Radio Interview by Radio New Zealand, featuring Professor Holly Thorpe and Dr Sarah Beable who discuss the National survey results on NZ’s elite female athletes.
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Almost three quarters of New Zealand’s top female athletes in a new national survey feel elite sport is putting them under pressure to look a certain way, potentially damaging their health.
One in four of the Kiwi sportswomen at the top of their game have been diagnosed with a stress fracture at some point in their careers.
And nearly a quarter have been iron deficient, while a third reported their menstrual cycle was affected by their training volume.
These are some of the findings just released from research carried out by a team of experts in New Zealand, published in the Frontiers in Sport and Active Living journal.
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Have you seen this?!
The multi-disciplinary work of WHISPA and HPSNZ, a team I am a part of, worked hard to get this paper out. With some eye-opening findings, this is worth the read. It is open access which means you will be able to access and read it for FREE!
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Media Article: Written by Professor Holly Thorpe, Katie Schofield, and Dr Stacy Sims in The Conversation.
9th December 2019
Recently, several elite sportswomen have spoken out about toxic sport culture and the damage it does to their long-term health.
Mary Cain went from being the fastest and the youngest American track and field athlete to make a world championships team to having her health completely break down. Cain revealed how coaches, sponsors and medical support staff told her to lose weight for performance, and refused to listen to her concerns about her physical and mental health…
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Media Article: Written by Suzanne McFadden, LockerRoom
17th December 2019
It's the syndrome few people have heard of - or dared talk about - but RED-S is affecting the health of many of our female athletes. New Zealand, though, is leading the way in its approach to educating coaches, parents and athletes about the importance of eating.
Katie Schofield has watched the Mary Cain video that’s gone viral. “She’s a very, very brave woman,” Schofield, a former New Zealand cycling star now doctoral candidate, says…
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This is a blog post that I wrote and published on my athlete blog page in September 2014, as a result of being diagnosed with Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports (RED-S). As the blog page is no longer available, I pulled this post out of my personal archives to share. The following post is unedited, raw and real. How I like to keep it. At the time, writing this was extremely cathartic and I hoped it would provide information and insight to others.
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From a young age, I’ve always been active and aspired to dream big by competing in the Olympic Games. Gymnastics was my first sporting love, admiring ‘The Magnificent 7’ - the American Atlanta Olympic team. I vividly remember having a giant poster of them on my bedroom wall. The gymnasts were standing on top of the podium and I dreamt that I too, would experience that. I also loved to run FAST, and jump high and long so it was only natural that I fell in love with track and field. And I continued to do both with gymnastics as my primary after school activity, with athletics on the weekends.
However, my time competing in gymnastics was short-lived.
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