbing her knee and learning more about her recovery process, surrounded by fellow Red Bull athletes from all disciplines. She felt not only inspired by them, but more comfortable and confident in a gym space than she’d ever found herself.

Bobby Brown started working with Red Bull as a sponsor at just 18-years-old, the same year he became the first skier to win back-to-back gold medals at the X Games. Just a couple of years later, he suffered an ankle injury, and he also found himself at one of the early iterations of the Red Bull APC. “It was just in this big warehouse, and they hadn’t really done all the science stuff and everything they do now,” he said.

He recalls spending his whole day at APC doing physical therapy and learning about strength training and more. “It was cool just to see skateboarders in there and snowboarders and mountain bikers and skiers and athletes you’d never think would be utilizing that stuff. But then you see all these guys being able to extend their careers,” he said. 

The practices Parker found (that eventually stuck), like a consistent gym routine, tracking her nutrients to make sure she gets enough protein, utilizing a sauna, and doing regular bodywork have allowed her career to evolve from film segment after film segment, to massive human-powered missions alongside folks like Nick Russell and Jim Morrison, to competing in NST, and now, on her way to parenthood.

Brown has gone even deeper into recovery technologies as he’s shifted his career to spend more time skiing and filming in the backcountry, but, unfortunately, he has also dealt with additional injuries.

In 2021, Brown underwent a procedure in which a piece of bone marrow was taken from his pelvis, stem cells were harvested from the marrow, and the marrow was then injected back into his knee. The former US Ski Team physician, Dr. Tom Hackett, performed the procedure that Brown says “brought his knee back to life.” Shortly after, Brown broke four vertebrae while skiing in Saas Fe. He underwent surgery that put 10 screws and two rods in his back, which were able to be removed after five months. 

Like Parker, Brown has now found practices that help him keep performing well on skis even after his injuries. A morning routine of stretching and warming up his body is essential to a good day on snow. During his recovery time, Brown uses a red light sauna, shockwave therapy (which sends shockwaves through your tissues to stimulate healing), and cold plunging. Brown’s wife is a massage therapist and has been working to help pinpoint any “weak links” in his musculature via bodywork. 

Unlike in the early days of Brown and Parker’s careers, athletes today have a wealth of information at their disposal. Technology that helps athletes recover is more prominent than ever. Companies like Whoop, Oura, and Hyperice, which make wearable wellness trackers and devices to aid and speed recovery, are valued in the billions. A peek at the hands or wrists of most athletes (though not Brown) will show you how many use these tools to gain insights into metrics like VO2 Max, HRV, sleep, and more.

However, for all that Brown and Parker have learned about optimizing their performance and recovery since their teenage competition years, another tool has proved even more useful than one in a corner of a garage or gym.

Dr. Francine Bartlett has been working as a physical therapist, athletic trainer, and wellness practitioner for more than 20 years. Her own experience as an athlete and living in communities that didn’t have access to good healthcare prompted her on what she described as a ‘rampage’ around the world to learn more about healing her own being and learning to heal others. Eventually, Bartlett, who is of Apache descent, landed in Jackson, Wyoming, where she began working with more high-level athletes, including Parker at various times.

She soon found that while her patients were recovering from physical injuries, something else lingered. “We can get the knee feeling better and get you back up on the mountain, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, there was a lot of disconnect,” said Bartlett. That disconnect she found in traditional Western medicine, not to mention the ways our healthcare system had made it difficult for folks to afford certain healing modalities, led her to start Sacred Athlete.

Sacred Athlete relies on the four directions to incorporate healing through modalities that impact the spiritual, mental, and emotional, as well as the physical, such as BEMER Vascular therapy, electromagnetic therapies, infrared sauna, yoga, training, movement classes, and mindfulness. While acting as a resource for those learning to take care of their physical well-being through these modalities is certainly part of Bartlett’s work, many of the high-level athletes she works with already have a good sense of how to care for their bodies and recover.

“I don’t even think it’s about the puffy [NormaTec] pants. It’s like, what are you doing with that time where you’re slowed down, and you’re actually stuck in the puffy pants for 50 minutes,” explained Bartlett. “A lot of athletes are working on a lot of grief and fear. We’ve lost a lot of friends in the mountains, and there’s a lot of fear of ‘I’m losing my career,’ or ‘I didn’t get asked to be on a cover in the last two years.’ So, it’s a lot of mindset, and I feel like that’s one of the most important things with care. The body’s going to heal itself. We’re just working on optimizing and guiding it through its process,” said Bartlett. 

As it turns out, finding a mindfulness practice proved to be integral for Brown as well. Looking back at the injuries he endured early in his career, Brown wishes he’d had a better understanding that he not only needed to heal his physical body but also his nervous system. 

“The more you get hurt, the more you realize that the mental is so connected to the physical and really trying to calm yourself down and heal your nervous system makes it so that your body can kind of heal every injury,” he said. The equilibrium Brown has found through routines that support both his mental and physical body allowed this past winter to be one of his favorites to date and gave him a clear path to continue his career even longer.

For Parker, one of her greatest tools turned out to be not what she did physically, but how she approached it mentally. At the beginning of this past winter, her trainer encouraged her to put on several pounds of muscle mass to better offset what she burned on long endurance missions.

Like most women, Parker had felt pressure not to gain weight. “I feel like we are kind of going back to this time period of women in the spotlight wanting to be super thin and I think it’s so detrimental to younger women and people,” she said. “Before pregnancy, I was giving myself permission to gain weight intentionally in a really positive way. I want to maintain that and know that stronger is more beautiful to me and stronger is more functional to me, and if that means more weight, then that means more weight, and that’s totally okay and acceptable.”

Returning to the gym after spending the first trimester of pregnancy away was nerve-racking but Parker’s trainer and her gym’s community created a space where she felt safe coming back as her body changed to create new life. It wasn’t just her own mindset, but the supportive and strong community around her that allowed her to continue practices that supported her before pregnancy, have continued to do so during, and will no doubt help her postpartum recovery. 

“Michelle Parker is a sacred athlete. She’s a kind-hearted person that cares about things that are bigger than herself. You see it in her performance, you see it in the ways she supports, the kind of advocate that she is, the kind of friend that she is, the kind of wife that she is. She’s not gonna just do one thing,” said Bartlett, “You are more than the physical, you are an energetic body and you are also a heart body, you’re an emotional body. That’s what a sacred athlete is.”

Related: Up & Coming Freeskiers Take on Whitewater Kayaking’s Rowdiest Race