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The first known culture to consider physical activity as an educational element, as an important aspect of the integral formation of the individual and also as a recreational and competitive challenge. In classical Greek society there is already an ideal of education of the body that forms a substantial part of the Greek Paideia, it is the global ideal of training the individual, the system by which a stable balance between intellectual and physical and organic training can be achieved. Aristotle dealt with the study of physics, rhetoric and aesthetics. For him, physical exercise, directed by the paidotriba, is of the utmost importance in the training of the young man, as a complement to his intellectual training. He rejects an overwork of the body, which he justifies only in the professional athlete, an idea which is far from that of the average Greek youth. The cultivation of the body through gymnastics is closely related to medicine, as it also contributes to the general well-being of the individual.

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Because of its constant imperialistic attitude, which obliged the state to give priority to military training, it increased the importance of physical values in the professional soldier, a true "armed athlete". This dimension of military gymnastics was therefore a fundamental legacy of Roman civilisation. So was what we might call the "professional gymnastics" of the games. If the Olympics, with their spiritual and pan-Hellenic significance, were a specifically Greek legacy, the circus games, the ludi, were a Roman and Italic inheritance.
In the reception of Greek medical ideas, it was Galen, a Greek from Pergamon but who carried out a large part of his professional activity as a doctor in the Rome of the Antonines, who received and transmitted to posterity the Hippocratic medical ideas and, in general, those of the entire Greek world. He remained a symbolic expression of the great ancient medicine. We know that Galen served as a physician and scientist among gladiators, which gave him the opportunity to study certain types of injuries sustained in the games. Like Hippocrates much earlier, he was concerned with the value of gymnastics as an element in improving the health of the organism. He regarded gymnastics as "the form of physical exercise which produces fatigue". This physician was as interested in what we might call medical gymnastics as he was in the professional sporting gymnastics of the specialists or gladiators.

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Perhaps in no author will we find a greater exaltation of the bodily activity of the knight who fights in defence of the true faith than in Bernard of Clairvaux, the great 12th century Cistercian.
The medieval period did not contribute anything important in terms of medicine and the care of the body in a therapeutic and hygienic way. Medieval medicine in the Christian world did not become important until the 13th century. Only among Jews and Muslims, who had received and translated the classical works, did medical activity reach a certain height and rigour.

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A new attitude towards the body emerged at the dawn of the so-called Renaissance. A certain naturalism was gaining ground, especially in Italy, a tendency that was consubstantial to all Renaissance art. The physical values of the human body took on a new dimension, both in the field of art and in the new medicine. At the same time, a movement of pedagogical renewal took place in Italy, in which physical education was of enormous importance. The driving forces behind this new trend were: Vergerio (1349-1420), forerunner of Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446) and Hyeronimus Mercurialis (1530-1606). From the institution of the gymnasium, which took up the old Greek concept, the new pedagogical ideas gradually found an echo in the higher social levels. Da Feltre founded the famous casa giocosa, a model of a new type of school, and on the frontispiece of the building one could read the illustrative phrase "Come children; here we instruct, not torment", thus indicating the break with medieval pedagogy "by blood and fire".  The fundamental contribution of Mercurialis consisted in the recovery of the fundamental elements of Galen's thought concerning the care of the body, with the author's own contributions, which gave gymnastics an important role in the preservation of physical health. For Mercurialis, however, gymnastics was related to medicine.

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The XVIII century, especially in its second half, witnessed one of the most fertile and progressive intellectual and cultural movements in the history of the Western world. The great revolutionary changes that were to take place with the so-called bourgeois revolutions, especially the French, had as their antecedent and laboratory this Enlightenment movement, with its unstoppable critical spirit, which called into question the whole ideological and social order of the time. Pedagogy, the interest in a new education that had begun in the Renaissance, culminated in the Enlightenment. The old scholastic educational schemes which, more or less transformed, survived in religious schools, were violently rejected by several generations of the Enlightenment. A new, more complete and inclusive paradigm was postulated, in which the integral education of the child, the need for him to be in contact with nature and for his physical qualities to be cultivated in his education, was vindicated.

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CONTEMPORARY PHYSICAL EDUCATION: THE 19th CENTURY

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CONTEMPORARY PHYSICAL EDUCATION: THE 19th CENTURY

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The 19th century, following the triumph of the bourgeois revolutions and the rise of the bourgeoisie, brought a new world of values, a new ideology and new ways of life. The new ideological movement that took hold was Romanticism. One of its fundamental components was nationalism. The individual takes on a special dimension, and as a result, also in physical education, "national schools" emerge. These "gymnastic schools" were the great legacy of the 19th century.
In this century, the gymnastic movements from the medical, pedagogical and military traditions were definitively established as the three main branches of all subsequent developments.

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Jahn (1778-1852) is often considered the true founder of German gymnastics, but his activity was preceded by that of other important figures such as Vieth (1763-1836) and, above all, Guts Muths (1759-1839). Guts Muths has been described as the patriarch of gymnastics, both for his writings and for his style and ideal of life, which advocated a balance between body and spirit and led him to a passionate dedication as a gymnastics teacher, thus uniting theory and practice throughout his life. From the point of view of the pedagogical tradition, he is rightly considered the founder of "education through physical exercise". His treatise envisaged the desirability of practising all those exercises that were "natural", such as running, throwing, rings, swinging, skating, dancing, skiing and other popular activities, which could be directed towards educational purposes.
For Jahn, the creative character of exercises and apparatuses of artistic movements was based on a pedagogical stance aimed at the salvation of the fatherland, with an ideal of freedom and nationalism. In his view, gymnastics played an important role in political, social and educational change. Jahn's exacerbated nationalism led him to reject Guts Muths' concept of gymnastics as classically derived and therefore alien to the Germanic tradition, preferring to use the German term turnen as a synthesis of all his activities. Jahn's main contribution is the need to involve the community in the practice of physical exercise carried out collectively and in public, mobilising the people under moral norms and values of self-improvement and general enthusiasm, within the framework of a longed-for political unification, which would still take time to come about, and which went far beyond a mere pedagogical renovation.

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It was the Danish F. Nachtegall (1777-1847) who propagated the ideas of Guts Muths in Scandinavia, where they achieved a currency and development far greater than in Germany itself. Gymnastics remained a fundamental element in the later dominant theories, and the first teacher training institutions were established. He founded a private gymnastic institute (1799) in which a simple method of skill exercises, running, throwing, climbing, balancing and tumbling was followed. He contributed to the introduction of gymnastics in primary schools (1801) and founded pioneering centres such as the Military Gymnastic Institute (1804), the oldest in the world, which was followed by the Civil Gymnastic Institute (1808). He culminated all this work with the foundation of the first Normal School of Gymnastics for teacher training in 1838. Among his continuators was the Swede P.H. Ling (1776-1839). When he returned to Sweden, he began to work at the University of Lund as a teacher of fencing and later of gymnastics.
Swedish gymnastics, which was born out of Ling's activity, has been criticised for its rigidity and formalism.

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There was no indigenous school of gymnastics in France, but it was brought about by the outside influence of a Spaniard and a Swiss. The first of these was Francisco Amorós y Ondeano, Marquis of Sotelo, born in Valencia (1770) and died in Paris (1848).
After the War of Independence, with the defeat of Napoleon, his status as a Frenchman led him to prison, and he subsequently went into exile in Paris in 1814. In France, he continued his pedagogical work with soldiers and obtained approval for the foundation of a Normal Military Gymnasium in 1818, whose activities were soon extended to the civilian population, creating the Normal Military and Civilian Gymnasium in 1820. From the same year comes a definition Amorós gives of gymnastics which we think may be illustrative of his thinking, as "the reasoned science of our movements, of their relations with our senses, our intelligence, our feelings, our habits and the development of all our faculties. Gymnastics embraces the practice of all exercises tending to make man more courageous, more intrepid, more sensitive, stronger, more industrious and more agile, and which prepares us to resist all inclemency, all climatic variations, to endure all the privations and hardships of life, to overcome all difficulties, to triumph over all dangers and obstacles; in short, to render distinguished services to the State and to Humanity".

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The most significant figure of what some have called the English school was T. Amold (1795-1842), who did not promote the gymnastic movement, but rather games and athletic activities. He held the position of headmaster at Rugby College and at that time (1827-1842) he advocated and introduced major reforms in the English educational system, promoting athletic activities and, in particular, team sports games, in which he tried to instil in students a sense of honesty and cleanliness, exponents of the characteristic English fair play. Amold's action was very effective as an element in the dissemination of sport both in schools and universities, the origin of the tradition, maintained to this day, within the Anglo-Saxon world. It is well known how important sport has been in the school and university model, which we could describe as Victorian, and which has lasted, with few alterations. Up to the present day.

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The historical analysis up to now allows us to approach the different lines existing at the present time, observing that the psycho-socio-pedagogical current has given rise to a set of knowledge and practices, with different denominations, which are described below.

Psychomotricity:

This term was first used by the physician Dupre at the beginning of this century. His research in child neuropsychiatry led him to discover, in 1905, the parallelism between the development of motor functions, the capacity for action and psychic functions.

Psychokinetics:

The creator of this method was Le Boulch, in his work Education by Movement (1969), describes psychokinetics as a general method of education which, as a pedagogical means, uses human movement in all its forms, advocating the interdisciplinarity of different intellectual aspects and physical education in the early ages, especially in children under 12 years of age.

Sociomotricity:

This term, which refers to the social dimension of human behaviour, found its definition in the prolific work of Parlebas. According to his conception, sociomotricity is situated in the field of physical and sporting activities that necessarily generate instrumental motor interactions in those who participate in them.

Educational sport:

In contemporary sporting history, the revitalisation of the Olympic movement, mainly due to the tireless initiative of Baron de Coubertin, is a most important milestone. A certain romanticism prompted this great philanthropist to restore the Olympics in Athens itself in 1896. This movement was conceived as a revival of the old sporting activities in classical Greece, but the socio-economic constraints of the 20th century soon took over and turned them into a gigantic financial set-up.

Corporal expression:

It is ambiguous and poorly defined, as it is configured and identified with dance, mime, gesticulation, the release of internal tensions, unblocking, wellbeing, learning to signify with the body, creation, spontaneity, etc.
It is not, therefore, an autonomous discipline, but it tries to situate itself with the intention of contesting or renewing already established techniques such as dance, theatre, psychomotricity and psychokinetics, etc., among others.