Professor Joan Duda of the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences describes her work training the trainers and enabling sport coaches to promote wellbeing.
60 seconds with Professor Joan Duda
My name is Joan Duda. I’m a professor of sport and exercise psychology in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences.
I study motivation, which relates to the why people engage in activities such as sport and physical activity. There are more autonomous or intrinsic reasons why people do this, because they love the activity, or there are also extrinsic reasons, such as feeling compelled to exercise or because of some extrinsic rewards.
That relates to the PAPA Project, which is a project going on right now across Europe. In this project we are taking the principles of adaptive motivation, how to foster intrinsic motivation, to youth sport coaches in football and training them up with our Empowering Coaching programme. That is a theory-based and evidence-based programme. To date over 500 coaches have been trained and we are impacting more than 5,000 children in the UK.
So, what we are trying to do is promote intrinsic motivation in physical activity so we can promote sustained engagement and wellbeing.
Professor Joan Duda's profile