Aug. 21, 2025 – When Spencer Nadolsky, DO, heard about the return of the Presidential Fitness Test, he shared his personal experience.
His older brother, a star athlete, got the top award year after year. Earning that coveted blue patch meant you'd finished in the top 15% in all five components: 1-mile run, sit-and-reach flexibility test, shuttle run, situps, and pullups.
"I could not do a single pullup," Nadolsky wrote in his newsletter, which meant he had to settle for the consolation prize, a red patch. "A few of my friends were able to do pullups and won the blue patch. I was not happy about it."
He worked on pullups every day for the next year. It took him three weeks to complete his first one. A few weeks later, he could do two. And he kept going. The next time he took the test, he completed 26 pullups – which not only earned him the blue patch but also broke his brother's school record.
Inspiring? Sure.
But Nadolsky knows he's in a pretty small minority of adults with positive memories of the test. He hears the other side of the story from patients in his medical practice as an obesity and lipid specialist in Portage, Michigan.
"By far, their experiences were terrible," he said. "It made them embarrassed."
Unloved and Unmissed
If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, you're probably either too young to have taken the fitness test or you were lucky enough to attend a school where students weren't required to take part.
For almost everyone else, it was an annual ordeal that almost nobody missed after it was discontinued in 2012.
That's why the president's announcement on July 31 was so surprising. Of all the things Americans express nostalgia for, the Cold War-era Presidential Fitness Test is nowhere near the top of the list.
The test was rooted in fear of what President John F. Kennedy called "the soft American"– generations of sedentary people who were "mentally, morally, or physically unfit" for service to their country.
The original test included a softball throw for distance, a nonlethal stand-in for throwing a hand grenade in battle.
The emphasis on military preparedness may seem out of date at a time when less than 1% of U.S. adults are active-duty service members, and just 6% are military veterans.
But in the White House's official fact sheet, "military readiness" was mentioned twice as a rationale for reinstating the test, under the auspices of the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.
The original name of the commission, created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the President's Council on Youth Fitness. Kennedy changed it to the President's Council on Physical Fitness. Later it became the President's Council on Physical Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition.
The word "sports" moved ahead of "fitness" during the first administration of President Donald Trump. The fact sheet makes that priority crystal clear, with references to "the exceptionalism of America's sports and fitness traditions" and "global dominance in sports."
The document also refers to the Presidential Fitness Test as "a time-tested approach" to combating "obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition."
We've Seen This Movie Before
It has indeed been tested over time, and it has failed decisively.
"Fitness testing, on its own, will do nothing to improve the long-term health and well-being of children," said Avery Faigenbaum, EdD, a professor of kinesiology and health sciences at the College of New Jersey and author of Essentials of Youth Fitness.
"Is there any research to show that fitness testing on its own will help to develop skills, confidence, motivation?" he said. "No. Zero."
But there was increasing evidence showing the opposite by the time the Presidential Fitness Test was discontinued. Much of that research was described in a 2012 report from the U.S. Institute of Medicine. (Faigenbaum was among the report's expert reviewers.)
A 1990 study, for example, found that the small percentage of teenagers who do well enough in the test to receive awards are those with high levels of speed, power, and agility.
Not coincidentally, those students had already "received recognition for success in athletics."
In other words, fitness tests celebrate the already celebrated. And they punish everyone else.
A Test That Serves No One
Kathleen Martin Ginis, PhD, co-author of The Psychology of Exercise, has seen both sides of the celebrated-punished equation.
Her husband, she said, "still has his badges, which he shows quite proudly to this day."
He earned them in the Canada Fitness Award Program, which was similar to the Presidential Fitness Test. (It was discontinued in 1992, 20 years before the U.S. stopped its program.)
Martin Ginis, director of the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management at the University of British Columbia, had a very different experience, thanks to one specific exercise.
"The flexed arm hang was torturous," she said. "Especially for girls. I have horrible memories of that."
She's not alone. The flexed arm hang, which was also included in several versions of the Presidential Fitness Test, was so notorious it was name-checked in "Fireworks," a song by a Canadian band called The Tragically Hip.
But the problems with youth fitness tests go beyond their individual exercise components. The entire concept is flawed.
"It's based on a very simplistic notion of motivation: 'If you offer people rewards, they will do whatever you're asking of them,'" Martin Ginis said.
"There are people like my husband, who as kids would've been totally into all that. But that's a very small proportion of the population who are already motivated. It's just a bonus that they get a reward for doing it."
Even those kids might not be well-served by fitness tests.
"If you reward a kid for doing something they already love intrinsically, you actually demotivate them," Martin Ginis said. "They associate it as work."
In psychology, it's known as the overjustification effect, which has been studied since the early 1970s.
Nor would it help for schools or governments to create awards for children and teens who don't intrinsically love exercise.
"If kids aren't keen to do it, and you reinforce them with something extrinsically, they'll do it," Martin Ginis said. "But as soon as you remove that reward, they lose interest again."
We Have a Better Way to Do It
The tests don't just misunderstand motivation. They also misunderstand kids.
"Children exercise to have fun, make friends, and learn something new," Faigenbaum said, summing up a key lesson from 30-plus years of studying pediatric exercise science. "If we take the fun out of youth physical activity, we take the children out of youth physical activity."
For kids, the 1-mile run may be the most misguided test component.
"If you watch children on a playground, you'll never see them" run a long distance without stopping, Faigenbaum said. "They exercise in short bursts" and stop to rest when they need to.
But there is a much better alternative. It's called the Youth Fitness International Test, or YFIT.
Faigenbaum was among the 169 fitness experts from across the globe who endorsed YFIT in a recent consensus paper.
YFIT has four main parts:
- BMI, or body mass index, a simple calculation of weight divided by height
- Handgrip strength, measured with an inexpensive dynamometer
- Standing long jump, an easy-to-do test of lower-body strength and power
- Shuttle run, an endurance challenge
The tests are all simple to do and track over time at the individual and population levels. More important, none of them confer bragging rights or set kids up to fail in front of their classmates.
Take the shuttle run, for example, which would typically be tested in a school gym.
"Some kids will poop out early," Faigenbaum said, while others will keep going. "It's the opposite of a mile run, where the fittest kids will finish first, and the slowest are left out on the track, where everyone can see them struggle."
Tests and Badges Don't Solve Complex Problems
As we write this, no one knows what will be included on the reanimated Presidential Fitness Test. The White House statement was long on endpoints ("creating a national culture of strength, vitality, and excellence") but short on details.
"The good news is, we're having the conversation," Faigenbaum said. "But fitness testing, without a physical education curriculum most days of the week, will do nothing to move the needle toward a more active generation."
That curriculum, Martin Ginis said, should be focused on developing fundamental movement skills, which fall into three general categories:
- Locomotor skills (running, jumping, climbing)
- Object control skills (throwing, kicking, catching)
- Stability skills (balancing, twisting)
Another key, Nadolsky said, is to build in ways to help kids improve from their baseline.
And despite his success in mastering pullups, he would emphasize "finding ways to make it fun."
If there's one lesson we can take away from decades of experience with youth fitness tests, it's that they were very good at achieving the opposite of their stated goals.
"You have entire generations of people who hate 'exercise' because they think of it as this very painful, narrowly prescripted set of behaviors," Martin Ginis said.
That's why the problem of inactivity is so complex, she said. And complex problems require complex solutions. "You can't just do any old random thing and think it's going to make a difference."
