Our first FAST and Female webinar!!
“Our goal is simple, we want to educate and support girls in sport to inspire enjoyment and longevity”
Since launching FAST and Female in 2025, an extension of FAST (Freya Anderson Swim Training) established in 2023, we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback we have received from swimmers and parents that have attended our female-focussed swim clinics.
Inspired to do more
Seeing the positive impact of the camps is inspiring the FAST Team to do more to support young women and girls, and one thing has been made clear to the team - there is a real need to support females in swimming, normalise the conversation about the menstrual cycle and body changes and support girls to build confidence both in and out of the pool.
Partnership
That’s why we were delighted to work with Hackney Anoconda, a Swim England affiliated aquatics club based in London who run a competitive and inclusive programme working with swimmers from beginner to national level, on our first webinar “Empowering Females in Swimming: Confidence, Nutrition and the Menstrual Cycle”.
In this hour long webinar Freya was joined online by FAST and Female lead Coach Jen Rice, previous Commonwealth and International swimmer and currently High Performance development coach in the UK, and Dr Emily Jevons, FAST Nutritionist and Physiologist and herself an endurance athlete.
Swimmers heard first hand from Freya on the challenges of competitive sport including her personal experiences with confidence and resilience and attendees got insights on nutrition, and training and fueling around the menstrual cycle from Dr Emily. The session finished with a Q and A panel session led by Coach Jen,
Working closely with the club meant the content was shaped by their swimmers’ real concerns, and also, on a practical level we got insight into the best time of day to hold the webinar to maximise attendance and ensure it didn’t interrupt training schedules.
The club promoted the webinar through their normal channels - the webinar was open to all their female club swimmers under the age of 25 with the preference that parents of younger swimmers didn’t attend to give the girls more freedom to engage. The session wasn’t recorded, again to support the girls to be open. Some female coaches from the club attended. Sign up was high with 71 girls registering and 56 swimmers attending on the day. Swimmers mostly attended from their own homes with few centred in rooms poolside to enable them to still attend training.
Feedback
The other benefit of working collaboratively with the club was the feedback gained following the webinar. Working closely with Club Co-Chair Stephen Roberts, the girls were surveyed afterwards to collate feedback to help shape future webinars. The response was very positive.
Stephen said
‘I hope the team are pleased to see such an overwhelmingly positive response. We are delighted. There was a high level of engagement and interest in the webinar from the start. I am confident that the FAST and Female programme will go from strength to strength. You have rightly identified a gap and are a welcome inspiration for female swimmers’
The feedback from swimmers, parents, and coaches has been overwhelmingly positive, with many commenting on how valuable it was to hear directly from Freya about confidence and resilience, and to get practical, science-backed advice from Dr Emily on nutrition and fueling around the menstrual cycle.
The Future
Importantly, this session has shown us that there is a real appetite for these kinds of open, empowering conversations and that they can make a tangible difference to how girls experience their sport. The ideas we received from the club for future topics were fantastic and give us a clear direction on what we can offer going forward.
We are now delighted to make this webinar available more widely so that more swimmers, parents, and coaches can benefit, and we will continue to develop new sessions that tackle the issues that matter most to young women in swimming.
If your club is interested in hosting a FAST & Female webinar please click through to our Webinar page HERE.
Many thanks to the swimmers, coaches, parents and committee at Hackney Anacondas, thank you for your willingness to work with us and wishing you the best of luck for the coming season.
FAST and Female Team
September 2025
Thank you swimmers of Hackney Anacondas - we love swimming too!!