The home of future sports leaders

In the Carnegie School of Sport building, we have two world class environmental chambers capable of reaching temperatures as low as -30 degrees C and as high as 50 degrees C, an ability to replicate humidity between 15 and 95%, and able to simulate altitude up to 8,848 metres, which is the top of Everest.

You'll see on the bench behind me that we have a range of equipment which we use to measure physiological responses at rest and during exercise. These environmental chambers are unique compared to other chambers as we're able to manipulate the temperature, the humidity, and the altitude, and also the chambers work independently of each other. This will really enhance our ability to deliver practicals with undergraduate and postgraduate students which have a focus on firmer regulation and high altitude. Students can gain a real experience of what it's like working in in extreme environments.

These two environmental chambers will underpin our active research programmes. In particular, they will help us with our collaboration with the defence medical services where we work on projects related to heat illness as well as high altitude. These chambers are also used and will help to support our work with national governing bodies and athletes in terms of our partnerships in preparing athletes for performing in extreme environments.

This is our strength and conditioning facility in the Carnegie School of Sport building. It's a multi-purpose facility used for both teaching, research, and also access by our sporting partners and our student athletes. The strength and conditioning facility will be used by students for both undergraduate and postgraduate taught content, and also hands-on research studies as well.

This is a world-class strength and conditioning facility based on the sheer size and also the specialist equipment that it houses. We have 24 lifting platforms, embedded force plates which allows our students to get hands-on experience.

Our facility is shared with both our student community, but also our sporting partners as well. We have a lot of elite athletes that also use this which creates a really unique environment for students who can be having a taught content on weightlifting whilst looking over and actually an Olympic athlete is also doing the same thing.

It's really important to us that our students get hands-on experience to allow them to apply the theoretical knowledge that they learn. This is a fantastic facility to do that, so not only can they learn around the fundamentals of human physiology and biomechanics, but then come into the strength and conditioning facility and apply that through coaching and also working with each other.

This is the biochemistry laboratory which displays an extensive collection of equipment used for routine biochemistry analysis. The equipment ranges from plate readers, gas analysis systems, western blotting, imaging systems, and p-pads to name a few.

Many of the analytical techniques we will be employing underpin activities of research centres within the university. Research centres such as the Centre for Human Performance, Active Lifestyles and Applied Obesity, and the Centre for Biomedical Science Research.

Students will develop skills, gain experiences and knowledge regarding the biochemical basis for the health effects of exercise, which are becoming fundamental in contemporary exercise science research. As a result, their employability prospects will also be increased since they will be better prepared to make significant contributions to their field.

This is one of our IT laboratories in the Carnegie School of Sport building. This specific one is our performance analysis laboratory in partnership with Catapult. We have 58 state-of-the-art computers.

Undergraduate and postgraduate students within the Carnegie School of Sport will use this performance analysis laboratory. It'll allow them to get hands-on industry-relevant experience, which will help them understand the real-world practice that goes on within sport.

In this laboratory, we have Catapult Vision Licence which allows students to then click, cut, and track player performance during matches. We have Catapult Open Field which is a software which allows students to then measure how far, how fast, the distances that athletes run during matches. Students can look at both the physical output and the technical tactical outputs of match performance, which is the same as what a performance analyst would do in a sports team.

This is a breakaway from the very traditional lecture format that most students are used to. We have a number of clusters or tables where students can work together in pairs or in small groups, and this really facilitates collaborative learning.

I think there are a number of features in these lecture rooms that make them a little bit different. One of them is that we have greater physical access for people who use wheelchairs for example, and you can see that in some of the tables at the front here, this allows wheelchair users to be able to interact with their peers. The second feature is we have inbuilt mics on each of the tables, and this allows students to be heard by all of their classmates, but it also ensures that their contributions are recorded when we do any recordings of live lectures. The third feature is the screens. We have a number of screens positioned at the front of the room which means that anything that is visual can be seen by all students within the room, and the fourth feature is around students being able to hook their devices up wirelessly to those screens, so if they want to share any work they've done on their on their phone or their iPad, then they're able to do that and they'll be able to share that work with the lecturer and their classmates.

What's really great about the fact that we can draw on different teaching styles and appeal to different learning needs is that we can ensure that a greater range of students are having more enhanced learning outcomes, and we're really improving the student experience.

The athletics centre will be used by students on the physical education, sports coaching, and sports performance degrees to provide an indoor athletics facility that means we can teach high quality athletics activities all year round.

The athletic centre is an 83 metre long indoor athletics track with an integrated throws area. The flooring on the athletics centre is a Mondo surface, which means students and athletes will be able to wear sprint spikes whilst they train. That will enable them to do high intensity sprints right the way through the year. The throws area is actually designed in such a way to enable a high quality throws teaching and learning experience to allow high numbers of students to actually practise.

The indoor athletics centre and the adjacent research labs are going to be very attractive to some of our external partners. For example, England Athletics are looking to run some of their endurance and jumps regional coach workshops and are likely to deliver some of their highest level coach education qualifications here.

This large multi-purpose exercise studio is a versatile space that allows for a range of activities to be undertaken, such as dance and fitness classes, circuit training, and exercise rehabilitation programmes.

This exercise studio is a powerful asset that will significantly enhance the quality of teaching since students will have the opportunity to apply theory into practice and to improve themselves as practitioners.

Delivering, for example, evidence-based cancer or cardiac rehabilitation exercise programmes that run alongside service delivery will give ample opportunities to students to deliver in exercise sessions working alongside experienced staff members.

As a result, their employability prospects will be hugely increased since they will be fully prepared and well equipped to work with a population of interest in the field.

The sports performance lab is specifically designed to help us understand what underpins sports performance across a whole number of sports. In this lab, we can work with athletes and coaches and help them kind of peel back the layers of their performance and understand what their strengths and weaknesses are and how we can go about improving their performance.

With the equipment here, it allows us to measure different metabolic thresholds and movement efficiencies so we can really start to unpick what drives performance, but also importantly, we can start to understand how an athlete responds to their training and therefore the effectiveness of training as well.

The services we have here are very high quality and give us some great capabilities to offer coaches, athletes, and also our research students some great facilities in which to further the work they're doing.

The treadmill itself, as you can see, is a very large treadmill. It's sunk into the floor, which allows us to wheel on bikes and wheelchairs as well very easily, and it's large enough to accommodate those, so for running, cross-country skiing as well, we have rowing ergometers and an array of different bicycle ergometers, so there's a large variety of exercises and sports that we can measure and monitor in here.

We can do things independently in the lab, but we also can link in with the other labs we have in the building such as biochemistry, strength and conditioning, cardiovascular lab, body composition suite as well, as well as our environmental chamber, so based through the activities you can see here in the lab, we can also add additional stresses in, and also take lots of other types of analysis and measurements.

Our sports psychology lab is one of our many sport and exercise science laboratories, but with a focus and design intended to support the study and research of human behaviour, so psychology is mainly the mainstay of the focus in this space, but it does give flexibility to looking at that in an interdisciplinary way.

Just behind me you can see our new igloo dome, a 210 degree semi-circular screen which is designed to create an immersive virtual reality experience.

So this facility is going to be used by students at all levels of study to really understand and experience what it's like to behave in sport, exercise, and health related environments. What we intend to do is expose students to studying and researching and understanding some of the responses, not just psychological, but maybe physiological and biomechanical to some of the things that you might see in the real world happening, but you don't have the opportunity to study it under laboratory conditions.

The students really will get a flexible learning experience in a space like this. At one point you might be doing something very practical, you then don't need to switch rooms to go and do something a little bit more traditional, so it gives that best of both worlds experience.

I think that the space allows us the opportunity to engage with technology, equipment, and really have a little bit more opportunity to ask some really sophisticated questions and study some things that are really meaningful and cutting edge for our understanding of human behaviour in sport and exercise related contexts.

So the human movement lab is a multi-functional laboratory and as the name suggests, we use it to analyse human movement in a variety of different contexts and sporting applications.

The unique selling point in particular is the instrumented treadmill that you see behind me here, which has embedded force platforms within it allowing us to analyse running motion, capture ground reaction forces in three directions, and from this, we can gain insights into athletes performance, injury risk, and also their asymmetry.

The lab will be used by students on our undergraduate and postgraduate courses. From a teaching perspective, it does allow students to really get hands-on in collecting data and apply that theory to practice, which they learn about in their lectures. It allows them to be integrated to within the work that we do with our partners in supporting our local clubs, organisations, and athletes.

Working with partners like Leeds United is invaluable and it's mutually beneficial. It allows us to provide added insights to what they would usually be able to gain from field-based testing, and this helps inform their training, their testing, and their injury prevention strategies.

The facility is a great addition to some already fantastic laboratory facilities that we already have. It expands the range of options that students have in conducting their research, and because of the versatility of the space and the fact that it bridges onto the athletics track, allows a great range of options in what students are able to look at in their own research.

A real plus point of the facility is the fact that it allows different measurement systems to be integrated together, and as well as that, other systems from physiology for instance can be integrated together allowing real interdisciplinary teaching and research to be conducted.

This room within the Carnegie School of Sport building houses the AltarG anti-gravity treadmill. The AltarG uses differential air pressure to provide an accurate and safe partial weight-bearing therapy.

The user is essentially slightly lifted off the treadmill belt by enclosing themself in an airtight chamber that inflates with precise increments. The treadmill allows the user to reduce the impact of walking and running by reducing the amount of weight that they need to support.

Our undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as our research students can access this lab to utilise the AlterG for research projects. The AltarG can be used by anybody that requires partial weight-bearing therapy, so that includes rehabilitation from injury or lower leg surgery, gait training and strengthening for neurological patients, strength and conditioning in a full safe environment, as part of a weight loss program, as well as injury prevention as part of a sport specific conditioning programme.

The AltarG uses NASA differential air pressure technology, so the pressurised air chamber allows a user to lower their body weight from 100% to as low as 20% in precise 1% increments. The unique technology though allows for normal gait mechanics. The percentage body weight as well as the speed and the incline are controlled by the user, therefore allowing individualised protocols.

The equipment is a proven aid for rehabilitation recovery and conditioning.