Health Promotion in Sports Settings

Abstract

Sports-related settings, including both sports clubs and stadiums, reach a large population across life stages and socio-economic levels. Sports clubs play an important role in their members’ health through their informal education nature. While sports clubs’ core business is offering physical activity, a well-acknowledged health determinant, their potential to go further is enormous, by being health-promoting sports clubs (HPSC) and promoting the physical, social and mental health of their members. In the last decade, the state of the art has evolved including renewing the theoretical model, providing an intervention framework and guidelines, developing new measurement instruments and some interventions, and conducting several cross-sectional studies. Sports stadiums/stadia have also been identified as potential settings for health promotion. Stadiums reach large numbers of people with wide variation in their background. Healthy Stadia was established in 2005, and in 2006, the European-level network started. This chapter introduces the evolvement of the Healthy Stadia, its current activities and future aims.