ABSTRACT
The forerunner of this book was published quite a long time ago (Biddle and Mutrie, 1991). Unfortunately, it was produced in hardback only and was available at a very high price. Consequently, its visibility was limited to the extent that another publisher advertised their own book on ‘exercise psychology’ a year later as the rst ever! However, our initial publishers no longer wanted to publish psychology books, and hence we moved to Routledge where we produced the ‘rst’ edition of the current book with them in 2001 (Biddle and Mutrie, 2001). The second edition was published in 2007 (Biddle and Mutrie, 2007), and now here is the third edition. Thus, from initial publication to 2015, it has been almost a quarter of a century. A great deal has changed during this time in the interconnected worlds of research, physical activity, health and psychology. The eld has changed and moved on and, we would like to think, so have we. But what have we learned over this 20-plus-year period and what are the big issues for the future? This chapter will allow us some reection over the past few years, and especially the past seven years or so since we prepared the last edition of this book. We will do this by posing some key questions and oering some thoughts in response. Each chapter in this book has its own set of conclusions so we do not feel we need to repeat those here, although we will discuss some future directions.
