LAST THURSDAY, ACCORDING TO A WHITE HOUSE press release, “President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order revitalizing the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, and reestablishing the Presidential Fitness Test.” Since President Trump brought it up, let’s talk fitness! In the process, let’s dispel some myths.
Most Americans think the Presidential Fitness Test began with John F. Kennedy, whose famous 1960 Sports Illustrated essay warned that America was becoming a nation of soft bodies and softer wills. But the origins of the test go back further—to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led soldiers in the most consequential conflict of the twentieth century and who understood the vital connection between national readiness and physical fitness.
As supreme allied commander in World War II, Eisenhower had become aware that many young Americans were rejected for service—more than 40 percent in the first months of the war—due to poor physical conditioning, undernourishment, disease, or other preventable health issues. Following the war, comparative studies showed that American youth were performing well below European counterparts on basic physical tests. In 1956, alarmed by these trends, Eisenhower launched the President’s Council on Youth Fitness to spur national improvement in children’s physical health. He rightly saw the health and physical fitness of young Americans as a national security issue.
Kennedy gave the initiative new energy, framing fitness as a patriotic imperative in the Cold War. His administration created the iconic battery of field tests that soon became part of school gym classes across the country: shuttle runs, sit-ups, pull-ups, and later the one-mile run. For millions of kids, the test became a benchmark of childhood—unfortunately, equal parts challenge and humiliation. “At one point,” notes the Washington Post, “children had to complete 40 push-ups, 10 pull-ups and a 6½-minute mile to pass.” Anything less was failure.
In the decades that followed, the council endured but rarely evolved. Lyndon Johnson expanded the public outreach. Richard Nixon folded the program into education policy. Gerald Ford appointed athletes as spokespeople. Jimmy Carter quietly sustained the effort. Ronald Reagan renamed it the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. George H.W. Bush created new youth fitness awards. Bill Clinton emphasized volunteerism and community outreach. George W. Bush connected the program to his broader “HealthierUS” initiative. But for all the updated branding, little attention was paid to the structure or science behind the test itself.
Meanwhile, America changed—dramatically.
By the early 2000s, childhood obesity rates were spiking. Fast food chains had normalized supersized portions. Working parents had less time to monitor physical activity. Latch-key kids were spending more time indoors. Fears about crime and safety limited free-range outdoor play, and organized sports replaced, as we used to call it, “having fun until the lights went on.” The spread of air conditioning—and entertainment electronics (which, in my time on the President’s Council, we would call “tube time,” no matter the device)—turned outdoor activity into an option rather than an expectation. Schools cut back or eliminated physical education classes in favor of academic test prep and digital literacy. Most children, when surveyed, said they didn’t enjoy gym class—and by 2012, only 36 states (and the District of Columbia) required physical education in elementary, middle, and high school.
But the end of the Cold War and the American “unipolar moment” hadn’t ended the relationship between physical fitness and national readiness that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had identified.
IN 2010, DURING MY TIME as the commanding general of initial military training for the Army, we undertook a comprehensive review of incoming soldier fitness because we had observed recruits fell short of standards. What we found was alarming: Only about 27 percent of American youth between the ages of 17 and 24 were eligible to serve in the military without a waiver. The number one reason for ineligibility was insufficient physical fitness—primarily linked to obesity, sedentary behavior, and poor nutrition. I even did a TedTalk emphasizing the link between our exercise and nutrition habits and our national security.
In response to our findings, we fundamentally changed how we trained and evaluated soldiers. We redesigned basic combat training to emphasize progressive physical development, injury prevention, and functional strength. We partnered with civilian exercise scientists and sports performance experts. And we created a new Army Combat Fitness Test—focused not on arbitrary metrics but on battlefield-relevant movements: dragging casualties, lifting gear, sprinting under load, and building resilience for the operational environment. This wasn’t fitness for aesthetics. It was fitness for survival—and mission effectiveness.
That shift caught the attention of then-First Lady Michelle Obama, as childhood obesity and nutrition was her major cause and the President’s Council had just launched the “Let’s Move!” campaign. She visited one of our Army installations to see the new training in action and asked me to serve on the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition after my retirement. Her vision, like ours, was to rethink health and fitness as part of a broader system—not just a single test.
After my retirement from the Army in 2012, I joined the twenty-five-member council beside athletes as well as educators, physicians, public health experts. We launched the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, replacing the legacy test with a more inclusive and research-based model: push-ups and curl-ups; the Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run (PACER) test; a sit-and-reach test measuring flexibility; BMI or skin-fold measurement; and an individual goal-setting and improvement tracking for year-long assessment versus a one-time test.
The fitness program used metrics from the FitnessGram—a field-tested tool developed by the Cooper Institute at Texas Tech. It measured aerobic capacity, muscular strength, flexibility, and body composition—not geared to reward the best kids in the class, but to encourage all children to understand importance of holistic health and how to improve over a lifetime. Teachers received resources to help integrate wellness into education.
The focus also shifted to a healthy lifestyle. The physical tests found in the “Let’s Move!” campaign were complemented with nutrition initiatives like the “Fuel Up to Play 60,” “Partnership for a Healthier America,” “Healthy Food Financing,” “Nutrition Guidelines and Policy Integration,” and the “MyPlate” program. Combined, these fitness tests and nutritional approaches emphasized activity, health over competition, progress over performance, and science over spectacle.
WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO PRESIDENT TRUMP’S executive order, announced at the White House last week. Surrounded by high-profile athletes and entertainers—golfers Bryson DeChambeau and Annika Sorenstam, WWE executive and wrestler Triple H, NFL stars Nick Bosa, Saquon Barkley, Harrison Butker, and Lawrence Taylor—Trump described the initiative, with characteristic fanfare, as a return to tradition that was urgently needed because, he claimed, President Obama had “eliminated” the fitness test.
That was simply not true. Obama’s council did not eliminate the test. It updated it—using science, not nostalgia. It responded to decades of shifting public health data, educational realities, and behavioral trends. It emphasized individual improvement, accessibility, and lifelong health.
To be clear: A renewed national focus on youth fitness is welcome—and overdue. That the Trump administration is now devoting attention to the issue, after a lack of attention in the first Trump administration, is a good thing. But details matter. No specifics were released on what this new “test” will entail, only that his new commission will study an approach. Will it rely on outdated benchmarks? Will it consider behavioral, nutritional, and environmental realities? Will it offer support for schools struggling with capacity and funding? Or will it be a one-day presidential news event, more messaging than action?
Notably, per the White House’s press release, the rebooted fitness test will be administered by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is already overseeing a major reorganization of his department and responding to the worst outbreak of measles in the United States in thirty years. Whether he has the capacity to modernize and reinvigorate the program his uncle made famous more than six decades ago remains to be seen.
The original motivation behind the presidential fitness effort was preparedness. Eisenhower saw fitness as a national security concern. Kennedy cast it as a patriotic duty. Obama reframed it as a public health imperative. The question now is whether this new initiative will succeed in refocusing attention to a growing national health concern for our youth—or fall back to old messages and tests.
The measure of success won’t be in who gets the most media attention, or who can do the most push-ups. It will be in whether the program helps American children live healthier lives, builds awareness and capacity in schools and communities, and addresses not just the symptoms of our declining readiness, but the root causes—in activity, poor nutrition, and a lack of education on the subject of wellness. The test, as always, will be in what comes after the announcement.