The article deals with modern approaches to promoting values of a healthy lifestyle in students in the process of physical education. The paper presents results of a study of students' health culture formation in the family. This analysis has shown that the family is currently unable to fully perform its function to provide children with basic ideas about a healthy lifestyle and optimal motion activities. At present, destructive processes, as well as the loss of traditional family upbringing are obvious and observed in family institution functioning. The authors highlight the importance of developing an educational process at the university through a paradigm of health protection in the system of traditional values on the example of Belgorod State Technological University named after V.G. Shukhov. The article reveals the role of systematic work on the whole complex of components: creating modern sports infrastructure, activities aimed at promoting a healthy lifestyle, providing opportunities to regularly engage in physical culture and sports, developing and implementing projects to form hard-working nature, developing students' socially important needs, creative activity, facilitating graduates' employment. Educational work in this context involves formation of students' high moral principles, developing behavior standards, proper labor, physical and professional readiness to realize themselves in a particular field. Due to their specificity, sport and physical culture have a huge educational potential and can be considered as one of the most powerful mechanisms to form such ideological foundations of personality as citizenship and patriotism. The centuries-old history of our peoples shows that without patriotism it is impossible to create a strong power. Health formation in the system of traditional values is focused on the education of an individual that naturally combines spiritual wealth, moral purity and physical perfection.