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Kinesiology is the scientific study of human movement — how the body produces, controls, and adapts movement, and how physical activity affects health, performance, and disease across the lifespan. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws on anatomy, physiology, physics, neuroscience, and psychology, and applies them to a defined set of practical questions: how muscles, bones, and joints generate mechanical force; how the body’s physiological systems respond and adapt to acute and chronic exercise; how the nervous system plans and refines movement; and how physical activity relates to chronic disease risk, rehabilitation, and athletic performance. This guide gives a genuine, thorough answer to what kinesiology studies, covers its major subfields, and adds the research-administration layer generic overviews leave out: who actually funds kinesiology and exercise-science research, the methods and tools the field relies on, and typical career and training paths into it.
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What Is Kinesiology?
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Kinesiology (from the Greek kinesis, movement) is the scientific study of human movement, encompassing the mechanical, physiological, neurological, psychological, and social dimensions of physical activity and exercise. It is sometimes called exercise science, though in practice “kinesiology” is the broader academic umbrella term used by most U.S. university departments, while “exercise science” often refers more narrowly to the exercise-physiology and applied-fitness side of the field.
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The field’s core questions include: How do muscles, bones, tendons, and joints work together to produce and control movement, and what mechanical forces act on the body during activities from walking to elite athletic performance (biomechanics)? How do the cardiovascular, respiratory, muscular, and metabolic systems respond to a single bout of exercise, and how do they adapt with repeated training over weeks and months (exercise physiology)? How does the central nervous system plan, execute, and refine motor skills, and how are new movement patterns learned and retained (motor control and motor learning)? What psychological and social factors shape physical activity participation, motivation, and performance under pressure (sport and exercise psychology)? How does physical activity — or its absence — affect population-level chronic disease risk, and how should exercise be adapted for people with disabilities, chronic conditions, or across the aging process (physical activity epidemiology and adapted physical activity)? Answering these questions requires laboratory-based physiological and biomechanical measurement, controlled exercise trials, longitudinal cohort studies linking activity to health outcomes, and increasingly, wearable-sensor data collected outside the lab in free-living conditions.
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Kinesiology is not the same thing as physical therapy or athletic training, though the fields are closely linked and often conflated: kinesiology is the research base studying how the body moves and responds to activity, while physical therapy and athletic training are the credentialed clinical professions — requiring their own accredited graduate training and state licensure or board certification — that apply movement science to diagnose and treat injury and dysfunction in individual patients.
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How Kinesiology Relates to Neighboring Disciplines
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Kinesiology sits at the intersection of several established sciences rather than being fully contained within any one of them. Its physiological core overlaps with human and exercise physiology as taught in biology and medical departments; its biomechanics subfield borrows directly from classical mechanics and applies the same statics-and-dynamics tools used in mechanical engineering — force, torque, kinematics, and mechanics of materials — to the human musculoskeletal system rather than to machines. Its motor-control and sport-psychology subfields draw on cognitive and behavioral science from psychology, particularly motor learning theory and performance-under-pressure research. Its public-health and physical-activity-epidemiology subfield depends on the same population-level study designs and quantitative methods used across statistics and epidemiology. And its clinical applications feed directly into, without being identical to, sports medicine, physical therapy, and athletic training as distinct clinical professions. This breadth is what makes kinesiology a genuinely interdisciplinary department on most campuses — it is the discipline that integrates mechanical, physiological, neurological, and behavioral perspectives on the single question of how and why the body moves the way it does.
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Major Subfields of Kinesiology
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Kinesiology departments and journals typically organize the field into several recognized subfields, though the exact boundaries and department structures vary by institution:
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- Biomechanics — the mechanics of human movement: how forces act on and within the body during activities ranging from gait to elite athletic performance, and how joint, muscle, and tissue mechanics relate to both performance and injury risk.
- Exercise physiology — how the cardiovascular, respiratory, muscular, and metabolic systems respond acutely to exercise and adapt chronically to training; includes clinical exercise physiology, which applies these principles to disease populations (cardiac rehabilitation, pulmonary rehabilitation, metabolic disease).
- Motor control, motor learning, and motor development — how the nervous system plans and executes movement, how motor skills are acquired and refined through practice, and how movement capability changes across the lifespan from infancy through older age.
- Sport and exercise psychology — the psychological and social factors that influence physical activity participation, motivation, athletic performance, and the mental-health effects of exercise.
- Physical activity epidemiology and public health kinesiology — population-level study of how physical activity (and sedentary behavior) relates to chronic disease incidence, and the design and evaluation of physical-activity interventions and policy at a population scale.
- Adapted physical activity — the study and design of physical activity and exercise programming for people with disabilities or chronic health conditions.
- Pedagogy and physical education — how movement skills and physical activity are taught, most directly relevant to K-12 physical education teacher preparation, often housed within kinesiology departments.
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Who Funds Kinesiology and Exercise-Science Research?
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Kinesiology has no single dedicated federal funding agency of its own; because it sits at the intersection of physiology, biomechanics, neuroscience, and public health, its research is funded across multiple existing federal structures rather than through one program.
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In the United States, the National Institutes of Health is the largest single funder of exercise- and movement-related research, distributed across several disease- and population-focused institutes rather than one dedicated exercise-science institute. The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) funds musculoskeletal and movement-related research relevant to biomechanics and injury. The National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research (NCMRR), housed within the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), explicitly funds rehabilitation research spanning exercise, motor training, and assistive technology for people with physical disabilities. The National Institute on Aging (NIA) funds exercise-intervention research aimed at healthy aging and functional independence in older adults. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) funds cardiovascular exercise physiology, and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) funds exercise-metabolism research connected to obesity and diabetes. The National Science Foundation contributes through its Directorate for Biological Sciences, which funds organismal physiology and comparative biomechanics research, and through its Engineering directorate where biomechanics overlaps with biomedical engineering. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds and conducts physical-activity surveillance and public-health intervention research through its chronic-disease-prevention programs. Outside the federal government, the American Heart Association funds cardiovascular-relevant exercise research, and the American College of Sports Medicine Foundation makes smaller targeted research grants within the field. Institutional and departmental funding conventions otherwise follow the standard NIH/NSF grant-management practices covered elsewhere on this site.
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Research Methods and Tools in Kinesiology
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The methods used across kinesiology’s subfields are as varied as the subfields themselves, but several categories recur throughout the field:
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- Biomechanics instrumentation — 3D motion-capture systems, force plates that measure ground reaction forces, and surface electromyography (EMG) that records muscle electrical activity, typically combined through inverse-dynamics modeling to estimate joint forces and moments that cannot be measured directly.
- Exercise physiology testing — indirect calorimetry and metabolic carts for measuring oxygen consumption and metabolic rate (including maximal oxygen uptake, VO2max), blood lactate analysis for tracking metabolic thresholds, and body-composition assessment methods such as dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA).
- Motor control and neuroscience methods — reaction-time and kinematic tasks for studying motor learning, and, in more specialized labs, electroencephalography (EEG) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for studying the neural correlates of movement.
- Physical activity measurement — accelerometers and other wearable sensors for objectively measuring free-living physical activity outside the lab, alongside validated self-report questionnaires, used heavily in physical-activity epidemiology.
- Quantitative and statistical methods — standard biostatistics and, for longitudinal training and intervention studies, mixed-effects and repeated-measures models to account for repeated observations on the same participants over time.
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Career and Training Pathways
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An undergraduate degree in kinesiology or exercise science provides the foundational coursework — anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, and motor behavior — that most graduate and clinical pathways in the field build on. From there, paths diverge by subfield and career goal:
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Research and academic paths typically follow a master’s and/or PhD in kinesiology, exercise physiology, biomechanics, motor control, or sport and exercise psychology, structured like other health-science graduate programs around coursework, a supervised research apprenticeship in a laboratory, and an original thesis or dissertation, leading to university research and teaching positions, or research roles at institutions such as NIH, the Department of Veterans Affairs, or industry research labs.
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Applied and clinical-adjacent paths use an undergraduate kinesiology degree as preparation for further credentialing in a distinct, separately licensed profession — physical therapy (Doctor of Physical Therapy plus state licensure), athletic training (accredited master’s degree plus Board of Certification credential and state licensure), or occupational therapy — rather than kinesiology credentials themselves conferring clinical scope of practice.
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Applied fitness and strength-and-conditioning paths commonly pursue professional certification through the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), which offers credentials such as the ACSM Certified Exercise Physiologist, or the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), whose Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) credential is the field’s standard qualification for strength-and-conditioning roles in athletics.
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The American Kinesiology Association (AKA) is the field’s principal academic professional association, representing kinesiology departments and faculty across U.S. universities, publishing Kinesiology Review, and supporting departmental leadership and faculty development. The National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA) is the professional association for the closely adjacent, separately credentialed athletic-training profession.
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Frequently Asked Questions
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What is the difference between kinesiology and exercise science?
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The terms are used inconsistently across institutions, but “kinesiology” is generally the broader academic umbrella covering biomechanics, physiology, motor control, and the psychological and social dimensions of movement, while “exercise science” is often used more narrowly for the exercise-physiology and applied-fitness-testing side of the field. Many university departments use the two terms interchangeably in their naming.
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Is kinesiology the same as physical therapy?
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No. Kinesiology is the research base studying how the body moves and responds to physical activity; physical therapy is a separate, clinically licensed profession (requiring a Doctor of Physical Therapy degree and state licensure) that applies movement science to diagnose and treat injury and dysfunction in individual patients.
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What are the main branches of kinesiology?
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The major subfields are biomechanics, exercise physiology, motor control and motor learning, sport and exercise psychology, physical activity epidemiology and public health kinesiology, adapted physical activity, and pedagogy/physical education.
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Who funds kinesiology research?
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In the United States, kinesiology and exercise-science research is funded chiefly through the National Institutes of Health — distributed across institutes including NIAMS, NICHD’s National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, NIA, NHLBI, and NIDDK, rather than one dedicated institute — alongside NSF’s Biological Sciences and Engineering directorates, CDC public-health programs, and targeted funding from organizations such as the American Heart Association and the ACSM Foundation.
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What jobs can you get with a kinesiology degree?
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Common paths include university or federal research, further clinical training toward physical therapy, athletic training, or occupational therapy, applied fitness and strength-and-conditioning roles (often via ACSM or NSCA certification), corporate/community wellness program roles, and K-12 physical education teaching.
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Related Guides
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This guide is part of a series covering major scientific disciplines from a research-administration perspective — see the overview guide to the branches of science for how kinesiology relates to neighboring fields, this site’s What Is Mechanical Engineering? guide for the mechanics underlying biomechanics, What Is Psychology? for the behavioral-science foundations of sport and exercise psychology, and What Is Nutrition Science? as a closely related applied health-science discipline with an overlapping federal funding landscape. For the broader research-methods cluster this guide belongs to, see the Research Methods & Statistics hub.
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