Baz Moffat: The lack of knowledge around women’s health is shocking
Baz Moffat is on a mission. To put women’s health and fitness front and centre of the wellbeing conversation. Because for far too long women have been treated as little more than “small men”. This huge lack of knowledge and empathy around female health, fitness and fertility has left women in the dark ages on knowing how their bodies work and then understanding how their bodies change as they age.
To bridge this knowledge gap, the former Team GB rower, alongside GP Dr Bella Smith and Dr Emma Ross, former head of physiology at the English Institute of Sport, founded The Well HQ, a women’s health and fitness education provider to empower women – and anyone who works with women – to better understand their bodies so they can become the architect of our own health, happiness and performance.
For Moffat more woman need advice and support not just to perform better, but live healthier, happier and longer lives. And she means all women, not just elites performers who want to steal an extra millisecond but also “women who don’t want to wet themselves when they stand up”.
Torpedo women’s health taboos
In our interview with Moffat she discusses how we can torpedo some of the major “taboos” that still exist around women’s health, including those still evident in GP surgeries across the country when perimenopausal women – many juggling kids, a career, running a home and more, all while their brains and bodies are going through life-altering changes – are dismissed with a wave of the hand and told to try and get more sleep.
Moffat also expresses her huge frustration at the lack of effort from government, sporting bodies and large corporations in investing in better education on women’s health, and suggests how we can move the conversation forward past the main obstacles of progress – that the action so desperately needed would “cost too much time and money”.
We also discuss the optimal ways for women to exercise both during and after having a baby; the best forms of training for women approaching and going through the menopause; and how male partners can do a much better job of supporting the women in their lives to make the transitions that all women experience that little bit easier.
And, as a former elite athlete, we get her take on whether trans women should be allowed to compete with biological women in sport, both at grassroots and professional level.
