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Fitness industry gets new university research facility
A Queensland personal trainer turned academic has established the Australian Institute of Fitness Research at the University of the Sunshine Coast and initiated major research projects.
Dr Mark McKean, a former president of Fitness Queensland, and Professor Brendan Burkett established the institute, at the university’s Sippy Downs campus, to gather data on the fitness industry and use it to improve knowledge and techniques.
It is the first Australian facility dedicated to fitness research.
“Until now, most innovation in the industry has been based on anecdotal evidence, the experience of individuals or training myths,” says Mark. “The aim of our early projects is to establish reliable data on aspects of the industry so that more objective judgments and decisions can be made.
”The first major project is an online survey of personal trainers to document their knowledge about nutrition and how they communicate this information to clients. It was launched at the recent FILEX conference in Sydney and Mark hopes to get more than 1000 responses.
Other projects include comparing constant intensity and interval training for people over 65 and an investigation of possible adverse impacts of the shoulder press exercise, where people sit and push a weight vertically from behind their heads. A third project aims to establish protocols for muscle function testing.
“The Australian Institute of Fitness - a Registered Training Organisation - provided$210,000 to fund the research institute over three years,” Mark says.
“Our research will help establish industry benchmarks and, hopefully, will attract grants from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council to carry on the work.”
Mark intends that the research will provide useful and practical feedback to the fitness industry.
People wanting to respond to the personal trainer nutrition survey should visit the Institute’s website : www.usc.edu.au/AIFR.
Mark urges trainers to participate: “It will take just 20 minutes of your time and will provide invaluable baseline data for the industry, so please join us.”
The survey and other research projects will feature in a new regular column in FFAPaySmart News. Look out for it in our next edition.
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