What Female Athletes Aren’t Always Told: The Basics Are Your Superpower
A conversation with a gymnastics medicine PA on female athlete health, access to care, and why tracking your period matters more than you think
TL;DW - here’s a succinct summary of our conversation with Dr. Elspeth Hart!
Dr Hart been a gymnast, an athletic trainer, a PA, and now a sports medicine specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital who helped build gymnastics medicine as its own subspecialty. In this conversation, she brings the kind of knowledge that most female athletes never get access to and makes the case that the simplest habits are often the most powerful ones.
The Fundamentals Most Athletes Underestimate
When it comes to injury prevention and performance, she keeps coming back to four things: sleep, hydration, nutrition, and menstrual tracking. Not because they’re flashy but because they’re within reach and they work.
She’s especially direct about period tracking. Athletes routinely come in saying their cycle is regular, and then can’t name when it last happened. That disconnect matters. Your cycle is a health signal, and not tracking it means missing data that could affect your training, recovery, and long-term wellbeing.
Her take: you don’t need a full medical team to start. These are things athletes can act on right now, on their own.
The Gap Between What Exists and Who Gets It
This is where the conversation got personal for me. The research on female athlete health is advancing tissue engineering, biomechanics, personalized prevention but most athletes, especially in under-resourced settings, can’t access it.
Her answer is honest: the two biggest barriers are money and time. Female athlete research is still underfunded relative to male sports. But the surge in women’s sports participation and viewership is starting to shift that and she sees real momentum building.
The harder problem is the access-and-trust gap: even when good care exists, athletes need both a pathway to reach it and enough education to want it.
A Name Worth Knowing
She pointed me toward Dr. Kate Ackerman, co-founder and director of WHSP Medical and the biennial international female athlete conference and now her own private practice dedicated entirely to female athletes. Cutting-edge research, clinical innovation, and a model for what athlete-centered care can look like. Worth following.
How She Got Here
She was a gymnast first. Her own injuries introduced her to the full web of sports medicine providers including orthopedic surgeons, PAs, athletic trainers, physical therapists. Her mom suggested she shadow all of them. She did.
That curiosity led to a degree in athletic training, a PA master’s, a doctorate in research, and eventually a role at Boston Children’s — where she noticed gymnasts kept seeking her out specifically. That pattern became a subspecialty. Gymnastics medicine now exists in part because she paid attention to what was missing.
Knowledge is power. And for female athletes, the right knowledge at the right time can change everything.