For some, return of Presidential Fitness Test revives painful memories

Boston Globe

4 days ago

'I never did a pullup,' she said. 'My jam was just to hang there and cut jokes.'
President Donald Trump's announcement Thursday that he was reviving the fitness test, which President Barack Obama did away with in 2012, has stirred up strong feelings and powerful memories for generations of Americans who were forced to complete the annual measure of their physical abilities.
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While some still proudly remember passing the test with flying colors and receiving a presidential certificate, many others recoil at the mere mention of the test. For them, it was an early introduction to public humiliation.
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'You would see it,' Burnett said. Her classmates 'would feel body shamed if they didn't perform as well.'
Born of Cold War-era fears that America was becoming 'soft,' the test was introduced by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. Although it changed forms over the years, the most recent version included a 1-mile run, modified situps, a 30-foot shuttle run, the sit-and-reach flexibility test and a choice between pushups or pullups. Children who scored in the top 15% nationwide earned a Presidential Physical Fitness Award.
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When Obama abolished the test, he replaced it with the FitnessGram, a program that emphasized overall student health, goal setting and personal progress -- not beating your classmates on the track or the pullup bar.
Trump signed an executive order that revived the test and reestablished the President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition. The order cited 'the threat to the vitality and longevity of our country that is posed by America's declining health and physical fitness.'
The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said at a White House event where Trump signed the order that he had fond memories of taking the fitness test as a child.
'It was a huge item of pride when I was growing up, and we need to re-instill that spirit of competition and that commitment to nutrition and physical fitness,' he said.
Trump did not say what elements the new test would include, but the announcement came as his administration has also rolled out new physical fitness standards for soldiers in combat roles.
News that the test was returning sent many Americans back to a time when they were frightened children in gym shorts and sneakers.
Robin Gray, 60, who grew up in Tempe, Arizona, said she remembered being marched into her elementary school gym and told to complete a series of physical tests that she had never prepared for. As a bookish, asthmatic child, she struggled.
'There was this hanging on a bar,' she said. 'We weren't built up to learn how to hang on a bar. It was just how long can you hang here on this one random day?'
The test did not encourage her to become physically active, something she did later in life by taking up swing dancing and yoga, she said.
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'It was survive or fail,' she said. 'It was Darwinist.'
Some gym teachers said they never liked giving the test, knowing the effect it had on children who did not excel at sports.
'To tell you the truth, I dreaded it because I knew for some kids, it was one of the units they hated,' said Anita Chavez, who retired last year after 33 years as an elementary school physical education teacher in Minnesota.
Chavez said she would offer some students the option of taking the test in the morning without other students present, so they would not feel embarrassed. She also set up stations in the gym so children would stay on the move and not gawk as their classmates struggled to do a pullup.
Megaera Regan, who retired in 2021 after 32 years as an elementary school physical education teacher in Port Washington, New York, on Long Island, called the return of the test 'a giant step backward.'
'It really breaks my heart that it's coming back,' she said. 'If our mission is to help kids love being physically active and love moving, we have to do more than testing them in ways in which the majority are going to fail, and they're going to feel ashamed, and they're not going to like physical education.'
Still, the test has its supporters, who describe it as a rite of passage -- and even a transformative experience.
Steve Magness, 40, an author of books about performance and the science of running, said that he 'wasn't your typical athlete' as a child growing up outside Houston.
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Then he won the mile run and the shuttle run during the Presidential Fitness Test in second grade. Pretty soon, he was known as the fastest runner in his class. He went on to run a 4:01 mile in high school and win a state championship in track, he said.
'That was my introduction to, 'Oh, I'm good at something,' and it pushed me into endurance sports and running,' he said. But even he found one part of the test to be insurmountable.
'I would ace everything else but couldn't touch my toes,' he said. 'That was my nemesis.'
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