Boy, we truly are living in the era of reboots. This week, President Donald Trump announced the return of the Presidential Fitness Test, the program intended to promote physical activity in schoolchildren through twice-yearly exercise assessments like a one-mile run.
Trump officially resurrected the program via an executive order he signed Thursday. The order also calls for the revitalization of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, which will include several athletes and sports figures such as Paul “Triple H” Levesque, the pro wrestler turned chief content officer of the World Wrestling Entertainment company. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will oversee the fitness test.
“I was always a person that loved playing sports. I was good at sports,” Trump said at a White House event announcing the signing of the executive order. “When you are really focused on sports, you’ve thought about nothing else. To an extent, this is one of the reasons I like golf. You get away for a couple of hours.”
The Presidential Fitness Test for American Children was first established in 1956. Though there have been different iterations, the test primarily included measures like a one-mile run, pull-ups or push-ups, sit-ups, and the sit-and-reach test. Children who scored in the 85th percentile nationwide would win an official Presidential Physical Fitness Award. The test was retired in 2012 by the Obama administration and was replaced by the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, which steered away from ranking children’s athletic prowess and focused more on encouraging a generally healthy lifestyle.
It’s debatable whether the Presidential Fitness Test in its original iteration accomplished much. Children’s weight and obesity rates rose steadily during the decades it was active, for one. Some states have also considered suspending their own local version of the test over concerns that it promoted weight-related bullying, stigma, and discrimination. But at least one review of the evidence in 2021 failed to find strong evidence of a link between bullying and school-based physical fitness testing.
It’s not known yet if the resurrected test will be markedly different from the old. In his executive order, Trump tasked the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition—which may now have up to 30 members—to reestablish criteria for the test and accompanying award.
Physical exercise is truly one of the best things you can do for a healthy and long-lived life; make no mistake about it. And while the benefits of exercise can be seen no matter how old you are when you start, people who become more active as children tend to stay that way into adulthood, research has found.
That said, color me skeptical that an administration manned by a president who reportedly once believed that exercise drains the body like a finite battery and a health secretary who bathed in a sewage-filled creek this year will do anything meaningful to improve the fitness and health of American kids.
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