Abstract: Sports, as a relatively independent human activity in human society, is a product of history. Therefore, the compilation of Basic Principles of Physical Education should clarify the object, nature, and characteristics of sports activities based on a full understanding of the historical conditions and significance of the formation of sports history, and achieve the historical and logical consistency in understanding sports by taking historical materialism as its guidance, the historical development of human society as its basis, and human activity divergence as its perspective. However, the compilation of Basic Principles of Physical Education in more than 100 years is far from meeting the goal, although it underwent changes in text labels from "principle", through "theory" and "concept" to "fundamentals" in different historical periods. In the new era of new liberal arts construction, the compilation of Basic Principles of Physical Education should attach importance to: intrinsic nature-cognition of objects based on ontology; industrial revolution-analysis of motivation based on epistemology; human activities-analysis of characteristics based on methodology.

Key words: sports, history, basic principles, human activities, intrinsic nature, industrial revolution