Simone Manuel is meditating on gold at Tokyo 2020

One of the key ingredients to swimming‘s sprint events is explosivity, but Simone Manuel believes she can maintain her competitive edge during the COVID-19 lockdown by sitting still.

Not only has the USA star admitted to watching more TV during her increased downtime in Palo Alto, California, but she has been working on her mental game.

“I’ve been able to kind of get into meditating, which is something that I hadn’t done in the past,” the 100m freestyle Olympic champion told ESPN.

“I’ve been stretching 15 minutes every day, which is something that I never did. So I’m really just finding ways to better myself outside of the pool… when things hopefully get back to normal, I’ll be ahead of the game.”

“I think that’s what helped a little bit is trying not to focus on, ‘Oh, what is someone else doing over here? What is someone else doing over here,’ but really just focusing on what’s important for me.

Simone Manuel of the United States and Canada’s Penny Oleksiak tie for gold and set an Olympic Record in the women’s 100m freestyle.

Training and inspiring with Katie Ledecky

While solitude and silence create an ideal environment for meditation, Manuel ensures she keeps the best of company for her physical training.

When Stanford University pool was temporarily closed, the 23-year-old started training at a private 25m pool, where she does reps in the lane next to five-time Olympic gold medallist Katie Ledecky. Their coach keeps socially distant on the side, but otherwise practice continues as normal for the USA and former college teammates.

“(We’re) just trying to maintain that confidence and that competitive edge so that when we get to the Olympics next year, we’ll be ready to go and we’ll be able to inspire women with our accomplishments,” Manuel told Popsugar.

“What I’ve learned most, especially from being an Olympic medalist, is that we’re able to just inspire people. And so for me, obviously I want to win some medals, but I also just want to go to the Olympics and inspire people to have confidence in themselves, to dream big, to work for their goals. And that is something that’s so precious to me beyond just receiving a medal or…