The perception of health and exercise science has been that students are trained solely to become strength coaches, personal trainers, and physical education teachers. However, in actuality many students with undergraduate degrees in HES are also qualified to excel in many clinical and allied health professions ranging from physical therapists and health promotion specialists to surgeons, or pursue graduate degrees in exercise physiology and health promotion. Health and exercise science students learn the skills needed to enter into these and many other exciting fields or to continue their education and receive master's or doctoral degrees in exercise physiology or health promotion or in the allied health professions.
The Department of Health and Exercise Science at OU is one of the few interdisciplinary programs and one of the largest in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. The program integrates the biological, physiological, medical, social, and behavioral sciences as they relate to physiological responses to exercise and other aspects of human health and lifestyle behavior. All the faculty in the department specialize in the areas of exercise physiology or health promotion. This unique curriculum and instruction in both the classroom and the laboratory helps students develop the skills needed to work in sports- or health/medicine-related fields. Many of OU's Health and Exercise Sciences students choose to continue their education after receiving their bachelor's degrees and enter fields such as medicine, health education, physical therapy, dietetics, public health, or nursing.
Housed in the department are several state-of-the-art laboratories used by faculty and students to work on a wide range of research projects that are subdivided into health promotion and exercise physiology. Health promotion is the study of the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behavior towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions. Our health promotion faculty and students engage in projects that include: designing and evaluating theory-based health programs, physical activity and sedentary behavior measurement, tobacco use prevention, social marketing, health disparities, adolescent health behaviors, teen pregnancy prevention, worksite wellness, and social determinants of health. Exercise physiology is the study of the physiological mechanisms that regulate and contribute to physical activity and movement. Our exercise physiology faculty and students engage in projects that include: muscle, nerve, bone, endocrine, and cardiovascular physiology and body composition. We study how these components integrate and function in human health and disease conditions (e.g., multiple sclerosis, hypertension, obesity, cognitive decline, osteoporosis, etc.), including healthy aging. The laboratories give students the opportunity to work on their own research ideas during their undergraduate and graduate studies as well as a chance to work with new technology that will better prepare them for their careers.
