President Trump on Tuesday signed a memo directing the restoration of the Presidential Fitness Test Award, reviving a program that was a fixture of American school physical education for decades before it was retired more than a decade ago. The move was announced at an Oval Office ceremony attended by several high‑profile athletes, including MLB pitcher Noah Syndergaard and golfers Bryson DeChambeau and Gary Player, and is being framed by the administration as part of a broader drive to promote athletic traditions and competitiveness among young Americans.
“My administration is working very hard to defend America’s cherished athletic traditions and pass our values of excellence and competitiveness to the next generation,” Trump said at the event. The president first signaled his intent to bring back the test in an executive order signed last summer that he described as efforts to “restore the urgency of improving the health of Americans.” The memo signed Tuesday directs agencies to restart work on the award program, but officials have not released details about the specific battery of tests that will make up the revived evaluation.
The original Presidential Physical Fitness Test, which the federal government phased out in 2012, assessed students on a handful of discrete events: sit‑ups, a shuttle run, a one‑mile run, a flexibility test (V‑sit and reach), and pull‑ups, among others. Over its long history the test was adjusted — for example, a softball throw once included to approximate grenade‑throwing ability was dropped, sit‑up technique was modified to reduce back strain, and running distances were changed as cardiovascular fitness became a greater emphasis. The Obama administration replaced the uniform test with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, which emphasized individualized fitness goals and broader measures of health.
Related Recipes
Manitoba School Psychologist Advocates Relationship-Based Approach to Student Mental Health
LA Archdiocese Suspends St. Joseph High School Principal During Review of Controversial Recording
Shaquille O’Neal earns LSU Master of Arts in Liberal Arts, jokes Barkley at graduation
Magnetized Early Earth Surfaces May Have Seeded Life’s Molecular Handedness
Officials who advocated retiring the original award pointed to research and concerns that testing children on a narrow set of skills was an imperfect measure of overall health and could encourage shame and bullying when students were publicly compared. Health experts argued the older approach risked focusing students on singular test outcomes rather than on sustainable, personalized fitness habits.
While the White House has not yet published the new test’s components, adults who want to measure themselves against the old standard can use archived test criteria. For example, the mid‑1980s norms for a 12‑year‑old listed one‑minute sit‑ups of roughly 40 repetitions for boys and 35 for girls at the 50th percentile (about 50 and 45 reps respectively at the 85th percentile). Shuttle run times of about 10.6 seconds for boys and 11.3 seconds for girls represented median performance; one‑mile run medians were listed at roughly 8 minutes 40 seconds for boys and 11 minutes 5 seconds for girls, with 85th percentile times around 7:11 and 8:23. Pull‑ups, measuring upper‑body strength, had medians of 2 for boys and 1 for girls, with 85th‑percentile benchmarks at about 7 and 2 respectively.
Trending Now
Uncertain AMOC weakening highlights need for intensified ocean monitoring and emissions cuts after 2020 acidification risk finding
D.C. Circuit panel questions Trump administration argument that projects underway are untouchable in White House East Wing ballroom dispute
Paige Bueckers’ 2025 WNBA debut jersey sells for $64,720, a record for women’s game-worn memorabilia
Dua Lipa and Callum Turner Hold Three-Day Sicily Wedding Celebration in Palermo After London Civil Ceremony
The administration frames the revival as restoring a shared national standard and inspiring renewed attention to physical education, but specifics of how the program will address prior criticisms — for example, avoiding public shaming and offering inclusive, developmentally appropriate standards — remain unclear. The coming weeks are likely to yield more detail as agencies implement the memo’s directives and outline how the award will be administered in schools nationwide.
Continue Reading
