Effective Approaches to Sports Performance and Health Enhancement

Description

The course will provide an overview of 2 perspectives in sport performance or health enhancement.

Sports training represents a complex process that involves planning, organization, leading, and assessments. For a successful preparation, it is important to actively involve the athlete in his/her own training and development processes. The key to success in performance sports relies on the coach ability to enhance the athlete’s abilities, by providing the feed-back in the training process, using correct indicators that relate to performance and injury prevention, and using effective communication and motivational techniques.

The significant health benefits of physical activity (PA), which includes exercise, have long been recognized. The main difficult is to follow key considerations when making a cardiovascular (CV)  exercise prescription, so that it can be tailored individually for each subject. Such awareness of the need  to improve exercise prescription does constitute a major challenge in the worldwide context. The correct cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) assessment and CV exercise training process and its follow up are at the core of this course.

During the course students will deepen their understanding of theorical concepts by performing many laboratories. Moreover, in order to get a more intensive experience about Italian sport and health systems, two field visits will be organized.

Course contents 

The learning goals of the course are: 
a) to explore the main dimensions of performance and health enhancement with different professionals;
b) to point out the main issues related to planning customized loads, with a specific focus on functional evaluation; 
c) to get familiar with the main aspects of load monitoring; 
d) to deepen knowledge about some peculiar Italian sectors

Method of teaching 

The course aims to implement a student-centered approach to learning; teacher and students will play an equally active role during classroom activities. Teacher's role is to facilitate student learning and comprehension of subjects.
Lecture, in-class discussion, group work, training activities, companies’ visits.

Course requirements

Students are expected to comply with the following requirements:
• Regularly attend classes and actively participate to the discussions and practical sessions
• Take a final written exam