President Donald Trump is bringing back the Presidential Fitness Test as part of the mission to "make America Healthy again."
From its creation in 1966 until it ended in 2013, the Presidential Fitness Test measured students' strength and endurance with exercises like sit-ups, pull-ups, and one-mile runs. Students who scored in the top percentiles received national recognition.
"It’s a wonderful tradition and we’re bringing it back," Trump said.
The return of the test is a victory for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leader of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement who has long voiced concern about childhood obesity. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was sounding the alarm about Americans going "soft" way back in the 1960s.
“He was lamenting the fact that America had prided itself on a beef jerky toughness, and that we were losing -- that we were falling behind Europeans, we were falling behind other nations,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at the White House on Thursday.
The Presidential Fitness Test originated during the Eisenhower administration, when the President’s Council on Youth Fitness was established in response to a study on American kids' health that raised concern.
President John F. Kennedy took up the issue, famously writing an article titled "The Soft American" in Sports Illustrated.
He warned about an "increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies -- whose physical fitness is not what it should be -- who are getting soft."
"And such softness on the part of the individual citizen can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation," he wrote.
Kennedy also promoted taking the 50-mile hikes that were used by Marines, with his own brother, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, completing the task in the snow.
President Lyndon Johnson established the Presidential Physical Fitness Award in 1966.
For all of President Kennedy's concern about fitness in the 60s, America's health problems have grown exponentially worse since then, with one in five kids now suffering from obesity.
The fitness test was phased out in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama over concerns that it hurt students' self-esteem. It was replaced with a more individualistic assessment of health as American culture drifted away from meritocracy.
The Trump administration says returning to the old, competitive approach will produce better health outcomes.
“The executive order will be focused on strengthening athletics in our country and making America healthy again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “And we are going to reimplement the Presidential Fitness Test in America’s schools, which is, I think, something all Americans can get behind.”
