Exercise and Health

You will develop a sound understanding of the scientific and practical relationships between physical activity, exercise, health and wellbeing and apply these in various work-related settings, such as health and fitness centres, GP referral schemes, cardiac rehabilitation, exercise physiology laboratories and health promotion programmes. In addition, you will have the opportunity to specialise and focus your exercise and health science discipline interests within biomechanics, physiology and psychology.

All students begin by learning the core sciences of physiology, psychology and biomechanics. As the course progresses you can choose to specialise between biomechanics or physiology (with psychology remaining throughout the course). You will experience a wide variety of teaching settings and assessment methods and participate in online tasks, lectures, seminars and workshops.

In your second year, in order to gain your Level 3 Personal Trainer award you will undertake a placement in an exercise and health promotion workplace, usually a gym. In your third year you will undertake a semester long – usually linked to a profession or career path you’re interested in.

You will explore case studies throughout the course that are based on real life scenarios. For example you will work on GP referrals of real people, and through a client report will focus on exercise testing and prescription of suitable remedies. Case studies are also clinically based, allowing you to examine how further complications such as obesity, hypertension, osteoporosis or heart disease will affect the client report.

Who will teach me?

You will be taught by academic staff who are at the cutting edge of their fields. Our staff are active researchers who publish text books and peer reviewed journal articles. Our staff don’t just teach from these text books, they’re the people who write them!

Amongst the high profile contributing to this course are:

Andy Lane, Professor of Sport Psychology. Andy has authored more than 200 peer refereed journal articles, given numerous keynotes talks, and is on editorial boards of prestigious journals in sport sciences (Journal of Sports Sciences), Sports Medicine (Journal of Sports Science and Medicine), psychology (Personality and Individual Differences) and education (Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism). He has edited five books including Case Studies in Sport Science and Medicine, a co-authored work with Prof Greg Whyte, and his recent book on sport psychology and nutrition in running, co-authored with colleagues at the University. Professor Lane is regularly asked for comment on TV, radio, websites and newspapers. For example, he worked with Adidas on videos with Glenn Hoddle and Mathew LeTissier on penalty taking: The Science of Penalty Taking. He has also led high profile research projects such as the BBC Science Lab “Can you compete under pressure?" project fronted by former Olympian Michael Johnson.

George Metsios, Professor in Clinical Exercise Physiology. George’s work focuses on physical activity, exercise and health, and specifically how physical activity and/or exercise can be used to improve disease symptoms and health parameters in patients with different chronic diseases. George has published more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific articles in his field. His work has had a significant impact, and has been used, by, amongst others, the World Health Organisation, the British Heart Foundation, the National Health Services and the European League Against Rheumatism. George has also received both national and international grants (Medical Research Council, FP-7, Horizon 2020) and he is an expert evaluator for multiple funding bodies and peer-reviewed journals.

You can find more information about the Institute of Sport and Human Science staff research on our Research Centre for Sport Exercise and Performance webpage.