The intention of this study is to explore young people’s physical activity practice today. Our previous research has shown that the current norms of youth culture involve a dominating social arena characterized by parties and alcohol (Thing & Ottesen, 2013). Moreover, these norms and values doesn’t fit very well with living a healthy and physically active life, and therefore the physically active body, which is often assigned with positive value in the western world, can have lower status among young people and can in some contexts contribute to a feeling of being outsiders in the general youth culture (Nielsen, 2015; Nielsen, Ottesen, & Thing, 2016). This paper outlines a further exploration of this contradiction by studying Physical Education (PE) in the Danish high school in order to understand what is at stake between young people when they use their body in a physical activity context? Both national (Laub, 2013; Pilgaard & Rask, 2016) and international research (Allender, Cowburn, & Foster, 2006; Salmon, Booth, Phongsavan, Murphy, & Timperio, 2007) show that young people drop out of organized sport and physical activity, and that young people exercise too little in general. At the same time the curriculum for PE in high school states the subject must motivate the students to a physically active lifestyle (Undervisningsministeriet, 2013). This study explores this paradox further. Green (2014) problematizes the fact that we take the connection between PE and lifelong participation in physical activity for granted and there is lack in research that supports this assumption. Girls especially can feel excluded in PE. However, girls-only PE has shown a tendency to actually create more differentiated relations among girls. Some reinforcing their social status and others becoming more marginalised (Hills, 2007). We wish to challenge the traditional understanding of physical education, which is related to physical capacity and skills, and examine whether there may be something more at stake in relation to motivate and retain young people in a more physically active life. The primary question that this study will try to answer is:
How do relations and power struggles among young people in physical education in high schools influence on their sporting practice and their desire be physically active?

We draw on Norbert Elias’ figurational sociology (Elias, 1978, 1994 (1939)). More specifically, his notion on power relations between established and outsider groups, which characterize all smaller communities (Elias & Scotson, 1994 [1965]). A figuration is formed by the interdependencies between the people who inhabit it, and it is not possible to comprehend individual I-identities within a figuration without understanding the complex web of social power relations in the form of we- and they-identities (Evans & Crust, 2014). Consequently, within figurations the actions of individuals are intertwined with each other, which cause unintended consequences and changes over time (Elias, 2001). In this study we explore how power relations appear and are negotiated between young people based on PE lessons in the Danish high school to understand what is at stake when it comes to young people’s sporting practice and their desire be physically active.

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