Sport, Health and Exercise Sciences with Placement Year

Sport, Health and Exercise Sciences is a degree that examines the human body and mind through the lens of physical activity, performance and wellbeing. It is a genuinely interdisciplinary subject, drawing on physiology, biomechanics, psychology and nutrition to understand how people move, perform, adapt and recover. The discipline is concerned both with optimising performance in competitive sport and with understanding how exercise promotes health and prevents disease across the population, and graduates from these programmes work across an exceptionally wide range of professional settings.

At Brunel University London, this four-year full-time programme with a placement year develops your understanding of how the human body works at physiological, biomechanical and psychological levels, and how to apply this knowledge to training methods, mental techniques and nutritional strategies. You will learn how the mind and body respond to the demands of sport and exercise under intense conditions, from strenuous physical training to high-pressure competition, and develop the practical and analytical skills needed to translate scientific knowledge into real-world performance and health outcomes. The placement year gives you a sustained period of professional experience in an applied setting, significantly enhancing your employability on graduation.

Graduates from Sport, Health and Exercise Sciences programmes go on to careers in sports science and performance analysis, strength and conditioning coaching, exercise rehabilitation, health promotion, sports development, physiotherapy, occupational health and public health. The NHS, professional sports clubs and organisations, leisure and fitness providers, schools, universities, research institutes and corporate wellness programmes all employ graduates with this background. Many go on to postgraduate study in sport science, physiotherapy, nutrition or exercise physiology, and a growing number move into research careers as the evidence base for exercise as medicine continues to expand.