Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore how an exclusive sample of women’s national football team coaches described how they implement careful coaching while facing social and organizational pressure to win medals.

Method: To consider coaches’ negotiations, we drew on Noddings’ concept of caring. Using an interpretive research paradigm, we conducted in-depth interviews with five Swedish women’s national football team coaches. An abductive approach was used to simultaneously process the theoretical framework of “ethics of care” and the empirical data.

Results: The coaches unanimously adopted a holistic perspective to coaching. The coaching strategies they described included promoting players’ development, well-being, and sustainable elite performance; listening to the players’ voices and engaging in dialogue; and creating a positive environment and promoting fair play.

Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that the women coaches, despite performance pressure, adopt caring coaching in the form of Noddings’ pedagogical modelling, dialogue, and confirmation strategies, and provide an example of how coaches can adopt caring, holistic, and athlete-centred coaching while working at the highest level of competitive sport and achieving competitive success. 

© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 

This study explored and elucidated how orthorexia is framed in Swedish daily newspapers with a focus on characteristics of orthorexia. Key questions include: 1) how do the newspaper articles connect exercise with orthorexia? and 2) what trends in depicting exercise in relation to orthorexia do the newspaper articles represent over time? The method used was a longitudinal qualitative content analysis guided by the framing theory. We analyzed 166 articles published between 1998 and 2013. Our analysis revealed that orthorexia originally was framed as an eating disorder and subsequently included unhealthy exercise. Two trend shifts could be identified: in 2004, exercise was added as an element and in 2013 extreme exercise trends were described to influence the increase of orthorexia. The findings indicate that Swedish newspapers extend Bratman’s definition and depict orthorexia indiscriminately to describe a range of different behavioral characteristics. These results are discussed in terms of the idea of “healthism” and general health trends in society.

Bratman first proposed orthorexia nervosa in the late 1990s, defining it an obsession with eating healthy food to achieve, for instance, improved health. Today, in the Swedish media, excessive exercising plays a central role in relation to orthorexia. A few review articles on orthorexia have been conducted; however, these have not focused on aspects of food and eating, sport, exercise, or a societal perspective. The overall aim of this study was to provide an overview and synthesis of what philosophies of science approaches form the current academic framework of orthorexia. Key questions were: What aspects of food and eating are related to orthorexia? What role do exercise and sports play in relation to orthorexia? In what ways are orthorexia contextualized? Consequently, the concept of healthism was used to discuss and contextualize orthorexia. The method used was an integrative literature review; the material covered 19 empirical and theoretical articles published in peer-reviewed journals. This review demonstrates a multifaceted nature of orthorexia research; this field has been examined from four different philosophies of science approaches (i.e., empirical-atomistic, empirical-atomistic with elements of empirical-holistic, empirical-holistic, and rational-holistic) on individual, social, and societal levels. The majority of the articles followed an empirical-atomistic approach that focused on orthorexia as an individual issue, which was discussed using healthism. Our analysis indicates a need for (a) more empirical-holistic research that applies interpretive qualitative methods and uses a social perspective of health, e.g., healthism and (b) examining the role of sports and exercise in relation to orthorexia that takes the problematizing of “orthorexic behaviours” within the sports context into account.

Fitness center activities have gained popularity. One central role fitness staff members have is to help participants to become or maintain health and fitness. In recent years, a new phenomenon – orthorexia nervosa, which M.D. Bratman coined in the late 1990s – has emerged. He termed orthorexia as "a fixation on eating healthy food". Research has mentioned that participants in sports and fitness activities may be at higher risk of becoming orthorexic. Since the late 1990s, orthorexia has been noticed, also in Swedish newspaper articles. In so doing, the 'condition' has evolved to include fanatic exercise and eating behaviours. Fitness professionals might thus work with individuals that are considered to suffering from orthorexia. The purpose of this presentation is to elucidate and problematize ethical issues that are raised during the research that deals with personal trainers and group fitness instructors talk of health and orthorexia. The material will consist of four focus groups with 18 fitness professionals that work in Swedish fitness centers. It will be carried out as a qualitative study. This study raises ethical issues, including for instance: a) by focusing and giving attention to orthorexia, the study may contribute to categorizing "the problem", as well as enlarge it. This paradoxical situation as the aim is to contribute scientific knowledge that can problematize orthorexia; b) the challenge to manage and balance a critical approach without causing harm (e.g. introduce orthorexia to fitness professionals who might have an erroneous perspective of and/or have little knowledge about orthorexia) (cf. Halse & Honey, 2005).