The Origins of the Presidential Fitness Test

It was born out of Cold War fears of an overweight, sluggish populace. It tormented students, who viewed it with dread. And although educators were unclear at best about its benefits, it endured for generations.

It was the Presidential (or President’s) Physical Fitness Test. For decades, students took it (or were subjected to it, depending on your outlook), demonstrating physical fitness through running, sit-ups, and pull-ups, among other tests.

And then it was gone.

The Cold War Origins of the Presidential Fitness Test 

The Presidential Physical Fitness Test, like many things in modern American life, grew out of national defense fears.

The U.S. military ramped up its study of nutrition around the time of World War II, in no small part because of the decade that preceded it. The Great Depression led to widespread hunger; immediately before the war, it was estimated that a third of draft rejections were related to poor nutrition.

But by the 1950s, a different problem was starting to develop. The Cold War was in full swing, and with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the United States was losing the Space Race. There were concerns over a “missile gap”—and there were concerns about a fitness gap, too, thanks to the fact that Americans had a standard of living unequaled in the world.

In 1955, Jack Kelly, an Olympic rower-turned-millionaire in the building trades (and father of actress Grace Kelly, the future princess of Monaco) brought a troubling study to the attention of Pennsylvania Senator James Duff, who shared it with President Dwight Eisenhower. Soon, the president, the senator, Kelly, and more than two dozen other sports figures gathered at a White House luncheon to hear about the study directly from its co-authors: Hans Kraus, a medical doctor and an associate professor at New York University, and Bonnie Prudden, a director and owner of the Institute for Physical Fitness in White Plains, New York.

The scientists revealed that nearly 58 percent of American youth failed at least one of the six mobility tests administered, which included whether they could do sit-ups and touch their toes—and if that wasn’t concerning enough, only 8.7 percent of European children failed at least one test.

In its August 1955 issue, a new magazine named Sports Illustrated called it “The Report That Shocked the President” and quoted Kraus, who said, “We’re paying the price of progress … The older generation was tougher because it had to undergo adequate physical activity in the normal routine of living. We have no wish to change the standard of living by trying to do away with the automobile and television. But we must make sure that we make up for this loss of physical activity. In other words, let’s take the sting out of the benefits.”

Eisenhower took action in 1956, signing an executive order to start the President’s Council on Youth Fitness with Vice President Richard Nixon as chairman. The following year, a conference was held at the U.S. Military Academy (Eisenhower’s alma mater) to develop a plan, and in 1958, the first youth fitness test standards were unveiled: A shuttle run (a run back and forth between two markers to test speed and agility), a 50-yard dash, a 600-yard run/walk, pull-ups, standing long jump, sit-ups, and a softball throw (which, it was supposedly noted, demonstrated the same skill set as throwing a hand grenade).

Enter JFK

Eisenhower’s time in the White House was up in 1961; his vice president, Nixon, was defeated in the 1960 presidential election by Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was a marked change from his predecessor: Eisenhower was old enough to be his father (Nixon’s too), and, after establishing the council, had very little to actually do with it. The new president’s own vigorous activity (which belied serious health issues, including back pain, colon problems, and Addison’s disease) led him to encourage others to remain active and healthy.  

Kennedy—who thought fitness wasn’t just a youth issue—wrote in the December 26, 1960 issue of Sports Illustrated that “human activity, the labor of the human body, is rapidly being engineered out of working life.” Echoing some of the same points raised by his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt in the 1899 speech “The Strenuous Life” (which he even quoted directly), Kennedy noted that “in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security … such softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.” In 1962, Kennedy found one of Roosevelt’s executive orders urging U.S. Marine officers to tackle a 50-mile walk in 20 hours over the course of three days, which his council spun into a national fitness campaign, complete with publicity blitz (Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, did the hike in his Oxfords). Kennedy also changed the council’s name to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness.

Kennedy’s council developed a curriculum to improve physical fitness and encouraged participation. Lyndon Johnson—who became president after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and was elected to a full term in 1964—undertook another presidential fitness survey in 1965. The results were markedly better than the previous decade. In 1965, he implemented the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, which was given to students who scored in the 85th percentile or higher in a series of physical fitness tests similar to the 1958 test (by that point, a flexed arm hang had replaced modified girls’ pull-ups, apparently because it produced more reliable scores). He also changed the name of the council once again, this time to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. The President’s Physical Fitness Test had taken its full—but not final—form.

Generational Trauma

Almost as soon as it was introduced—and for generations after—the Presidential Fitness Test was absolutely traumatizing. “The worst part of the Fitness Test for an out-of-shape kid wasn’t the actual exercise,” Rodger Sherman wrote on SBNation. “It was the fact that everybody in your class saw you trying to exercise and saw how bad you were at it … so many of us were humiliated.” 

Even gym teachers realized that the test’s effectiveness was counterbalanced by embarrassing students enough that they dreaded it. “We knew who was going to be last, and we were embarrassing them,” phys ed teacher Joanna Faerber recalled to NPR in 2014. “We were pointing out their weakness.”

The test was modified again in 1976: the softball throw was dropped (it was theorized that the throw was a test of skill, not of fitness), the sit-ups were changed from straight legged to a timed, flexed-leg sit-up; and longer runs were added as options. Another survey was performed a decade later, with additional changes to the test (including the addition of the dreaded sit-and-reach), but none has been done since. In fact, if there’s anything the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports became known for after that, it’s for the litany of celebrity chairpersons, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Florence Griffith Joyner, and Lynn Swann.

In 2012, the President’s Physical Fitness Test was replaced with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program as part of the Let’s Move! initiative, which aimed for a more holistic approach to keep children physically active and teach lessons to ensure good choices in health, activity, and nutrition. The Youth Fitness Program does include an assessment, but the skills tested—and the parameters—are vastly different.

“The thinking is totally changed,” Faerber told NPR. “Now you want to get into the healthy fit zone, instead of being the person who can throw the softball the farthest.”

The Evolution of the Presidential Fitness Test Through the Years

What began as the Youth Fitness Test has evolved both in skills and in name since it was created in 1958. Originally, the test was based on the work of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (AAHPER; later, they’d change Association to Alliance, and later still add Dance and become AAHPERD). In the mid-1980s, The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (later the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition, abbreviated PCPFS and PCPFSN) took the lead; they changed the test markedly and would continue to tweak it until 2012. While other school fitness programs emerged in this era, here’s how the skills included in the more government-sponsored tests have changed over the years.

Table Sources: AAHPER Youth Fitness Test Manual, 1958; “Emblem to Boost President’s Drive for Exceptional Physical Fitness,” The Durham Sun, 1966; AAPHER Youth Fitness Test Manual, 1976 [PDF]; The Presidential Physical Fitness Award Program, Featuring the President's Challenge. Instructor's Guide, 1986 [PDF]; Get Fit! How To Get in Shape To Meet the President's Challenge. A Handbook for Youth Ages 6-17, 1997 [PDF]; “State Will Evaluate New Test As Measure of Physical Fitness,” Hartford Courant, 1997

Read More Stories About Fitness in the Past: