Love It or Hate It, the Presidential Fitness Test Is Making a Comeback

KQED's Forum

KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Remember the flexed arm hang? The mile run? The Presidential Fitness Test – a battery of physical challenges that has prompted both dread and pride in students since the Eisenhower administration – is getting a reboot under the current administration. We’ll look at what California is currently doing to encourage youth fitness and what we’ve learned from more than 50 years of health data collected by school fitness tests, including the updated version that took hold under the Obama administration in 2012. And we want to hear from you: what are your memories of the Presidential Fitness Test? What do you think about its return? Guests: Hannah Thompson, assistant research professor of Community Health Sciences, UC Berkeley; incoming director for the UC Nutrition Policy Institute Taylor Tobin, freelance journalist who writes about food, health and lifestyle Renata Simril, CEO and President of the LA84 Foundation, and President of the Play Equity Fund Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves.
0:07.9	When you keep your money with Star 1, you keep more of your money. Star 1 credit union in your best interest.
0:14.6	Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. ServiceNow puts AI to work for people
0:22.4	across your business, removing friction and frustration for your employees, supercharging
0:28.0	productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make
0:32.9	customers happier. All built into a single platform you can use right now. That's why the world works with
0:39.6	ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com slash UK slash AI for people. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim.
1:05.6	Coming up on forum, the presidential fitness test is making a comeback under this administration.
1:11.6	Remember the mile run, the pull-up, the sit-and-reach test?
1:15.8	This battery of physical challenges has prompted both dread and pride in students since the Eisenhower administration.
1:22.7	So why give it a reboot?
1:24.7	Well, look at what we've learned from 50 years of collecting the data.
1:27.9	And we want to hear from you. What are your memories of the presidential fitness test?
1:31.9	And what do you think about its return? Join us.
1:50.0	Welcome to the. I'm Ena Kim.
2:09.1	If you were a kid that went to school here between the 1960s and the early 2010s, chances are you experienced the presidential fitness test, which wasn't eliminated by the Obama administration as Trump's executive order calling for the test's return claims, but rebranded and reformed.
2:21.2	The test usually consisted of push-ups, sit-ups, the sit-and-reach test, the shuttle run, the one-mile run, and the pull-up test, which was the bane of my existence.
2:26.6	My guest freelance journalist Taylor Tobin retook the test as an adult not that long ago.
2:29.4	And joins me now. Taylor, welcome to Forum.
2:31.9	Hi, thanks so much for having me.
2:33.2	Well, thanks so much for being on. So what I'm wondering is why you'd
2:36.6	retake the test. Like, did you like it as a kid? So, okay, first of all, I hated the test as a kid.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KQED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KQED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.