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Preparing kinesiology undergraduates with the foundational knowledge required by professional organizations is no longer enough when considering the skills students are required to demonstrate upon entering the job market. Work-integrated learning, embedded through curricular and cocurricular activities, has seen extensive growth in the posteducation landscape of Canadian institutions. With increasing expectations from future employers, graduates in the field of kinesiology require more experiential opportunities to meet these expectations. The aim of this paper is to provide commentary on how the Bachelor of Kinesiology program at Capilano University underwent the necessary changes to incorporate a required professional practice stream to align with industry expectations. The authors discuss the development of laddering course learning outcomes, course content, reflection, and student evaluation. Additionally, they provide rationale for its inclusion in the second year of the program.

Dishman challenged kinesiologists to seek a compromise between “the ideal physiological prescription and a manageable behavioral prescription.” High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is the first exercise modality that has been claimed to meet this challenge, combining substantial benefits for fitness and health with pleasure and enjoyment. If true, these claims may revolutionize the science and practice of exercise. In this paper, four claims are critically appraised: (a) HIIT lowers the risk of mortality more than moderate-intensity continuous exercise, (b) HIIT doubles endurance performance after only 15 min of training over 2 weeks, (c) 1 min of HIIT is equivalent to 45 min of moderate-intensity continuous exercise, and (d) HIIT is more pleasant and enjoyable than moderate-intensity continuous exercise. The evidence for these claims appears questionable. Kinesiology should heed the principle endorsed by Hume, Laplace, and Sagan, namely that extraordinary claims should be supported by commensurate evidence.

The purpose of this review was to identify and summarize research that has been conducted on the potential impact of physical education (PE) on students’ feelings of anxiety, depression, and stress. This review followed the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. Twenty-seven articles were identified from four databases: Academic Search Complete, APA PsycInfo, ERIC, and SPORTDiscus. Key findings indicated caring, task-involved climates were more likely to be related to reduce feelings of anxiety, depression, and stress, while ego-involving climates were related to heightened symptoms of mental distress. This review demonstrated that participation in PE had an unclear relationship with students’ mental health. To improve the understanding of the relationship and potential impact of PE on students’ mental health, future researchers should apply more rigorous methods to account for environmental factors of the school, program characteristics, social influences, physical activity intensity, and the quality of PE programs.

Research shows that physical activity (PA) -related professionals perpetuate weight stigma and discrimination in their practices by holding antifat attitudes. Given the adverse outcomes associated with weight stigma and discrimination (including PA avoidance), researchers and fat activists have proposed and implemented a range of strategies to reduce weight stigma and cultivate inclusive PA settings. In this paper, we summarized and organized research-informed strategies for reducing weight stigma and creating weight-inclusive climates in fitness spaces. We adopted a socioecological model to organize a variety of strategies for improving weight inclusivity in fitness spaces at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural levels. Ranging from staff training to adjusting the physical space, the strategies proposed in this paper aim at dismantling limited and harmful weight-centric narratives and practices that keep fat individuals marginalized from PA settings.

Emerging research suggests that the stress and complexities of the teaching profession contribute to early exits from the field. Stressors may be increased when individuals are tasked with teaching physical education and another school subject(s) concurrently. More specifically, role conflict in teaching multiple school subjects consists of three subdomains: status conflict, schedule conflict, and energy expenditure. The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretically informed conceptual model of this type of conflict that better informs the professional lives and careers of teachers. The framework’s three interrelated elements are dynamic and contextually bound and influence the experience of multiple subjects role conflict. These three elements include experiences of role conflict, contextual and individual factors, and an outer limit of individuals’ capacity to manage stressors. Three vignettes are used to illustrate how teachers’ experiences of conflict interact with contextual and individual factors to increase or decrease their capacity for stress.

Physical education (PE) plays a central role in children’s and young people’s holistic development, enabling cognitive, psychomotor, and affective development while boosting healthy lifestyles and socialization. Children equipped with developed motor abilities, such as muscular strength and power, will be better prepared to learn motor performance skills and sustain the demands of learning and playing games and sports. A scientific literature search was conducted in January 2021 to identify all relevant controlled studies from January 2000 to 2021 on PE interventions and strategies based on resistance training to achieve PE outcomes. The review showed that exposure to resistance exercises in PE lessons might be beneficial for primary school students’ general physical fitness, motor performance skills proficiency, and learning diversified sport skills. Interventions that include muscular strength and power development can support adequate muscular fitness and motor performance skill proficiency to achieve primary school PE outcomes.

The modern sports world is currently obsessed with records, data, statistics, and/or the objective measurement of human performance. A primary message originating from this trend—manifesting in youth, club, interscholastic, intercollegiate, and professional sport—is that breaking records and improving one’s statistical output is the main objective of sport. In this article, we argue for why a predominant focus on records, stats, and winning is self-limiting and thereby misses the mark of what sport and sporting performance are. It is human beings who play sports rather than mere physical mechanical objects. Furthermore, we propose an arete-based philosophical perspective—taken directly from the ancient Greeks and particularly Aristotle—for how we ought to conceptualize and pursue sport. An arete-based philosophy captures the true essence of what sport is about by rooting it in what is “good and beautiful” (kalokagathia as the Greeks called it). Arete or “virtue” is, for Aristotle, about the cultivation of human excellence. Excellence, however, is not myopically reduced to “being the best,” “achieving fame or honor,” or “winning.” Instead, arete aims at cultivating the skills, both kinesthetic and moral, that lead to a good life. Elite performance, no matter how impressive, is never more than one small aspect of such a life. Character matters too, which means human excellence is never reducible to the measurable. After articulating this Aristotelian philosophy of sport, we then conclude the article by offering five recommendations for how teachers, coaches, and leaders of sport organizations can improve the culture of sport. Physical educators and coaches would be wise to take this Aristotelian conception of arete to heart.