Sports as leisure during the pandemic period: theory and practice

ENRelevance and novelty. During the last year, physical culture/health/sport mass spectacles have revived in Lithuania. The success of the region and the city in the field of physical education and sports is mainly determined by the persis-tent efforts of the community, which has increased since the restoration of Lithuania’s independence. The year 2020 was extremely difficult for education, as well as for other areas of public life. Education and its environment have been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It disrupted the usually gradual change in education and caused the need to urgently look for solutions on how to organize training, but also led to a breakthrough in the application of innova-tions, opened up new opportunities, actualized the ones under consideration and raised new questions when considering the future of physical education / health / sports education (Lithuania. Education in the country and regions, 2021). Scien-tific problem: How has the epidemic situation of COVID-19 and its management measures (aimed at protecting the per-son physically, but threatening the sustainability and well-being of his/her social connections) affected physical culture/health/sport? Subject: physical culture / health / sports during the pandemic. The goal is to reveal the physical culture/health/sports situation during the CIVID-19 pandemic in a practical and theoretical aspect. Tasks: 1. Discuss the theo-retical aspect of the pandemic as a phenomenon; 2. To define the sustainability of physical culture/health/sport through innovation. Methods: review and analysis of scientific literature. Literature review is a theoretical research method. Its essence, according to Daubarienė (2018) (cited Žukauskienė and Erentaitė, 2011).is that the author, by reading, analyz-ing, comparing, evaluating previous literature in a certain field, evaluates the current situation, solving a certain problem. This section provides context to the study and demonstrates the importance of the study. The purpose of the literature analysis is to methodologically base the investigative analytical part.Keywords: leisure, sport, pandemic, change, sustainability, governance.