Rate My Professor Clint Bellenger

Dr Clint Bellenger serves as a Lecturer in Human Movement, Exercise and Sport Science within the School of Allied Health and Human Performance, College of Health at Adelaide University. He earned his PhD in 2016 from the University of South Australia, where his dissertation examined the effect of training-induced fatigue on autonomic heart rate regulation. Before entering academia full-time, Bellenger worked as a sports physiologist at the South Australian Sports Institute (SASI) and the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS). In these roles, he supported high-performance athletes across multiple disciplines, including athletics, rowing, boxing, gymnastics, volleyball, and basketball. Since 2012, he has been involved in teaching at the University of South Australia—now integrated into Adelaide University—delivering courses such as Exercise Physiology 1 and 2, Human Nutrition, Performance Analysis and Player Monitoring, Applied Exercise and Sport Science, Exercise Delivery, and Exercise Prescription.

As a member of the Alliance for Research in Exercise, Nutrition and Activity (ARENA), Bellenger investigates the impacts of exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle factors on health, human performance, and clinical outcomes. His primary research interests encompass performance recovery and its periodization, training load monitoring in endurance sports, and the quantification of match demands in team sports. Bellenger has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, contributing seminal works like "Monitoring athletic training status through autonomic heart rate regulation: a systematic review and meta-analysis" (Sports Medicine, 2016), "Monitoring athletic training status using the maximal rate of heart rate increase" (Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 2016), "Wrist-based photoplethysmography assessment of heart rate and heart rate variability: Validation of WHOOP" (Sensors, 2021), "Heart rate acceleration at relative workloads during treadmill and overground running for tracking exercise performance during functional overreaching" (Scientific Reports, 2020), and more recent articles such as "Impact of Drafting on Race Outcome in the Paris Olympics 1500-m Final: A Retrospective Analysis of Ingebrigtsen and Hocker Using the D′ Balance Model" (International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 2026) and "Fatigue assessment in distance runners: a scoping review of inertial sensor-based biomechanical outcomes" (Gait and Posture, 2025). He has obtained research funding, including grants from the South Australian Sports Institute for high-performance sports research to increase athlete availability (2018-2019) and from the Australasian Association of Podiatric Sports Medicine for a novel method to prevent overtraining in competitive runners (2015-2017). Additionally, Bellenger supervises postgraduate students at Master's and PhD levels and served as an editor for "Horizon 2030: Innovative Applications of Heart Rate Variability" (Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2022).