CW: some mention of body weight in children and use of the word “obesity”. Sorry, I’ll keep it to a minimum.
If you’re a news-attentive person, you know it’s become hopeless to keep track of all the evidence and good-sense-absent decisions by the Trump administration.
Full and happy discplosure: most of my info is from the superb podcast Maintenance phase episode on this topic. You can listen here and read the transcript here. And I recommend listening to other episodes of this podcast, hosted by the superb Aubrey Gordon and her superb co-host MIchael Hobbes.
If you need a reminder about what exactly was the President’s Physical Fitness Test:
It sort of started with the Kraus Weber Test, developed in the 1940s, which tested children once on a few physical tasks (this I got from Wikipedia):
- A simple sit-up with knees bent and feet planted
- A sit-up with legs extended and not bent
- Raising feet while lying on the back
- Raising head, chest and shoulders off the ground while lying on the stomach
- Raising legs off the ground while lying on the stomach
- With knees straight, bending forward to touch the floor
Then, American Bonnie Prudden used the test on American children (insert lots more detail I’m not including), and found that 58% of kids didn’t pass the test. Meanwhile, only 8% of European children given the test (under other circumstances at different times, etc.) failed the test.
Insert big panic here.
Then-President Dwight Eisenhower was horrified at these results. So, instead of turning to education or medical or public health experts to investigate to see if there was actually a problem (along with increasing funding for physical education in schools and communities), he founded a presidential commision:
The President’s Council on Youth Fitness, which morphed over time into the President’s Council on Fitness, and is now the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition.
Important and famous people have served on these commissions. However, no one did any research at all on:
- whether the original or modified versions of the test actually measured anything meaningful or useful in children (Spoiler: NO)
- why American children didn’t do better on the test (Spoiler: they hadn’t practiced calisthenics in school like the Europeans did; with 6–8 weeks of practice kids did fine on the test)
- what a one-time physical fitness test should show– current physical fitness? potential short-term fitness? potential fitness in adulthood? overall health? predictions about future health? (Spoiler: it showed none of these, as determined by later research)
- If all schools in the US gave ths test every year to school children, what they would do with the data, like develop funded programs for improving fitness from the baselines, or even track kids’ fitness over time (Spoiler: no one did any of this, ever)
The commissions did make very nice recommendations, like:
Set aside more time and facilities and staff and training for kids to do a wider variety of sports that are accessible to everyone—e.g. fishing, bowling, archery, etc. Also, make time for free play with other kids, without the parents/teachers supervising and guiding (from Maintenance phase transcript)
Doesn’t that sound sweet? (Spoiler: the commission’s recommendations were ignored in favor of modified versions of the original test, which– as I think I mentioned earlier– measured nothing at all, other than someone’s ability to do those required tasks at that time.)
So, this test was given all over the US to all the school kids with no health goals at all. Yep.
Until 2012, when the Obama administration pivoted away from the test and toward an emphasis on overall health and activity, rather than measured (for no reason) performance. Yeah, that sounds better, doesn’t it?
Hmmm. Then why does the Trump administration want to bring it back?
In short, (you can read the long version here) because Trump and RFK think that there’s a crisis of obesity, chronic disease, and poor nutrition in the US, especially among children.
Bringing back this test will Make American Active Again, according to the press release (Spoiler: it totally won’t).
Okay. But, just for the sake of argument, why not bring it back?
Glad you asked. In addition to the above information which leads us to believe that this test doesn’t measure anything or contribute in any healh-goal-directed way to children’s health or fitness, there’s this:
Everyone hates this test. Teachers hate it. Kids hate it. Parents hate it. Why? It makes almost everyone feel bad about themselves or children they care about for no good reason.
There’s some evidence that tests like these make kids hate physical activity. That’s the opposite of what we wanted, right?
Oh, and there’s overwhelming evidence from tons of research that physical activity does not have strong effects on body weight. Physical activity is predictive of all sorts of great health outcomes like longevity, improved mental and cognitive health, and loads of other things we blog about regularly. So, bringing back the test will arguably have no positive effects on distribution of body weight among school children.
Here’s a great quote from Aubrey and Michael:
There was no evidence to do it in the first place. The evidence that it works is non-existent. And the evidence that getting rid of it is good is out there.
Need I say more? Oh, I want to. There’s so much wrong with these tests. But I’ll leave it for another time.
In the meantime, dear readers: do you recall taking these tests in gym class? What did you think? Was there one kid who climbed the rope all the way to the top, and can you remember their name?
