Kinesiology

This book provides an overview of current issues being discussed in higher-education kinesiology and sport pedagogy departments, as well as current research being conducted in physical education, physical education preparatory programs, and kinesiology departments more generally. Those who are served valuable content from this publication include kinesiology faculty, and college/university instructors who prepare future physical educators, future coaches, and future allied-health professionals and movement specialists [such as personal trainers, athletic trainers, physical therapists, etcetera]. This book is composed of an assortment of both qualitative and quantitative research. Some chapters include empirically collected data, others are more philosophical 'think-pieces' -- representing an array of current issues, research foci, methodologies, and perspectives in the field of kinesiology. Contributing authors hail from institutions all over the United States -- ranging from Texas, Washington, Illinois, Georgia, and Alabama -- providing a broad and rich variety of perspectives, opinions, and experiences in the field. Each chapter is specific to an important line of research or concept being explored in higher-education kinesiology and sport pedagogy. Readers will find that most chapters do not overlap in particular concept, but rather they all generally apply to the advancement of leadership, mentorship, teaching and conducting research in kinesiology and sport pedagogy â making the book a broad overview of current topics and the status of modern kinesiology departments in higher education.

At the turn of the twentieth century, as African Americans struggled against white social and political oppression, Black women devised novel approaches to the fight for full citizenship. In opposition to white-led efforts to restrict their freedom of movement, Black women used various exercises--calisthenics, gymnastics, athletics, and walking--to demonstrate their physical and moral fitness for citizenship. Black women's participation in the modern exercise movement grew exponentially in the first half of the twentieth century and became entwined with larger campaigns of racial uplift and Black self-determination. Black newspapers, magazines, advice literature, and public health reports all encouraged this emphasis on exercise as a reflection of civic virtue. In the first historical study of Black women's exercise, Ava Purkiss reveals that physical activity was not merely a path to self-improvement but also a means to expand notions of Black citizenship. Through this narrative of national belonging, Purkiss explores how exercise enabled Black women to reimagine Black bodies, health, beauty, and recreation in the twentieth century. Fit Citizens places Black women squarely within the history of American physical fitness and sheds light on how African Americans gave new meaning to the concept of exercising citizenship.

Physical culture can be crudely defined as those exercise practices designed to physically change the body. In modern parlance we may associate physical culture with weightlifting, physical education, and/or calisthenics of various kinds. While the modern age has experienced an explosion of interest in gym-based activities, the practice of training one's body has a much longer, and fascinating, history. This book provides an engaged and accessible historical overview from the Ancient World to the Modern Day. In it, readers are introduced to the training practices of Ancient Greece, India, and China among other areas. From there, the book explores the evolution of exercise systems and messages in the Western World with reference to three distinct epochs: the Middles Ages and Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and its aftermath and the nineteenth to the present day. Throughout the book, attention is drawn not only to how societies exercised, but why they did so. The purpose of this book is to provide those new to the field of physical culture an historical overview of some of the major trends and developments in exercise practices. More than that, the book challenges readers to reflect on the numerous meanings attached to the body and its training. As is discussed, physical culture was linked to military, religious, educational, aesthetic, and gendered messages. The training of the body, across millennia, was always about much more than muscularity or strength. Here both the exercise systems, and their meanings are studied.

For more than forty years, scholars of the history and sociology of sport and recreation have studied how, no matter the time or place, sport is always more than just a game. In Playing for Change, leading scholars in the field of sports studies consider that legacy and forge ahead into the discipline's future. Through essays grouped around the themes of international and North American sport, including the Vancouver and Sochi Olympic Games; access to physical activity in Canadian communities; and the role of activism and the public intellectual in the delivery of sport, the contributors offer a comprehensive examination of the institutional structures of sport, physical activity, and recreation. This book provides wide-ranging examples of cutting-edge research in a vibrant and growing field.

"Physical Activity Instruction of Older Adults, Second Edition, is the most comprehensive text available for current and future fitness professionals who want to design and implement effective, safe, and fun physical activity programs for older adults with diverse functional capabilities. Along with an updated review of the research and literature, the second edition introduces a new chapter on the concept of whole-person wellness. It offers strategies for integrating the six dimensions of whole-person wellness (physical, emotional, intellectual, vocational, spiritual, and social) into health promotion and physical activity programs for older adults. This cohesive blend of theory, practical content, and detailed instruction is divided into four parts, each of which addresses one or more of the nine training modules that comprise International Curriculum Guidelines for Preparing Physical Activity Instructors of Older Adults, the expert-developed guidelines on which this text is based."

This is the first book to offer an in-depth review of research pertaining to individuals with visual impairments across the full span of movement-related disciplines, from biomechanics and motor learning to physical education and Paralympic sport. Each chapter highlights current research trends, future research directions, and practical implications in a key discipline or area of professional practice, drawing on empirical research evidence and opening up new avenues for cross-disciplinary working. Covering physical activity across the life course, from children and young people through to older adults, and addressing the important topic of deafblindness in some depth, the book goes further than any other book published to date on visual impairment and movement. This is essential reading for all advanced students and researchers working in sport, exercise and disability, and an invaluable reference for practitioners and service providers, from in-service teachers and camp directors to physical therapists and physical activity promotion specialists.

In cities around the world, in parks and roadways, people are taking part in sporting charity challenges. Corporate sponsorship has transformed these events into philanthropic endeavours that bring corporate marketing strategies together with medical research and social care agendas. Despite this growth in popularity, little academic attention has paid attention to the ways in which gendered labour shapes the nature of sports-charity events. Sports Charity and Gendered Labourexplores a series of questions about the meaning and politics of physical activity, and notions of gender, labour and responsibility.Drawing upon auto-ethnography, studies of major events, in-depth interviews, and analysis of social media, Sports Charity and Gendered Labourprovides examples for teaching and knowledge sharing across analyses of gender, sport, leisure, health and wellbeing in ways that will have broad relevance to a range of audiences.

This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). This book focuses on physical culture - systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert - because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the "universal" ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement's drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

Shortlisted for the North American Society for Sports History 2020 Monograph Prize It's hard to imagine, but as late as the 1950s, athletes could get kicked off a team if they were caught lifting weights. Coaches had long believed that strength training would slow down a player. Muscle was perceived as a bulky burden; training emphasized speed and strategy, not "brute" strength. Fast forward to today: the highest-paid strength and conditioning coaches can now earn $700,000 a year. Strength Coaching in America delivers the fascinating history behind this revolutionary shift. College football represents a key turning point in this story, and the authors provide vivid details of strength training's impact on the gridiron, most significantly when University of Nebraska football coach Bob Devaney hired Boyd Epley as a strength coach in 1969. National championships for the Huskers soon followed, leading Epley to launch the game-changing National Strength Coaches Association. Dozens of other influences are explored with equal verve, from the iconic Milo Barbell Company to the wildly popular fitness magazines that challenged physicians' warnings against strenuous exercise. Charting the rise of a new athletic profession, Strength Coaching in America captures an important transformation in the culture of American sport.

A fascinating cultural history of fitness, from Greek antiquity to the era of the "big-box gym" and beyond, exploring the ways in which human exercise has changed over time--and what we can learn from our ancestors. We humans have been conditioning our bodies for more than 2,500 years, yet it's only recently that treadmills and weight machines have become the gold standard of fitness. For all this new technology, are we really healthier, stronger, and more flexible than our ancestors? Where Born to Run began with an aching foot, Lift begins with a broken gym system--one founded on high-tech machinery and isolation techniques that aren't necessarily as productive as we think. Looking to the past for context, Daniel Kunitz crafts an insightful cultural history of the human drive for exercise, concluding that we need to get back to basics to be truly healthy. Lift takes us on an enlightening tour through time, beginning with the ancient Greeks, who made a cult of the human body--the word gymnasium derives from the Greek word for "naked"--and following Roman legions, medieval knights, Persian pahlevans, and eighteenth-century German gymnasts. Kunitz discovers the seeds of the modern gym in nineteenth-century Paris, where weight lifting machines were first employed, and takes us all the way up to the game-changer: the feminist movement of the 1960s, which popularized aerobics and calisthenics classes. This ignited the first true global fitness revolution, and Kunitz explores how it brought us to where we are today. Once a fast-food inhaler and substance abuser, Kunitz reveals his own decade-long journey to becoming ultra-fit using ancient principals of strengthening and conditioning. With Lift, he argues that, as a culture, we are finally returning to this natural ideal--and that it's to our great benefit to do so.