Teaching and coaching lifestyle sports: A primer

Lifestyle sports have witnessed unprecedented growth in popularity over recent years, leading to increased professionalisation and institutionalisation, evidenced primarily through the inclusion of these activities at the Olympic Games. The professionalisation of lifestyle sports, coupled with their enhanced popularity across participation and performance contexts, means there is a pressing need for accredited teachers and coaches to facilitate participant learning through formalised training programmes and effective pedagogies. Yet, academic research to date has tended to solely focus on lifestyle sports participants, overlooking the role of teachers and coaches, in addition to their experiences and development. This very issue functioned as the catalyst to develop this book, with the hope of providing readers with theoretical and empirical insights into the process and practice of teaching and coaching lifestyle sports across school, community, and high-performance sport contexts. This chapter expands upon the aim and rationale behind the development of this book, offering a primer to what lifestyle sports are and their associated definitional and conceptual challenges. Existing literature on the teaching and coaching of lifestyle sports is discussed to demonstrate what we currently know, while identifying gaps in our understanding. The chapter closes by outlining the book’s structure and remaining chapter content, before describing its intended use and readership.