Curious about studying Sport and Exercise PgCert, PgDip, MScat University of the West of Scotland? We've gathered all the key details—entry requirements, modules, fees, and more. Hear from real students by checking out reviews, or take the next step by booking an open day to explore it for yourself.
MSc - Master of Science
Lanarkshire Campus
Full Time
Sep 2027
1 Year
Our MSc in Sport and Exercise aims to advance your skills as a practitioner in sport and exercise, while allowing you to specialise in a specific discipline. You will have the choice of studying towards a broad MSc in Sport and Exercise, an MSc in Sport and Exercise with Sport Coaching or an MSc in Sport and Exercise with Strength and Conditioning. The course draws on a range of disciplines including sport coaching and strength and conditioning. Whether you work with children, elite youth performers or talented masters athletes, the course is designed to provide support in the application of scientific principles to challenge and enhance you as a sport practitioner. Throughout your studies, you will be supported by experts with extensive experience in sport and exercise practice and research. This support will be tailored to your needs and the environment you work within. For example, practitioners with an interest in developing youth athletes may focus on the development of an intervention that accounts for the impact of biological maturation on sport performance. You will also have the opportunity to specialise (e.g. strength and conditioning, sport coaching) within the placement module and applied project module - working with a highly experienced, research-active supervisor to develop bespoke interventions for your sporting context. The Division of Sport, Exercise and Health has an enthusiastic and committed staff team that provides a supportive learning environment and a flexible approach to study. The MSc in Sport and Exercise is offered at our state-of-the-art Lanarkshire Campus.
In Supervised Experience in Sport Coaching 1, you will work closely with a supervisor to develop a needs analysis and learning plan for you as a sport coach. You will engage in work-based learning (WBL) in a coaching role relevant to your development. As part of your learning, this module will prepare you to address any of the sport science disciplines or a pedagogical area in your chosen coaching role. You will be embedded within your chosen coaching context allowing you to choose a professionally relevant sport science-related or pedagogical area to develop. You will work with a supervisor to develop reflection and critical thinking in relation to your own learning aligned with your personal, professional and academic interests and needs.
In Term 2 (T2), you will continue to developing as a sport coach in the Supervised Experience in Sport Coaching 2 module through continued work-based learning (WBL). This module builds on the coaching experiences in Term 1 (T1) by asking you to reflect on the professional knowledge and skills you have developed and how these could be advanced further. You will evaluate your application of science to coaching and address your learning plan for T2 so that your knowledge and skills in the coaching environment are further developed. You will be supported by a supervisor specialising in the sport science or pedagogy area you have chosen to develop within your coaching environment. Your supervisor will work with you to create a supportive climate that encourages critical reflective practice and solving complex coaching problems.
This module will introduce in-depth investigation of coaching practice as a means to improving coaching knowledge and understanding. Initially in this module you will be introduced to traditional and contemporary research approaches in coaching practice as well as differing philosophical positions that researchers can take. After this you will learn about the research process from reviewing literature, refining a research question, making methodological decisions, to writing a research proposal and ethics application. Beyond this you will explore research designs, methods, and analytical approaches that embrace the complexity of coaching. Subsequently, you will then be challenged to take this new knowledge and design a research study to investigate the practice of others through a discipline-specific lens. By the end of this module you will have developed knowledge and skills to undertake in-depth evaluation of coaching or related practice.
The ability to plan for long-term athlete development is considered an important skill in advanced coaching. Yet many coaches rely on ?intuition? arguing that coaching is too complex and changeable to make significant plans. In this module you will explore the concept of professional judgement and decision-making in sport coaching and the myth of coaching intuition. In doing so you will investigate the importance of both classic and naturalistic decision-making processes in adaptive expertise. After the introduction of this decision-making framework you will use it to analyse the theory and practice of planning from 4 inter-related but unique perspectives. Planning from psychological and technical/tactical perspectives will be introduced. Additionally, the concept of periodization for physical development will be addressed. Finally, planning from the perspective of the athlete will be explored. By the end of this module you will have developed knowledge and skills to develop a long-term development plan for the athletes you work with in your current coaching role.
In this module you will build upon your understanding of the purpose of research into coaching. This will be done by exploring a series of diverse approaches all relevant to the investigation of coaching practice. You will learn about quasi-experimental and case studies as a means of testing theory in practice. Qualitative and quantitative surveying will be introduced as a method of gathering thoughts, feeling and opinions in research studies. Finally, action research will be presented as a way of directly investigating your coaching practice, with a focus on changing and improving practice. By the end of this module you will have an improved grasp of the different purposes of applied coaching research, and you will have developed the knowledge and skills to investigate coaching practice from multiple perspectives.
In this module you will reflect on your personal development as a coach and the development of other coaches an organisational level. You will engage with both international and U.K. policy relating to the increasing professionalisation of coaching and will analyse the impact of these policies at the micro level of coaching delivery. The module will provide you with the knowledge and skills to manage and develop coaches through rigorous review of, for example, mentoring, education systems, and reflection.
Coaching practice is by nature complex, therefore creative problem-solving is a key skill identified in expert coaches. The Applied Coaching Project module aims to build upon the theoretical knowledge, applied knowledge, and reflective and evaluative skills gained across the programme, to investigate a self-constructed applied coaching problem. In investigating this problem, you will define the problem, research current understanding and solutions, investigate the problem, and present practitioner-focused solutions. You can choose between empirical, applied or conceptual modes of investigation to best address the identified problem.
Understanding the complex and social nature of coaching is important if coaches are to effectively evaluate professional practice. Coaching practice is context-specific and involves decision-making around the consideration of multiple layers of competing demands. These demands include beliefs, roles, strategies, behaviours, and goals. To best understand coaching practice, coaches should not only investigate what coaches do and how they do it; they should also establish why coaches act the way they do. By the end of this module, you will have the opportunity to take the research study you designed previously, and to plan data collection, manage the process, evaluate the data collected and write a research report. This will develop enquiry and analysis skills that can be taken into the Applied Coaching Project.
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