There is a classical result first due to Keen known as the collar lemma for hyperbolic surfaces. A consequence of the collar lemma is that if two closed curves A and B on a closed orientable hyperbolizable surface have non-zero geometric intersection number, then there is an explicit lower bound for the length of A in terms of the length of B, which holds for any hyperbolic structure on the surface. By slightly weakening this lower bound, we generalize this statement to hold for all Hitchin representations. This is a joint work with Tengren Zhang.