This comprehensive text explains how health fitness psychology has emerged from other parent disciplines to be addressed in numerous exercise, fitness, and health settings, allowing both current and future professionals to assist their patients or clients in adopting healthier lifestyles.
Applied Health Fitness Psychology considers behavioral issues regarding exercise and nutrition using a research-to-practice approach. This comprehensive text explains how health fitness psychology has emerged from other parent disciplines to become a wide-ranging discipline that can be addressed in various exercise, fitness, and health settings, allowing both current and future professionals to assist their patients or clients in adopting healthier lifestyles. Applied Health Fitness Psychology uses contributions from sport and exercise psychology, counseling and clinical psychology, exercise science, sports medicine, and behavioral medicine to provide a scientific basis for presenting strategies for behavior change. Unique to this text is a critical consideration of cultural, spiritual, and religious components as a factor in initiating and maintaining exercise behavior. The evidence-based approach will help readers use techniques and interventions that promote positive changes among various populations. Students will grasp the scope of this emerging field by studying the following topics: The theoretical foundation of health behavior change and motivational theories; Physical, cognitive, and motivational obstacles to adopting a healthy lifestyle; Use of cognitive and behavioral strategies and interventions to promote exercise adherence, set goals, and improve fitness and exercise performance; Steps that will help students become professionals in health fitness psychology; Considerations in working with special populations, such as older adults, pregnant women, individuals recovering from injuries, and individuals with chronic conditions or dysfunctional eating behaviors. Chapter objectives at the start and a summary, review of key concepts, and student activity at the end of each chapter help students and instructors stay focused on understanding the main concepts and putting this information into practice. Highlight boxes, tables, and figures throughout the book keep readers engaged with the material. From Research to Real World sidebars show students how the information in the text can be used in multiple professions and illustrate the many applications for health fitness psychology in today's society. For instructors, Applied Health Fitness Psychology includes online access to a presentation package and test package. While modifying a person's--or a culture's--disdain for exercise will not happen quickly, Applied Health Fitness Psychology equips aspiring and practicing professionals working in a variety of health, fitness, and allied health fields with strategies to help people make the shift to more active and healthy lifestyles.
This is the first applied handbook for practitioners who want to help patients begin and maintain an exercise program as a lifestyle change. Mental health practitioners (MHPs) often earn a trust that not many other professionals do with their patients. It is with this trust that MHPs are able to encourage and help their clients begin a healthy and active lifestyle through exercise programs. This book, with easy to understand language, provides a simple introduction for mental health practitioners and clinicians to help their clients achieve better mental and physical health through exercise and learn how effective the psychological aspects of exercise can be. The book helps MHPs obtain the background of ways to achieve proper fitness, and to go through the process of obtaining information about the client's individual needs, and finally to prescribe an exercise program that is compatible with those needs. A fundamental knowledge of applied principles of exercise physiology provides additional credibility to the prescribed exercise regimen. Coverage includes: Applied exercise psychology Motivation technique Theories and models in health psychology Fundamental applied exercise physiology Specific cognitive and behavioral strategies Program interventions Recommended books and journals List of exercise and health organizations Exercise checklist This book will be of use to all mental health providers, including psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, counselors, and consultants, whose relationship with clients provides a unique opportunity to gain entry for proposing lifestyle changes. For further information on Dr. Anshel, please Click Here.
Biller integrates exercise, nutrition, and health issues within an applied developmental psychological framework. Readers are presented with ways of making fitness an enjoyable and positive force in their daily lives. Biller's primary mission is to encourage a healthy lifestyle that enriches self-awareness and personal growth.
Many of our greatest athletes, scientists, and entertainers failed repeatedly throughout their careers, yet they refused to allow past mistakes stop them from striving for future success. Instead, they turned those so-called failures into opportunities to learn, improve, and eventually earn the achievements they are celebrated for today. Why, then, is failure considered negative in our society? Perhaps failure is not, in fact, something to be avoided, but something to be encouraged. In Praise of Failure: The Value of Overcoming Mistakes in Sports and in Life aims to change the way our society defines and perceives what is commonly called “failure.” Mark H. Anshel provides a refreshing, new perspective on how we can embrace failure as part of the process of achieving and succeeding at the highest level. Anshel uses sports psychology in a grounded, easy-to-read manner to examine failure in sports settings, revealing that not only is failure inevitable in an imperfect world, it is essential. He addresses such issues as how to properly promote failure in sport and exercise settings, how errors lead to improvement, ways to constructively cope with failure, and how to help child athletes fail “safely.” In the process, Anshel shows that the highest-performing athletes have one characteristic in common—they learned and improved from apparent setbacks. In Praise of Failure shares stories of professional athletes, business professionals, scholars, and famous inventors who failed repeatedly before attaining their dreams, revealing the integral role failure plays in success. Offering a fresh and exciting take on how to approach the failures we face in life, this book will be invaluable for athletes, coaches, exercise and fitness trainers, dieticians, students, and even for the corporate world.
Changing habits, particularly habits that are self-destructive and unhealthy, is among the most challenging goals of therapists and coaches who work with clients in promoting a healthier lifestyle. The purpose of this book is to "help the helper," that is, to assist the person whose professional mission it is to provide a service that enables clients or patients to acknowledge their unhealthy habits and to replace them with more desirable, healthier routines. It focuses on the power of helping clients identify: (1) the inconsistency between their core values – what they consider most important in life – with one or more unhealthy habits, (2) the costs and long-term consequences of this inconsistency, called a "disconnect" in the model, and (3) their willingness to conclude that the consequences of this inconsistency is unacceptable. At that stage, (4) clients should be prepared to work with a coach in developing and carrying out an action plan that aims to remove the disconnect between the client’s values and at least one of their unhealthy habits.
Applied Exercise Psychology emphasizes the application of evidence-based knowledge drawn from the fields of exercise psychology, health psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, and exercise physiology for physical activity behavior change. The book provides readers with: theoretical bases for understanding and promoting physical activity behavior; interventions to use for facilitating physical activity behavior change and the tools for measuring the effectiveness of these interventions; cross-cultural considerations for practitioners to ensure multicultural competency; considerations to guide best practices with special populations (e.g., persons with medical conditions and persons with mental health conditions); overall applied implications and future directions. The collection builds a bridge between up-to-date research findings, relevant field experiences, and applied implications. This is the first book to cover such breadth of topics in applied exercise psychology, with chapters bringing often overlooked issues to the attention of practitioners to promote not only evidence-based practice but also responsible ethics and referral.
