Abstract: Taking Plato's early works and Xenophon's Memorabilia: Recollections of Socrates as the data source, this paper studies Socrates' ideas on health and virtue development entailed in his thoughts on sports value. Socrates believes that the body-caring skills include sports and medicine, and sports is an effective skill to make body strong and fit; regular exercise helps people to stand tests, and he himself demonstrated that strong body helps serve the country; physical exercise helps strengthen self-discipline and develop a healthy lifestyle.The realistic enlightenments that these ideas have for Chinese sports include: enhance the discourse right of sports in the medical field; strengthen research on the role of physical exercise in training bravity; pay attention to the role of sports self-discipline in promoting the performance of value; regulate sports events to ensure the value of sports in promoting justice.

Key words: Socrates'sports thought, health promotion, virtue promotion