About

In brief:

My name is Adam Lewis and I’m a University sports science lecturer and a strength and conditioning coach. In my day job I’m in charge of the degree called “BSc Sport Performance Coaching” at Solent University and I teach on most of the sports fitness related modules taught to our students across multiple courses, including on our Masters degree MSc Sport Science and Coaching.

This site is my personal hobby to provide an outlet for ideas and additional content that doesn’t always fit within my lessons. A place where I can have a little more flexible control over the content, the topics and any useful resources I find.

Note – This website is not part of Solent University in any way, instead it is created and run by me in my own time just for my own interest.

What led me to create this website?

I have always been involved in learning and teaching one way or another. As an undergraduate I completed a degree BSc (Hons) Sport and Exercise Science at The University of Birmingham back in the late 1990s. Completing a degree was a great experience that I highly recommend to anyone, but I wished even at the time that there was more help and assistance to help me get more from my studies. Of course, this was largely before the internet and universities did not have such an ‘open-door’ policy as they tend to have now!

After graduating I went on to work in the fitness industry, like many people, progressing up through the ranks, first as a Gym Instructor, then a Gym Manager and then a Health Club Manager. During this time I continued to learn and instruct, gaining various coaching and personal trainer certifications and helping clients learn how to exercise safely and effectively. I did this initially in the clubs I worked at, and for quite a few years as a freelance personal trainer.

After 10 years of working in industry I returned to University to complete a Masters degree, MSc Human Nutrition (Sports) at London Metropolitan University with the aim to help me better support my clients with both their exercise and nutritional requirements. As a more mature student I found academic study to be easier in some ways, utilising many of the organisational skills gained from years of working in my profession. There were things I wish I could have gone back and told younger me about how to study more effectively, things I cover on this website.

Shortly after my sports nutrition masters the area of Strength and Conditioning was growing in popularity. I loved working with my personal training clients, but it was the clients with sporting goal, the athletes I trained, that I found most interesting and I wanted to develop my sports science and fitness knowledge further into the area of sport-specific fitness.

So, I decided to complete a second Masters degree, this time an MSc in Strength and Conditioning at St Mary’s University, and began working as an S&C coach within a University setting training sport-scholarship athletes from a variety of sports who were competing at national and international level.

Having completed 3 different degrees at 3 different Universities spanning nearly 15 years, and at that point supporting student athletes undergoing their own academic stress, I found myself comparing things that Universities did well, and areas where similar mistakes kept being made.

Around this time, I was asked to give the occasional guest lecture by friends who were teaching at colleges, universities and other institutions. I found this so enjoyable that I made the decision to move my career from working in industry to teaching the next generation of fitness coaches.

I gained my post-graduate certificate in teaching and joined as a Fellow of the Higher Education Authority and I have now been a university lecturer for over six years.
I have written and re-written many of the sports science and fitness modules that I have taught, from foundation degree level through to post-graduate. All the while I have tried to bring the elements I noted throughout my own education to help the students I teach.

Of course, now I also see the time restrictions and administrative tasks that often prevents staff from giving as much of the added support they would like to the students.
As with all colleges and universities, the amount of contact time staff have with students is limited and very often a class is full of people with a variety of needs and abilities.

Some students risk being left behind unless they understand the basics first, whilst others who have had their interest sparked want to race ahead and learn as much as possible!

In Higher Education all taught modules have pre-defined learning objectives that must be met, and the delivery must fit within the semester-based calendar covering the required content prior to assessments. The result of all this is little scope for repeating the basics over and over, or for allowing enthusiastic tangents to occur!

The same is just as true for me as it is the students! In no way do I consider myself an expert on anything. I’m knowledgeable in some areas but admittedly ignorant in others. I still always want to learn more, to develop myself and I enjoy going off-topic exploring new sports science avenues as I find them.

And all this brings me to why I started this website. Unaffiliated to any University, course, or module, I can indulge myself creating content that is either for my own interest or that may be useful to students. The information does not have to be part of a curriculum, no pre-defined learning objectives, and best of all, no assessments!

I’m excited that this website allows me a place to compile information and resources that will be helpful to my knowledge, to my in-class teaching and hopefully to the development of sports science students eager to learn more.

What would you like to learn? Click here to find a sport science topic to explore >>