Mountainscape illustration and "Stronger Than Ever Summit" logo for Heather Blackmon Yoga.

Meet Your Host

About Your Host: Heather Blackmon

I’m the creator and host of the Stronger Than Ever Summit and a yoga teacher for active people.

For over 15 years, I’ve worked with runners, lifters, hikers, and riders who are consistent, committed, and doing everything right, but still don’t feel as good as they used to. I’ve also spent that time as an endurance coach and personal trainer, which means I understand what your body is actually doing in your other workouts and what it needs to recover and keep going.

For most active people, yoga is the missing piece. Done right, it helps you move better, feel stronger, and keep doing what you love for the next 20+ years.

Website | Instagram

Meet Your Speakers

Lorraine Lawson

Why You Still Feel Tired Even When You’re Doing Everything Right

My name is Lorraine Lawson. I’m a science educator, running coach and author with over 25 years of experience. I help people build confidence and resilience through simple, sustainable habits. My work sits at the intersection of science and real life – taking complex ideas and turning them into practical strategies you can actually use.

I’m the author of How to Run Easy, a beginner’s guide to finding joy in movement, and Dancing in the Sunlight, where I explore how light, timing and daily rhythms influence energy, sleep and long-term health.

I’m especially passionate about supporting women in midlife who feel like their body is no longer working with them. My approach isn’t about doing more, it’s about working with your body’s natural rhythms, so everything starts to feel easier.

Through small, consistent changes, I help women reconnect with their energy, rebuild momentum and stay active for decades to come.

Website | Facebook

Dr Sandy Evans

When Exercise Steals Your Iron – Even When Your Labs Look Fine

Dr Sandy Evans holds a PhD in pharmacology and focuses on making complex biology understandable and practical. Her work explores how everyday physiology—particularly iron metabolism, hormones, and metabolic function—shapes health in ways that are often overlooked. Rather than offering generic advice, she translates the underlying science into clear, visual explanations that help people see what is happening inside their bodies and why it matters. With a background in teaching medical and science students, she brings depth and clarity to topics that are often misunderstood. Her goal is to equip people with the insight needed to make more informed, effective decisions about their health.

Website | Instagram

Kristin Gauthier MSN, RN

What Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You: The Mineral Connection to Fatigue, Hormones, Brain Fog, and Bloating

Kristin Gauthier, MSN, RN, CHt is the Founder of Nourish Women’s Health, where she helps women reclaim their health, vitality, and confidence through a personalized, root-cause approach—plus a powerful dose of subconscious modalities to shift the patterns that keep them stuck. After her own health journey of being dismissed, unheard, and left searching for answers, Kristin transformed her frustration into fuel. That experience became her mission: making sure no woman has to feel unseen or struggle in silence while navigating midlife, hormones, or the emotional acrobatics of doing all the things for everyone else. 

Whether you’re facing low energy, mood shifts, metabolism mysteries, or the general “plot twists” of midlife, Kristin meets you exactly where you are. Her goal is simple and powerful: equipping women with the knowledge, tools, and subconscious rewiring to feel vibrant, grounded, and fully themselves again.

Website | Instagram

Tracey Willingham

The 5 Symptoms Active Women Misread (Mind and Body) and Why Training Harder Makes Them Worse

Tracey Willingham, LMSW, is the founder of That Hormone Girl, a hormone health brand built on the belief that hormone health is bigger than physical symptoms. It’s your healthcare, your relationships, your career, your nervous system, and the version of yourself you’ve been carrying for 20 years. She works with women whose periods are debilitating, who are navigating perimenopause, or who are figuring out what comes after a hysterectomy. After 25 years in healthcare, Tracey left to teach women what the system isn’t telling them: how to read their own bodies, advocate for what they actually need, and stop chasing the next quick fix. Her work is built on The Unruly Method™, six shifts that take women from “I think I’m losing it” to “I run this.” Host of the podcast That’s Not Very Ladylike.

Website | Instagram

Nikki Cheak

3 Food Habits Draining Your Energy (And the One Protein Shift That Fixes All Three)

Nikki Cheak is a Certified Health & Nutrition Coach who teaches midlife moms how to make choices that actually stick. After her own breaking point – exhausted and disappearing despite doing everything “right” – she founded Real Food Made Easy to help women in perimenopause bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

Website | Instagram

Diana Benz

Why Your Body Still Feels Tight – Even When You’re Doing Everything Right

Diana Benz helps active women restore energy, clarity, and ease in their bodies through breathwork, fascia-focused practices (Block Therapy™), gentle movement, meditation, and energy work. As founder of Block and Breathe™, she leads workshops, retreats, and 1:1 sessions—both in-person and online—that support the release of patterns of compression and restriction that can build over time, even in consistent movers. Her work is informed by her own experience of fatigue and disconnection when traditional approaches didn’t address root causes, as well as her training in breathwork, Block Therapy™, Reiki, yoga, and education. She offers simple, body-led tools that help create more space in the body so movement feels more supported, energy feels more available, and daily life feels less effortful.

Website | Instagram

Ami Patrick

From Burnout to Built: The Missing Link in Midlife Fitness

Ami Patrick is the Midlife Muscle Mentor and creator of LIFTED: The Muscle-First Method to Recalibrate Your Body, Brain, and Metabolism After 40. Through high-touch virtual 1:1 coaching and her signature programs, she helps women 40+ stop chasing smaller bodies and start building stronger ones—because muscle is the master switch of the midlife metabolism.

After burning out teaching 13 fitness classes a week, Ami ditched the “eat less, do more” playbook and rebuilt her body from the inside out. Now, she blends evidence-based strength training, functional nutrition, hormone + cortisol support, and peptide optimization to help high-performing women drop fat, define their midsection, boost energy, and think clearly again.

She’s the voice behind the Fck the Frump* movement because midlife isn’t decline… it’s your power era.”

Website | Instagram

Makayla Meixner RD

Why Underfueling Is Holding Active Women Back (And What to Do Instead)

Makayla holds a MS in Nutrition, is a Registered Dietitian, and is a Board Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics. She has over 8 years experience working with active women, both competitive and recreational. Her nutrition philosophy is that nutrition doesn’t have to be complicated, even for athletes at the highest level. She teaches active people how to fuel for health and high performance without spending hours in the kitchen or overthinking their food choices.

Website | Instagram

Marissa Axell

Get Stronger to Go Longer: 5 strategies that are working in 2026 for 35+ women athletes

Marissa Axell, a USECA certified cycling coach and ACE certified personal trainer, coaches 40+ women cyclists to climb faster and adventure farther without spending all day in the gym or on the bike. With more than a decade of coaching experience, she’s been featured on Hit Play Not Pause podcast & Bicycling Magazine. In the past 12 months 3 of her athletes have won at TransRockies Gravel Royale, the Alabama Senior Games time trial & road race, and rode into the Guinness Book of World records as the fastest woman over 50 to ride 18,100 miles around the world.

Based in El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay Area, Marissa continues to coach and inspire by fulfilling her own competitive cycling goals, proving that strength training and cycling are the ultimate combination to pave the way to cycling success. 

Website | Instagram

Dr Becky Allen

Beyond Kegels: How Active Women Can Build Real Core + Pelvic Floor Strength

Dr. Becky Allen is a pelvic health physical therapist, founder of Genesis PT & Wellness, and educator who helps active women understand their bodies, move with confidence, and stop feeling limited by symptoms like leaking, pressure, pain, or core/pelvic floor dysfunction.

Her approach goes beyond kegels and quick fixes. Becky looks at the whole body — breath, strength, mobility, hormones, nervous system, and movement patterns — to help women get back to the things they love, whether that is lifting heavy, running, hiking, chasing kids, or simply feeling strong in daily life.

Through Genesis, Becky and her team support women through pregnancy, postpartum, fertility, menopause, and beyond with a goal of helping them feel strong, capable, and at home in their bodies.

Website | Instagram

Ashley Basilio

Train Smarter, Not Harder: How Active Women Stay Strong for Decades

Ashley Basilio is the founder of Get Fit With Ashley and StrongHER Together, a private wellness community for women who are tired of starting over and finally ready to make their healthy habits stick — with the right people beside them.

After spending over 20 years in the corporate world as an engineer and product design manager, Ashley made a purposeful shift to follow her passion for helping women better understand their bodies, move well, and feel supported in meaningful, sustainable ways. As a certified menopause health coach, personal fitness trainer, and group fitness instructor, she brings a systems-thinking and evidence-based approach to helping women understand what’s actually happening in their bodies – and how to work with it instead of against it.

Ashley hosts the StrongHER Voices podcast, publishes free workouts on YouTube, and was a featured speaker at the 2026 Pennsylvania Menopause Conference. She believes the women who stay strong for decades aren’t the ones who train hardest –  they’re the ones who finally learned the new rules.

Website | Instagram

Brittany Stout

Strong and Fit for Life

I’m an occupational therapist, personal trainer, and health and fitness coach helping women over 30 get strong and fit for life. I fell in love with strength training and endurance racing as a teenager and in college. In 2018, I experienced a medical complication that took away my independence. I saw firsthand how much a lack of exercise can impact a person’s life. That’s why I decided to create my business, Fitness in a Cinch. I want women to learn how easy fitness can be so they can be strong and fit for life.

Instagram

Anna Mapson

Why improving your gut health could be the key to better results

I work with people who have IBS and SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth) to improve gut symptoms when the basic advice hasn’t worked. I’m a UK registered nutritional therapist working with clients from all over the world.

Website | Instagram

Marie Clark

Building Resilience for When Life Gets Hard (Lessons from a Marathon Swimmer)

I’m the Possibility Partner and Career Coach for women who feel as if their work is sucking their soul dry, and who want to find a career that fills their heart and not just their wallet – but don’t know exactly what this is or how to make it happen.

I have made four significant career pivots myself, so I know what it takes – not just tactically, but to create alignment and find joy.

Career pivots aren’t all I’m known for – I’ve had some health pivots, too. I am a former couch potato turned triathlete who’s now a marathon swimmer. Along the way, I lost 100 pounds, learned how to fuel my body and how to have the active life I want, now and in the future.

Website | LinkedIn

Shannon Polson

How to Finally Build Strength in 5 Minutes a Day

Shannon Polson is a Certified Personal Trainer of over 17 years on a mission to help midlife and senior women stop waiting and start building strength now. Her approach cuts through the noise with doable, powerful movement that creates real results: more strength, less pain, and the freedom to move through life with confidence.

Website

Misha Palmer

Why Your Body Is Holding Weight Differently Now (And What Actually Helps)

I’m Misha, a Midlife Reset Coach specialising in weight loss and body image. I help women in midlife not only eliminate weight gain, but reinvent their identities so they become the most confident version of themselves yet – the kind of women who refuse to settle for “this is just how midlife is.”

My work was shaped by my own experience of navigating body changes, low energy, and a loss of confidence that left me feeling disconnected from myself. When the usual approaches stopped working, I realised this phase of life requires a different way forward.

I am certified in Nutritional, Menopause, and Identity Coaching, helping women rebuild their energy, confidence, and sense of self while achieving sustainable weight loss – through a powerful blend of mindset, nutrition, and lifestyle, because real transformation happens when all three work together.

Website | Facebook

Terra Momont

Reduce Inflammation & Recover Smarter: What Active Women Need to Know

Terra Momont is a RN, Regenerative health practitioner and CEO of Rise Into Wellness, where she helps women restore energy, reduce inflammation, and heal at the root. After being diagnosed with two autoimmune conditions, Terra transformed her own health by combining targeted detoxification, cellular support, and faith-centered healing. Today, she is symptom-free, off medication, and living an active, vibrant life she once thought was out of reach.

Through her 12-week program, Rise Into Vitality, Terra guides women—especially those over 35—out of depletion and into sustainable energy using personalized protocols that support the nervous system, gut, lymphatic system and mitochondrial health.

She is passionate about helping women feel strong, clear, and alive again—so they can fully enjoy the things they love, especially time outdoors and an active lifestyle.

Website | Instagram

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