Physical activity promotion and translational research

Excerpt

In 2013, I was invited to the University of Western Ontario to give the Albert Taylor Distinguished Alumnus Lecture. I called my doctoral mentor Dr. Bert Carron to bounce off ideas for the talk. We reminisced about some of the early studies I did as a student working with Dr. Kerry Courneya testing interventions in a university fitness facility [1‐3] and a study Bert and I did together with the Victoria Order of Nurses in Ontario. The later study was a very small pilot but resulted in a community physical activity program for older adults that was sustained for years after the study was completed [4]. We talked at length about how these and other studies helped to identify what factors could accelerate the use of physical activity promotion science in typical community and clinical practice. I landed on the idea of a talk on “Keys for Translating Physical Activity Interventions into Practice: Theory, integration, scalability, and existing measures,” and as I reviewed the papers included in this special section of Translational Behavioral Medicine, I was drawn back to the following propositions I presented during my talk in Western. …