About Me

Your body is not your masterpiece. Your body is what you use every day to create your masterpiece.

A strong body is an asset whether you’re building a family, running a business or changing the world. I want to help you to be and to feel strong, so that you can get on with what really matters to you.

I work with women. Women get pregnant, give birth, breastfeed, have wombs and have periods.

In a patriarchy, women’s health is regularly sidelined. We end up with taboos and shame around our bodies. How can it be that 50% of UK women don’t know the difference between their vagina and their vulva? How can we feel better in our own skin when we live in a system in which women’s bodies are shameful?

The most important thing about exercise is consistency. Building habits that last a lifetime is what it’s all about. We can never, ever, ever quit because we need to move until we die. That’s why I’d like to help you learn to love strength training.

My Backstory

• I became a feminist at university in Stirling in the early nineties, although I really should have started earlier when I was sexually harassed in my first job.
• I started regularly exercising in 1997 when I was a proper grown-up, not because I liked it but because I have a family risk of heart disease.
• I have two grown up children. When they were babies I gave up my work as a parliamentary lobbyist to do full-time mumming. That was when exercise saved my sanity and I built an extensive collection of fitness DVDs.
• In my early postnatal years, I struggled with the sleeplessness, the early starts and the soft plays, and their fighting made me want to lock myself in the toilet and eat cake.
• When I left school I planned to study dentistry. In the end, I got a first in Politics. I started working in fitness when my weans went to school.
• When I’m not in the gym you’ll find me reading and writing. I write for therapy and pleasure.
• Between 2010 and 2015 I ran 14 full marathons before Achilles Tendinopathy took me down. Since then, strength training has been my love and my favourite exercises are pull-ups and deadlifts.

My Favourite Courses

Body Peace, Body Love: Aged 45 I was sick of hating my body and constantly wishing I was thinner. It was boring and it held me back, but it was deeply ingrained because I grew up in the eighties and nineties when calories were for losers. Fed up of trying to change my body, I changed my mind by writing my Body Peace, Body Love course. It took lots of reading, lots of meditating and spreading the word to other women, but it truly helped me to care a lot less about the number on the scale. It wasn’t easy but it was worth it.

Menopause for Feminists: after a lot of study on menopause in 2019 & 2020, I built this course which took a distinctly feminist approach to midlife. I concluded that most of the ‘menopause myths of misery’ result from medical misogyny; and that midlife rage is not wrong and not a symptom to be eradicated, it is a reasonable reaction to spending fifty years living in a patriarchy.

I believe the midlife transition is a crucible. Even if symptoms are challenging, menopause is a portal to something better, where we are wiser and stronger. We must nurture ourselves when we are frazzled and exhausted, whether it’s a change in lifestyle, HRT, or a full-blown change of how we live our lives.

Rel-ease: I have spent many hours helping women to unwind, relax and let go, especially as a massage therapist. Rel-ease is a Holistic Core Restore® class, created by Jenny Burrell. The content is beautiful and I use it in all of my offerings now. It blends yoga positions, self-massage, meditation, stretches, breath work, deep pelvic awareness and a good, hard, lie down. I believe all women need all of these elements, and need to take action to get more of them.

“Elspeth’s Pregnancy Power Up classes are brilliant – a great workout and feeling confident that I’m in really safe hands.”

Katriona Harding