Sport, Exercise & Wellbeing (SEW)

With the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences, the Centre for Sport, Exercise and Wellbeing Research (SEW) has a growing international reputation for work examining the control processes underlying physical and psychological performance of both healthy and medically challenged individuals in response to stressful challenges, particularly exercise.

Research in SEW is focused around and integrates five main themes, including:

• brain control mechanisms regulating exercise performance
• humoral control mechanisms and immune function signallers regulating activities of daily living and exercise performance
• biomechanical control mechanisms regulating activities of daily living and exercise performance
• psychological function in exercise and sporting environments
• nutritional control during activities of daily living and exercise activity

Utilising a combination of cutting edge quantitative research technologies, including transcranial magnetic stimulation and brain and muscle near infra-red spectroscopy, continuous GPS monitoring of activity in the field and biomechanical assessment of gait in the laboratory, and biochemical markers of protein function and immune related activity, along with innovative qualitative assessment of psychological function and social behaviour, the ultimate goal of SEW is to understand in a 'gestalt' manner how the body and mind interact to produce human performance and behaviour in both healthy individuals and elite level athletes during exercise.

There is also a growing health related component to the work, with research examining exercise and performance in athletic individuals with a diverse array of medical challenges, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, exercise-induced bronchospasm, orthopaedic injuries, neurological disorders, lower back pain and muscle atrophy in space medicine, and social challenges such as alcohol abuse in athletes, childhood nutritional control and obesity, and the growing psychopathology of sport supporters.

The researches in SEW work with a large number of national and international collaborators in both the academic and industrial sectors, including medical doctors, physiotherapists, sport scientists, psychologists, social workers, mathematicians and biomedical engineers to better help them understand and solve the interesting and difficult research challenge of how integrative human function occurs.