Biokinetics is an exercise therapy profession that exclusively prescribes individualised exercise and physical activity for rehabilitation and promotion of health and quality of life. Biokinetics differs from physiotherapy primarily due to its management of injuries, illnesses and disabilities within the final phase of rehabilitation.

The profession of Biokinetics is a specialised discipline of exercise therapy (ET), which emerged from the South African Physical Education Programme. In the 1920s a medical and physical conditioning surveillance report identified South African boys to be in poor health and physical condition.

This specialised interprofessional medical and rehabilitation collaborative unit addressed the poor medical and physical condition of the boys joining the SADF, via the physical and medical experts.

The focus of the South African Physical Education at that time was ergogenic in nature and the research involved was to evaluate and prescribe performance enhancing exercise or physical activity to improve the physical conditioning of children.

The HPCSA describes Biokinetics as a final-phase functional therapeutic health related profession concerned with enhancing the physical and physiological health status of patients through personalised evaluation and subsequent exercise and human movement prescription in the context of chronic clinical and orthopaedic pathologies and performance enhancement (pathogenic health paradigm).
Biokinetics is also dynamically involved with health and wellness campaigns and the prevention of orthopaedic injury and hypokinetic diseases, advocating salutogenic effects of exercise (fortogenic health paradigm