The Role of the Study of Exercise in Defining the Frontier of Integrative Biology

Of all the fields that comprise the physiological sciences, exercise is one of the hardest to categorize even though it is a common everyday experience for nearly everyone whether it is a formal exercise program or simply walking from one place to another. This familiarity makes the field understandable to the average person, but this familiarity also sometimes leads to an oversimplification of the complexity of the investigation of the physiological response to exercise. This is further complicated by the idea, as Tipton and Franklin (2006) point out, that exercise has different meanings for different people and is thus inherently diverse in terms of what one may think it consists of, as well as diverse in the lines of scientific inquiry that concern it.