When personal trainer Kate Rowe-Ham found herself experiencing breathlessness and heart palpitations in the middle of the night at the age of 41, she turned to her husband and told him – in the event she didn’t wake up the next day – that he should tell doctors her heart had been the cause of her death. Never in a million years did it occur to the now 49-year-old mum-of-three that her symptoms could be indicators of perimenopause. And the sad truth is that a diagnosis of perimenopause was far from her doctor’s minds, too.
‘As a PT, I was a perfectly fit and healthy person with access to all this information about health and fitness, and yet my perimenopause journey literally came out of nowhere to me in lockdown,’ she tells Women’s Fitness. ‘I started getting joint aches, pains, terrible night sweats, anxiety, panic attacks, fatigue, feelings of anger and heart palpitations. And, admittedly, while I was your perfect example of a “sandwich-generation” woman juggling the needs of my children and my father – who had just been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer – I knew my health issues were more than just stress-related.’
Feeling terrified and alone yet unable to see a doctor in person, Kate Rowe-Ham called her GP fortnightly for two months, often crying in desperation as she tried to explain her symptoms to a different doctor each time. ‘Eventually, during a minimal gap in lockdown, I was sent for an ECG, a chest x-ray and a test for asthma despite not showing any signs,’ she recalls. ‘But when everything came back clear, perimenopause still wasn’t mentioned. I remember calling my GP surgery and literally shouting at this doctor because he was being so ignorant, telling me I was hysterical and depressed, and I was saying, “Believe me, I’m not! There is more to this than that!” But they just weren’t joining the dots, and I don’t blame them at all because I was 41 and menopause wasn’t necessarily on anyone’s radar then. I ended up thinking, “What do I do now?”.’
Kate Rowe-Ham on making changes
It was only when Rowe-Ham started talking about her symptoms on social media that she realised she wasn’t alone and, after hosting her first live Instagram chat with Dr Rebecca Lewis at Newson Health, the penny finally dropped that she was perimenopausal. However, she only sought a private diagnosis after realising she needed to be fully functioning to care for her dad once he was given a few months to live.
‘I felt really privileged to be able to pay for that appointment, but even after I was diagnosed, I still didn’t really believe I was perimenopausal,’ she explains. ‘I looked at my HRT for three months before I took it because my symptoms would go away for a few days and come back. I guess you could say I was in denial because the images I had of menopausal women didn’t fit with how I saw myself – and it doesn’t help that they aren’t painted in a great light!’
Once Rowe-Ham did begin to take her HRT, she found it didn’t work for her straight away, which became the final catalyst she needed to start making some major lifestyle changes. ‘I’d been drinking too much alcohol – which I’m very transparent about – to kind of numb the noise, but it would make me feel totally rubbish the next day. So, I stopped drinking and started looking up what I needed to eat to feed my body in perimenopause, and why. Having had disordered eating when I was younger, I’d always thought food was the enemy, but I became less afraid of food for the first time in my life. And crucially, I also swapped my cardio workouts for lifting weights.
‘I was born in the 70’s,’ continues Rowe-Ham, ‘and I think the women I’m “menopausing” with grew up in that Jane Fonda era where we had to do an hour of cardio. I loved working out, but I’d always done it for the aesthetics. I’d never had a love of fitness that was about looking after my heart, my bones and my mental health. It was always about a number on the scale or fitting into certain size clothes because I thought being small was better.
‘Weight training was never on my radar, even after I’d trained to become a PT following the birth of my third child, Rupert, at the age of 40. I’d really struggled to find any mum-friendly online workouts that spoke to me as a busy woman juggling a home and kids, so I got my qualification specifically to help other mums like me, and shared over 1,000 free HIIT workouts on my HIIT for Life Instagram because I thought HIIT was the only way I could look after myself.’
‘We don’t talk about weight. We talk about strength and resilience, and that’s a powerful thing’
Kate Rowe-Ham on getting stronger
It wasn’t until Rowe-Ham signed up for a menopause PT course with Burrell Education to try to navigate her perimenopause symptoms that she learnt about the positive impact that bodyweight training, weight training and impact training can have on our hearts, bones and joints. She finally started lifting weights to strengthen her body, but it was her mental health that experienced the biggest initial improvement.
‘It takes a good eight-to-12 weeks to start seeing changes in your body with weight training, which is something I think women find totally frustrating because you’ve got to keep progressively overloading and challenging muscles to build them,’ says Rowe-Ham. ‘But because I have ADHD as well, I found the only time my brain stopped talking to me was when I was concentrating on lifting the weights and thinking, “Have I got my core pulled in? Am I lifting heavy enough? What is my back posture like? Oh my god, I’m lifting 10kg! Yes, I feel strong!”. And, after a session, I’d realise my brain wasn’t thinking about the zillion things I had to do.’
‘To this day,’ she continues, ‘I remember how weight training helped me on the day my dad died. I hadn’t done anything other than sit by his bed, because I was terrified of leaving in case something happened while I was gone, but I took myself out and did a strength workout for the first time in three weeks and didn’t think about the unfolding nightmare that was about to happen. That’s what weight training gave me mentally, and when I got better mentally, the joint aches and pains got better. I can’t remember the last time I had a panic attack or heart palpitations or anxiety and, on a physical level, I am without doubt a completely different shape from what I’ve ever been in my life. I’m possibly a little bit bigger, but not bulkier. I love that my kids look at me and say I’m strong, and that I’m a better role model for my daughter. We don’t talk about weight in terms of size. We talk about strength and resilience, and that’s such a powerful thing.’
Kate Rowe-Ham: ‘We all have a choice to wake up and decide what we’re going to do with our day’
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Healthy for life
Interestingly, Rowe-Ham tells us she has now reduced the amount of oestrogen she takes, which she credits to the many lifestyle changes she has developed to help her find balance. ‘But that’s not to say any of it has been easy,’ she affirms. ‘Every day I wake up, I have a choice. We all have a choice to wake up and decide what we’re going to do with our day, how we’re going to move, what we’re going to eat, and how we’re going to get that dopamine hit. For instance, I wake up and decide I’m going to go for a walk wearing my weighted vest because it makes me feels great, and then I’ll have some lovely bone broth and eggs afterwards. That’s all very natural to me now and habitual, but I know something inside me would very happily have a fry-up and do all the things that aren’t necessarily going to make me feel the way I want to feel. So, for me, it’s very much about trying to let people know that making change isn’t easy, but you do have a choice, and only you can make it. Because I can sit here and tell women what they need to do – they’ve got my online platform and book to tell them also – but only we can go, “You know what? Enough is enough. I want to change”.’
The platform Rowe-Ham is referring to is Owning Your Menopause (OYM; owningyourmenopause.com): a first-of-its-kind online community and app designed to help women navigate menopause positively and confidently using a holistic approach that champions her five pillars of movement, nutrition, community, mindfulness and support. Following its launch in 2023, Rowe-Ham next released her first book, Owning Your Menopause: Fitter, Calmer, Stronger in 30 Days (Yellow Kite Books, £16.99), which was born from her desire to explain ‘all the little things every woman can do to improve their health from the day they start feeling rubbish, without having to spend lots of money, because I don’t want women to feel that thriving comes with a massive price tag’.
Featuring 30-day fitness and meal plans and accessible information that simplifies the massive impact of this natural life stage, the book quickly became a bestseller, attracting celebrity fans including Gabby Logan to further cement Rowe-Ham’s position as the meno fitness guru on everyone’s lips today. However, while she admits the conversation around menopause has ‘greatly improved’ in recent years, she is adamant there is still much work to do.
‘I find it extraordinary that I talk to women in my age group who still kind of deny they are perimenopausal because they aren’t getting the information they need,’ she exclaims. ‘I once talked to an older woman about menopause who said her generation just sucked it up and got on with things. And while I think that’s fine, what we now know is the impact that declining oestrogen has on our heart, and its potential for type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So, when people tell me they breezed through menopause, I’m not saying having symptoms is a great thing. What I’m saying is that, perhaps, because you weren’t aware of the symptoms, you weren’t able to put into practice the lifestyle changes that can prevent osteoporosis developing in later life, for instance.
‘You must remember that a law was only passed in 1993 to ensure women had to be included in clinical studies for many of the medications that were prescribed for them,’ Rowe-Ham points out. ‘But we are not mice, and we are not small men. I feel the advancement of women being allowed to take part in medical trials – and the closing of the gender health gap – is allowing us the opportunity to live as well as our male counterparts and not have to suck it up. And why should we? That’s why we need to keep talking, because while women might have been “getting on with things”, that doesn’t mean they’ve been living well. Most importantly, we shouldn’t have to suffer in silence to the detriment of our own health.’
Kate Rowe-Ham: ‘If we can change the narrative for women, we will hopefully have an opportunity to live well and make the years we have count’
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Next steps
With these wise words in mind, it should come as no surprise to hear that Rowe-Ham is now widening her focus to the subject of longevity, expanding the conversation of perimenopause to post-menopause and beyond with a new book due in 2026 that will address women’s health at every life stage while offering practical solutions and the necessary tools to live well, not just exist. Suitable for all ages, The Longevity Solution: 21 Days to Health, Strength, and Vitality, will include a 21-day plan of movement and meal ideas along with practical strategies for wellbeing, plus longevity tests and actionable tasks focusing on movement, nutrition and mental wellbeing that have all been tested on Rowe-Ham’s 76-year-old mum to help improve her balance, mobility and strength.
‘I’m focusing on longevity now because I think it is seen so much more as a male health issue, even though women are living longer than men but in poorer health,’ says Rowe-Ham. ‘That, for me, is a key concern, and I guess one of the reasons why I wanted to write about longevity is it follows nicely after the transition into menopause and implementing all the things that I talk about in the first book. We now really need to home-in on those and extend them even more so we can live well, and independently, for as long as possible. It’s not about extending our years or biohacking. This is about three simple pillars of nutrition, exercise and mental wellbeing; things that absolutely everybody can do to ensure that they live in a mobile, independent state for the time that they have. And if we can really try to change that narrative for women, we will then hopefully have an opportunity – hopefully in my daughter’s time – to be able to live well and make the years we have count, rather than count the years.’
Moreover, Rowe-Ham points out that while the information we have about menopause is better, she believes we are talking about ‘perimenopause, then menopause and then longevity almost separately, when they are actually completely entwined’, because the way we look after ourselves as our perimenopause journey unfolds has a direct impact on our future health outcomes.
‘During perimenopause, our oestrogen levels decline, which has an impact on every physiological part of our body, including our metabolic health. And if we don’t deal with the impacts in perimenopause, we take them through into post-menopause where, actually, we live in a longer state of our life,’ elaborates Rowe-Ham. ‘It’s vital we remember that perimenopause potentially lasts for 10 years for some women, then menopause is one day, and then you’re post-menopausal until you die. And it’s in those later years where we are so susceptible to these age-related diseases or the risk of falls from a lack of strength, mobility and flexibility training. So, while I think it’s never too late to make changes, I do believe we should be trying to educate and empower women to realise that if they’re beginning to have joint pains and brain fog moments from the age of 35, or they’re feeling really insecure and overwhelmed and lost in their own very chaotic, busy world, that these things could be indications of perimenopause’.
‘When I started my perimenopause, I knew I did not want to live the rest of my life the way I felt at that moment in time,’ she concludes. ‘And now, I’m so excited to be hitting 50 next year. I’m honoured, and it’s onwards and upwards from here. Nothing is going to hold me back, and I want every woman to be able to have that same opportunity to believe in themselves. Most importantly, I haven’t spent thousands and thousands of pounds on any of it. I love to move my body and eat well and, while I could definitely still do with managing some of my mental health better, I think two out of three pillars is good!’
