The objective of the Diploma in Sports Nutrition is to produce highly skilled, evidence-informed sport and exercise nutritionists with equal proficiency in understanding the science and their ability to translate it into effective nutritional strategies in practice. A programme graduate will have the theoretical and practical proficiency to progress to a qualification at a higher level or be ready to work as a sport and exercise nutritionist in the field.

A sport and exercise nutritionist must be well-versed in the four rapidly evolving disciplines that comprise sports nutrition: exercise biochemistry and integrated metabolism, exercise physiology, nutrition, and psychology. Moreover, practitioners must translate their knowledge of these disciplines into practical nutrition strategies that assist their athletes in modulating their capacity to meet the key performance determinants aligned with their sport. In contrast to the reality in which practitioners cross and integrate a variety of disciplinary boundaries to deliver their nutritional strategies, the science from which this information is derived and delivered is frequently studied as separate disciplines. Furthermore, such studies are often difficult to translate into practice due to most research being undertaken on populations divergent from professional athletes, using non-ecologically relevant exercise models, and outside of the real-world, complex environment of professional sport (Close et al., 2019). Therefore, our programme was designed to include the most important topics within these disciplines relevant to a sport and exercise nutritionist, as well as to "bridge the gap" between science and practice by contextualising the translational potential of science from these disciplines and focusing on how the relevant knowledge can be applied in practice.