Health Promotion in Sport Coaching: Coaches and Young Male Athletes’ Evaluations on the Health Promotion Activity of Coaches

Abstract

Sport coaches have paradoxical attitudes towards addressing health promotion as a part of their coaching practice: health is recognized as an important factor, but not greatly invested in. Overall, the extent to which youth sport coaches take health promotion into account has been unclear. Therefore, it is the intention of this study to clarify this situation. The results show that coaches evaluate their own activity on health promotion as being relatively active, whereas young male athletes’ evaluations reveal a wide gap in how they perceived the coaches’ activity. Young male athletes perceived their coaches as being substantially more passive in comparison to coaches’ self-evaluations. This difference may indicate either that coaches’ health promotion activity is generally infrequent or that what is done is broadly ineffective. Either way, as the global health-related problems of decreasing physical activity, increasing sedentary lifestyles, and obesity are all issues affecting youths attending sports clubs, arguably there is a need for youth sport coaches to invest more in health promotion activities. However, the coaches need more support from the sports clubs.