This book examines how social issues shape and influence our engagement with sport, leisure time physical activity and health-promoting exercise. Connecting the personal with the public, it helps the reader to develop a deeper understanding of how social contexts and structures create or constrain opportunities for exercise, leisure and sport.

Presenting a series of in-depth descriptions of grassroots sport, urban lifestyle sport, physical activity across the life course, sport for children with special needs, and the development of creative climates in sport, the book seeks to encourage what C. Wright Mills described as the 'sociological imagination'. Every chapter begins with an individual-level account centered on everyday challenges with accessing sport, partaking in leisure activities, and meeting guidelines for daily exercise before exploring the larger, socially-determined patterns in which those experiences are located, establishing a vital template for the social scientific study of sport, leisure and health.

Touching on key contemporary themes including diversity, inclusion, non-participation and health inequalities, the book offers new case material and theoretical tools for understanding the relationships between sport, leisure, health and wider society. This is an indispensable companion for any course on the sociology of sport, exercise, leisure, or physical activity and health.