One Obsession: Jamie Anderson

A mellow, down to earth, tree-talking yoga enthusiast, Jamie Anderson is not your average Olympic gold medalist. But when you observe the 25-year-old snowboarding phenom in her hometown of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., everything snaps into focus.

Living in a cabin with her parents in the beautiful mountains of Tahoe, Anderson was connected to mother nature from a young age. She started snowboarding as a kid, and won her first competition at age nine. By 13, she qualified for the X Games. Anderson has been at the top of the snowboarding game ever since, punctuating a brilliant start to her career with a gold medal in Slopestyle at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

While a big part of her training certainly takes place on the slopes, there’s another element to Anderson’s regimen that helps her keep her edge: yoga. If you want to take some of snowboarding’s signature hard falls (and the strange musculoskeletal contortions that come with them) and live to tell the tale, you need to be flexible.