30 FOR 30 TOK

Sports science studies the body from the outside. Athletes know it from the inside. The gap between those two kinds of knowing is one of the most productive and underexplored tensions in the IB curriculum, and this book examines it directly.

30 For 30 TOK: IB Sports, Exercise and Health Science is the twenty-first book in the 30 For 30 TOK series, which pairs thirty IB diploma subjects with thirty searching questions about the nature of the knowledge it produces. This volume focuses on the IB SEHS course, asking questions about embodied knowledge, the evidence base for sports science recommendations, the ethics of performance enhancement, and the relationship between scientific models of the body and the lived experience of physical activity.

From the reliability of VO2 max as a measure of fitness to the placebo effect in sport, from the ethics of doping and anti-doping to the question of whether sports science research on male athletes can be reliably applied to female ones, the thirty questions in this book press on what sports science knows and how confident its claims should be. Sample responses model what rigorous, critical engagement with sports and health science looks like in practice.

Designed for IB SEHS students, teachers, TOK educators, and anyone interested in what it means to know the human body from both inside and out.