The role of sport in health-related promotion of physical activity

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Enrico Michelini illustrates that sport plays a very marginal role in the contemporary health promotion. This is the main result of the present analysis of national strategies for the promotion of physical activity issued by the health ministries of France, Germany, and Italy. All these health-strategies are rather ambiguous on this subject: They mention sport systematically as an abstract term, but they marginalise it as a medium of health in its traditional-competitive form. As a consequence, while sport has generally been considered healthy over a long period in the past, most health organisations today recommend only moderate physical activity as conducive to good health. The author examines this paradigmatic change in the international discussion about the forms of health-enhancing physical activity through a theoretical framework based on Luhmann’s systems theory.