Buried in the talk of tariffs, Ukraine, Gaza, Azerbaijan and Armenia, India and Pakistan, the Epstein files and much else is yet another Executive Order (EO) from US President Donald Trump, this one reviving the old Presidential Fitness Test.
Generations of American schoolchildren would every year perform a series of exercises, either at top speed or with as many repetitions as possible, before the “phys-ed” teacher called a halt. The children would be scored against standards, and at the end of the year, if they scored high enough, they would receive a certificate – the Presidential Fitness Award – with the facsimile signature of Ronald Reagan, or whoever was in office at the time, as well as a patch.
The test originated in the 1950s because research was even then suggesting that Americans were less fit than Europeans. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who commanded the invasion of Normandy, established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness in 1956, and four years later, Eisenhower’s successor, former naval officer John F. Kennedy, published a related article, called “The Soft American,” in Sports Illustrated. Kennedy’s own successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, formalized the test.
The original test dates to 1958 and was published by the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (AAHPER), which revised it in subsequent years to this:
- pull-up for boys, flexed arm hang for girls
- sit-up
- shuttle run (variant of the sprints known also as suicides)
- broad jump
- 50-yard dash
- 600-yard run
Military training and competition have come into disfavor with American school boards over the past quarter century or so. And so in 2012, bowing to this sentiment, US President Barack Obama retired the Presidential Fitness Test and substituted the Presidential Youth Fitness Program (PYFP). The PYFP was voluntary and, as the US Department of Health and Human Services describes it, designed to “enhance important skills like concentration and problem solving.” It set aside “comparisons between children” so as to help them “pursue personal fitness goals for lifelong health.”
Trump’s EO seeks to “reverse” the American “health crisis,” build on the Make America Healthy Again Commission (itself established by EO, in February) and tie it all in with the big sporting events that the US will be hosting in full or in part under his administration: the Ryder Cup (Sept. 25-28, Farmingdale, New York), the President’s Cup (2026, Chicago), the FIFA World Cup (June-July 2026, US, Canada, Mexico) and the Olympic Games (July 2028, Los Angeles).
Among other things, the EO establishes the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, which is to advise the White House on how to improve and reestablish the Presidential Fitness Test, with its accompanying Presidential Fitness Award. Like Eisenhower and Kennedy, Trump is presenting American unfitness – childhood obesity, chronic diseases, sedentary living – as a threat to national security.
→ For more on the history, see:
- President’s Council on Physical Fitness & Sports: The First 50 Years: 1956-2006 (127 pages)
- President Gerald Ford’s speech on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness (1974)
