project I've done a service evaluation of the Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals

trust Phase 3 cardiovascular rehabilitation programme that's offered at City Hospital

in Birmingham. Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of mortality in the United Kingdom

and cardiac rehabilitation is put into place as a secondary prevention with the aims of

restoring patients’ health from their disease condition and also ensuring that their quality

of life is brought back to what it was previously. So the aim of this study was to basically

see if the cardiac rehabilitation programme they offer at City Hospital was effective

and see whether there were any differences between sex, ethnicity and also the intervention

of the patients. We had 94 patients in total all of them were referred to the outpatients

for cardiac rehab at CH and they all underwent assessment before they started their exercise

training sessions. These assessments were anthropometric so we measure age, weight,

height and body mass index. We also did some cardiovascular assessments which included

resting heart rate, resting blood pressure, heart rate maximum during exercise and then

heart rate recovery and blood pressure recovery at one minute and five minutes post exercise.

Exercise capacity was determined by incremental shuttle walk test. Patients had to complete

24 exercise training sessions and then we did follow up measures. What we found was

there was a significant increase in the number of shuttles which patients completed after

cardiac rehab. There was also significant increase in heart rate recover at one minute

and five minutes post exercise. There was no difference in anthropometric measures at

follow-up and there was also no difference in blood pressure at follow-up either. These

findings are quite encouraging, we're showing that patients can walk further after cardiac

rehabilitation and also that they have a greater reduction in heart rate after exercise, which

is really good. We can use these findings as well for best practice in development of

cardiovascular rehabilitation at City Hospital Birmingham.

My name's Alex and for my third year dissertation as part of my Sport and Exercise Sciences

degree I looked at matching energy intake to energy expenditure during different intensity

exercise bouts. So basically we got people to do a VO2 max test. So they run as hard

as they can so we can work out their fitness levels. Then we get them to run at 60% or

90% of their VO2 max. Both energy bouts were expending the exact same amount of energy,

450 calories. From there we asked them to consume food to the same amount of what they

thought that they and give us an estimation of what they had expended. So we found that,

actually, a lower intensity or moderate intensity [exercise bout] causes people to, first of

all, think that they’ve expended less energy and consume less energy compared to higher

intensities. This has implication on people trying to lose weight. So if choose a moderate

intensity exercise bout it might actually cause a greater weight loss compared to higher

intensities. My name is Simon Franklin and I was looking

at the effect of footwear on foot strike in middle- and long-distance. Basically we got

runners into the lab and focused on kinematics associated between barefoot running and running

in shoes. We used our motion capture system that we have in the kinesiology lab to focus

on differences in technique and style associated between running in barefoot and running in

shoes. The results we found from this were that middle distance runners, as they are

used to running more quickly and with more fore-foot strike which is associated with

barefoot running, that there was very little difference between running barefoot and running

in shoes. Whereas in longer distance runners they normally adopt a rear-foot strike and

therefore running barefoot changes this and there are significant difference between the

two conditions. Therefore, this has implications on the recommendation for middle- distance

and long-distance runners as there is little difference between barefoot and shod in middle

distance runners, the benefits which they'll get from doing barefoot will be very limited.

Whereas for long-distance runners, if they switch to running barefoot, this may alter

their kinematics so they can be beneficial for their performance.

My name's Laura Bowen and I'm currently in my third year studying Sport and Exercise

Sciences. My project was looking at how maximal and dynamic strength predicts sprint, shuttle

and jump performance in young elite footballers at Aston Villa Academy. It was based on a

previous study which looked at maximal strength and sprint and jump variables in adult elite

footballers. We tested 12 players. They did the one rep and three rep max dead lifts.

They did two ten-metre sprints, two ten-metre shuttles and three counter-movement jumps.

We didn't find any relationship in the results for the one rep max or the three rep max predicted

sprint, shuttle or jump. This could have been due to the fact that the players had never

had any strength training before so they didn't know how to maximally produce force. It also

could be due to that fact that they all had different maturity levels. So, it might have

affecting their functional capacity. What we did find was maximal and dynamic strength

was strongly related to one another but the sprint and shuttle were only moderately related

and the jump didn't predict either sprint or shuttle. This suggest that we picked the

wrong test to test sprint and jump and that also sprint and jump can't be grouped together

in young elite footballers. In future what we are going to do is use this dissertation

as a baseline and do a strength training intervention for a number of weeks and then test them again

to then see if a relationship exists. My name's Scott Powell, I'm a third year Sport

and Exercise pupil. I've recently finished my third year dissertation project which is

looking coaches and athletes motivation in a grassroots football setting. What we specifically

wanted to look at was the antecedence of coaches’ specific styles. So whether they used controlling

styles or autonomy-supportive styles. Autonomy supportive styles are where you are offering

your athletes choice and provision and this is very adaptive. Whereas controlling behaviour

is where you give your athletes rewards or you may be threatening them, which is obviously

mal-adaptive to their athletes motivation. So we used a questionnaire which measured

a lot of variables for the motivational climate and we specifically found that a coach's basic

psychological need was associated with their autonomy-supportive style. So therefore you

can conclude that the club environment should, sort of, create an environment where these

needs can be satisfied and therefore your coach is more likely to use more adaptive

coaching styles, which is autonomy-supportive. I also investigated for the perceived pressures

in the environment had any effect on the coach's style. We found no significant results in

this area but this may be because we looked at a grassroots sample. Future research may

look in a more competitive area of sport, so academy performers where there was high

pressure and see whether this affects the coaching styles of those coaches.