MSc in Strength and Conditioning
Bedford, United Kingdom
MSc
DURATION
1 year
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
EARLIEST START DATE
TUITION FEES
GBP 16,900
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
Fast-track counseling
By contacting the school, you'll get access to free priority counselling for any study and application questions.
Key Summary
This Master’s course prepares you for careers as a high-performance strength and conditioning coach or applied sport scientist at both the elite level and within grassroots and school sports. Within an ideal environment for scientific exploration and practical skills development, you explore approaches to supporting athletes including strength and conditioning, testing physical capacities and laboratory work, and assessing their contribution to helping athletes increase performance.
Student experience
- In the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) 2024, our sports sciences and biosciences courses rank 6th in their subject field for sense of community.
- Study with an academic team who have world-leading expertise in their fields and are actively involved in research as well as supporting elite sports performers.
- Benefit from our successful partnerships with professional sports teams, elite athletes, academies, schools, colleges and other relevant organisations.
- Local placement opportunities with Luton Town FC, Bedford Blues RFC, Ampthill Rugby club, Northampton Saints, MK Dons, Saracens, Northampton County Cricket Club, Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) and the USA’s National Football League (NFL).
- Gain invaluable work experience at our community exercise clinic for University BUCS team athletes, and our Human Performance Centre, which offers testing to sports people, teams and the general public across the range of fitness capacities.
- Regular industry speakers attend our ISPAR seminar series including Jack Wells (PGA), Tom Bromley (S&C coach for MK Dons), Mark Finney (former head of S&C at Northampton Saints), and Phil Pask (former lead physio for England Rugby).
- Our graduates have gone on to careers at the Lawn Tennis Association, British Water Skiing, Red Bull Racing and the Geelong Cats in the Australian Football League, to name a few.
Industry links
We are official partners of Luton Town FC and Bedford Blues RFC as well as other sporting organisations in the region such as Bedford Tigers RLFC, MK Dons, Cricket East and Be Active, giving you opportunities to build your employability through work placements.
There are also opportunities to develop personal and professional networks through our links with Sport England, governing bodies, active partnerships and health-industry experts.
We increase the employability of our graduates by being a Higher Education Partner of the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA).
Course accreditation
Once you complete your degree, you can apply for professional accreditation with the UK Strength and Conditioning Association (UKSCA).
The course is endorsed by the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA), allowing you to gain additional qualifications as a Strength & Conditioning trainer.
Why choose the School of Sport Science and Physical Activity
| One of the only Master’s courses in the UK to embed the CIMSPA Strength and Conditioning Trainer qualification at no extra cost. | The University of Bedfordshire ranks 3rd in the UK for overall taught-postgraduate student satisfaction; 1st for student engagement and learning community (PTES, 2024). | Block course delivery (two four-hour days for full-time students and one four-hour day for part-time students) allows time for work experience and employment. |
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Postgraduate Scholarships
You can find all of our Postgraduate scholarships listed below.
- Postgraduate Global Subject-Specific Merit Scholarship
- Postgraduate Global Merit Scholarship
- Vice Chancellor's Scholarship for Postgraduate Students
- Chevening Scholarships
- Alumni Scholarship
Prompt Payment Discount
A discount of £500 is available for prompt payment of each year’s fees in full, before or at the point of registration, for both undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes.
Postgraduate research students who pay their full tuition fee before or at registration will receive a £1,000 discount on that year’s fees.
The tuition fee pre-payment of 65% will be calculated on the full, published tuition fees and will not take into account any scholarships, bursaries or awards. These will be applied to the remaining balance of your fees.
Sport Scholarships
Our sports scholarships are designed to develop and support talented students at the University of Bedfordshire.
Our sports scholarships on offer provide financial and performance support services that utilise the University’s outstanding facilities.
Please contact us for more information.
What will you study?
Studying our Strength and Conditioning MSc course will equip you with the specialised knowledge and skills required to be an effective strength and conditioning (S&C) coach. You will be introduced to concepts of coaching running and jumping-based actions such as acceleration, deceleration, plyometrics and metabolic conditioning in the unit Principles of Strength and Conditioning, enabling you to design training sessions to optimise these physical capacities. Our unit in Applied Strength and Conditioning will concentrate on resistance training, with session design and coaching lifts at its core. Furthermore, Advanced Strength and Conditioning will deal with more complex information and skills development such as periodisation, weightlifting and agility. These core S&C units allow you to design and coach training programmes specific to sporting physical requirements and fulfil the main requirements for the embedded S&C Trainers award that this Master’s provides.
Additional underpinning skills are provided via our Laboratory Skills unit, where you are taught how to use a variety of physiological and biomechanical assessment tools for different population groups enabling you to prepare, perform and interpret results from these tests. Broadening your knowledge base, our unit Sport Science Support will expose you to support systems used to optimise sports performance in specific populations, such as children, the disabled, women and the ageing athlete. A major component of this course is our Placement unit where you will be able to develop your skills and knowledge in the application process and practice employability skills for an S&C work-based environment. Finally, you will complete a Dissertation where you will undertake a research project into a topic of interest relevant to the broad area of S&C. To help you with this, our Research Methods unit will facilitate your ability to understand, evaluate and conduct research in sport and exercise science at an advanced level.
How will you be assessed?
A wide range of assessment formats will be used within this course, including laboratory reports, case studies, portfolios, practical exams and presentations. The course will move assessments from a controlled established scientific base through to a more autonomous and practical application of research to inform the practical skills associated with performance sport as a career. This will be reinforced by original research and athlete assessment creating data to be explored and analysed through reports and research dissertations, while high-order practical competency (with problem-solving) will be examined in line with governing body competencies, preparing students for potential accreditation and work opportunities.
Completion of this course will give you the opportunity to work within sport coaching; teaching; high-performance coaching; and performance conditioning. Specific career paths include strength and conditioning coach; sport scientist; and laboratory technician.
You can also continue to further research-based study on MSc by Research, MPhil or PhD programmes.