Assignment Task
As an Accredited Exercise and Sport Scientist you will most likely in your profession be responsible to conduct testing on individuals or groups of individuals to assess their physical fitness, their health and/or their psychological state and then report these findings in a clear and succinct manner. Prior to conducting any of these assessments, however, you must first undertake certain pre-exercise procedures to better understand the general health and fitness levels of your clients. The aim of this assessment is for you and a partner to conduct pre-exercise procedures on each other and then use this information to write a practical lab report providing preliminary information on your own suitability for future physical activity
Introduction
Keep this short and to the point. What is the topic and its significance? What is the aim (check your task description above)?
Methods
This provides details on how you conducted your assessments and should provide enough information that someone else could pick this up and run the assessments. Please include methods on height and weight, body mass index, waist circumference and resting blood pressure and make sure to reference (these aren’t your methods!). You should also provide a statement on the APSS screening process (How many stages did you conduct and what was the purpose of each stage) and include your completed sections as an appendix to your lab report.
Discussion
Here is your chance to provide an interpretation of the results and tell us why they are important. Do you need to categorise your data (check ESSA manual!)? How do your results compare with normative data of the general population? Here are some additional prompting questions to help you put together your discussion:
- What are the results of the APSS telling you?
- What are your levels of physical activity? Do they meet the recommended levels? (We do not expect you to go into great depth here.)
- Tell us your recommendations about future physical activity based on the information provided on the APSS.
- Do the results of the APSS tell you about any risk factors you need to be aware of?
- Where and why do the tests that you conducted fit into the Exercise and Sport Science profession?
Research
Providing evidence to support your arguments is an important requirement of practice as an exercise scientist. If you use information that is not yours, then you must cite the resource being used. Think about where you may need to get information from when explaining why we need exercise scientists for example. Also think about the methods that you used to conduct the assessments – were they your methods or did you extract them from somewhere?
