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Accessibility statement
Qualification dates
StartEnd
03 Oct 2026Jun 2027
This module is designed for sports coaches, exercise professionals, and sports enthusiasts. You’ll develop your scientific knowledge, analytical skills, coach-athlete relationships, and reflective practice in sport and exercise settings. By exploring and applying key areas of sports science – including physiology, movement analysis, and strength and conditioning training methods – you’ll deepen your understanding of human movement and performance. Through case studies, you’ll put these principles into practice, honing your reflective skills to become a more effective coach. Some options, built into the module, let you explore areas of interest in greater depth.
People who work, or who have an aspiration to work, in sport and fitness environments, whether as teachers, coaches or instructors will always require a level of underpinning scientific knowledge to get the best out of their athletes/participants. It is this underpinning knowledge that allows them to make effective decisions in the planning and monitoring of injury risk reduction, performance gains, technical adjustments etc. with the person’s wants and needs at the centre of every decision.
The module content draws on Côté and Gilbert’s (2009) definition of effective coaching which introduces that coaches require underpinning ‘professional, interpersonal and intrapersonal knowledge’. This underpinning professional knowledge will be covered in four of the six study topics by providing applied anatomy and physiology, athlete monitoring and biomechanics, and strength and conditioning content. Following this, you’ll work through a final study topic that covers the softer skills of coaching (inter- and intra-personal knowledge), applying these to coaching contexts and possible athlete outcomes. This module will therefore allow you to develop a solid grounding in physiology, athlete monitoring, biomechanics, strength and conditioning training methodologies and effective coaching, allowing reflective application to various populations/contexts throughout. Ultimately, this module will allow you to become a more effective coach, meeting the needs of your clients/athletes/participants in the sport and fitness environments you choose to work in.
Study Topic 1 (3 weeks): Exploring science and coaching
You’ll be introduced to sport and exercise science as a discipline and begin to explore how this can be applied to coaching in various sport and fitness settings. The study topic will guide you through the science of coaching, what makes a coach effective and how coaches learn. Within this, a multi-disciplinary approach to working with an athlete will be introduced: i.e. a coach drawing on many different areas of sport and exercise science to influence the training and behaviours of athletes.
Study Topic 2 (5 weeks): Understanding the body in action
This study topic will explore the different systems in the body used in sport and fitness settings with a view to understanding the production and control of human movement. For example, the nervous, muscular, skeletal and cardiorespiratory systems.
Study Topic 3 (5 weeks): Monitoring people and performance in sport and fitness
This study topic will include ‘Athlete monitoring’ from multiple aspects: e.g., athlete workload (training, practice, competition, etc.), hydration, fuelling, body composition, recovery, biomechanical analysis (including movement and force analysis), linking to performance increases, and injury frequency/risk reduction.
Study Topic 4 (5 weeks): Strength and conditioning in action
Following on from study topics 2 and 3, it’s important that you develop your underpinning knowledge of how the body can produce and control movement and how we can monitor the athlete to increase performance levels through strength and conditioning. This study topic will guide you through various training approaches to meet the needs of each individual, be that a sports athlete or a fitness client. It will consider strength, endurance, and power/speed training as well as exploring periodisation for various contexts.
Study Topic 5 (two options from a choice of three – 4 weeks total):
a) The child athlete
b) The ageing athlete
c) Environmental physiology
The three options allow you to focus your attention to working with and developing young people in sport and fitness, or working with older people in sport and fitness, or alternatively to develop your understanding of how varying environments can impact upon human performance and physiology of people you may be supporting. For each of these contextualised scenarios, you’ll consider the individual needs in potential scenarios. You’ll draw on your reflections and study through previous study topics in this module to be able to plan, programme, monitor and adapt training/coaching to meet these individual needs under the context of these three options.
Study Topic 6 (3 weeks): Sport and exercise science in practice
The content will draw together the previous five study topics for you to critique and build on the softer skills of coaching in a sport and fitness environment. This final study topic will help optimise the development of coaches’ competencies by encouraging self-reflection on all aspects of applying sport and exercise science to coaching.
This module will also build on the academic skills that you’ve developed at OU level 1.
There are no formal entry requirements to study this module.
However, this is an OU level 2 module and you need to have a good knowledge of the subject area, obtained either through OU level 1 study or by doing equivalent work at another university.
You’ll get help and support from an assigned tutor throughout your module.
They’ll help by:
Online tutorials run throughout the module. While they’re not compulsory, we strongly encourage you to participate. Where possible, we’ll make recordings available.
Course work includes:
The OU strives to make all aspects of study accessible to everyone, and this Accessibility Statement outlines what studying E236 involves. You should use this information to inform your study preparations and any discussions with us about how we can meet your needs.
To find out more about what kind of support and adjustments might be available, contact us or visit our Disability support website.
Applying sport and exercise sciences to coaching (E236) starts once a year – in October.
This page describes the module that will start in October 2026 when we expect it to start for the last time.
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