Based on the questionnaire of SF 36, the paper analyzes the life quality of 6 senior high school students in A city to explore the life quality differences of sports and non sports high school students and dig out the factors affecting high school students to participate in physical exercise. The results indicate that generally, the situation of students’ participation in physical exercise is not good and the number of non sports population is significantly larger than that of sports population which even drops sharply when students are in their senior year; except the scores for the dimension of physical pain, all the scores for other dimentions of senior year students are lower than those of students from Grade One and Grade Two, and there are statistically significant differences between them (P>0.05) while there is no significant difference between Grade one and Grade two (P>005) even though some of the scores are high and others are low; the life quality of sports population was significantly higher than that of non sports population and the life quality of students in Grade one and Grade Two is higher than that of students in Grade Three. However, there is no significant difference between students from Grade one and Grade Two. The factors like failure to understand the essence of sports and the influence of examination oriented education on schools affect urban high school students’ active participation in physical exercise.