After Christianity replaced paganism in Europe, sports activities declined. Church doctrine considered exercises for the development of the body to corrupt the soul and distance a person from God. If for the first Christians the body was a temple of the Holy Spirit, then later the idea of renouncing worldly goods in the name of saving the soul prevailed, from which followed the demands of asceticism and "mortification of the flesh", the idea of the sinfulness of physical exercise.
After the transformation of Christianity into the state religion of the Roman Empire, ancient physical culture declined and already in 394, under Emperor Theodosius, the Olympic Games and the Olympic calendar were abandoned. In the future, sports competitions were held on a case-by-case basis, only with special permits and mainly in the eastern part of the empire (for the last time in 520). After large-scale popular unrest in 529, Emperor Justinian closed almost all organizations and institutions of physical culture, including the famous Athenian Gymnasium. The development of sports in the Western world stopped for centuries, resuming only in the Renaissance.
At the same time, physical culture was also stagnating at the other end of Eurasia – in China, where, under the influence of Confucianism, interest in human physical development fell. This era was a period of fragmentation of Chinese therapeutic gymnastics into many very different directions. The lessons of the Yellow Armband Uprising prompted the Jin authorities in China to ban the carrying of weapons, which led to the emergence of new forms of unarmed wrestling among the people, as well as the development of stick fencing. In the sixth century, the Shaolin school of martial arts was born, then similar schools arose in other places in China with the support of Buddhist monks, and even later, in the middle of the second millennium of the new era, a similar ban on carrying weapons by the common people led to the emergence of Japanese martial arts, different from those that developed on the continent. During the era of Mongol rule (Yuan Dynasty), other sports related to military training, such as horse riding, archery, and various types of wrestling, became widespread in China.
Japanese samurai, who even with weapons began to lose battles to unarmed peasants, in turn developed a system of fighting without weapons, called "jujutsu" (in the West – "jiu-jitsu").
Despite the official negative attitude of the Christian Church towards physical culture, the authorities had to not only encourage the training of chivalry, which was the main military force in Western Europe, but also turn a blind eye to folk games and competitions – in particular, in the German lands and in Ireland, where the tradition of games persisted until the second half of the XII century. The attitude towards popular entertainment among the people in the regions where Orthodoxy prevailed was even more tolerant. With the weakening of feudal oppression in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages and later in the Renaissance, a similar popular physical culture was formed for different countries, including running, jumping, weight throwing and wrestling. Already in the XIII century, treadmills appeared and organized production of skates began, and in the XIV century there were descriptions of various ball games – tennis, fives, bendiball, football (in England and in Italy, where the game was called "calcio"), bowling, hurling. In cities where there was a guild culture, competitions were held between workshops in disciplines related to the main profession of participants – rowing, diving, swimming with salt workers, fencing with gunsmiths, etc. With the beginning of the Renaissance in Western and Central Europe, interest in the harmonious development of the human body is returning. Chivalry is being replaced by infantry as the basis of regular armies, and among folk competitions, shooting tournaments (both archery and crossbow, as well as firearms) and fencing occupy a prominent place. In the XVI century, treatises were published in Italy with a detailed description of the rules of individual games (including calcio) and training methods. In France, in the same century, the same de paume boom, the predecessor of tennis, was going through. A contemporary Englishman who visited France at the end of the century wrote that the number of ball courts exceeded the number of churches there. Skating has become an equally popular pastime in the Netherlands.
Under the feudal system, physical competitions were one of the means of military training for knights. The Church in the era of feudalism, on the one hand, fought against folk games, competitions, etc., and on the other hand, widely supported the chivalric system of military physical education. At the end of the 18th century. In Germany, special schools for bourgeois youth were created – "philanthropines", in which the main attention was paid to physical education. These schools subsequently influenced the formation of the first gymnastic systems – I. Guts-Mutsa and F. Jan in Germany, P. Linga in Sweden, Ya. Tyrsha in Austria-Hungary, etc.