Emma Ross: Why it’s important to talk about women’s bodies in sport

This week’s guest on The Game Changers podcast is Emma Ross, the former Head of Physiology at the English Institute of Sport.

During her time at the EIS, Ross led the smartHER programme, which aimed to educate coaches and athletes about the female body in high performance sport.

Ross co-founded The Well HQ, an organisation that helps women to understand their bodies and use that knowledge to thrive in sport, health and life, in 2020. In recognition of her work, she received the Sunday Times Sports Women of the Year Changemaker Award last year. 

She began her interview by explaining how she developed a passion for sports science following an active childhood. 

“I actually had an ambition to be a PE teacher when I was going into university, but then sports science just grabbed me and I was like, ‘wow, this is fascinating’,” Ross said. “I just kept wanting to study it, and started my PhD. And then I sort of fulfilled that teaching ambition by becoming a lecturer.

“So it was really a love of sport that got me to study sports science, and then this whole new world of science and physiology and psychology that I just thought was fascinating.”

Ross described how she took part in a number of “really amazing research projects” as a lecturer, before moving into the vacant Head of Physiology role at the EIS in 2013. 

“I always felt really lucky to arrive in 2013 because I was riding a bit of a wave because we’d just come out of London [2012 Olympic Games],” she explained. “First of all, everyone was still talking about it six months later when I arrived, as just the most memorable and brilliant Games.

“It was a very vibrant time for the UK high performance system, and I came into the targets that had been set for Rio, which were,