President Trump on Tuesday restored the Presidential Fitness Test Award for public schoolchildren — less than a year after he revived the health program that was nixed during the Obama administration.
“This was a wonderful tradition, and we’re bringing it back,” Trump declared on July 31, 2025 after signing an executive order to reestablish the test.
The president called it “an important step in our mission to make America healthy again.”
But what exactly is the Presidential Fitness Test?
The test consists of these five components that are designed to assess cardiovascular fitness, upper-body and core strength, endurance, flexibility, and agility.
There’s no failing grade. But students who scored at or above the 85th percentile on every exercise earned the Presidential Fitness Award.
Why — and when — did the federal government develop the fitness test?
It starts with a figure: 56.6%.
That’s the share of American children who failed at least one exercise in a study conducted by Dr. Hans Kraus and Dr. Sonya Weber in the early 1950s, compared to just 8.7% of European children.
The test, which Kraus and Weber called the “Minimum Muscular Fitness Test,” consisted of only six basic exercises, and American kids were still failing it at seven times the European rate.
The alarming findings were presented to President Eisenhower at a White House luncheon in 1955.
Moved by the results, Eisenhower appointed Vice President Nixon to chair a new presidential committee dedicated to developing a national fitness program.
In July 1956, Eisenhower created the President’s Council on Youth Fitness by executive order, and the first official youth fitness test was published in 1958.
How did President John F. Kennedy play a part in the test?
Early interest in physical fitness testing dated back to the late 1800s, when testing centered on anthropometric measurement — lung capacity and strength.
But testing later changed to focus on physical efficiency, a term describing the healthy function of bodily systems.
It took a Cold War anxiety about out-of-shape American children to make it federal policy.
That concern was conveyed by then-President-elect John F. Kennedy in 1960 when he published an essay in Sports Illustrated titled “The Soft American.”
Kennedy warned that an “increasingly large number of young Americans” were neglecting their bodies, and that “such softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.”
He also pointed to findings from the Selective Service showing that roughly half of potential Korean War conscripts were physically or mentally unfit to serve – framing the fitness gap explicitly as a national security threat.
Eisenhower saw fitness as a national security concern. Kennedy cast it as a patriotic duty.
Nearly 70 years later, that same argument is being made again by the Trump administration
