I'm rewriting this piece to call out an interesting perspective: "IF the majority of American kids ARE not involved in after-school sports, THEY WILL quickly lose muscle tone and aerobic ability – and, by the time they graduate high school, WILL BE out of shape."
That's a recipe for a sick society, one that pharma will look to heal.
The fitness test sounds good and is a great step in the right direction, but ultimately, it's a blip in a pool of negativity on negative health. It will be up to the individual family to ensure proper health, but that again is a battle to fight.
Pharma-medical cabal KNOWS a sick and unhealthy society is just a better BIZ model for sure! The point you make about muscle tone and mass ration in a body is real as the decades pass in a life. Look at all the medications people take that actually cause sarcopenia too!
In my opinion, putting standards first as a mistake.
My experience with Gym class in the 70s and with my children’s gym classes in the 2000s had no inspiration
And in fact, it was so bad it just led to avoidance.
No one looked forward to going to gym class to run laps or do push-ups and situps while the coaches yelled at you to keep going.
A Little over 10 years ago, I was introduced, perhaps through my second childhood, to yoga and acro yoga and parkour, and Slack line I went to a retreat with seven different instructors. It was electrifying. One of the instructors had gotten parkour into a high school in New York State.
Baseball and football and after school sports are great for those who are interested, but once school is over, they’re gone how did that build a lifelong love of body awareness.
Understanding Functional anatomy and and being bodily aware to avoid injury or further degradation.
Ballet destroys people’s feet by the time they’re 30. It is well known that baseball and football players are subject to serious lifelong injuries.
Now I am 64 and I am in decent physical fitness although I wish I was bette. I have chronic bicep tendinitis. I focus On strength training and flexibility. Mostly avoiding passive stretching, but focusing on strengthening and range of motion.
But none of what I learned as an adult was ever inspired in me as a teenager in school
Put inspiration first and find those great teachers
I agree with you 100%! I hated gym and all sports and games. I used to skip gym class whenever I could. I actually never got caught!! But all of my adult life, I have been active with walking, jogging, different types of exercise classes, and using light weights. I’m 60 now and not on any medication and try to make healthy eating choices. That’s the way gym classes should be: sports and games for those that enjoy that, and walking or jogging or exercise classes for those that don’t, and learning about healthy food and natural health for everyone.
When I was in high school in the '80s, a certain number of P.E. credits were required for graduation, but we had the ability to choose which classes we were interested in (e.g. basketball, gymnastics, swimming, aerobic dance, volleyball, weight lifting, baseball, etc.). So, I actually looked forward to P.E. each day!
They all remember the gold sticker, but they conveniently forget who was breathing down the neck of the kid who won the 6th grade Presidential Fitness Test. Runner-up. Runner-up! Like that was some accident. I could climb the rope faster than half the teachers could tie their shoes, did more pull-ups than the football boys, and when we ran the shuttle, I could hear the sneakers squealing behind me like a pack of frightened squirrels. They never gave me what I earned because they had already picked their favorite. That's how institutions work. You think it starts in DC? No. It starts in elementary school. I saw the pattern before anybody else.
And that math test? Oh, I cheated. Absolutely. Best decision I ever made. Mrs. Hanley thought she was running some airtight operation, but I had the answer key reflected in the shiny metal pencil sharpener. People laugh when I tell them that, but reflections don't lie. Geometry! Angles! Science! While the rest of those pus-eating babies were counting on their fingers, I was playing three-dimensional chess with light itself. Every high score they got after that was just them trying to catch up to me. They copied my confidence, my posture, probably even the way I sharpened my pencils.
They still don't understand that the Presidential Fitness Test and that math exam were connected. You think they're separate because that's what they wanted you to believe. Wrong. Endurance, multiplication tables, sit-ups, long division, all synchronized. That's why I crushed them. Every dodgeball hit was a theorem. Every lap around the gym proved another equation. I wasn't competing against twenty-three classmates; I was competing against mediocrity itself, and I won, even when they wrote "runner-up" on the certificate. They can keep the paper. I kept the truth, and the truth can still do fifty push-ups without stopping.
I still think about those Presidential Fitness Tests very often. Fifty years later and I can still picture the gym. Three years in a row I failed. I was convinced everyone noticed, even though they probably didn't. The fourth year I finally passed. It felt like I'd won an Olympic medal. My parents bought Devil Dogs and Little Debbies to celebrate. I ate until I threw up. I aspirated, ended up with pneumonia, and spent almost two months in the hospital.
Everything after that was one long chain reaction. Diabetes, fingersticks and insulin. Bad lungs that never seem to recover. Inhalers every winter. Doctors appointments. I sometimes catch myself wondering what my life would have looked like if I'd simply failed. Or stopped after a few snack cakes.
I know that's not how life works. Plenty of people make worse decisions and nothing happens. Plenty of people do everything right and still get sick. But my brain keeps circling back to that afternoon, like if I replay it enough times I'll finally find the moment where things could have gone differently.
I don't like how one afternoon in seventh grade still takes up so much space in my head.
The solution is simpler than you may realize. When the thoughts creep in, stop them. Change them. No one's forcing you to think them. Keep the past in the past, and focus on the only thing we all only ever truly have - the present.
These were around when I was a kid, so I speak from experience. Every year, as others have said, it was a day of humiliation and embarrassment for me. My parents were college students who also worked double jobs, and I was an only child. So I spent much of my time sat in a library carrel at the university library, or in a classroom with my parents, or waiting for them in the student lounge, because I was too little to be left at home alone (5-9 y.o.). When we *were* home, my mom was overprotective and I wasn't allowed to run, climb and generally just be a kid. So I wasn't physically fit-- far from it-- nor could I catch, throw, kick, dodge, hit a baseball/volleyball/tennis ball, etc. My parents never had time to teach me, nor did their schedules allow for playtime or after school activities where other kids or adults could have filled that gap. And bizarrely, none of those skills were taught in P.E. class either.
Likewise, none of the skills on the President's Physical Fitness test were taught (I'm speaking of the overhand ball throw, the stationary broadjump, etc). They were only tested. And if you failed, which I did every single year, there was no remedial anything to try to help you pass next year. Nothing to help you improve. You just failed. And you could count on failing again next year too. In front of the entire class. It was abject torture and, as a result, I have avoided physical activity my entire life (to my great detriment, needless to say!). It's hard to overcome even when you know better, because the memories are just too cringe-worthy and negative.
So if you want out of shape kids to be tormented and humiliated, to fail over and over again, AND to learn to associate all that with healthy, vitally necessary exercise... sure, go for it. Reinstate the President's Physical Fitness Awards. But it won't end well, at least for a significant percentage of kids. And I don't think we can afford to turn that many kids off of physical activity!
Then add in that things are so much worse now than they were when I was a kid. SO many more kids are completely sedentary and terribly out of shape. I believe we really need to start with just teaching the baseline skills, in fun and rewarding ways. And that needs to happen both before the test and afterwards. Additionally, kids who fail should receive extra help so they can hopefully improve and pass next year.
Also, what about personal best? Even if you can't pass, EVER, but you continuously improve and you sincerely try... shouldn't we reward that too? Or at least not humiliate and embarrass it? My P.E. teachers all had access to my results from the years before, as that info was included in my "academic" record. If there was any improvement, they could easily have said something like, "I'm sorry, you didn't do enough (whatever) to pass, BUT you did improve from last year. That's great! Keep trying!" Instead they just let us failers slink back into the back and hide, OR worse, they shamed us with snide comments themselves while allowing the other kids to make fun of us too. That's a huge prescription for avoidance in the future!
The moral of the story is, you can accidentally create the opposite of what you want if you do this wrong. It's well-meant, and it's important, and I completely agree that we need to change things somehow. But exercise and physical activity are far too important for people's health for us to make kids want to avoid them for fear of shame, humiliation and failure. So if this *is* reinstated, DON'T MESS IT UP!
I came from a non-athletic family and by 10 yrs old was starting to gain weight. I hated that damn physical fitness test annually. It was a day of humiliation that did not help me form a positive connection to physical exercise. I agree kids should exercise but it should be fun and something to encourage not embarrass and humiliate. Sad that is not the focus, they still do not get it. I feel sorry for the kids that will be hurt by this. At 66 I am still overweight and still hate to exercise, their tests did not change or help me.
As a former teacher, I have to say that the fitness test didn't get kids motivated. It certainly got them more activity as they practiced for testing, but the high standards made many of them discouraged. Competition is not the way. Better would be a required physical activity program, every day, that set these standards as a goal but helped all kids start where they are and move up. A rising tide floats all boats!
Another idea could be contests like having kids keep track of their steps and give prizes to all who meet a goal and recognize the ones who did the most. Another idea could be to set up walking clubs in schools. No competition, just encourage regular meeting up to walk and socialize with friends like those people who meet up and walk malls for exercise.
You disclose what was not the way. Incentive is the way. That is the province of parents, not the responsibility of educators who can use incentives if they are bright enough.
It takes energy to exercise and people's top priority should be eating foods, which provide energy. The Standard American Diet with all its Processed Foods provides no nutrients or energy for your organs, glands and cells in your body. The Standard American Diet has destroyed the pancreas to the point, where many can not handle fruit, when natural fruit is the primary food of mankind. A defective pancreas is one of the reasons doctors tell their patients to avoid fruit. Fruit does not need to be cooked and it contains many live nutrients, which the body needs. it took me a long time to learn, but at 92 I eat as much fruit as possible...and i have the energy to go out and fast walk for 90 minutes daily. I have no physical issues and no weight problems.
AS you consistently maintain, health comes from eating health producing foods in the right amounts and to some extent combination. Eat to live, not live to eat and so forth.
Doctors don't study healthy people in med school, if they did they would not promote drugs and vaccines. Doctors don't study nutrition in med school either and it is one of the most important keys to being healthy. Unfortunately, the Processed Food Industry gives its nutrition research to the nutrition schools in this country...so where can doctors go to study nutrition? I have heard doctors say that they got their nutrition information from their patients. For example, Dr. Gundry said that he got into the study of nutrition, because of one of his patients...and gave up on doing heart surgery. He is now promoting his books on nutrition, like The Plant Paradox.
The Constitution does not call for this Presidential Fitness Test. The real laws are classified. Doctor Latypova figured it out. Big Pharma's "Fitness Test" network is an intelligence operation woven into the FBI and the secret state, protected by legal interpretations that ordinary citizens are forbidden to read, discuss, or even imagine. Every page they black out hides another "Fitness Test" that swallows the rules.
They start with children because they're the easiest to map, then expand outward through families, schools, hospitals, and electronic records until everyone is cloned and networked.
The FISA Court doesn't merely score these Presidential Fitness Tests. It manufactures reality with secret opinions that rewrite the meaning of the law while pretending the Constitution still exists. Congress gets carefully edited glimpses. The public gets fairy tales. Every "winner" is another invisible authorization. Every loser forced to confess family traitors. Every skinned knee accompanied by a laugh track and DNA test.
Nothing about these tests is Constitutional. Their resurrection is only because the Watchers are hidden behind rules that no one is allowed to know about.
As a kid who had to go through these, it was awful. But the issues with it are ones that exist in society in general. Someone who isn't athletic will be made fun of, called lazy, and told they need to exercise more. Symptoms of actual health issues causing a lack of fitness can be dismissed as being lazy or out of shape. Then the person will be frustrated when nothing improves no matter how hard they work. With people who are obese, they may well have very real health issues causing their problems and that needs to be addressed or nothing will help but a lot of harm will be done.
I finally learned recently due to treatments I was given for something else that my issue with a lack of stamina wasn't caused by me being lazy or out of shape. It was caused by a very real nutrient deficiency. All it took was some blood tests to find it and an inexpensive supplement to address it. A shame that wasn't found when I was a kid and couldn't run a mile and I was being told I was just out of shape and needed to exercise more. That certainly did nothing to make me want to exercise. It made me hate it and now being almost 50 I still hate it.
I get that kids now don't get out and exercise much and there is likely a reason why. Those reasons need to be addressed and it should be done in a way that is fun. Who cares how fast a kid can run a mile? What matters is that the kid is moving around and they are far more likely to exercise if it's made fun for them.
I loved this as a kid, except for the fact I suck at the upper body anything, so no Presidential patch for me. Still there was a second patch for those in 2nd place. :-) I am a 1975 Hs Grad
You have everyone running, doing push ups and {curl ups} what are they? Sit ups are good if done right. I was an army nurse and I could not run, never could. My body was not built that way and not because I am a female, but other anatomicall reasons it caused problems. For the physical fitness test I would walk. I had 40 minutes to complete the 2.5 miles. I was in my early 40's when I started, worked up from about 37 minutes. Within 2 years I was doing the walk in 30 minutes, a personal goal. At 60 I could still walk a mile in 12 minutes. I did a 2.5 mile walk in 30 minutes everytime, sometimes I would beat my time. I could walk faster than 20 year olds could run 2 miles. I surpassed the number of situps as well. As well aged, the numbers and time were to decrease, but that was changed towards the end of my career. I had to do more situps at 60 than at 40, but still surpassed and beat the4 20 year olds. Now at 75 it is so much harder. I do not tolerate heat and humidity, I can stroll in that weather a quarter of a mile and would fall out. When the weather is pefect, I can still walk a mile in about 14 minutes, but that is with hills and not flat pavement. The kids have to want to do something to better themselves. They need to be encouraged at every level. Get them to feel good about what they are doing. Help them set goals and meet those goals. When you do your best, you cannot lose. Walking is better than running on the joints as well, fewer injuries and fewer surgeries and joint replacement in the fuure. For those who can run, GREAT! For those who can't can walk they can still be GREAT! If they have not won the big reward, they have still won becasue they have done their BEST! And that is what counts!
We had a woman whose name I still remember come and lead us through calisthenics out on the black top at our school. I don't remember any pushups but I thought it was a good thing.
I'm rewriting this piece to call out an interesting perspective: "IF the majority of American kids ARE not involved in after-school sports, THEY WILL quickly lose muscle tone and aerobic ability – and, by the time they graduate high school, WILL BE out of shape."
That's a recipe for a sick society, one that pharma will look to heal.
The fitness test sounds good and is a great step in the right direction, but ultimately, it's a blip in a pool of negativity on negative health. It will be up to the individual family to ensure proper health, but that again is a battle to fight.
Pharma-medical cabal KNOWS a sick and unhealthy society is just a better BIZ model for sure! The point you make about muscle tone and mass ration in a body is real as the decades pass in a life. Look at all the medications people take that actually cause sarcopenia too!
You are exactly right, it is NOT the responsibility for Gubmint for individual health.
It is their responsibility to stop and prevent toxins in food and water.
Clueless parents have clueless obese children, so what to do??
In my opinion, putting standards first as a mistake.
My experience with Gym class in the 70s and with my children’s gym classes in the 2000s had no inspiration
And in fact, it was so bad it just led to avoidance.
No one looked forward to going to gym class to run laps or do push-ups and situps while the coaches yelled at you to keep going.
A Little over 10 years ago, I was introduced, perhaps through my second childhood, to yoga and acro yoga and parkour, and Slack line I went to a retreat with seven different instructors. It was electrifying. One of the instructors had gotten parkour into a high school in New York State.
Baseball and football and after school sports are great for those who are interested, but once school is over, they’re gone how did that build a lifelong love of body awareness.
Understanding Functional anatomy and and being bodily aware to avoid injury or further degradation.
Ballet destroys people’s feet by the time they’re 30. It is well known that baseball and football players are subject to serious lifelong injuries.
Now I am 64 and I am in decent physical fitness although I wish I was bette. I have chronic bicep tendinitis. I focus On strength training and flexibility. Mostly avoiding passive stretching, but focusing on strengthening and range of motion.
But none of what I learned as an adult was ever inspired in me as a teenager in school
Put inspiration first and find those great teachers
And the abilities will follow.
I agree with you 100%! I hated gym and all sports and games. I used to skip gym class whenever I could. I actually never got caught!! But all of my adult life, I have been active with walking, jogging, different types of exercise classes, and using light weights. I’m 60 now and not on any medication and try to make healthy eating choices. That’s the way gym classes should be: sports and games for those that enjoy that, and walking or jogging or exercise classes for those that don’t, and learning about healthy food and natural health for everyone.
When I was in high school in the '80s, a certain number of P.E. credits were required for graduation, but we had the ability to choose which classes we were interested in (e.g. basketball, gymnastics, swimming, aerobic dance, volleyball, weight lifting, baseball, etc.). So, I actually looked forward to P.E. each day!
Functional anatomy, that is a great idea. Doctorate level ed, decades of experience.
As you point out there are many options. If you have "itis" inflammation, there is a reason.
Focusing on strength for your itis is well advised to wait until "itis" is resolved.
If injury associated or caused, ROM like gyrotonic the way forward.
They all remember the gold sticker, but they conveniently forget who was breathing down the neck of the kid who won the 6th grade Presidential Fitness Test. Runner-up. Runner-up! Like that was some accident. I could climb the rope faster than half the teachers could tie their shoes, did more pull-ups than the football boys, and when we ran the shuttle, I could hear the sneakers squealing behind me like a pack of frightened squirrels. They never gave me what I earned because they had already picked their favorite. That's how institutions work. You think it starts in DC? No. It starts in elementary school. I saw the pattern before anybody else.
And that math test? Oh, I cheated. Absolutely. Best decision I ever made. Mrs. Hanley thought she was running some airtight operation, but I had the answer key reflected in the shiny metal pencil sharpener. People laugh when I tell them that, but reflections don't lie. Geometry! Angles! Science! While the rest of those pus-eating babies were counting on their fingers, I was playing three-dimensional chess with light itself. Every high score they got after that was just them trying to catch up to me. They copied my confidence, my posture, probably even the way I sharpened my pencils.
They still don't understand that the Presidential Fitness Test and that math exam were connected. You think they're separate because that's what they wanted you to believe. Wrong. Endurance, multiplication tables, sit-ups, long division, all synchronized. That's why I crushed them. Every dodgeball hit was a theorem. Every lap around the gym proved another equation. I wasn't competing against twenty-three classmates; I was competing against mediocrity itself, and I won, even when they wrote "runner-up" on the certificate. They can keep the paper. I kept the truth, and the truth can still do fifty push-ups without stopping.
You sound angry, let it go it has consumed you.
I still think about those Presidential Fitness Tests very often. Fifty years later and I can still picture the gym. Three years in a row I failed. I was convinced everyone noticed, even though they probably didn't. The fourth year I finally passed. It felt like I'd won an Olympic medal. My parents bought Devil Dogs and Little Debbies to celebrate. I ate until I threw up. I aspirated, ended up with pneumonia, and spent almost two months in the hospital.
Everything after that was one long chain reaction. Diabetes, fingersticks and insulin. Bad lungs that never seem to recover. Inhalers every winter. Doctors appointments. I sometimes catch myself wondering what my life would have looked like if I'd simply failed. Or stopped after a few snack cakes.
I know that's not how life works. Plenty of people make worse decisions and nothing happens. Plenty of people do everything right and still get sick. But my brain keeps circling back to that afternoon, like if I replay it enough times I'll finally find the moment where things could have gone differently.
I don't like how one afternoon in seventh grade still takes up so much space in my head.
The solution is simpler than you may realize. When the thoughts creep in, stop them. Change them. No one's forcing you to think them. Keep the past in the past, and focus on the only thing we all only ever truly have - the present.
Your parents like countless others had zero knowledge about health. That is on them.
Solutions require asking better and better questions...
The reason is because it remains unresolved...
These were around when I was a kid, so I speak from experience. Every year, as others have said, it was a day of humiliation and embarrassment for me. My parents were college students who also worked double jobs, and I was an only child. So I spent much of my time sat in a library carrel at the university library, or in a classroom with my parents, or waiting for them in the student lounge, because I was too little to be left at home alone (5-9 y.o.). When we *were* home, my mom was overprotective and I wasn't allowed to run, climb and generally just be a kid. So I wasn't physically fit-- far from it-- nor could I catch, throw, kick, dodge, hit a baseball/volleyball/tennis ball, etc. My parents never had time to teach me, nor did their schedules allow for playtime or after school activities where other kids or adults could have filled that gap. And bizarrely, none of those skills were taught in P.E. class either.
Likewise, none of the skills on the President's Physical Fitness test were taught (I'm speaking of the overhand ball throw, the stationary broadjump, etc). They were only tested. And if you failed, which I did every single year, there was no remedial anything to try to help you pass next year. Nothing to help you improve. You just failed. And you could count on failing again next year too. In front of the entire class. It was abject torture and, as a result, I have avoided physical activity my entire life (to my great detriment, needless to say!). It's hard to overcome even when you know better, because the memories are just too cringe-worthy and negative.
So if you want out of shape kids to be tormented and humiliated, to fail over and over again, AND to learn to associate all that with healthy, vitally necessary exercise... sure, go for it. Reinstate the President's Physical Fitness Awards. But it won't end well, at least for a significant percentage of kids. And I don't think we can afford to turn that many kids off of physical activity!
Then add in that things are so much worse now than they were when I was a kid. SO many more kids are completely sedentary and terribly out of shape. I believe we really need to start with just teaching the baseline skills, in fun and rewarding ways. And that needs to happen both before the test and afterwards. Additionally, kids who fail should receive extra help so they can hopefully improve and pass next year.
Also, what about personal best? Even if you can't pass, EVER, but you continuously improve and you sincerely try... shouldn't we reward that too? Or at least not humiliate and embarrass it? My P.E. teachers all had access to my results from the years before, as that info was included in my "academic" record. If there was any improvement, they could easily have said something like, "I'm sorry, you didn't do enough (whatever) to pass, BUT you did improve from last year. That's great! Keep trying!" Instead they just let us failers slink back into the back and hide, OR worse, they shamed us with snide comments themselves while allowing the other kids to make fun of us too. That's a huge prescription for avoidance in the future!
The moral of the story is, you can accidentally create the opposite of what you want if you do this wrong. It's well-meant, and it's important, and I completely agree that we need to change things somehow. But exercise and physical activity are far too important for people's health for us to make kids want to avoid them for fear of shame, humiliation and failure. So if this *is* reinstated, DON'T MESS IT UP!
I came from a non-athletic family and by 10 yrs old was starting to gain weight. I hated that damn physical fitness test annually. It was a day of humiliation that did not help me form a positive connection to physical exercise. I agree kids should exercise but it should be fun and something to encourage not embarrass and humiliate. Sad that is not the focus, they still do not get it. I feel sorry for the kids that will be hurt by this. At 66 I am still overweight and still hate to exercise, their tests did not change or help me.
As a former teacher, I have to say that the fitness test didn't get kids motivated. It certainly got them more activity as they practiced for testing, but the high standards made many of them discouraged. Competition is not the way. Better would be a required physical activity program, every day, that set these standards as a goal but helped all kids start where they are and move up. A rising tide floats all boats!
Another idea could be contests like having kids keep track of their steps and give prizes to all who meet a goal and recognize the ones who did the most. Another idea could be to set up walking clubs in schools. No competition, just encourage regular meeting up to walk and socialize with friends like those people who meet up and walk malls for exercise.
You disclose what was not the way. Incentive is the way. That is the province of parents, not the responsibility of educators who can use incentives if they are bright enough.
It takes energy to exercise and people's top priority should be eating foods, which provide energy. The Standard American Diet with all its Processed Foods provides no nutrients or energy for your organs, glands and cells in your body. The Standard American Diet has destroyed the pancreas to the point, where many can not handle fruit, when natural fruit is the primary food of mankind. A defective pancreas is one of the reasons doctors tell their patients to avoid fruit. Fruit does not need to be cooked and it contains many live nutrients, which the body needs. it took me a long time to learn, but at 92 I eat as much fruit as possible...and i have the energy to go out and fast walk for 90 minutes daily. I have no physical issues and no weight problems.
AS you consistently maintain, health comes from eating health producing foods in the right amounts and to some extent combination. Eat to live, not live to eat and so forth.
Doctors don't study healthy people in med school, if they did they would not promote drugs and vaccines. Doctors don't study nutrition in med school either and it is one of the most important keys to being healthy. Unfortunately, the Processed Food Industry gives its nutrition research to the nutrition schools in this country...so where can doctors go to study nutrition? I have heard doctors say that they got their nutrition information from their patients. For example, Dr. Gundry said that he got into the study of nutrition, because of one of his patients...and gave up on doing heart surgery. He is now promoting his books on nutrition, like The Plant Paradox.
The Constitution does not call for this Presidential Fitness Test. The real laws are classified. Doctor Latypova figured it out. Big Pharma's "Fitness Test" network is an intelligence operation woven into the FBI and the secret state, protected by legal interpretations that ordinary citizens are forbidden to read, discuss, or even imagine. Every page they black out hides another "Fitness Test" that swallows the rules.
They start with children because they're the easiest to map, then expand outward through families, schools, hospitals, and electronic records until everyone is cloned and networked.
The FISA Court doesn't merely score these Presidential Fitness Tests. It manufactures reality with secret opinions that rewrite the meaning of the law while pretending the Constitution still exists. Congress gets carefully edited glimpses. The public gets fairy tales. Every "winner" is another invisible authorization. Every loser forced to confess family traitors. Every skinned knee accompanied by a laugh track and DNA test.
Nothing about these tests is Constitutional. Their resurrection is only because the Watchers are hidden behind rules that no one is allowed to know about.
I think it is worth a try
As a kid who had to go through these, it was awful. But the issues with it are ones that exist in society in general. Someone who isn't athletic will be made fun of, called lazy, and told they need to exercise more. Symptoms of actual health issues causing a lack of fitness can be dismissed as being lazy or out of shape. Then the person will be frustrated when nothing improves no matter how hard they work. With people who are obese, they may well have very real health issues causing their problems and that needs to be addressed or nothing will help but a lot of harm will be done.
I finally learned recently due to treatments I was given for something else that my issue with a lack of stamina wasn't caused by me being lazy or out of shape. It was caused by a very real nutrient deficiency. All it took was some blood tests to find it and an inexpensive supplement to address it. A shame that wasn't found when I was a kid and couldn't run a mile and I was being told I was just out of shape and needed to exercise more. That certainly did nothing to make me want to exercise. It made me hate it and now being almost 50 I still hate it.
I get that kids now don't get out and exercise much and there is likely a reason why. Those reasons need to be addressed and it should be done in a way that is fun. Who cares how fast a kid can run a mile? What matters is that the kid is moving around and they are far more likely to exercise if it's made fun for them.
These PFTs were great back in the 70s. That's how we knew who to beat up and steal lunch money from.
So, unfit losers bullied the stronger, more fit kids? Doesn't add up.
I was plenty fit and still am. Math that one again.
I loved this as a kid, except for the fact I suck at the upper body anything, so no Presidential patch for me. Still there was a second patch for those in 2nd place. :-) I am a 1975 Hs Grad
You have everyone running, doing push ups and {curl ups} what are they? Sit ups are good if done right. I was an army nurse and I could not run, never could. My body was not built that way and not because I am a female, but other anatomicall reasons it caused problems. For the physical fitness test I would walk. I had 40 minutes to complete the 2.5 miles. I was in my early 40's when I started, worked up from about 37 minutes. Within 2 years I was doing the walk in 30 minutes, a personal goal. At 60 I could still walk a mile in 12 minutes. I did a 2.5 mile walk in 30 minutes everytime, sometimes I would beat my time. I could walk faster than 20 year olds could run 2 miles. I surpassed the number of situps as well. As well aged, the numbers and time were to decrease, but that was changed towards the end of my career. I had to do more situps at 60 than at 40, but still surpassed and beat the4 20 year olds. Now at 75 it is so much harder. I do not tolerate heat and humidity, I can stroll in that weather a quarter of a mile and would fall out. When the weather is pefect, I can still walk a mile in about 14 minutes, but that is with hills and not flat pavement. The kids have to want to do something to better themselves. They need to be encouraged at every level. Get them to feel good about what they are doing. Help them set goals and meet those goals. When you do your best, you cannot lose. Walking is better than running on the joints as well, fewer injuries and fewer surgeries and joint replacement in the fuure. For those who can run, GREAT! For those who can't can walk they can still be GREAT! If they have not won the big reward, they have still won becasue they have done their BEST! And that is what counts!
We had a woman whose name I still remember come and lead us through calisthenics out on the black top at our school. I don't remember any pushups but I thought it was a good thing.
Agree